Strolling though the green lane at customs, doing all the things normal people do in order to avoid making eye contact with anybody with access to rubber gloves, I found myself being eyed eagerly by a bored looking security officer who clearly needed to fill his daily quota of laughing at tourists underpants. "Ah," he thought to himself, "here's a guy with hair slightly longer than regulation length. He obviously must have several kilos of crack cocaine stuffed up his arse.", or whatever the official way of wording that might be. And that was that - with a single beckoning finger, it became clear that my bag was about to be pulled apart and minutely inspected by somebody who almost certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as keen to put everything back where he found it afterwards.

For the first time in nearly mumble mumble years of flying around the world, I found myself being subjected to interrogation by a man with a gun and absolutely no sense of humour - although, to be fair, when you're being interrogated by a man with a gun, the sense of humour is entirely optional. I lifted my backpack onto the long steel counter and waited to see what would happen next, hoping to god that the officer didn't just fancy me and want to jump straight to the cavity search. In the event, what did happen next was that the two of us stared at each other quietly for a moment while he waited for me to make the first move - but as I just stared blankly at him instead, he eventually decided to nod towards my pack and grunt in a way I took to mean that he couldn't even be bothered to open it himself.

"So," I was asked, as my clothes flew around the customs hall like Superman's knickers, "perhaps you have some medicines with you, or something like that?"

I stared incredulously at him. This guy's leading tactic in detecting drug dealers was to ask people if they had any stuff on them. From the casual tone in which he said it, I almost expected his next words to be: "Would you like some?"

I informed him that, on this occasion, I was unable to help him with his enquiries. Then, I waited while he turned my camera on and took a photograph in order to make absolutely sure that it wasn't just some sort of really clever camera shaped bomb - in which case, presumably, he would have found this out by exploding at about this point. Not exactly the brainiest of the bunch, I was starting to think. Finally, after arranging all of my belongings in a messy pile on the counter, he shrugged in a way which told me that he was now bored, and indicated with his trademarked grunt that I'd have to repack everything myself. Then, as I did so, he asked casually what I would be doing in Croatia, and was less than impressed that I actually had a reasonable answer, waving me through the door to the arrivals hall with a resigned sigh of defeat. Once, on one of those television documentaries about border patrols at London's Heathrow Airport, an American gentleman was stopped and asked where he was intending to go in London. "Oh, I'm looking forward to all the attractions," he replied, his eyes darting around nervously, "The Tower of London, The Eiffel Tower, The Great Pyramids of Giza...". Actually, he didn't say that last one - I was just enjoying, for a moment, the idea that Americans don't know much about geography. He did, however, insist that he was planning on visiting the Eiffel Tower, with the result that the nice customs man decided to follow up with a cavity search - and this is why, whenever I go anywhere these days, I always know exactly what I'm going to see.

I had made arrangements to be collected from the airport and driven to my apartment by the mother of the proprietor, who I had been told was the only person available to pick me up while he was away. You can imagine, then, my surprise at being met instead by a six foot thug of a taxi driver holding a flimsy piece of paper on which my name was written, and possessing all the charm of a medium sized house brick. I may have been new to the country and not yet acquainted with all the local customs, but I was pretty certain that this wasn't anyone's mother. When I finally stepped from the customs hall, wanting nothing more than to be greeted with open arms and driven to my home for the next few days by a charming old lady with delightful stories to tell, I found instead a dodgy looking bloke leaning casually on the railings with his back to me, quite blatantly eying up every tall Croatian girl who walked past. To be fair, I was pretty much doing the same thing for much of the rest of the day, so I can't entirely blame him - I really don't know how anyone is supposed to separate the supermodels from the average woman in the street over here, unless they have some sort of rota system which allows every woman in the country to walk the catwalk at least once before she turns 40. In the end, after standing behind the man with the sign for some time watching him fantasising over everything in a skirt in the general vicinity, I decided that the best thing I could do was to cough politely in the hope of getting his attention - but this actually turned out to be a bad idea, because it distracted him from a blonde with legs until tomorrow and this put him in a pretty bad mood all the way to the apartment.

Outside, the door to my taxi was opened by a tall brunette with a figure which didn't look entirely authentic, but a figure, nonetheless, which I found it embarrassingly hard to tear my eyes away from for some time. She smiled in a way designed to melt my heart while making it absolutely clear that Croatia was a place full of happy, smiling, beautiful women and unhappy grumpy, lecherous men with no chance whatsoever. When the taxi finally took off in the direction of downtown Dubrovnik and I was forced to tear my eyes away from the airport siren, I think I may have had to shake my head a few times to get rid of the afterimage.

The next thing to distract me was Dubrovnik itself, although this time for all the right reasons. The moment we left the airport, I found myself gazing out of the taxi window at breathtakingly perfect views of the ocean, the coast lined with little brown medieval buildings all crushed together into communities from another time. And then, in the distance, the old city appeared, jutting out into the deep shimmering blue of the Adriatic, almost like a walled island cut off from the rest of the world, and I started to feel as though I couldn't possibly be awake. If there is a more complete, untouched remnant of a medieval world, I have yet to find it. This isn't just another collection of ruins on which somebody has stuck little white signs relating the history of the town while reminding you to keep off the grass - this is the real deal. Walk the streets of Dubrovnik and you are walking a UNESCO World Heritage Site, making your way through a living, breathing medieval world of narrow streets and back alleys, each teeming with life. This is a modern world of shops, bars and restaurants concealed within the heart of an ancient city, unchanged since time immemorial. Strolling through the old city streets and climbing its ridiculously steep flights of steps in order to explore ever higher levels is the closest you're ever going to get to stepping back in time into a thriving medieval world. But without the plague, obviously.

On the way to the apartment, I tried to make smalltalk with the driver but to no avail - nothing I could say could make up for having forced him to stopping looking at the blonde. I suggested that he lived in the most beautiful place on Earth, that I was hugely envious of his being able to drive around the beautiful Adriatic coast all day, and even that his car had a nice new car smell to it that you wouldn't expect from a London taxi cab. None of it had any effect - he just grunted and shrugged in response to everything I said, occasionally pointing at some distant landmark and telling me something about it in a disinterested voice which made me want to slit my wrists. If the scenery hadn't been so fantastic, I might have asked him to turn the car around and take me back to the airport so I could catch the first flight home. This is one guy who isn't going to be working for the Croatian tourist board any time soon.

When we arrived, having shot several red lights on the way and spent at least 50% of the journey narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic as the driver swerved around corners with his face glued to his mobile phone, we found the lovely elderly Croatian lady who I had expected at the airport waiting in the street for us. Luckily, she managed to jump out of the way before my driver could run her down. Nina was the complete polar opposite of everything I had experienced of Croatian hospitality so far, and within five minutes of arriving at the apartments I suddenly felt as though everybody here would want to be my friend. Nina was warm, inviting and gloriously over the top in the way she wanted to treat me as a member of the family from the moment I arrived. She spoke only about ten words of English, which is probably why she decided not to collect me personally from the airport, but that didn't matter - I somehow knew exactly what she was saying from her gestures and the way she steered me towards everything she wanted to show me, and I couldn't have felt more welcome. After showing me around my apartment in that delightfully patronising way that foreign hosts do when they want to be as helpful as possible - "This is sink, this is bed, this is shower, this is tap..." - she ushered me over to a plastic table and chair on the patio and rushed off to prepare juice, tea and biscuits. This took me quite by surprise, as I had only been expecting the usual form on which to report my name, address and passport number. We sat for some time in the sweltering heat, Nina insisting on calling me "Boy" whenever she wanted my attention in a way that was somehow not remotely offensive, and chatted in broken English about where I came from and how long I was staying. Then, she gave me a form to fill in which was almost totally incomprehensible and explained that her supermodel niece would be home in the morning and would be able to explain it to me properly in perfect Englsh. To be honest, I'm rather pre-empting the supermodel bit - but I'm fairly certain it's a safe bet she's not going to be the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Lord Byron once described Dubrovnik as the jewel of the Adriatic, but I would have to disagree - I would describe it as the jewel of the seven seas. I've only been here for a few short hours, but if you told me right now that Dubrovnik was the most romantic city on the face of the Earth, I would believe you without hesitation.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.