We Arrive in Croatia; Our Luggage Makes Other Plans

Our flights to Croatia were uneventful: Detroit to Rome, Rome to Moscow, and Moscow to Split. This last leg had us crammed on Aeroflot in a planeload of drunken Russians, acting like 40-year-olds on Spring Break. Sadly, we arrived at Split airport with no bags. Just the clothes on our backs (funky is too kind; we had been on the move for just under 24 hours straight). If you know us at all, you know we worried about them. Were they in Rome or Moscow? Were they delayed or lost? What would it cost to replace everything? What had we actually packed? Would Customs find the contraband Roger had stuffed in his suitcase?

The hotel turned out to be great, and the owner, Frane, took charge of tracking down the luggage, giving us time to explore this great city. Split was clean, interesting, walkable, and filled with good restaurants and gelato stands. What's not to like?

 We hit the streets, with Roger immediately shopping for replacement clothing. Two shirts later, he was once again dapper. How good did he look? Like a local, apparently. 

Posing as a Local Seems to be Working.

He went to a local market very early on Sunday morning. The cashier returned his change.  “Thank you,” he said reflexively in an otherwise wordless transaction.  The guy behind him in line, a grizzled old Croat, heard his English looked him hard in the eye.  Hard and cold. “You’re not Croatian,” he said.  “No, I’m American,” Roger said.  They guy looked him up and down, from his sandals and white socks to the top of his head and back again.  “You LOOK Croatian,” he finally said.  “Thanks,” was all Roger could think of.  We spent the rest of the day pondering if the guy meant this as an insult or a compliment.

Was Lost, but Now it's Found
Frane, our host, with missing bags.

Split is one of the oldest walled cities on the east coast of the Adriatic, built as a retirement palace by the Roman emperor Diocletian.  We know this because we had just  read it in Wikipedia.  A beautiful city, but pretty poorly labeled.  We usually get a proper tour when we visit the historical sites, but we did this one on our own.  We bought the requisite entrance tickets but had no idea what most of it was.  The advantage here is that you can make shit up, confounding the other English-speaking tourists by our own narration while looking intently at a hotel brochure but might be a guide book. We speak quietly with each other, but with other, but with great authority: “Elvis was buried in this crypt before the Balkan War, and re-interred in Graceland in 1993.”

The city had an interesting market, a promenade along the waterfront, and a world-class, one-of-a-kind display of stuffed frogs in human positions. The mind boggles! Rather than spend the cash to see the exhibit, we took photos of the poster and store-front and used our imaginations to picture the displays. Cost-effective tourism!

 

"...507 Stuffed  Frogs Displayed in Human
Positions."  That's why we travel!

 Literally minutes before we left our hotel for the Split bus station for Dubrovnik, our bags appeared at the hotel. Frane was right; there was nothing to worry about. I guess we should have taken that advice. 

Dubrovnik: Cash Cow of the Adriatic

Dubrovnik is gorgeous.  It is an ancient walled city, much larger city than Split, and popular with the tourists for a very good reason: it is one of the most picturesque cities in the world. Several large cruise ships dock there daily, spilling thousands of tourists into town in addition to the thousands already staying there. And this is slightly off-season. We had arranged to rent an apartment right in the old walled city, a great location for sight-seeing and general exploring. The old city is spectacular, the architecture is beautiful, the marble streets gleam, and everything we need or want is at hand. Shortly after arriving in town we stopped at a grocery store and Linda recognized Lauren, who is from our hometown and graduated with our daughter Kate. She and her husband Chris are on a year-long global trek, having wonderful adventures. Had we walked into that store 10 seconds later, we never would have seen them. We love that quality about travel, the serendipity of so many experiences.

Linda Takes a Dive

Heroes of The Wall: Aron  and Cameron;

Victim: Linda (Center)

Bystander: Roger (Right)

Walking the fortified wall surrounding Dubrovnik was the first order of business, and the views from the top are ispectacular. The brilliant blue sky, red roofs, and terra-cotta buildings made every corner a photo op. The Adriatic was a pretty good backdrop for it all. This is where and when Linda did a face-plant, transforming half or her face to an ever-changing array of color and cutting our walk a little short. Cameron and Aron, paramedics from California, came to her rescue and became our closest friends in the country, at least for a while. Certainly our only hero friends! We found that gelato made Linda feel better, sort of icing her face from the inside, so we increased the frequency of our gelato stops. It seems to help.  

It is also delicious.

Dinner in Old Town with new
Best Fiends: Julian and Daria

The Adriatic coastline is dotted with beautiful lsands. Which one to choose? Time constraints led us to Lokrum, an easy ten-minute boat ride from Dubrovnik. It had peacocks, a fortress, rocky beaches, an old monastery, and filming sites from Game of Thrones. A well-spent morning for sure. Back in Dubrovnik, the tourists return to their cruise ships in the late afternoon and the city quiets down considerably. That evening, we just barely managed to ride the cable car to the top of the mountain in time to catch the sunset. Quite a show! At the cable car, we met an interesting couple, Julian from Stuttgart, and Daria from Bolzano, Italy, who became our brand new best friends. (Do we sound fickle?) He's an automotive engineer and she's finishing her PhD in architecture, and both of them were charming company. They hung out with us on our terrace for drinks and joined us for dinner at an old town restaurant, impressing us with their historical and architectural knowledge, typical intelligent European insights into American culture, history and politics, and just having fun.

Enjoying the walk on the city walls.

Dubrovnik's terra cotta rooftops.

The walled city hugs the Adriatic Sea.

Streets of the city are narrow and steep.

Montenegro: Sort of like Croatia but with drunken Russians

Zlatko, trying his best!

The country of Montenegro is a short drive from Dubrovnik, and we hoped to get a peek at it since we were nearby. There's no telling if and when we'll be back in this part of the world. Small tour companies throughout Dubrovnik offer day trips, so we booked one for the next day. There were 15 of us in a small bus with Zlatko, our tour leader who made every effort to show us a good time. Our group was a strangely unresponsive group of slack-jawed dullards, appropriate since we were, after all, on the short bus. It made the day day less than thrilling and Zlatko's efforts fall flat. We visited the walled towns of Kotor and Budva, known for orthodox churches and walled fortifications.  We missed most of the commentary on the way back to the city as we dozed, but by then we were mentally finished learning for the day. One can only absorb so much!

The food has been great. Italian, seafood, pizza, street food sandwiches, and ice cream have met our nutritional needs quite well. As always, we are deeply impressed by the language abilities of our waiters and other workers who deal with tourists. We've pretty much stopped apologizing for only speaking English, but we still feel pretty crappy about it. Not enough to learn another language, you understand, but pretty crappy.

Coming up Next:  Bosnia:  Was it a good trip?  We had a better time than Archduke Ferdinand!