Dubrovnik

16th - 18th April 2010

We were up super early to catch the only bus of the day from Korcula to Dubrovnik (No ferries run in the off season). The bus left at 6.45am, and first had a 15 minute ferry crossing over to the mainland. What I saw from when I was awake was beautiful mountains and ocean scenery, but I regret to say that I did snooze for most of the journey.

We arrived into Dubrovnik around 10am and decided to walk from the bus station to the Old Town, where we were staying. According to my earlier research Google maps thought it would take about 25 minutes. Turns out that was being measured from a bus terminal, which we passed about 20 minutes into the walk. So the whole journey took us almost an hour, up a very decent hill.

We checked into our lovely room which was in a building, which apart from us was empty - the owner explained that the other guests she was expecting never made it because of all the flight cancellations. The only downside to this place was the lack of Internet access, however the owner said we could visit her place whenever we needed to use her internet. (Usually no Internet is not a problem, however as it turned out, this was the only part of our trip that it was absolutely essential, but more on that later!)

The rain was coming down again, so we did a very brief walk around the old town, before picking up some lunch (Awesome bakery job - hot dogs in bready pastry) and heading back to our room dry off.

When the rain had cleared up a bit we walked down to the old town port and out around the rocks at the edge of the city walls and dreamed of hotter weather and being able to jump into the water. We checked out a number of souvenir shops before heading to the supermarket late afternoon to buy supplies for dinner.

We cooked ourselves a yummy dinner, pasta again, before heading out for a lovely nighttime walk through the Old Town. Dan insisted on getting some ice creams for the walk, which I didn't protest about too strongly! Then it was off to bed!

The next morning we slept in late, but got quickly organised and had breakfast and was out of the apartment by about 12. We did the city walls walk, which took about an hour. It was bloody hard work at times on the legs and it was quite warm (I brought out the ¾ pants!) but the views of the Old Town and the ocean were magnificent. Dan had fun climbing in all the little holes. We had a lovely beer and pizza lunch at the place down from our apartment (Where we got 10% discount and even a free Grappa - shame that wasn't enjoyable). Then we went for a wonder outside of the Old Town walls and up to another fort just outside the city walls. We were able to climb up and around the whole fort, which gave spectacular views of the city.We continued to make good use of the awesome weather and walked around to the other side of the old town before making our way back up through the city looking at more jewellery and souvenir shops along the way. By late afternoon we both got a case of afternoon CBF's and ended up watching all the horror of almost 30,000-grounded flights on CNN. The predictions weren't looking good with predictions that airports wont be up and running for another few days. This is when we started worrying about flying home in 2 days! Cooked more Čevapčići burgers for dinner.

Sunday morning we were up and organised at a reasonable time, and picked up a packed lunch from the bakery on our way to the port. We were there at the perfect time to buy tickets and jump on a boat to take us out to Island of Lokrum, about 15 minutes by boat from Dubrovnik. It is a small island, which is a protected nature reserve, and only accessible by the special boats which take you over and back (For a really small cost). As soon as we hopped off the boat we were greeted at the dock by a massive bunch of wild peacocks just milling about. There were no real marked paths around the island, but we had a rough map that we could follow to check out the points of interest on the island. We decided to follow the coastline around and check out the 'FKK'. Not sure what the abbreviations translate to, but it was a nudie beach. (In fact on reading up on the island since we returned home, the whole island is 'clothing optional', but most tend to stick to the small beach to ditch their kits) We thought we'd go for a bit of a sticky beak, but we'd only gotten a few steps down the path to the beach and stopped a rather overweight older man sprawled out on his back without a stitch on. I had a quick giggle, then felt as though I was intruding, so we turned and walked back up the path and let the nudies be.

We continued to make our way through the very peaceful and dense bushland and eventually we found the 'dead sea'. It's an inland body lake which is fed with sea water through an underground tunnel to the ocean. It was really pretty and I even took my shoes and socks off and went for a wade through the water. It was all rocky though and after 5 minutes I was sick of hurting my feet on the sharps rocks and got out. We continued on to another beach and decided to sit and eat our bakery lunch. While eating lunch we were joined by another massive peacock, this one with it's full tail flared out. After lunch we explored the old monastery, which is on the island and then Dan made me hike up the massive hill to the fort on the top of the island. This gave us beautiful views back over Dubrovnik and out to the many islands scatter throughout the sea. We made our way back down to the little port, just in time to see the boat heading back leaving. As the boats only left hourly, we set ourselves up in one of the cafes (surrounded by peacocks) and enjoyed a nice cold pint. The hour passed quite quickly and we made our way back to Dubrovnik on the 10 minute boat ride.

It was getting towards late afternoon by the time we arrived so we decided to pick up some dinner supplies, chill out at the apartment for a bit, and check up on the Volanco situation with some CNN. Reports were starting to sound promising with talks of all the airspace beginning to open up early the next morning, but we still weren't holding our breaths that our flight scheduled for the following evening would make it. We called it a night after our last dinner (fittingly, we had to have our last Čevapčići) and had an early nights sleep.