Not so safe swimming!

July 15^th 2012

Pula is a relatively small place and as we have no car to explore the surrounding villages we had another beach day, mixing it up by going to the slightly farther away Veruda. Once again we took (and mastered) public transport but Veruda ended up being really touristy and quite busy – not half as busy as say a Spanish beach but there were some people there and I was more in the mood for isolation. We walked for a good long while and eventually found a nice, quiet cove which seemed pretty perfect... 

But as I’m sure you can guess, it wasn’t so perfect. Rory and I had been well warned about the dangers of sea urchins in Croatia, so thinking we were really sensible, we bought water shoes. However, the plot thickens and as soon as I went in the water I felt a stab in my baby toe. Turns out that these water shoes are only good when you’re in sea-urchin free water. As we’d travelled all the way to the beach I got over the purple spine sticking out of my toe and had a nice swim. After a while the spine seemed to have disappeared, so hopefully it’s fallen out and if not it’s so deeply buried that I can’t see it and as they say, if I can’t see it, it’s not there. Rory however, wasn’t so lucky. He was being a gentleman and trying to find me an urchin free path back into the sea and got two big spines stuck in his toe. Admittedly his looked much worse than mine so I followed the internet’s advice and soaked his foot in hot water and then doused the thing in vinegar. I also poked around with tweezers but very sensibly so hopefully I didn’t make it worse and if I did and he needs his foot amputated, it’ll make a great travel story.