BootsnAll Travel Network



Archive for the 'Croatia' Category

« Home

Dubrovnik: Pearl of the Adriatic

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

I think I probably heard of Dubrovnik for the first time in late 2001 as I sat in the Feltrinelli international bookstore in Rome and began reading guidebooks to places I’d never considered visiting before. Ever since then I’ve been desperate to visit what is regularly described as the finest walled medieval city in the world. Finally, I got my chance.

Old DubrovnikLeaving the rain of Bosnia & Hercegovina behind (I’d been absolutely soaked walking from the bus station to the old town of Mostar the day before, an episode from which my shoes still haven’t recovered), I arrived in Dubrovnik at lunchtime on Friday. What I found was a glorious, stunningly beautiful, almost perfect old town inside the famous walls, one that I roamed around with great pleasure for the next three days. It’s dreadfully touristy, of course, especially when the enormous cruise liners dump passengers by their hundreds into the harbour and they descend en masse into the city, but it comes with the territory, I suppose.

I stayed in a lovely little studio apartment in the heart of the old city and my strategy to beat the crowds was to rise before 7am when everyone else was sleeping and have the old town virtually to myself in the early morning, then read my book and watch the French Open on TV during the middle of the day before embarking on another walking session in the late afternoon – and I found that this worked pretty well.

Dubrovnik RooftopsThe highlight, of course, was a walk on top of the city walls, which I did as soon as they opened at 8am on Sunday morning and which I, entering at the eastern end and not the western end, had pretty much to myself for the next hour. From the walls you get an amazing panorama of the old city and the Adriatic Sea beyond, and I found it especially interesting to see which buildings had new orange tiles installed on their rooftops after the city was shelled in 1991, and which buildings were lucky enough not to have been hit.

After three days of contented sighs and many photos, it was time to move on yesterday morning and I continued south across the border to Montenegro. While the travel has been great over the past 10 days, unfortunately the actual visa-run part of this visa-run isn’t going so well, and my ingenious plan to visit three countries in very quick succession and acquire loads of stamps to confuse the Italian immigration officials when I re-enter the Shengen zone has been somewhat thwarted. I did actually get passport stamps yesterday (unlike entering and exiting Bosnia & Hercegovina), but the Croatian exit stamp is on the observations page at the front of the passport and the barely legible Montenegrin stamp is on top of the Antartic penguin somewhere in the middle (“On top of the penguin? That’s blasphemous!” texted Wendy). Apart from a random and wrongly dated Canadian stamp, that leaves the Swiss entry and exit stamps side-by-side as the most recent ones. But my prior experience with the Italians leads me to believe that they’ll just stamp some random page without looking at any of the other stamps anyway.

For now I’m in Kotor and I’ll spend the next few days in coastal Montenegro before taking the ferry to Bari on Thursday night.

Let’s Split

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Way back in February, when I assumed (correctly) that Swiss immigration would not ask for a return/onward flight when I arrived from the United States but that the airline would, I bought a budget one-way flight from Geneva to Split in Croatia, one of the closest non-EU/Shengen countries, just to be safe. Four months later, here I am: the need to get out of the Shengen zone for a while sees me travelling without Wendy for the first time in eight years.

Diocletian’s Palace

I arrived in Split on Saturday night and yesterday morning began my first exploration of the former Yugoslavia. The central attraction of Split, of course, is the palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian, who built the palace near the Roman town of Salona after he became the first sitting emperor to voluntarily stand down in the first years of the fourth century AD. He spent the rest of his days living in his enormous palace and planting cabbages.

Today, the palace is an extraordinary ruin, unique in the former Roman Empire in that it is a living city that has never been abandoned since the residents of Salona took up there several centuries after Diocletian’s death. Within the walls of the palace today there are Roman columns, basements, marble debris, an old Pagan temple and the intact mausoleum of the visionary emperor himself – but that’s only half the story. There are also Renaissance mini-palaces, churches and houses, and in the 21st century it all comes together in a fabulously mismatched city-within-a-city. Today, 3000 people live inside the palace walls, many in buildings with Roman foundations, and it’s still the beating heart of Split. Wandering through the palace is a great delight and you never know what you might come across – like a modern bank with an original Roman column standing in front of the tellers. All of this makes Diocletian’s palace one of the most fascinating Roman sights I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. I’ve probably spent about 4-5 hours wandering through it over the past two days, and I’m not done yet.

Trogir

The other highlight of my trip so far was a morning spent at World Heritage listed Trogir, a small medieval city about 25km from Split. The architecture (including a glorious Romanesque church), the setting and the boats on the city’s shore gave it a classic Mediterranean feel, a world away from the same-period Germanic village of Stein am Rhein that we visited the previous weekend in Northeast Switzerland. I happily wandered the streets of Trogir for a few hours revelling in the beauty of the place. As a contrast to Diocletian’s Palace, which is very hodge-podge and disorderly (and I say that with love), Trogir is better laid out but still retains its laid-back Mediterranean air.

Today I had planned to go to the island of Hvar for the day, but the forecast of rain and the prospect of a 10.5 hour day-trip (as the boats aren’t running with high season frequency yet) meant that I decided to stay in Split, explore the palace some more, and plan my next move. Tomorrow I’m hoping to visit the ruins of Salona and then travel by bus across the Bosnia & Hercegovina border to Sarajevo. It’s a city that has intrigued me for years because I love the name, because it’s known as the European Jerusalem owing to a significant presence of all three monotheistic religions, and because it’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 15 years since the city was liberated from a three-year siege during the wars that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia.