Chapter 17: Nine days in Croatia

Well, nine days minus three hours. A more accurate, though rather too unwieldy title for this post would be 'Three hours in Montenegro, eight days and 21 hours in Croatia'.

I had no intention of visiting Montenegro. It looks like a great little country, and I could easily have come up with a week's worth of things to do there if I'd been able to squeeze in a visit. But even though I'm moving around pretty quickly, and covering plenty of territory, you can't go to every country and you certainly can't go everywhere *within* each country that makes the cut. I'm already visiting more European countries than I'm missing: Montenegro, unfortunately, wasn't going to be one of them.

Jadrolinija Lines had other ideas. I'd booked a ferry they run from Bari, in Italy and Dubrovnik in Croatia. It was pricey, but barring a flight - and flights are definitely barred - it was the only practical option to get to Dubrovnik, which is just about the worst connected major tourist city in continental Europe. So from Rome I returned to Bari, chewing up a day that was spent first on a train, then sheltering from a freak storm on the floor of a chip shop, and then making a half-hearted, unsuccessful effort to find a replacement for my pants after their sudden conversion to Catholicism, before finally boarding my boat to Dubrovnik.

Except it wasn't going to Dubrovnik. A couple of weeks earlier I'd gotten an email from Jadrolinija, regrettably informing me that the service I'd booked to Dubrovnik now goes to Bar, in Montenegro. Service changes are annoying enough, but I was being shuffled over to the next country along. I could cancel the service and get a refund, but Jadro weren't about to compensate me for the train I'd booked to Bari or the hostel in Dubrovnik. There was no option but to allow myself to be shanghaied to entirely the wrong country. 

To rub salt into the wound, if I'd had a car I would have apparently gotten the car passage for free, but because I was a foot passenger the only compensation I got was a free bus to Dubrovnik. That's not a 'free bus', I pointed out in an email. That's just a free - but deliberate - delay in your service. They chose not to respond to this feedback.

I was mostly pissed off about the sudden change of plans because I had set myself a rule for the trip: I didn't want to pass through a country's territory without doing something in that country. Now that I was going to Montenegro, I wanted to actually do something in Montenegro, but I already had (expensive) accommodation booked in Dubrovnik, and moving it back would have cost a lot. So I extended my stay in Dubrovnik by a night (this was cheaper), and planned a day trip from there to the Bay of Kotor, which is in Montenegro and only about 60km from Dubrovnik.

I'm lucky I ever made it to Dubrovnik, because I almost didn't get as far as Montenegro. I arrived at the ferry terminal a couple of hours early and waited around for somebody from Jadro to arrive. Nobody did. The terminal started filling with passengers and I noticed that a Canadian couple - or possibly father and daughter, it could have been either so I was very careful - already had their boarding pass. Where, might I ask, did they get those? "At the check-in office", came the reply. The check-in office, it turned out, was at the other end of the harbour. Two kilometres away. There was a shuttle bus running every 20 minutes or so to get people between the office and their terminal. 

That makes sense. Why would you want to have your check-in where the boat is parked and where people are arriving? And why would you want to, I don't know, have a staff member there to explain the situation to people who don't know that the check-in counter is (literally) somewhere over the horizon? Instead we relied on word of mouth: I got back from the office and had to break the news to a Utah couple, who made their own, even more frantic, dash to get there on time.

The boat was rather more spartan than the one from Greece, but I had the cabin to myself and the breakfast even passed the scrambled eggs test. And when we arrived in Bar I got to see the Montenegrin Navy:

I'm pretty sure that's the entire Navy. All of it.

As far as unwanted bus rides go, this one was pretty spectacular, with Great Ocean Road-level views. At one point the bus took a shortcut across the Bay of Kotor by boarding a ferry, and I recognised parts of the highway from whatever James Bond movie it was that was set in Montenegro (I think it was Casino Royale?). I spent most of the time talking to the same Utah couple who had narrowly made it to check-in the previous night, and the time went quickly until we reached the Croatian border, where we spent no less than an hour and a half waiting to have our passports stamped. 

My enthusiasm for coming back this way for Kotor waned from the moment we hit that border crossing, and after doing some research and finding that the only plausible way to do it was to join a tour for around €40, leaving at 7:30 in the morning, I ditched the idea. I'm not satisfied with my experience of Montenegro, but I saw the Navy, had a scenic bus ride, a great conversation and rode a bus ferry. It's not much, but it's *a* Montenegrin experience.  Or so I shall tell myself.

Because of the border travails, the bus didn't get to Dubrovnik until after 2PM, a full six hours after Jadro had initially pledged to get me there until they decided Montenegro sounded nicer instead. It's lucky that Dubrovnik is a small place - if pressed for time you could see and do all the important stuff in a day - because out of six days here I only had two that weren't significantly interrupted for one reason or another. Apart from the bus, the Swans were playing on day two (another win, I am currently undefeated in former Communist countries, but still without a win in the Western bloc). That night I stayed awake until 6AM to wallow in schadenfreude at Theresa May's expense, and so I barely had the energy to go outside on day three. I lost day six, as well, for reasons I'll get to shortly.

It worked out fine, though. As I mentioned, Dubrovnik's a small place, and I fell into a pattern of lazing about the hostel until the mid-afternoon before walking into town. My hostel was a good 20 minutes walk from the Old Town, but made up for it by being across the road from the marina:

Yes. This will do nicely.

It was late afternoon, inching towards evening, and there's no better time of the day to walk around Dubrovnik's City Walls. It's outrageously expensive - about $30 - but you can circumnavigate the entire town, and there's nothing to stop you going around more than once. And the scenery made up for the price:

There's a rock below the walls, but still a good 15m or so above the water, where crazy people like to jump. This fellow wasn't crazy, but all his friends had jumped and peer pressure was biting. He crossed himself, crept up to the edge, looked down and lingered for a minute or so. He stepped back, but looked at his friends and returned to the edge. Me and some other watchers on the walls decided to help by counting him down from ten, but I don't think he appreciated our gesture of support: he turned, waved at us to cut it out and tiptoed to the edge again to look down. He crossed himself again, but still didn't jump. I'd just about given up on him when he abruptly threw caution to the wind:

He got a well-deserved standing ovation from the walls.

Dubrovnik's walls are, of course, also King's Landing's walls. Game of Thrones is essential to the city's tourism strategy: official merchandise is available in all the souvenir shops, and there are heaps of tours that take you to all the filming locations. With only two seasons left to go they're going to have to come up with a new schtick soon, but apparently the next Star Wars movie was filmed here and there's already storm troopers in all the shops, so that should tide them over for another couple of years. 

I didn't book a tour. I enjoyed recognising the occasional filming location - the steps where Cersei began her walk of shame, the little beach where Myrcella was packed off to Dorne, the ramparts where Tyrion and Varys liked to meet up to exchange witticisms - but I figured it was more fun to happen across them like that than to be dragged around and having them pointed out to me. I did eavesdrop on one tour as I was walking past: the guide was pointing to a patch of concrete and droning about how "this is where everybody's favourite character, Joffrey, was attacked by a mob", while holding a photo album open to a picture of little King Lannister². The hapless people who had paid €30 for this tour were standing about awkwardly, feigning interest. I think I made the right call.

There was one tour advertised that I wish I'd made time for, though. I'd very much like to tour a pie:

(Yes, I know, it's in Spanish. But it made me laugh.)

The pie tour might have caught my eye, but it was another part of the ad - for sea kayaking - that lodged in my brain. I'm a planner by instinct, and I have to push myself a little to be spontaneous: I much prefer to schedule my spur-of-the-moment decisions well in advance, to occur spontaneously at regular intervals. But sea kayaking? I'd seen them out on the water while I was up on the walls. Sea kayaking looked like fun.

I went to investigate. I was worried about the diabetes: if they put me in a solo kayak and I had a hypo, I was going to be all at sea in more ways than one. And I didn't particularly want to pair up with another clueless paddler only to have to stop halfway through and be carried home. Could I share a boat with a guide?

I was instructed to come back the next morning, and they'd sort something out. The something they sorted out wasn't teaming up with a guide, as I'd hoped, but they'd put me together with a fellow from Los Angeles, Donny, an experienced sea kayaker whose planned paddle-partner was land-bound with food poisoning. Donny is a recreational therapist. He's used to partnering with physically and confidence-curtailed types, and was fine with driving solo for a while if necessary. 

Very well, then. Diabetes hedge in place, there was nothing to stop me from sea kayaking.

Crap. There's nothing stopping me from going sea kayaking. I'm going sea kayaking. Crap.

Getting into the boat was a little hair-raising - we almost capsized the moment I climbed in, before inertia worked its magic - but once in it was surprisingly easy. Donny had a little trouble keeping in a steady rhythm with me, but to be fair I wasn't exactly playing in tune. He warned me to paddle a little less furiously if I wanted to last the whole trip - we were going for three hours, minus a 45 minute swimming stop - and after 10 minutes or so my shoulders agreed with him.  

The half-time swimming break was at a beach hidden inside a big cave:

The guides handed out snorkelling equipment, but I couldn't figure out how they worked, I can't really swim properly and the water was clear enough to see perfectly in any case. So instead of snorkelling I just splashed about in the water with all the grace of a beached whale on opposites day. 

The second leg of the journey, around Lokrum - a big island that stretches out across Dubrovnik harbour - was twice as long, and Donny and I were having difficulty keeping up. Partly it was that kayaks have a mind of their own - ours had murderous intent and kept wanting to either crash straight into the rocks or head directly out to sea - but I also couldn't help but notice, whenever I turned around, that Donny's paddle wasn't in the water. Just who was supposed to be carrying whom in this arrangement, exactly?

On the far side of the island the guide explained that Lokrum is cursed. For hundreds of years, whoever owned the island - a list that includes Archduke Ferdinand, whose death started World War I, and an Emperor of Mexico - died a violent, grisly death. Now the island is a nature reserve, owned by the Croatian government, so poor Lokrum is copping the blame for killing the economy instead.

Once done with the kayak - somehow, I made it back to Dubrovnik- I headed back out to look around Lokrum. I would have loved to spend a whole day out there - there's a ruined monastery, a fortress at the top of the hill and swimming spots and walking paths up and down the island - but not long after arriving I looked down at my legs, which were starting to get sore.

They were on fire. 

I'd grown too confident in having an ozone layer over my head, and forgotten to put sunscreen on my feet and legs. So my visit to Lokrum ended up only being for an hour. I found a pond in the centre of the island called the 'Dead Sea' - it's salt water, connected to the ocean by an underwater tunnel - and sat down in it for a while in the hope that salt water is good for barbecued skin, before returning to the hostel to assess the damage.

Lots of damage. The walk back, with the burn exposed to full sun, was agony, and because my ankles were burnt every step I took only stretched and irritated the burn more. My time roaming Dubrovnik was at an end: without my newly-Catholic pants, I couldn't protect the burn from further damage even if I could tolerate the pain from walking. I spent my last day in the hostel, marinading in vitamin E cream, until it was time to head to the next city, Split.

The lack of pants wasn't for lack of trying, for what it's worth. I'd attempted to find pants in about half a dozen shops, but Croatia is not an ideal place for pants-shopping. I found plenty of leather pants, some velvet ones and even a vinyl pair, but none of those were *quite* what I was after. The few cotton ones I found, meanwhile, left rather too little to the imagination for physical *or* mental comfort: Croatian men evidently prefer a tighter fit up front than I'm accustomed to. I found one perfect pair, but whilst it had a fly and a button hole for doing them up, there was no button. It wasn't a manufacturing mistake: there were half a dozen pairs in different sizes, all of which had holes for fastening buttons, but no buttons. I only finally managed to replace them in Split, where I found a pair in a New Yorker store: you can always trust an American chain to cater to the well-rounded gentleman.

In fact, shopping in Croatia is just difficult generally, because none of the stuff in shops has any English labelling. I bought what I thought was butter, only to later find that it was really yeast for cooking with. But at least I can tell the difference between soap for washing myself with and soap for washing clothes with, unlike whoever left this in the hostel shower:

To be fair, almond milk doesn't belong in bath gel but it *certainly* doesn't belong in clothes washing liquid either.

From Dubrovnik I needed to get to Split, the other major city on the Croatian coast. Bigger than Dubrovnik, less famous but almost as touristy, it's best known for its old town, which is built entirely within the walls of what was once the Roman Emperor Diocletian's palace (or more accurately, his retirement villa: he abdicated from the throne after building the palace in Split to live out his days in). This was going to be my last significant Roman site of the trip.

First I had to get there, though, and the cheapest and fastest way is to go by bus. But If you look at a map of Croatia, it sort of looks like a badly drawn boomerang: the capital, Zagreb, is more or less in the middle, and there's a mountainous inland arm and a second, longer arm that stretches down the Dalmatian coast to Dubrovnik. Zoom in, however, and you'll see the coastal arm is broken: between Split and Dubrovnik is a 19km long stretch of coastline that belongs to Bosnia, not Croatia. The buses between Dubrovnik and Split, then, have to cross through Bosnia: they don't stop so you don't have to pass through passport checks, but nevertheless, through Bosnia they go. I could just about suspend disbelief about having done more than transit through Montenegro. But spend at best 15 minutes on a bus racing through Bosnia, without stopping? 

Up with this I could not put. 

So I looked for other options, and eventually found a catamaran that sails up the coast once a day, stopping in at a variety of islands along the way. The boat cost twice as much as the bus and was ridiculously noisy, but it was fast, it avoided the agonising question of whether I could say I've been to Bosnia, and once the heat went out of the day and I could bear to go outside the view was rather nice, too:

You get bored of those Mediterranean sunsets after a while. Ha.

I had about one a half days to play with in Split, and the city itself is tiny: you can see everything in a couple of hours. Many people stay longer and use it as a base camp for day trips, and I'd planned to go out to one of the islands before disqualifying myself from beach activities. So I tried getting out and about in Split itself, but apart from a disappointing and over-priced walk around the excavated remains of the palace complex (it costs $10 to visit and amounts to a concrete basement), everything else was out in the sun. 

So I retreated back to the hostel, and because the dorm had a TV, I turned it on and started flicking channels, thinking I might find a sitcom that I could make up a storyline to in the absence of subtitles. Instead I discovered the TV had Netflix! A fellow named Peter was logged in, and his account now shows that he binge-watched about eight episodes of House of Cards until the other dorm mates turned up. I hope Peter enjoyed it as much as I did. 

The bonfire below my knees had finally cooled enough the next day to gingerly wander about and check out the town before boarding a bus to Zagreb. The first thing I noticed was this statue of a man who clearly can't believe what he's reading:

Like everywhere else, the Catholics were quick to repurpose the former Roman buildings as churches, but there was a personal element to it in Split. Diocletian was the most enthusiastic and persistent persecutor of Christians of any Roman emperor. So the Church took over his mausoleum - kicked him out of his own grave - and turned it into the town's cathedral, pointedly dedicated to a local Saint that had been martyred when Diocletian was in charge. 

I accidentally paid to go into another church. You've got to be careful with churches: I'm not above freeloading by wandering around the free ones, but they often don't say that they charge an admission fee until you're already inside, and then you're reduced to avoiding eye contact as you slink back out. Not possible here. It was the smallest chapel I've ever seen - built inside the wall of the old palace, it's about a metre wide and has seating for two people. From the entrance you could see - you could almost touch - the whole thing:

 

I wasn't going to pay for this, I thought - but then an elderly nun came out of nowhere. Cutting off my retreat in the narrow space, she unleashed a torrent of Croatian she knew I didn't understand, apart from the final two words: five kuna. Before I could object, she said 'five kuna' a second time, and just in case I didn't get the message she pointed at my pocket, and then at her open palm. 'Five!'

Alright, Sister. You win. I paid the five kuna, received what I assume was a blessing for my trouble and then fled as she started pointing down a corridor that apparently led to some other chapel, before I got harangued into paying for that as well. This nun may think she already answered her calling, but I'm afraid she missed it. She was born for door to door sales.

From Split I went on to Zagreb, where I only had one day but managed to pack in a decent amount anyway, after an annoying start. I try to ask for a lower bunk wherever beds are assigned, rather than being first in, best dressed, and Zagreb had obliged: I was told at reception I'd been allocated not only a lower bunk, but a standalone bed. So I was pretty pissed off when I got into the room to find the bed had clearly been slept in, and the squatter's stuff - her name was Francesca - was all over it. 

After debating with myself whether I wanted the fight I decided to let it slide, but remarked to another guest, Sam - a self-confessed maths genius from Bristol, about to start wasting his talents at an investment bank - that I was tempted to buy a razor and shave the bed-thief's eyebrows during the night. Sam had a better suggestion: he claimed he knew how to cut into the legs of the bed in such a way that they would collapse halfway through the night, bringing Francesca down with them. The plan only foundered on the basis that neither of us knew where to buy a hacksaw at 11PM in Zagreb. Don't mess with British maths geniuses.

I set out in the morning for a walk through what seemed like an eerily deserted town centre, and kept following signs to bizarre-sounding museums - the Mushroom Museum and Croatian School Museum both sounded interesting, in at least one sense of the word - only to find them closed. I eventually discovered when trying the Croatian History Museum (also closed) that I was there on a public holiday. 

Thankfully, Zagreb's bizarre-museum-in-chief, the Museum of Broken Relationships, was open as normal. The formula for this place is simple: people donate an item that represents a broken relationship - a ratted-on spouse, an abandoned child, a forgotten summer lover - and write an account of what it meant and what went wrong. That's the whole museum: symbols and stories of heartbreak. It's funny, sad, uplifting, depressing, poignant and silly - and just a touch voyeuristic. I'm not quite sure what I made of it.

And on that somewhat ambivalent note, Croatia and I broke it off ourselves. I was left wanting more, wishing it wasn't over after only eight days and 21 hours. Croatia, I suspect, was mostly indifferent.