Spring 2014 Trip, Days 1-7: Dalmatian Coast, Croatia

My parents and I are in the midst of a nearly three-week-long trip to Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, and Paris. Today is the seventh day of our trip and I am only just now getting around to writing my first blog post. Contrary to what you might guess, my failure to post over the last week has not been due to exceeding laziness. Rather, this trip has been so full of sights and experiences that I simply have not been able to tear myself away long enough to write a single paragraph. Simply put, this last week may well have been the busiest (and best) week of my travel career.

I have been taking notes every day on our destinations up to this point but I don’t think my memory nor your attention span will allow me to give the kind of super-detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of my daily activities that I usually post on this blog. Instead I think I’ll tell you about each of the places I’ve been to over the last week and talk a bit about their highlights and my impressions of them. Today we are wrapping up our last day in Split, a city on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast. I’ll get to that later though. Our other destinations have included Dubrovnik, a.k.a. “The Pearl of the Adriatic,” another city on the Dalmatian Coast; Mostar, an historic town in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Korčula, a scenic island (and the name of its biggest town) just off the Dalmatian Coast.

We departed Portland at about 2:00 PM last Saturday and arrived in Dubrovnik at about 6:00 PM local time the next day. While I like to travel without reservations, I always reserve accommodations at the first place I’ll be visiting so that I’ll have an easy, guaranteed place to land after the long flight from home. Here in Croatia I had read that the best, highest-value places to stay were Sobe  - rooms or small apartments in private homes, almost always operated by families. I made reservations for my parents and myself in adjacent Sobe in Dubrovnik, and I had arranged with one of our hosts for taxi transport from the airport to our rooms. The proprietor’s name was Pero, and as it turned out he sent his son (also named Pero) to pick us up in the family car. When I met him at the airport I knew immediately that we were in for a great stay. Pero the Youngest (the nickname will make more sense in a minute) was friendly and spoke fluent English, talking to us about this and that all the way from the airport to Dubrovnik’s Old Town, where our Sobe were. You can’t drive cars into Dubrovnik’s Old Town, so Pero the Younger (our driver’s father and the owner/operator of one of our Sobe) met us at the gate to escort us to our rooms. Pero the Younger was equally talkative and outgoing and really made us feel welcome. When we got to our Sobe (which again were right next to each other), we met Pero the Elder, the unrelated proprietor of the Soba next door to Pero the Younger’s. While not related, Pero the Elder was very good friends with Pero the Younger and they had both figured out that I had reserved a room in each of their houses, so they both were there to greet us together. While speaking more limited English, Pero the Elder was just as warm to us as the younger Peros. I have found their demeanors to be common among Croatians, helping to make this an easy and fun place to travel in.

Mom and Dad on the town wall in Dubrovnik, Croatia

The street that our Sobe were on in Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik is hard to characterize. It was certainly my favorite stop so far on this trip, and it ranks among the top five places that I’ve visited in Europe. I would say that Dubrovnik epitomizes all that is great about the Dalmatian Coast. It is almost like the capital city of a Slavic version of Greece. The weather is perfect – temperatures in the 80s and generally sunny and slightly breezy. The Adriatic Sea is clear and surprisingly warm. The coastline is picturesque, rocky and tree-lined and with a dramatic mountain backdrop to the east at the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. The architecture is very much like what you see in Venice and in other coastal towns in Italy, which make sense given that Dubrovnik was heavily influenced by Venice and experienced its “golden age” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, around the same time as Venice’s own. Dubrovnik’s Old Town is a perfectly preserved Gothic-Renaissance city, complete with a remarkably well-maintained stone town wall. The people there are friendly and laid back, which may be as much a product of the ideal setting as the inherent quality of the people themselves. Nothing that I write about it will do Dubrovnik justice though. It must be experienced to be fully understood.

The cathedral in Dubrovnik

The courtyard in the Dominican Monastery in Dubrovnik

A gate atop the town wall in Dubrovnik

A view from the town wall in Dubrovnik

We stayed in Dubrovnik for three nights, but one of the days was spent renting a car and day-tripping to Mostar, a town in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mostar has been an important town in the region for centuries, and what makes it especially worthwhile for tourists is two things: its picturesque bridge spanning the Neretva River, the Stari Most, and the pervasiveness of the Islamic Bosniak culture. The Slavic people who have historically inhabited this region are divided among several ethnic groups which are primarily delineated by religion. There are the Croats, who are Catholic; the Serbs, who are Orthodox Christians; and the Bosniaks, who are Muslim. My exposure to Islam and Muslim people has been minimal in my 29 years, so I thought visiting Mostar would be an ideal opportunity to gain some exposure and learn about a group of Muslim people living practically in my travel back yard. There are beautiful mosques and minarets all over Mostar, and its people were even more friendly and welcoming than my new friends in Dubrovnik. The Stari Most was as picturesque as advertised, and we were fortunate enough to catch some bridge divers in the act of plunging down into the ice-cold Neretva River from the crest of the bridge, a harrowing drop of about 65 feet. I had read about the bridge diving in Mostar in my research for the trip and I had been thinking about attempting the jump myself. When it came down to it my parents talked me out of it, but I insisted on making up for it the next day by jumping off a cliff into the Adriatic back in Dubrovnik. My Dad and I estimated that my jump was about 45 feet, which I mention only to note that the drop from 45 feet felt like it took forever; 65 feet would have been death-defying.

Me jumping off a cliff into the Adriatic Sea in Dubrovnik

The Stari Most in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Mostar

After Dubrovnik and Mostar we spent a couple of nights in Korčula, a town on the island of the same name off the Dalmatian Coast between Dubrovnik and Split. There isn’t much to say about Korčula except that it was small, sleepy, incredibly scenic and perfectly relaxing. We hung out, walked around, swam and sunbathed until it was time to catch the ferry for Split. I’ll let my pictures do the rest of the talking.

Korčula

Korčula

Korčula

Korčula

After Korčula we caught the high speed catamaran ferry to Split. Split is the biggest city on the Dalmatian Coast, and it has been our first taste of a grittier, more metropolitan side of Croatia than the idyllic beauty of the rest of the Dalmatian Coast. I like it though. Here we have gotten a better idea of how most Croatians live and work. That being said, we didn’t come here just for that; we came for Split’s biggest attraction, Diocletian’s Palace. The Roman Emperor Diocletian, one of the most important of the late Roman Empire, constructed a massive palace to retire to here in Split. He was actually born in a town called Salona (Solin in Croatian) which was just inland of Split and which exists today. Diocletian decided to retire in the land of his birth, and given what I’ve seen of the weather and scenery here on the Dalmatian Coast I’d say he made the right choice. After the Empire receded from this area and the palace fell into disrepair and decay, local people began to take refuge in the huge old building and used its walls as fortifications for a new town, a town which would eventually grow into the city that is now Split. To this day thousands of people live and work among the hodgepodge of Roman ruins grafted to medieval and modern buildings which make up Split’s Old Town. There is a modern Splitska Banka bank branch, full of computers and encased in glass, with an original stone column from the palace rising up through its center. There are walls consisting of huge stone slabs from the original palace construction, rough stone masonry patches from the Middle Ages, and modern brick additions to increase their height and join them to new buildings. The palace’s mausoleum, where Diocletian himself was laid to rest, is now a Catholic cathedral. We watched a party emerge from the cathedral with a newly baptized boy just as we arrived to see its interior. Little did that boy know that he had just been baptized in a room where the Emperor Diocletian had once stood and been laid to rest. In Split’s Old Town we see the definition of an organic city, a place where there is rare physical evidence of the continuum of a society and its people from ancient times to the present day.

Split

Split

The dome of Diocletian's Mausoleum (now a cathedral) in Split

The main altar in the cathedral in Split

Split's northern wall, showing the mix of ancient, medieval, and modern construction

That is about all I have the time and energy to write today. It is near midnight and I have a long day ahead tomorrow. We will be picking up another rental car and driving to Plitvice Lakes National Park in northern Croatia. Tomorrow and the next day will be our final days in Croatia, and I will be sad to leave it behind. I plan to post more frequently going forward, so look for my next post on Plitvice in the coming days.