I booked a luxe holiday in Czech but got more than I bargained for

The Slavic languages are notoriously difficult to master. Sometimes the tiniest inflection can lead you down the strangest path. Other times, it can leave you without your clothes.

Language difficulties can lead us into some strange places

The Foreign Service Institute categorises Czech as a level IV language. It’s a step below the most difficult tongues to master – Korean, Japanese and Mandarin – and a level above Swahili. The difficulty lies not so much in the language but in the conjugation: four classes, six persons, and verb forms held hostage by gender and number. Then there’s the notorious diacritics that either maketh the Czech or revealeth the impostor (of particular social peril is the accented r which, when pronounced correctly, sounds somewhere between a cat’s purr and an old man aspirating on a sandwich).

In 2004, my girlfriend and I had been living in Prague. I loved the challenge of trying to master – or, more accurately, keep up with – the Czechs’ strangely beautiful tongue.

By the time autumn rolled around, we – a couple of coastal kids in a landlocked country – decided we were due a holiday.

Fancying myself as the linguist between us, I sauntered into a travel agent near Prague’s main square, Vaclavske Namesti, and rapped on the counter.

Dobrý Den!

The agent, clearly identifying an alien, raised an eyebrow:

Mluvíš cˆesky?

Do you speak Czech?

I panicked. My words disappeared. Each well-thumbed page of my Czech phrasebooks surrendered and fed itself into the paper shredder of my brain.

I fessed up.

Ah, no.

Dobrˇe (excellent), said the agent, whose fingers began flying across his computer’s keyboard. He glanced up, unsmiling, and fired a volley of Slavic consonants across the desk. It quickly became clear I’d forgotten not just my tongue, but the simplest of rules for English speakers in Czechia: “no” literally means yes. (Ano/no – yes; Ne – no).

Still, the longer I stood mute, like some hapless extra from Awakenings, the more words began trickling back. Phrases and key terms such as pláž (beach) and prˇíroda (nature) returned to active service in my hippocampus, and I grew determined to rise to the challenge: book a beach holiday in a foreign language or die trying.

A half-hour, a headache, and a healthy chunk extracted from my bank account later, I walked out into the street with a fistful of travel documents and self-congratulatory simper. I’d done it: two plane tickets to Split, Croatia, then transfers via luxury ferry to an eco-nature resort on the island of Hvar.

“You booked this in Czech? Are you sure you did it properly?” asked Debs, suspiciously.

Was I sure? Well, no. Not really. But how much harm could a white lie do? I nodded assertively. “Debs, I nailed it.”

The “plane” departed Prague Main Bus Station at 3am on a Thursday.

Honza, a Czech journalist friend, took great delight in driving us to the coach station to see us off. “What’s 13 hours on a Greyhound when you’re used to travelling halfway around the world?” he jibed.

Ruefully, we resigned our buttocks to the odyssey ahead. Once the novelty of being the only Australians in a coachload of Czechs wore off, we quickly found ourselves out of favour. As the only non-EU members, we – and only we – were required at each border crossing to leave the bus to be interrogated by international Customs goons.

With each crossing – Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia again – the friendly faces of our counterparts began to sour. The extra minutes of interrogation ultimately added hours to our journey and by the time we reached Split, 15 hours after we set off, the Czechs were ready to revolt.

But we’d made it to Croatia. Impossible, gorgeous Croatia. All that was left was an hour’s wait for a luxury cruiser to spirit us away to paradise. We cooled our swollen feet in the Adriatic and smiled. “You nailed it,” Debs whispered, kissing me on the cheek.

We located our mooring amid a phalanx of luxury yachts, their gangways laden with travellers exploring the Dalmatian coast. But it was clear there had been some mistake.

The “ferry” was a junk in the most literal of terms. All misaligned planks and rusted metal, it looked like something Tony Abbott might have sent back. I presented our documents to the skipper, cigarette drooping from his lip. Without a word, he hauled us on board.

We took a deep breath as we spluttered up to the island’s main port. Densely beautiful pine forests reached out to the chalk-white rocky shores that slipped into the clear waters. To our astonishment, we had not sunk. Our hearts had, however, at the revelation we were to board another bus. Thankfully, this one would take us directly to the resort.

The coach thundered through the woods, giving occasional glimpses of the coastline. My mind began to wander: Will there be champagne on arrival? Room service? A pillow menu would be nice. What was en eco-nature resort anyway?

The road narrowed further, and we approached a dead-end. A sign in the distance marked our ultimate destination. We could not yet make out what it said. We could, however, see from our moving vantage point over the destination’s stone wall: a pristine beach in the far distance, a line of tents, and a portly late middle-aged man standing buck-naked at a flaming barbecue.

The man half-turned, smiling broadly – sausage temporarily unsupervised – and snapped his tongs playfully at the bus. Our fellow passengers waved back. My eyes widened as I took in the scene. Children riding bikes in the raw. A young woman in the buff practising yoga on the grass. An elderly woman hanging out washing, without a shred of decency nor, apparently, irony. Out in the ocean, a windsurfer, rudder to the breeze, bobbed past a ferryload of tourists.

I bit my lip nervously as a large sign, in English, came into focus: Camp Vrboska Nudist Camp.

This was no “eco-nature resort”. I’d booked a week’s stay at an eco-naturists retreat, that most peculiar slice of vacational heaven where composting toilets meet strip-volleyball.

As we watched our Czech mates decamp to disrobe, I vowed to fix the situation.

With a few hours of Lonely Planet Croatia under my belt, I strode into the manager’s office and rapped on the counter.

Debs rolled her eyes.

A man appeared, mercifully clothed, albeit in a pair of tiny budgie smugglers.

“Pozdrav, došlo he do pogreške!” I said.

Hello, there’s been a mistake!

The man smiled.

“Govorite li hrvatski?”

Do you speak Croatian?

Before I had a chance to fib and answer “Da” (yes; what could possibly go wrong?), a shirt hit me in the back of the head. A bra ­followed.

“I’m going swimming,” Debs said, peeling off the rest of her clothes. “Come find me once you’ve stopped jabbering.”