Hanging out in Croatia

We’re now on our 3rd day in Croatia and the weather has been really hot and sunny. In fact, a couple of people we have spoken to have said that this is an unusually long summer and it’s usually much cooler by September. That said, since we’re on a honeymoon, it’s kind of nice to have some beach weather. Although we have not yet been to the beach! Haha, no time with all the site seeing and road trips.

We decided yesterday that we would travel south to the city of Dubrovnik which is one of Croatia’s oldest and most important cities. On a map, it’s only 250 km away but the tourist agency did say it could be as long as a 4.5 hour drive. I found it hard to believe but now we know the truth. We figured we would follow the coast highway south and enjoy the scenic view but we soon discovered it was a seriously slow way to travel. Town after town at low speeds so we decided to head up into the mountains to the expressway where the speed limit is 130km/h.

You start following Croatia’s 2 year old expressway south until you reach the end of it north of the town of Polce. And then the fun begins. Each time I think I have driven a challenging road in Europe, along comes something like this goat track up and over and through mountain valleys, with no shoulders, hair pin curves, and some incredible scenery. After weaving through this, you arrive back on the coast and follow along the sea all the way to Dubrovnik. This is a hairy drive with lots of steep cliffs on one side and some scary drivers on the other. I kind of got a thrill ripping along these roads but Raegan wasn’t nearly as impressed as I was, haha. Having a manual transmission makes it kind of fun to run into curves, downshift quickly, and punch it up coming out of the curves. I think I satisfied some of my desire to drive a race car.

Arriving in Dubrovnik, the road more or less lead us to a brand new parking garage which was welcome after some of the previous parking nightmares we’ve had. From there it was a short walk to the old city.

And what an impressive place it is! Dubrovnik has been a major port city throughout it’s existence so there has been a massive walled city for a lot of years. But it’s seriously busy as cruise ships stop here and disgorge thousands of people to tour the city. I think we arrived at the same time as several ships.

One of the biggest draws of the old city is to walk the walls. Sounds pretty straight forward but the wall is more than a mile long, it was over 30 degrees outside and it’s a lot of up and down old staircases. I think someone said there’s about 450 steps alongs the way. But it was really worth it and rewards one with some great views of the city and the Adriatic sea. I have never seen water like this and colours and clarity of the water was amazing, particularly in contrast to the bright red brick roofs of the city. Most of these roofs as new as the city was sieged during the war in 1991 which left about 65% of the roofs destroyed. It’s hard to believe war raged through here just 20 years ago but here and there, you would see destroyed building and walls that have not yet been repaired.

Finishing up on the wall, we wandered around a bit, snagged a nearby geocache, and got on our way back to Split. It’s a long 9 hour drive for 4 hours of visiting but it was worth it.

Curiously, you have to drive through Bosnia-Herzegovina to get from Split to Dubrovnik which means passing through the border twice. Passing through though was pretty well a  wave through and they only scanned my passport and not Raegan’s. Hmm, I must be more shady looking. Since we passed through BiH, we figured we would stop in the town of Neum for dinner at a pizza place. Europeans really know how to do pizza; none of that silly stuffed crust, mile high cheese crap that you get in Canada.

While sitting there in BiH, we noted there was a geocache about 16 km from town out in the countryside. Now technically, we’re not supposed to have our car in BiH but we figured just driving through between the two cities was ok but a drive into the countryside, maybe not so much.

After debating for a bit, we decided to get the cache as it was located at an old Turkish fort which offered a chance to see some old ruins. Off we went and it wasn’t long before the road got really, really narrow. So narrow in fact, that you often had to stop or really slow down to pass oncoming vehicles. I was sweating a bit and hoping for no scratches as I didn’t want to explain to the car rental agency where I picked them up. 16km in a straight line worked out to what felt like 30 weaving on this road. We did arrive at the fort, found the cache, and took some photos just as the sun was setting. Very scenic and very quiet and remote feeling.

So now we had a drive back in the dark with Raegan at the wheel after we crossed back into Croatia. I don’t think she likes the crazy mountain driving quite like I do, especially in the dark, haha. After a couple of hours, we arrived back in Split about 14 hours after we left. It was a long day.

And that resulted in us sleeping in today but we don’t have any huge plans. Some searching on Google has brought up some relatively unknown ruins and castles in the area and that will probably be our day.