Dubrovnik...

Nick’s post was no exaggeration regarding the road to Dubrovnik. It was indeed the worst thing ever, terrifying and I WAS physically shaking, crying and tensing the entire Peninsula, and half of the coast road on the mainland. I don’t know how Nick didn’t drive off the cliffs deliberately, just to make his pain stop as, clearly, I’d completely lost it and was not fun to be around.

Anyway, we wove up to Aerie Apartments and Dijana, who runs the place, was so nice and sympathetic, and grabbed us two Karlovascko (we mostly drank Ozujsko in Croatia, but Karlovascko is good too) and let us settle in before even tying up the balance of the money for the apartment. She later proved to be even lovelier, almost insisting on doing our washing for us so we could go out and go for a swim (we declined). The view from the room was magnificent, looking down on the azure water and the glistening, walled, red-roofed Old Town. I took us both a while to unwind (stop shaking) but the view… well, see for yourself:

Nick, recovering. With beer. As yet, immune to the view. And probably regretting his choice in travel partner.Jewel of the Adriatic. Someone famous's words, not mine. Pretty fitting though.

That balcony became one of our favourite places in Dubrovnik. 1) Obvious beauty; 2) Sans other tourists; 3) booze was cheaper than in pubs (although it was still pretty cheap by Aussie standards - just more expensive than other Eastern European places we’d been); and 4) because it meant we didn’t have 450 million stairs to negotiate on the way back up from Old Town, cos nothing worth having ever comes cheap. More like 300-400, really, but after having done it at least once already that day, and coming up from a massive feast and three to four hundred beers… yeah, I whinged. But it was always worth it.

View from marina back up to our place.From the top. Going down was fine...How much ‘noone’ goes outside Old Town… dilapidated building 15 m from the bridge in.

Now, Dubrovnik has received quite a rap as being one of the most, if not THE most beautiful walled cities in the world. So the wall’s around the Old Town (being that it was originally for fortification purposes) and the Old Town is all marble lined lane ways, tiny shops and restaurants (with inappropriate numbers/standards of toilets, by Australian standards anyway, but I’ll show you Croatian standards later). And Churches. It’s in amazing nick, both the walls and the city itself. And it was lovely just wandering around (it’s quite small really, so after 2 days you’re completely oriented) - except when the huge cruise ships of people came in. then it was hideous. The grey-haired mobs were flocking through the streets at an excrutiatingly slow pace, in large groups (so no overtaking),and completely oblivious to the fact that other people might be trying to get anywhere, or do anything else. Sigh. And the cruise ships came in almost every day. But the days they didn’t were greatttttt. We just kept thinking “and this is the OFF season!!!”

One of the interesting things that we found out about the city was that its immaculate condition was actually down to rebuilding efforts over the last 15 years. Basically, if you’re at war with some country like Croatia, what’s going to hurt more than bombing the bejesus out of their pride and joy??? Or at least the Serbians thought so. So it was pretty devastated. But then the city got UNESCO status, got some funds injected through that, and fixed it right up. And it was LOVELY.

Lanes from the walls.Drawbridge in.The throngs. Check out how many raised cameras there are there???The thin lanes. The Irish Jig Bar (regular haunt of our's) was on this one.

Here’s pics from our city walls walk. A must if you’re in Dubovnik… which is a blessing and a curse, because it’s also channelling the slow-walking crowds along an even thinner and often steeply-staired (big ow-ies afterall our missions up to our digs!) walls. But the water IS as blue and clear as the pictures show. It’s phenomenal to stand maybe 40m above the water on the walls and see the bottom clearly. Sometimes even from Dijana’s place we could see the bottom, looking down from up on the hill, which is like nothing I’d ever imagined.

This isn't actually FROM the walls, but is just inside Old Town looking up at them.Bit of an engineering feat really. No doubt plenty of plebs died when they did it in the olden days.Sweet sky, walls, cliff and water pic.One of Nick's patented tripod photos of us on the wall. That pigeon actually just trundled through (walking really slowly) after Nick pressed the timer thing, so we were laughing and watching that little guy.More... walls. Very castley looking hey?

In case you ever go to Dubrovnik (avid, cough cough, readers J ) something you may not think is worth it, but was one of the coolest things we did, was heading up to the fort you can see from the walls. It was a few kuna each to get in, but given that we’d spent about 40 min trying to get there (confusing laneways and crappy map, and workmen in our way) we thought we’d splash out. So glad we did. We weren’t up there crazy early or anything, but we were the only ones there. On the most beautiful clear day, looking over that clear water and wandering around this fort from the 1800s (which isn’t a spot on how old the original walls at Dubrovnik were, although they kept adding bits and tweaking it, so there probably wasn’t too much original wall there, even before the JNA had a go at it.

Looking down from the fort towards town. Check that water out!

At bottom of fort, looking over to the city walls around Old Town.
The place to ourselves...
Nick’s “I’m taking a photo, so serious a task” look.
No comment on THAT pic.

On the way back, Nick stepped on THE biggest soft grub thing I have ever seen. It was as fat as a big toe, and longer. And it EXPLODED all over his leg and mine. It was absolutely revolting and I laughed and gagged for the next 15min. I wiped my bug juice off with a leaf, but Nick really had the heebies about it and was obsessed with washing it off properly.

The thing I’ll remember about Dubrovnik (apart from the lovely walls, fort and water, and it being crazy busy in Old Town) is the FOOD. Talk about fresh seafood! And although still slightly more expensive than Split, it was still cheap as chippies and delicious. Also, we both had the best steaks we’ve EVER had on the second night. So much so we went back a few nights later. Well, partly for the delicious, tender steak (I had mine with truffle sauce, Nick’s with a creamy prawn-filled sauce) served simply with heaps of creamy potatoes. I have 2 words for you - Konoba Pupo. We also loved the waiter there, one Ivan. He was an enigma wrapped in a Limerick riddle. Croatian through and through, he’d once gone to Ireland with the intention of staying for a few weeks… in his own words, “it took me 6 months to get drunk in every county in Ireland”. So he’d switch between his Croatian accented (perfect) English, into an Irish accent everynow and then for a wry comment or a story. He’s also madly saving to come to Australia, so we’re trying to get back into contact with him to offer him a bed when he comes over - we lost the business card he gave us with his full name, for face book purposes. Anyhow - 2of our 6 nights (we ended up having to overstay a bit, because the ferry to Bari only goes once a week in the of season) we went to Konoba Pupo.

And two of our nights in Dubrovnik we were fed homemade (always unexplained, as well “drink this, or you‘ll insult”) grappa (we think). That was one night at Pupo and one night at Konoba Lanterna, which I found to be equally delicious, but we dined on seafood there. I had Mussels Bouzzara. That’s over a kg of mussels in white wine and garlic broth. YUMMO. Doesn’t sound like much (well, weight wise, yes) but we also had a massive starter plate of the ubiquitous cold meats and cheeeses (love Prsut, Croatian prosciutto and it’s so cheap there!!! Not like Aust) and we’re really into the fresh crusty bread, cut up and dipped into a mix of olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper as well now. How cosmopolitan. J Neither of the Grappa nights ended to well… for me (and therefore, for Nick) but what those waiters never considered (although they probably suspected and did it anyway) was that Nick and I had begun the night with a few pints of beer at the Irish Jig bar around the corner. So, after pints there, and pints with dinner, we most certainly did not need grappa. And in Nick’s case, in addition to the 2 x 60ml shots of grappa we were given each (and drank, bad idea, but surprisingly good tasting! Or rather, not heinous) a random extra shot. Ahhhh. Fond memories, and then a blank. And then a whinging trip up the hill to the accommodation. Poor Nick.

Now, a bit about Dubrovnik itself. It’s an interesting set-up really, because the Old Town is the tourist attraction with the cafes/restaurants/bars/shops, and then there’s really nothing else outside. A few corner store type things, but nothing to write home about. So, when you’re getting the poops at the throngs of oldies in the Old Town… there’s really nothing to do and nowhere to go. One day, we walked to a ’market’ marked on the map. Now, I think Nick may have mentioned that maps in Eastern Europe are completely without scale, consistency or accuracy. We walked about 5 or 6 km (which would have been 2km, had the map been consistent across board) to find that the ’market’ was a fish and flower market. Right up Nick’s alley, ha ha, though after all of the beautiful simple fresh dishes we’ve tried now, we think buying fish from the fish market and preparing it actually is something we’ll try and do in the future. So then we walked another 2 or 3km to the other ’market’ marked on the map. Which, in winter, is actually 4 crappy carnival style stalls selling plastic crap. But we found where the locals go in the off season, a row of restaurants filled with people sipping short blacks/espressos with an accompanying glass of water. A great place to escape the Old Town crowds.

The next day we had a swim at the rocky beach, choccas with leathery locals sunbaking and dipping. It was so fresh and lovely in the water, looking out at the island, the city walls and even the big boat calmly sitting near the island. It was bliss.

Here's the beach we swam at. Nick whinged about the rocks. It was different - and makes you appreciate the sand at home! But the water was lovely.

Here’s our view at tea that night - another fresh seafood place, right down on the water overlooking the Old Town.
I actually took about 40 photos of the sunset from here. The sky at Dubrovnik is just... magical. Sounds lame, but there's always beautiful cloud formations and colours.
Fish FEAST. Yup - that's 2 "fish platters"in a week. Yummo.

The ONE ferry to Bari each week in the off season, goes at 11:30pm. This meant we had to check out of our accommodation in the morning and fill in the 12 hours time til then. Simple yeah? Well, not so much if it’s pouring with rain. Thankfully Dijana (lovely lady that she is) lent us an umbrella for the morning (leaving a mere 9-10 hours to fill in. The ferry left from over near the (underwhelming) fish market,so we ended up driving over there when it lightened off, picking up our tickets (It said to pick them up at least 2 hours before the boatleft), and walking over to the deserted restaurant row with the locals. And sitting, killing time. It was pretty excruciating, really. We couldn’t even have too much to drink, being that Nick had to drive the car onto the ferry. When we returned to the car, we saw that the ticket office was shut and there were about 10 people waiting forlornly outside. Thank god we picked up early! Now, this ferry stop was the most confusing and disorganised experience of the trip. There was no information on the ticket, no information in the terminal, and noone to ask what to do with the car/passports etc. Nothing. We nipped the car in behind a few buses (facing, confusingly, away from the ferry, which we could see sitting there) and buckled down outside the terminal, given that the terminal was filled with the contents of the buses… about 200 old Italians. It was SO loud in there. And every now and then you’d see a disoriented German/UK/Aussie couple wandering around, looking for information/someone to ask, just SOME SIGNAL that they were doing the right thing. We just come from an organised country, as do they. Croatia? Not so much. Italy? (Ferry was staffed by Italians) Even less so, as nick will detail in the Rome blog.

Then it started to rain. Sorry - POUR. A hard core electrical storm thundered in. We still had no idea what we were doing (3 hours at the terminal, and still not knowing what to do makes one a bit worried) so when, on no discernable signal that we could see, a bunch of motorcyclists jumped on their bikes, and buses started and roar around the corner of the terminal (still opposite direction to ferry) we dashed and grabbed the car and joined the line. After passport control (a glance at passport to see that it IS a passport, and a stamp - no checking that it was us or anything) we sat and waited to be loaded. In the electrical storm. Quickly becoming more and more nervous about the boat ride. Couldn’t be that bad, could it? It was. Nick and I had splashed out and got a double bunk shoebox with a basin, right in the bowels of the ship.

Basically, there’s a range of cabins, then there’s a class of comfy-ish (not for 8 hours, I wouldn’t think) chairs in banks, and then just deck space, which is find a spot in the lounges/bars or just in hallways and set up camp. The deck space was occupied by the busloads of Italians (thank youuuuuu cabin) and more Aussie backpackers than you could poke a stick at. When we were having a quiet one in the lounge (WE were quiet, I mean) one of the Italian bar staff came out, plunked a stack of bags on the bench and said something to everyone (in Italian) ending with col mal di mare. Trusty Italian phrasebook said… “seasick”. And how. Those Old Italians snatched them up quick (not a good sign, seeing as they’d obviously come over on the ferry too). We retired to our cabin (ahhh, blissful silence). It was funny (we didn’t laugh for at least 8 hours though), because at one point (probably when they were raising the ramp or something) we heard a quiet engine and Nick said “I think we are moving”, and I paused and said “I agree”. Not so though. When your cabin abuts an engine (practically) ferries are really loud. And when you’re going on the sea, you know it. We were already rocking and rolling (through the wake of the storm) even before we passed the islands that shelter Dubrovnik. When we did… it was incredible. In a bad way. Nick and I were both lying stationery on our bunks, tummies lurching at every sideways movement. Because there were cross waves, not just forwards and backwards and up and down, it was impossible to ’get used to’. The sound of the bow crashing into the waves was NOT comforting either. At one stage we were both sitting up, waiting for the lifesaving Travacalm to kick in, just wondering how on earth we could survive the night, and thanking fate that we were not upstairs with hundreds of (LOUDLY, of course) puking Italians, as that’d probably set us off - and it‘s supposed to be WORSE the higher up you get in the ship. Then an old duck came down to her cabin, and it was really at the most rough point, proceeding to moan (LOUDLY) for 10 minutes or so “male, male… MALE”. Yes. We were sick too, but that’s not helping anyone. Thanks to travacalm though, we managed to get a few hours sleep each in the end. And then it was onto Italian roads, and Rome…

Parrot guy - saw him in parrot garb (working for tips) a couple of days in a row in the city with 6 cheeky parrots, then, had a “wooden child’s chair in Split”moment and saw him out on a double date at the Troubador jazz bar. Random!

Croatian Public toilet - of the male and female variety. Was happy to return to the land of toilet bowls...
Croanglish... "Meat dumpings, mmmm". Love the funny translations you see about the place, not just in Croatia. We saw a sign in the lift of our hotel in France saying that the hotel would "kick away any responsibility" for lost/stolen goods.

Splitsville

It was the smoothest drive yet from Budapest to Zagreb, Croatia where we spent the night as somewhat of a half-time in the 8 or 900 km to split. Zagreb’s bloody cheap so we thought wed splash out A$100 on a room at the Sheraton. Zagreb obviously isn’t banking on the tourist dollar to get them by so it was pretty quiet when we rolled into town. It was pretty drizzly weather too so we thought wed stay close to the hotel to eat and try and get a beer, trying out our newly learned Croatian that we were practising in the car on the way.

I tried it first and got told pretty sternly by the big croat kebab maker to tell him in English so we did and we eventually got our kebabs and had a few beers, but once again it seems the phrase book publishers might be having a good old chuckle at the likes of the clueless travellers like us. Ive since learned that the phrase book gives you the most formal way to say things that would never be said in such a way so theres been quite a few times when we would of looked like downright knobs, asking ‘may we please order and aquire a beer big please?’ to the always puzzled bartender/shopkeep. Overall wed have been stuffed without the book though!

Ok now, the Croatian roads were beautiful at this stage because wed been on the A1 national highway for the whole trip. 3 lanes and minimal trucks. And what seemed to be no speed limit. There is, apparently, but after looking on the net, you don’t get fined until you hit about 175km/h because of some crazy equation that they have. The speed limit is 130km/h but no fine until 175. Go figure. And that’s if you have the misfortune of coming across one of the non-existant highway cops. We never saw one. And on top of that, if you did luck out and get fined, the damage was only about 30 aussie bucks. A fair bit by Croatian standards, but still well worth getting to split half an hour earlier for some that flashed past.

Split looked beautiful as we cruised down the side of one of the cliffs that surround It. It sort of reminded me of looking at byron as your going over st Helena hill, only with a thousand slum-quality high rise buildings all over the shop….. That example works! don’t shake you head! The good old gps had done pretty well that day to that stage so it was due to send us on the daily wild goose chase it loves to provide us with every time we turn it on. I reckon that gps lady has a laugh at us as soon as weget out of the car too, just like those language book publishers.

For some reason, the gps thought the most appropriate route to get us to our apartment would be to take us up and down some alleys in old town that were barely wide enough for david boon to walk through. Although some other cars had tried. This made it even harder to negotiate. All the while im cursing at the non-human gps and getting honked at by tossers on scooters and in tiny smart cars. Its such a stressful situation because you get to a point sometimes where you can barely move forward or backwards, and it looks very much like Klaus will be stuck there forever and become an ancient tourist attraction for the tourist of the year 2200. honestly I dont know how some transit vans got to where they were and I wish i could have been there to witness them get out of there! I eventually found a park in some apartment complex and could breathe a short sigh of relief. Only short coz I knew id have to get in soon enough and negotiateour way out of there.

The guy who owned the apartment that we were staying at said for us to give him a call when we got there. But weve never had a phone that could call a European numberso we thought wed just show up and surprise him. Not a great idea, as it turns out. We got there before 2pm so we thought wed be sweet and hed be at his shop downstairs. 2pm being a fairly universally accepted time of day for someone who works in a store in a tourist area to be at work. Not so for mario. He opens up at 9am, then knocks off at midday for 5 hours then comes back for a few hours at night. Not a bad life! Not that he did any more then coffee, a smoke or two with his mates and a bit of net surfing. Me thinks renting the apartment out above his shop is his primary income source and the shop is the hobby. Good on him i say because he seems to not have a care in the world.

Anyway, our options were few. Wait around for 3 hours till he shows up for the night shift, or try and contact him by finding a phone booth and doing our best. By this stage though, I was so pissed off and dirty on the world and especially the gps lady so I wasn’t much help in the situation. Lucky lauren had her shit together because she got s calm and organised us a phone card and had me on a payphone to Mario in no time. He was 5 mins away so all worked out in the end but I hated split at this stage and I had a lot of redeeming to do!

The room was nice. Just like a beach apartment. Kitchen and all that. A nice big fridge for a heap of beers too which was a bonus. We stocked that then went for a walk to check out split. Once id finally calmed down and wasn’t seeing split through the redness of my rage I realised that split was one of the most beautiful places wed been. Completely different to the other places up north. Split is situated on a harbour with crystal clear turquoise water with a few islands a few kms out. A marina with boats of all shapes and sizes bobbing upand down. There was massive car ferries out further and little shitty tinnies that stink like rotten fish right up next to the esplanade. We happened to sit down to our first 3 dollar beer just at the sun was setting. This was the first time that id ever seen the sun set over the water so it was so nice aand relaxing after the earlier trials and ordeals. That sight was nearly as good as the ridiculously cheap bill for the 6 half litre beers that we had while sitting there soaking it all up.

Split looks like a bit of haven for the rich. But it probably isn’t really. If people like us could live it up there too.

The next day we had a cruise around and checked out the beaches. Which were quite weird, in that they were knee deep for about a hundred metres out. At this one beach, there was all these old blokes in theyre speedo’s playing some weird handball game with a small ball that they had to keep in the air. There would have been a dozen games going on, each with about 4 blokes playing. Quite a scene. They were all nearly black, they were that tanned so its obvious that they enjoy this game. Mario toldus later that it’s a traditional croation game that has a ‘world championships’ in split every year. That would be a dead set classic. It just resembled a game of Frisbee with a tennis ball to me.

Walked around the old town that afternoon and were impressed again with how nice it was. So relaxed and easy going although it would probly be a nightmare in summer. Heaps of interesting restaurants and shops and nothing was expensive, although it always looked like It should be.

Had an amazing seafood platter for two thaat night right on the water with seafood that was swimming a few hours before. It almost got me romantic! We had a couple of beers and a few caraffs of wine on top of that and paid about 60 bucks. ridiculous.

Split was all about relaxation and we continued this the next day. Just strolling around, checking out the crazy markets where the stall holders always yell at us in Croatian to by a bunch/bag/string/handful/pocketful/whatever of whatever unusual shaped fruit or vegetable, sometimes nut they were flogging for generally about 20c a kilo. Bit of ahead spin really. But funny. You just need to get used to either ignoring the old crazies or busting out a ‘Hvala Ne!’ (no thanks) and you’ll be right.

We would always try a bit of our newly learnt Croatian on Mario when we’d catch him in the shop and was always impressed. Well, he acted impressed. But hed correct us when we stuffed up which was important, considering how long we were gonna be in Hrvatska. he owes us a free night in his apartment too because on the last night we were there the alarm to his shop kept going off. we thought it was kids tryingto break in so it keptus up all night. i couldnt call him so i went out and checked and there were some dodgy looking kids around which made me think it was definitely them. he later said that it was probably a fly flying past the sensor so he said when we go back, he will give us a free night...

Split was not without its crazies and we saw a few crazy things at times. Apart from all the kittens that just roamed the streets and in the restaurants, we saw:

A bloke sprint through a bar we were at waving his arms and just screaming at the top of his lungs.

A well dressed ladt in high heels and a leather handbag bin diving and collecting cans.

A lady walking around apparently trying to sell a random childrens wooden chair. Just going up to anyone and hitting them up to buy it. Later that day we saw a guy walking down the street with said chair so she obviously had a win!

A bloke flop it out and have a leak on a tree in the beer garden of the restaurant we were at. He wasn’t a patron and he was about 80 in the shade. I caught It in my periphery and could not believe it.

Yet people don’t even blink at this stuff over here!

Another feast fit for a king later (I think it was a 2 person mixed grill this night) and we were ready to move onto Dubrovnik. We wish we could of stayed longer, in hindsight. But at the same time pretty keen to check out Dubrovnik, considering the pictures we were looking at on the net. We jumped in the car and punched the address of our next place into the gps. It said we were only about 200km away so we were happy with that and expected to be in Dubrovnik ina few hours. Ha! So naïve we were….

The direct route would oftaken us through bosnia and our rental agreement didn’t allow that so we had to take the coast road the get a ferry over to another peninsula then drive down that. The coast roadworthy mainland started off nicely, meandering around the bottom of the hills with the blue water of the Adriatic a few metres to lauren’s right, as we were driving south and on the water side of the road. It sort of snuck up on us, but all of a sudden we were a few hundred metres up and practically dangling over the water on the edge of the cliffs. Im not great with heights, but Lauren has an almost debilitating fear and this was causing her to actually scream at times. I wanted to slow down sometimes but I couldn’t because it was probably less safe to crawl along there and have a bunch of crazy croats road raging me the whole way. So we pushed on with Lauren almost physically sick at times. It was bad. But we made it to the ferry and thought the worst was behind us. The ferry was so relaxing and it was such a nice day that all our nerves were calmed and everything was good again. But then we get off the ferry….

We got off and it was a tiny little village with no easily recognisable way out of town. It too was surrounded by massive steeping hills and we couldn’t find the highway out. Because there wasn’t one. It was a tiny little road that for once the gps was right on, but we wish it wasn’t. a tiny half laned road wound its way up the side of the hills and we started to get this sense of ‘here we go agaaaiiinnn!’. we tossed up whether ornot to just cut our losses and turn around and risk breaking avis’s laws in bosnia, but I was the one who said that we should soldier on because wed come so far.

We needed petrol so we pulled into what seemed like the only servo on the peninsula. We pulled up to the onlybowser at the place and I filled up while lauren went in to tryand see whether the roads further on would be drivable or whether they would be cliffhangers, therefore making up turn around and got the other way. The bloke manning the servo spoke a bit of English but not much so when lauren asked if the roads were scary, he was replying with ‘no, you shouldn’t be scared of getting lost. Theres only one road’. so we didn’t know what to make of that and the map we had showed the road as running down the centre of the peninsula so we thought wed do it….. They ended up being even scarier than the ones on the mainland and made lauren go grey with fear. Shaking and sweating. It was even worse when a local bus would fly by in theother direction and cause me to take the car to what lauren say was about inches from a 200m plunge into to water. Crazy stuff! And something I never want to do again. But im becoming an even better driver than I ever was. As hard as it is to believe….

Klaus. expertly parked.

The lane out the front. one of the many that the car gpshas tried todrag us through.

crazy fish market.

crazy busker who comes complete with birds perched on his hat and instruments.

old guys playing handball.

nice beach.

frolicking.

part of Diocletian's Palace. the heart of oldtown and is about 2000 years old. they use it as a market to flog cheap crap these days. The pic up the top is also a remaining wall from the palace, it's really cool how there's just bits of wall/palace still standing through Old Town, and often utilised later to form walls of buildings that are now... churches/shops/hotels/people's flats.

more lanes in old town

trying to figure out how we were going to get into our apartment. we had to go in through the shop.

the place.

3 aussie dollars. Bargain.

the view whilst enjoying our seafood platter.

atms are really just a hole 'hole in the wall' here.

laurens breakfast on one morning. a banana split in split.

the view from our window.

lazy croatians, lazing.

the coast roads to dubrovnik. i wasnt kidding.

i got a quick smile out.

klaus on the ferry.

nice day for a cruise.

more niceness.