Finding myself in Varazdin

The bus ride from Pula to Zagreb was a quick four hours. It was so quick, in fact, that when we arrived at a bus station I thought surely this couldn’t be Zagreb already, so when ninety percent of the passengers got off the bus, I stayed on.

As were driving out of town, I started to get a funny feeling that I’d made a terrible mistake. I peeked at the girl’s ticket who had just sat down beside me: Zagreb-Varazdin. A normal person would have corrected her mistake while the bus was still in the city and got off the bus, but I didn’t move. When the bus driver came down the aisle to check the tickets of new passengers, I held my ticket in my sweaty palm, praying he wouldn’t ask to see it again. He checked the girl next to me, then looked at me.

“Varazdin?” he asked, and I nodded.

Thinking he must have heard wrong when I asked: “Is this the bus to Zagreb?” back in Pula, he just shrugged his shoulders and continued down the bus.

As little as I knew about Pula before I’d arrived there, I knew even less about Varazdin. In fact, I had to check my map to see if it was even in Croatia, or if I was on my way to Slovenia. Lonely Planet made no mention of it and no one had ever recommended a visit there.

But the more I thought about this Varazdin, the more excited I got. It couldn’t be all bad, and frankly, I needed one more quiet night before Zagreb.

An hour later, we arrived at the Varazdin bus station. I could see green spires and orange roofs tantalizingly in the distance, but I figured I should first follow the signs leading to hotels, rather than the signs leading to the Centar. Two full pensions and one Hotel Turisto with no vacancy later, I was afraid I might have to head back to Zagreb after all. What was going on in Varazdin, I wondered, and why the hell were there so many people here?

I discovered later that Varazdin is a town I probably should have had on my itinerary from the beginning. It was the capital of Croatia hundreds of years ago, before it switched to Zagreb. The reason there were so many people around was because I’d just happened to arrive halfway through their internationally-famous Baroque music festival.

I finally arrived at the Studentski Dom, a student dorm recommended by the Tourist Info with rooms so clean and well-equipped they made my little dorm room look like a shanty town.

After dropping off my bags, I ventured into the centre and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I wondered if I hadn’t crossed a border after all, not into Slovenia but rather Austria. Baroque buildings so quaint that I felt like I was in Salzburg.

I wanted to spend hours looking around but food and drink were calling me, so I stopped at a quiet restaurant and ordered sausages. The town square was full at dusk, the elegant City Hall building unimposing at one end.

Varazdin really is a city of music, the same way I’d always thought of Vienna. There was a Native American trio in traditional dress just finishing a concert in the square.

I went back to my room early, still a little hearbroken and not wanting to taint my opinions of this city with sad thoughts of Sasa, so I went to sleep after an episode of Croatian Big Brother.

The next morning, with a fresh start, I explored. I walked around the old white castle and along empty streets with buildings that looked like they were painted onto the sky. Everyone in town seemed to be riding a bicycle.

After a while I noticed that the same way I was staring at these buildings from another era, people were staring at me like I was from another era - the era when the weather was warm enough to be wearing a skirt and flip-flops. September in that county was not quite as warm as it had been in Istria, and by noon I was starting to feel a chill that a couple of lukewarm coffees did not help.

Between needing to warm up, and needing to cleanse myself once and for all of Sasa, my next destination seemed obvious: the spa.

Varazdinske Toplice is on the way from Varazdin to Zagreb so I hopped a bus heading there. It is a very small town in the valley of the river Bednja, among the green hills of Hrvatsko Zagorje. It dates back to the Stone Age, and it used to be well-known as the thermal spa called Aquae Iasae.

It was the quietest town I’ve ever been in and no one spoke English. That, the lack of clear maps, the steep roads and my heavy backpack made finding the spa quite a mission, but I finally found it in the basement of Hotel Minerva.

The water was a perfect 58 degree celsius, and contained minerals such as calcium, sodium, carbonte and sulphur. There were only three other people in the large pool when I arrived. There are three pools, two indoor and one outdoor. I learned from a spa in Quebec that switching between hot and cold temperatures is good for circulation, so I spent most of my time floating in the indoor pool, then did a few laps in the outdoor one. The hills on the horizon were so spectacular that I stuck to the backstroke outside just to look at them.

I felt a little silly being here to help cure myself of a heartache when I noticed that the majority of the other swimmers were limping, or walking with braces.

One man wheeled himself to the outdoor pool as I was panting on the edge after swimming one lap. He gave me a nod, lowered himself with his arms off his chair and disappeared under the surface of the cool water.