Brian on the Road

We hopped a really cheap early morning flight from Prague to Dubrovinik, Croatia, on the southern tip of the country. I still can't believe the neighboring countries let them divide up the land like this, since Croatia has pretty much the entire coast. We made it to the Dubrovnik airport with no problem and jumped on a bus to town. We immediately went to the tourist/travel agency where the woman gave us incredibly vague directions to our (excellent) room. Well, it had an excellent view and a fan as well as a bathroom shared with just one other room. So it was all good.

We hit the old city, which is completely contained in a fortress. It had been shelled within the past couple of decades, but it was almost completely restored. We grabbed lunch and headed for the top of the walls to walk around the city. I took about 50 pics because the view into town as well as out to sea were amazing. It's about a 2km walk around, so we took our time and enjoyed the sights. The rest of the afternoon we tooled around town checking out various churches and other sights. We made plans and bought tickets to go see some chamber music as part of their summer fesitval. We had an awesome seafood dinner of stuff that seemed like it jumped out of the water and onto the plate. We arrived for the concert a bit underdressed to find they were holding it in one of the most amazing courtyards I could imagine. There were general admission tickets available, which meant sitting on a giant stone staircase or up in some arches above the musicians. The music was incredible, and the acoustics were fantastic. With only about 200 people in attendance, it was a very cool sight.

We had made plans to go sea kayaking the next day, and I should have thought about it a bit more when I woke up to say 'wow, there are white caps out there'. So it was a no-go. Instead we wandered down to the ferry dock and hopped a boat to Lupon, one of three islands in the Elephitine set. (Not sure about the Elephitine thing). We hiked across the island (about 2k) to go to a sand beach, which is rare in Croatia. We sat down and it started raining - hard. So we packed up and headed back to the bay where the ferry dropped us and had lunch. We hung out on the pebbly beach all afternoon and hopped the boat back to Dubrovnik. We met up with our housemate, a very cool Aussie, and got dinner and drinks and listened to some jazz outside until late. After some confusion and a missed bus the next morning, we headed north for Split, a larger city about 5 hours up the coast by bus.