I had booked myself a nice leisurely bus ride at the very civilised time of 10am this morning so I didn't have to rush around early in the morning. I got up at about 8am and packed up my bag and actually sorted through my stuff and left a fair bit in the apartment. I departed with a half full backpack. Much easier to carry. I walked myself along the waterfront and down to the bus station, where I had my breakfast pizza while I waited for the bus to turn up.

The bus was a decent sized coach, but unfortunately it was nothing like the amazing coaches in the Baltic states and was rather cramped, with people just grabbing any seat, not the seats which they had been allocated. This upset some rather old British tourists, who almost got into a fight with some younger Kiwi's who were "in their seats". They soon felt rather foolish when they sat down and realised no one was sitting in their allocated seats.

The bus trip seemed to take for ever, it made stops just about everywhere, including a rather long stop in Bosnia, of which we had to cross a small part to get to Dubrovnik. I was actually woken up to have my passport checked. Lucky for me it was nothing like Russia, just a quick look and then off you go.

I arrived in Dubrovnik at about 3pm and texted my boss who was supposed to pick me up, after waiting an hour I turned my phone off and on and texted me again and he told me to go down to the harbour to meet Janice who would be training me. Lucky for my Janice was already on her way down to get me and I ran into her on the way. We walked down to the boat I would be spending the week on, Mlini and I dumped my bags in the cabin. Janice then went off to sort some stuff out and I got the bus into the old city.

It took about ten minutes to get to the old town gates, I don't know what I was expecting from Dubrovnik, but it wasn't this. The old town gates are completely in tact, there is a walkway between the gates and the entrance in a kind of double wall. You come through the gates to a beautiful fountain and streets with tall medieval style buildings either side. At the end of the main street there is an amazing church, whose bell tower looks simply majestic against the back drop of the speckled mountains. On with side of the street are small alleyways in which you could get lost in and on the left side of the street, the side streets went steeply uphill, with marble steps that seemed to go on forever up the narrow streets.

I managed to find my way around and find all the things in the Sail Croatia book. I also found an amazing church on the top of the hill, which was pretty deserted and I just sat in the beautiful silence with my eyes closed for ages. While I was sitting there, singing started up unexpectedly, three people had come in, sat down and started singing a hymn, I was beautiful and haunting at the same time.

I left the church and went back down to the town, I explored a few more side streets and found one of the Buza bars, on a cliff overlooking the ocean. At 8pm it was time to head back down to the fountain to meet Janice and the group for dinner. The group, as expected was nearly all really young people and Janice took us to one of the partner restaurants, called Ragusa (the old name of Dubrovnik) 2, which was up one of the very steep side streets. They gave us one free bottle of wine for every four people we brought and a welcome drink of something that was a bit like a sweet port, which I really liked. I had the carbonara, which was really nice.

After dinner, we headed out to Sky Bar and I met the owner, Bradley who took care of Janice and I drinks wise. I had a bucket of long island ice tea and danced the night away, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.