Try as we might, we couldn't muster much pity for her. Unlike nearby Korcula, Vis lacks a fortress city that Rebecca West (who in 1941 famously wrote about traveling through Yugoslavia in ``Black Lamb and Grey Falcon") might have described as ``dripping with architectural richness." Unlike Hvar, its nightclubs don't attract superyachts. But Vis, a brief punctuation in the Adriatic Sea blanketed by vineyards and orchards in late summer, has charms of its own, chief among them a deep languor that would be drowsy if there wasn't a quickening pulse underneath.
Vis offers one the sense of touristic accomplishment that comes with being somewhere at just the right time -- a feeling one gets, to a lesser extent, elsewhere along this coast, with its dark, gem-like water, craggy heights, and gleaming medieval walled port cities like Dubrovnik. In an age of cheap jet travel, few places are hard to get to. Many of today's ``unspoiled" destinations, then, aren't so much undiscovered as avoided. Croatia, while it hosts its fair share of European visitors, to most Americans still conjures up images of the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s. That is changing. ``You are adventurous Americans," an aristocratic-looking Croatian woman, dining with her English husband, told us condescendingly one night on Vis. It was clear she considered us the advance guard of a ruinous horde.
Military metaphors come easily on Vis. From the end of World War II until 1989, two years before Croatia declared its independence, it was a Yugoslav military stronghold, closed to tourism. Now, the adventurous visitor, American or otherwise, can leave behind the island's pristine stone beaches, sun-drenched waterside cafes, restaurants, and boutiques, and ascend the nearly 2,000-foot Mount Hum to visit the complex of caverns that briefly headquartered Marshal Tito's partisans as they fought the Axis during World War II.
