I recently returned from a semi-pleasant brief break in Soget Donji, near Trogir in the beautiful country of Croatia. Used to ‘holidaying’ by booking my own travel, trips and traipses, I decided - this year - to experience a Jet2 ‘package’ and actually experienced the quaintness of a very friendly travel agency to relinquish all the stresses associated with hitherto solo organisation.
Unused to the modes and manners of such coddled travelling, it was pleasant to sit back and let Jet2’s fire engine-red uniformed people welcome, usher and otherwise aid every part of my journey. They really do a great job. Unused, too, to the institutional and online cultures of comparative and competitive ‘reviewing’ that goes on with such things, I avidly and voraciously read all the reviews of the hotel at which I was staying. Amused by the types of things that people write about, I thought I would try my hand at such a genre.
Inevitably - this being my writing - I couldn’t help but not only be carried away by the mode, but also by shoe-horning in all of my other pathologically felt themes into the piece, like some sort of compulsive compendium - capitalism, managerialism, class and privilege. As such, the review reads like a parody of the genre of reviewing itself. It sounds smug and sententious for not inconsiderable swaths of its sentences, but the writing is not entirely in the control of this humble traveller. Any-way, enjoy my review of the Hotel Ola and its surrounds on the Adriatic coast.
Awkwardly and Effortlessly Beautiful: A Wonky Wonder
It is a truth universally acknowledged — or at least recognised by those who care to notice — that the best of humanity is demonstrated by the conviviality of those who are paid the least. The working class know how to treat people with respect and to offer genuine, human interaction: game recognises game, comrades! As such, the housekeeping, restaurant and bar staff at Hotel Ola — an architecturally incongruous, haphazard, designed-to-look-unfinished, quirky and neo-brutalist monstrosity sitting pertinently on the side of a steep hill above the Adriatic Sea in Seget Donji (not Split, not Trogir proper, to be transparent) — are probably the kindest folks one is likely to encounter. They come from all over the world – Bali, Indonesia, Moldova, Serbia, Malaysia and elsewhere – and they generously bring to this pocket of Croatia a cosmopolitan charm and grace.
The inevitable flip side to this coin of reviewing staff — overshadowing the last paragraph like a gigantically silent “but” — is to observe that the “managerial” echelons are comparatively, one might even say competitively, unfriendly, as each encounter betters the last like a sort of lamentable game of Top Trumps. “Haughtiness” is probably one word to describe the manner they exude (like the style of this review, perhaps!); or maybe “superciliousness”, for those of Latinate persuasion. Such is — perhaps and alas — the way of the world. I found out from a charming member of the bar staff that Hotel Ola is owned by a fabulously rich fellow who seems to possess most of the land and buildings as far as a stone can be tossed by an Enhanced Games thrower. When you own lots of property in such an effortlessly stunning environment, is it any wonder that you and your managerial staff don’t need to impress you with anything as gauche as effort?
That being said, I did wonder to my always reflexive self — checking my positionality and privilege as I do — whether there is something inscrutable (to me) or unfamiliar in the Croatian character, which seems to comprise a sort of unsmiling practicality and dour pragmatism, that I mis-interpret or mis-read as surly. (Though one cannot extrapolate or generalise about a whole country’s people based on only meeting a few). Perhaps I just needed the occasional smile from the reception staff, instead of askance glances and awkwardness, to reassure me that my questions weren’t completely wasting their time. However, they are performatively, if not functionally, polite, so I will leave it there.
As for the hotel. Well. What a delightfully spikey profile Hotel Ola has! To eyes focussed only on fleeting impressions and who experience the real world through the imaginative simulacra of a travel brochure, it is impressive. It boasts a range of capacious rooms, lovely balconies with glorious views, spacious and carpeted hallways and stairs (think, The Shining), some quite cool paintings and lots of places to rest a heat-stroked head. Peer more closely and spend a little more time critically evaluating, though, and the aesthetic or design choice of much of the hotel seems to be either, a. to give the impression of not having a design choice or, b. to belligerently lean into an almost-but-not-quite finished look. As I woodworker, I was curiously fascinated at the amount of bare sterling board to be seen. I think this was an explicit choice, as the rough surfaces feature in balcony dividers, bar-bottle shelves, huge hanging doors and, amazingly, as a door to just one of the cupboards in the room! If one were feeling generous, one might say that it was a “bold choice”. Otherwise, you might say that the rich owner actively wanted to save money or, — and this would be an impressive flex — wanted to ridicule and demean those who were expecting a finished product, as if to say: “you’ve paid your money, plebs, put up with the sterling board. You’re not as wealthy as me! You are privileged and able to get on holiday, but you won’t enjoy it that much! Your Stirling is paying for this sterling (evil laugh)!”
If “taste” is also measured by music choice, then the AI slop that accompanies one’s every move in the hotel, from the restaurant to the rooftop pool — following us around like a permanent reminder of robotic anti-humanity — illustrates the owner’s commitment to saving every last penny in avoiding re-play royalties of real human beings. (I and others had to listen to a sour and tuneless version of an already mawkishly awful song by Cold Play at least 100 times during the five days of my visit. I never thought I would say this, but I’d rather Chris Martin over Crass Martian any day). My last morning’s breakfast — which are delicious and lavish, by the way — was accompanied by an AI blues band, tinnily chirruping soulless, faux-twelve bars and fake mewling about the woes of “existence”.
I travelled alone to the Hotel Ola. As such, I could roam, strut, flop and dance (should I wish) around my spacious double room in any way I pleased. The beds are large, soft and solo-man snug. This solo man could also have a shower and go to the toilet in blissful isolation, unwatched by another, unheard, un-remarked and with it all hanging out. If this solo man were accompanied by someone else — particularly someone from whom they wanted to hide their most privy of privy-time — the strutting, showering and toileting (if not necessarily the dancing) would have been verboten. The bathroom spaces in the rooms seem to have been designed by a sadistic (or masochistic, depending on your preference) exhibitionist. Everybody poops, and we should all get over it. Seriously, we should. But toileting, while your paramour sleeps, squatting behind a thin, frosted glass door, surrounded by resonant tiles, unforgiving limelight, no hope of distraction, and with no solid walls, reassuring doors or crackable windows to comfort you, amounts to the opposite of sexy, even to the most openly depraved of us. If you do stay here as a couple or with a companion, you’d better have some honest and open conversations before you travel about how much of your personal micturating, excreting and general “private time” you are willing to subject each other to. If you are into these things, good on you! Roam, strut, flop, dance and poop as much as you want!
I have read lots of reviews of Hotel Ola which explicitly allude to its design choices (or errors) and perhaps implicitly respond to the spectral presence of low-level, sardonic contempt I have outlined. I quite liked the incongruity of the manners of the managers and the “designs” I describe above, as they enabled me to reflect on class, capitalism, tourism, privilege, Croatian culture and holiday expectations. However, the most amusing of the other reviews harp on about “four stars”, as if such a “standard” is universally meaningful. I always think comments that state, for example, “That wasn’t four stars” or, better, “it wasn’t a four-star experience”, draw attention to the authors’ inflexible understanding of relative luxury. Hotel Ola is objectively luxurious if your standards are “normal” and you know what living in non-luxury environs the rest of the time is like. One doesn’t order a curry in India and complain that it doesn’t taste like the Chicken-Tikka-Massala that Derek makes in the Balti House down the road in Birmingham. In other words, just because your “four stars” hotel in Manhattan offers universally clean pool tiles, doesn’t mean the merest hint of a local moss on such tiles in, say, Hotel Ola, amounts to a star demotion. Sure, the two pools (indoor and outdoor) look a little chipped and battered, but we might also say that they are loved or “worn in” by many a bathing bottom and sun-tickled toe! They are workable, beautiful and, importantly, wet pools, set in a glorious and God-kissed environment. One bonus of the hotel’s rooftop pool — apart from the obvious perk that perky and irritating children aren’t allowed anywhere near it — is that it is shared with delightful Herring Gulls, who drink, splash and frolic throughout the day.
Get over yourselves you weirdo reviewers moaning about the avian invasion upsetting your ideal of a fauna-abolishing vacation. If we humans are going to obnoxiously encroach into the environments of our furry and feathered brethren, colonising everything with our crass concrete and consumerism, the least we can do is allow them free use of the facilities!
The “Spa” in Hotel Ola doesn’t resemble the “Spa” in my imagination, but I haven’t seen many “Spas”, so don’t have a clear benchmark against which to judge this “Spa”. The Hotel Ola “Spa” consists of a few clean but barren rooms, with little decorations and plastic trinkets festooned in pleasantly haphazard ways, as if chasing the afterthought of the notions of “comfort” and “wellness” someone read about in a battered magazine from the 1980s in a dentist reception area. Personally, I enjoyed the “disappointment” — noted by other reviewers — that the grandly-advertised “gym” is actually a dark room featuring one elliptical thing, a sad looking, abandoned bike and a few 10g weights looking sorry for themselves as they gather the solemn dust of neglect. But who — this traveller enquires — wants to hear stentorious grunts and moans of Alpha dudes and soccer moms when trying to enjoy the gentle ripples of the pool filters while reading Nabokov? The place is clean, well-kept and pleasantly quiet (apart from the AI musak) as most holiday makers are making their holi-days walking the stunning beach paths only a hundred or so metres down the steep hillside from the hotel. Asthmatics beware though: getting down to the glorious Adriatic is easy; getting one’s little body back up to the hotel via precipitous and brutal stairs is a challenge. Bring water, plenty of smelling salts and brace yourself for effort.
Walking forth and back to the sea is worth every droplet of salty sweat, for the coast of this part of Croatia is sublime. I mean, it is astonishing. I wish I could take every person in the world for a stroll and dip in the warm, beautiful Adriatic. Croatia, you are lucky! While I wish that I had bought my litter-picker with me (plastic, fag-butts and human detritus are everywhere), and that I had a stronger constitution for the smell of roasting cat-and-other-poo, the sea and scenery are spectacular. There are loads of little concrete alcoves, inlets and pebbly atolls along the broad stretch of “beach” of Seget Donji on which to plonk oneself. There also seem to be many disregarded plastic sunbeds strewn around for those inclined to a beachy inclination. I liked the fact that there were no “rules” of usage for these cracked and wonky pieces of furniture and people just got on with it in quiet contentment (all the beaches are, rightfully, public and off-limits to people such as Hotel Ola’s land baron). I was content to sit on the limestone rocks, occasionally dipping and thrashing around in the clear and clean brine.
This part of Croatia reminds me of a rather run-down seaside town on the coast of West Wales. Charming, dilapidated, beautiful, requiring a good scrub, idyllic in a smelly way, and thoroughly, gorgeously used by tourists and locals alike who seem to muddle along in peace. The only differences between Croatia and my beloved Wales are the heat, the quality of the sea, the strikingly stunning light at all times of the day and the confidence of the brute beauty of the landscape that it doesn’t matter that your bins are overstuffed and that your scrappy cats and other critters are pooing everywhere as you have natural, robust and enduring beauty on your side. Sorry, Aberaeron, but Seget Donji wins Hot Holiday Top Trumps.
A young bric-a-brac-and-tourist-tat vendor I spoke to on my last day seemed surprised that I had enjoyed my stay. “Really?” she said, looking alarmed at my describing the beauty of the place. I understand her youthful reticence, as it is kind of tacky, dirty and dilapidated here if you are in search of pretentious glamour and glitzy stimulation. But, if you’d rather just experience natural landscapes, seaside-scapes and half-built buildings in all their ugly, glorious, smelly, splendid, well-used wonder, then I highly recommend travelling to this place. The mini-island of Trogir is worth a 40 minute trudge (if you bring your own snacks to avoid the tourist prices) and the architecture of old local houses and alleyways in Seget Donji (about 15 minutes away along searingly hot and cracked semi-pavements) are magical to a sweating wanderer like me.
If you are offended by “not-quite-but-almost-sort-of-nearly” four-star hotels, then I would book somewhere else (maybe Manhattan). If you don’t care about star ratings and understand that countries other than the one you live in have a whole range of surprising charms, quirks and different modes of being, then come to Hotel Ola. Just bring your inhaler and some headphones with real music, don’t worry too much about sterling board, make friends with the bathing birds, prepare for litter and heat and try to embrace the charms of the local gruffness! Seget Donji is incredible, people, and you are fortunate, privileged and lucky to be anywhere near it. Think, as we always must, of the HUGE majority of people in the world to whom the idea of a restful break in this beautiful place, to roam, strut, flop and dance with abandon and be nurtured by Croatian glory, is not something they can even remotely contemplate.
