“Italy …is BULLSH*T-a!”

The pause in this man’s words might be down to the fact that he is trying to speak in a language that he has only a functional grasp of (mine), but in reality, I suspect it’s down to an alcohol problem—historic or incumbent.

But we both have problems, however, and mine is one of fashion. Or rather the lack of it.

“Me? I’m like you,” he says, pointing out my outfit, “I don’t care.”

And I thought I was dressed okay.

I’m waiting for my train back from Croatia to Italy, the first one to run directly between these two countries in 94 years, and he’s on the platform with me.

That same train dropped my girlfriend and I off in the Croatian port city of Rijeka earlier this morning.

Arriving by train into Rijeka

The man chatting to us is a Slovene visiting friends in Croatia.

His unintentional dig at my outfit was just his way of trying to say he thinks Italians are overdressed.

I have other reasons to suspect this man has an alcohol problem:

1. Talking to strangers
2. Showing me his TikTok videos, unsolicited. They are an odd mashup of his merchant navy days and hard rock
3. The shakes

Add in a recent divorce, and the picture is starting to add up.

But he’s lovely and we have a grand old chat.

He hasn’t forgiven the entire Italian population for inheriting the Free Territory of Trieste, hence his earlier comment about Italians.

In Croatia's largest port

Riding the train from Italy to Croatia was its own attraction.

How to spend our day here in Rijeka was an afterthought.

Or a “no thought,” which is what we’ve given it.

As first impressions of a new place go, it’s a bad one.

We’ve been deposited beside huge piles of slag and scrap in the heart of Rijeka’s port. Giant rusting dock cranes straddle mismatched piles of corrugated intermodal containers.

Twenty-foot equivalent units of stark industrial ugliness fit for stevedores and seagulls.

Not content with how ugly it already is, contractors are attacking the road that runs alongside the port with jackhammers, layering an auditory assault on top of the visual one.

But somewhere must deal in moving scrap and humanity’s discarda, and it would be premature and facile to judge the entire city without stepping beyond the station complex.

Shopping malls and breezy cafés

Unfortunately for us, the entire port-side road network is being dug up and relaid.

Hairy men in tippers and steamrollers are at work changing the layout of the roads and flattening out hot tarmac.

Determined to leave the noisy port behind, we walk along a path demarcated by temporary barriers and hurricane fencing.

It disgorges us into a modern shopping district.

We pass an ugly shopping centre with a gaping frontage hung with a huge LED screen displaying adverts for lifestyle products.

England has refined windowless commercial labyrinths to their ultimate form, and we have zero desire to spend one of our precious days on vacation enduring the sights and sounds of tweens spending their pocket money.

Seeking coffee and a place to sit, we walk on, through a part of the city that opens up into broad squares, or trgovi, as they are called in Croatian.

Past these, the seafront turns inland and a wide quay has been dredged out of the mouth of the Rječina River that empties here into the Adriatic.

The quay is lined with fishing boats and small yachts.

Evidently, this is the trendy part of town and, being pedestrianized, teems with open-air bars and cafés.

We choose one near the seafront and, over coffee and Google Maps, thrash out a plan for the day.

When in doubt, find a good view

My instinct is to climb up to somewhere with a good view when confronted with an entirely new place.

Like many cities on this part of the Adriatic, the hinterland above Rijeka is appealingly lofty and has some inviting green patches, so we’re in luck, and our plan is soon settled.

We’ll buy cold cuts of meat, some bread, and have a picnic high above the city in a place with a good view.

Sightseeing can get in the way of understanding a new place, especially if one’s visit is short, and this simple itinerary is all we have the heart for today.

Besides, it’s good to do absolutely nothing with your partner sometimes, and just “be.”

Our chosen destination is Trsat Castle—up high and placed to one side of a verdant gorge that we can make out from our café on the quay.

We have no great desire to see it.

Rather, because it’s popular enough to pull in visitors, we’re confident that there is a path up to it that we can use to find a picnic spot.

Climbing up the Petar Kružić staircase

A picnic without food is just lemonade and wasps, so we hunt down a bakery.

We find one called Mlinar, which is Croatia’s equivalent of Gregg’s.

The young girl who serves us is extremely generous and gives us some free pastries that we gratefully pack while she teaches us some basic Croatian.

Behind the café where we made our plans, on the eastern side of the Rječina River, is an historic set of stairs called, though we didn’t know it at the time, the Petar Kružić staircase.

They are hard to miss and, despite having no prior knowledge of them, it’s pretty obvious that they rise in the direction of Trsat Castle, so we dutifully heave ourselves up.

The stairs climb past the small rear gardens of town houses—the kind of well-loved paved gardens full of potted plants that you see adjoined to houses in the centre of Bristol and Edinburgh.

As the stairs predate most of the modern city, a lot of infrastructure has sprung up about them, including an arched railway bridge that carries a small domestic line along the steep hillside.

Walking up them is a vertical tour of Rijeka’s history and social layers, with a different view every ten steps.

Towards the top, the stairs open out onto public gardens that have expansive views of the coast.

It’s the perfect spot for our picnic and a very different vibe to the grungy port at which we arrived.

It’s a hot day in late September and very humid.

Sweating after our climb, we slake our thirsts from taps dispensing fresh mountain water and tuck into some hard bread and salami that’s begun to sweat a little.

The change of the seasons has begun to usher in huge storms that we can see building over Italy and Slovenia—tall grey thunderheads that thankfully dump all their water before they can spoil our lunch.

It’s fun to watch them roll and build and bring a premature end to someone else’s plans while we bask under the sun.

Joggers run by, and elderly dog walkers perch and natter on the park benches that are dotted around, while their little terriers bicker and sniff about.

Satisfied with our spot in view of the Učka mountains and the Karst region, my girlfriend and I sit for over an hour.

The islands of the Kvarner Gulf

The islands off the coast are stunning.

They are far enough apart to permit the passage of huge ships, but close enough together to be visible all at once.

Perhaps the most famous among the cluster of islands is Rab, the site of a former concentration camp built by Fascist Italy. If you have the time, there’s a ferry that leaves for Rab from Rijeka.

Far above the city, with the elevated train line hanging off the hills and the view behind us completely blocked off, it looks like the kind of model railway you sometimes see where the creator has lavished more effort into building a perfect replica of an urban conurbation, complete with inane details.

A wide highway follows the contours of the gorge and disappears into a concrete tunnel bored into the hillside.

A cluster of distinctly Eastern European-looking high rises sit on the western side of the gorge. We’re just above the level of their roofs.

The dock cranes and railway sidings down in the port look appropriately like cardboard toys.

Eventually, we succumb to the urge to walk on.

Visiting Trsat Castle

As well as being home to the castle of the same name, Trsat is also a small neighbourhood in itself.

It’s only a little further up the steps, and, when we reach it, we’re pleased to see the ground level out.

There are a few pubs. Unfortunately, none of them have a decent view of the coast, but they are spacious and inviting.

Trsat Castle satisfies our appetite for tourist activities for the day. It has a fantastic panorama that young couples, including ourselves, pose in front of to take selfies for our albums.

The views are definitely worth the visit.

After a quick jolly around the grounds, we choose a pub to enjoy a few cold beers.

Several coaches roll up and a crowd of German tourists with walking poles and fanny packs clamber out, looking eager—I’d like to see their faces if they arrived at the port and had to walk up to this spot.

If you’re in this region and fancy something more adventurous, you can take tours of World War II-era bunkers and abseil down their tunnels.

But we are content to loaf around.

A late afternoon kind of place

Some strips come alive at night. Rural villages, on the other hand, are usually best enjoyed early in the morning.

It seems to us that Rijeka’s seafront is best enjoyed in the late afternoon.

Back at the quay on our return to the train station, the bars and cafés look a lot more inviting now that there are some punters to indicate to uninitiated visitors where the best joints are and what the best drink to have is.

Having acclimated to the place, it wouldn’t be a great shame if we had to stay the night and join in the revelry, but our train back to Italy leaves around 6pm.

Instead, we do the dreary things that people who enjoy self-catered accommodation must occasionally do on holiday.

Like buying wash tablets, dish soap, and coffee that requires only the addition of hot water to enjoy.

But onward travel forces us to plan ahead.

When we get back tonight, it’s my job to figure out how to work someone else’s washing machine—always tough—and the stickers on this one are printed in Italian.

Tomorrow, we have a very early start to travel to Venice, and I don’t want to have to waste time fighting to make one and a half lukewarm coffees using a moka pot.

Visiting Rijeka. Give it time

Our visit ended a lot better than it started.

It’s flawed to expect Rijeka to offer the same standards of beauty and effortless relaxation as Croatia’s holidaying hotspots further along the Dalmatian coast—it’s an industrial centre with an economy based primarily on moving freight.

Visitors that fail to acknowledge this will never get past feeling underwhelmed and risk carrying the misconception that the place has an identity crisis.

If it aimed to be a tourist hotspot, it would have an identity crisis. But it isn’t, so it doesn’t.

It makes what it can of its industrial heritage without gentrifying it, rather like Cardiff or Hamburg.

Whether it’s to one’s taste is another matter.