"The sheer bloody awfulness of air travel..."

...is a phrase I once read in a newspaper article, uttered with confidence by the head of Eurotunnel, and that seems particularly apt to the journey Ash and I made to get to Croatia last week. Until Ryanair (remember them?) moved forward by two hours their single weekly flight to Pula, we had an early but feasible start to get to Stansted and then to fly on to Croatia that same day. After they moved it, we not only had to book new flights to London for the night before, but we were faced by the choice of spending the night in the airport or finding a hotel near Stansted. (easyJet's cancellation fees are so high it was cheaper to buy entirely new flights - and the aviation industry is whining about being scapegoated for carbon emissions? No wonder, when it's cheaper to leave seats empty than to amend a booking.)

Turns out there are no hotels near Stansted; at least, none costing less than £150 per night. With neither standby rates nor in fact any rooms available at the exorbitant inn, we spent a truly grim night on a plastic bench in Domestic Arrivals, kept awake - or rather, in a hideous semi-waking nightmare - by a hippie student arythmically banging a djembe so his compadres could practice capoeira into the small hours.

For the record, they were all crap at it.

We slept through the flight and woke up circling Pula International. The plane went from temperate to sauna as the doors opened and we ambled slowly across the scorching apron to the single gate. The airport is small, plain and refreshingly matter-of-fact: there are no airbridges, covered walkways, shuttles to the terminal or any of that jazz: if you get sucked into a jet engine then it's your own fault for displaying such rank carelessness. We got on a ancient transfer coach (either it or the equally ancient driver had an inbuilt speed limit of about 40kph) and trundled to Pula bus station.

Our accommodation for the first few nights was south of Pula, in an area called Punta Verudela. Despite having booked everything months in advance, we were almost studiedly unprepared for everything after the transfer bus and it took us two hours of blistered feet, aimless wandering and constant whining from yours truly (I will never wear flip-flops again, I can tell you that much) until we finally collapsed, sweating and exhausted, in our '70s apartment.