According to the online weather forecast today, the temperature in Dubrovnik was supposed to peak at about 19 degrees and 50 percent humidity - a not unreasonable temperature which would probably have you reaching for a light jacket and commenting on what a pleasant day it was going to be. Well, let me stop you right there. You might be aware, after the whole Michael Fish hurricane debacle proved once and for all that weather forecasters understand as much about the weather as a bunch of bananas does about the origins of the universe, that these sort of predictions should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. For a start, 19 degrees apparently doesn't mean quite the same thing in Croatia as it does, lets say, anywhere else. Multiply it by 3, and add in another couple of hundred percent humidity, and you might be starting to approach reality. I have made up my mind that, from now on, I am going to ignore the weather forecast entirely and instead simply carry around two buckets in order to catch the copious amounts of sweat which will no doubt soon be pouring from my body. It also doesn't help that there's never a single cloud in the sky - so you can't even wait for a shadow to darken your path before darting quickly into the next air conditioned building. In the summer, I am assured, the temperature reaches the mid 40s around here - and this leads me to the inescapable conclusion that people on the Dalmatian coast must be born with coolant running through their veins.

The streets of Dubrovnik old city, in a move which makes ancient Rome look like a collection of rat infested sewers by comparison, are paved with pure white marble. No, really they are. One of the most expensive construction materials on Earth, usually only found covering the floor of the lobby at Hotel Posh, and the Dubrovnik forefathers have only gone and paved their entire city with it. The surface of the Stradun, the main street in Dubrovnik, is so highly polished that it's difficult to go five minutes without slipping and falling on your arse, and so reflective that you can expect to be blinded from all directions wherever you go. By the time I'd found a friendly looking Irish pub in which to get a cooked breakfast this morning, I felt as though both my corneas had been bleached - it was at least 10 minutes before anything inside the pub stopped looking like an indistinguishable dark blob, and I realised that the reason I wasn't getting much response from the waiter was because I had been addressing a hat stand. Still, at least I was able to start my day with egg and chips and a bacon sarnie like a normal person, rather than by stuffing my face with the sort of thing we would call a three course banquet back home but that they stuff down themselves at all times of the day in this part of the world.

The Gaffe, for that is what the Irish pub called itself, certainly seemed like a virtual embassy amongst the narrow streets of souvenir shops, high class restaurants and jewellery stores that otherwise made up the old city. Outside, a menu board proudly listed the relatively small number of dishes available within to remind a starving traveller of home, and ended by mentioning casually that there was a complaints book on the bar. I wasn't entirely sure whether I should take this as really good customer service, or a slightly worrying lack of confidence in their own cuisine. Still, I was hungry and didn't particularly fancy spaghetti bolognese for breakfast, so I decided to risk it. I asked the waiter several times during my meal for the password to their free Wifi, but apart from resulting in a casual wave and a slightly indifferent cry of "Okay, one moment", this seemed to achieve little. If this had been an English theme pub, I might have put this general nonchalance down as a deliberate attempt to create the right ambience - I may have even praised them for their authenticity and asked if they could send someone over to tell me that I'd spilled his drink before punching me in the face. But this was an Irish theme pub, and the Irish are known for their hospitality. That, and painting things green once a year for no adequately explored reason.

Actually, I am doing The Gaffe a slight disservice here in the name of humour, of course. Once the breakfast rush had died down and the staff actually had a moment to breath, things became a lot more relaxed. I went back several times during the day, mainly to get out of the sun and drink about six gallons of any liquid they could provide me with, but also to fill my face at regular intervals - because the food, despite the presence of a complaints book in which I was all but expected to have a good whinge, was fine. The waiter also turned out to be something of a fountain of all knowledge, producing leaflets of information and showing me where to go whenever I started scratching my head. I'm afraid I started, after a while, to use him as my own personal tourist information centre, and when he suggested that I should ensure I walked around the old city walls in a clockwise direction, I took him at his word. Walking this way, he assured me, would mean that I'd get all the steep flights of steps out of the way within the first ten minutes and be able to enjoy a pleasant downhill stroll for the rest of the way. He was absolutely right, and I can honestly say that I was really enjoying my clockwise amble right up until the moment when, about half way around, I came quite suddenly across a sign pointing back the way I had come which read: "One way only". Even then, I might have chosen to ignore this obvious attempt to detract me from my walk, but unfortunately the sign was accompanied by an unnecessarily grumpy security guard who spent at least two minutes carefully inspecting my city wall entry ticket for any excuse to throw me over the battlements, before insisting that I turn around and repeat the first half of the circuit in reverse. In the end, because of this, I managed to circumnavigate the city wall at least twice while knocking several people over the side in my eagerness to barge around it in entirely the wrong direction.

Entry to the city wall, at the time of writing, will set you back the princely sum of 70 Kuna, or you can splash out on a 1, 3 or 7 day Dubrovnik card which gets you into all sorts of touristy wonders at a hefty discount. Be aware, however, that many of the museums and attractions with which the Dubrovnik card works are free anyway on mondays due to a government mandate which forces most public exhibitions to open free on at least one day a week. When compared to the entrance fee levied by many castles and historic houses back home, 70 Kuna actually comes off quite favourably, but what you get for your money here is also far more than you could ever hope for in the UK. If you are travelling to Dubrovnik with your other half, and they begin muttering something under their breath about not wanting to pay seven quid to walk around a wall, you might like to point out that the Dubrovnik old city wall is not quite the same as the crumbling battlements of the Norman castle at the bottom of your garden. And frankly, if you've got a Norman castle at the bottom of your garden, what are you doing complaining about the entrance fee to anything anyway, because you are probably a member of the royal family.

In all honesty, you're going to want to give yourself at least a couple of hours for a complete circuit of the Dubrovnik walls - and there's a very good chance that you'll want to quickly nip to a cafe for a drink afterwards before going straight back to do it again. This is because the view over the houses of the city is nothing short of stunning, and you will spend so much time snapping away with your camera and perching precariously on every step just to get that perfect shot that you really won't care how long it takes. The roofs of the buildings form an intricate patchwork of colours stretching out as far as the old port, where they are replaced by the perfect azure blue of the ocean. The buildings are packed tightly together, arranged at haphazard angles with barely enough room between for a narrow alleyway, and their roofs are littered with old fashioned television aerials and wonky satellite dishes - each seemingly pointed in a different direction. The colours are dynamic - oranges and reds are woven in amongst faded yellows and browns. The older roofs display a certain medieval charm, multicoloured tiles arranged in a meandering line across their surface as though the tiler was drunk when he laid them. Others are new - lovingly crafted to mimic the genuine article, but giving away their age in subtle ways. The old roofs are colourful, interesting and constructed in elaborate shapes which seem to serve no purpose other than to look pretty. The newer roofs are square, flat and doing their best to fit into a sea of colour. These are the casualties of the Croatian war of independence.

In 1991, Croatia declared itself an independent state, removing itself from the rule of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the war that followed, fighting between the forces of the newly formed Croatian government and the Yugoslav People's Army was fierce. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, nobody seriously thought that the battle would come to Dubrovnik, and the city was left all but undefended. Nobody, the government said, would dare to attack such a historic world monument. They were wrong. In October 1991, acting on orders from Slobodan Milosevic, the president of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, Yugoslav and Serbian forces began to cross the border from Montenegro and Bosnia with the intention of surrounding the city on all sides and annexing it to Montenegro. On the 6th December 1991, in what has become known as the St Nicholas Day bombings, Serbian and Yugoslav forces shelled Dubrovnik relentlessly for over twelve hours, destroying or damaging over 60 percent of the city. Today, it is still possible to pick out the crumbling remains of once beautiful medieval buildings amongst the rebuilt city streets, but the real telltale signs are in the roofs - a disjointed patchwork of colourful tiles littered with featureless grey slabs, a lasting reminder that war respects no boundaries.

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.