Thursday – 4th Week: Dubrovnik

Up at 6am again today to get on the road down to Dubrovnik to beat all the buses that will be taking the tourists from Makarska and points in between. The road to Dubrovnik is interrupted by an 8km stretch that passes through the coastal part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. We’d had to specially request that we could do this with Peugeot, as B-H is not one of the countries you are insured to take the car, but we got assurance that we were covered for this particular piece of road.

At the first check point I held out our passports and was told to “mush mush” without the guard so much as touching them. B-H looked remarkably similar to Croatia for the 8 kilometres that we saw, but the buildings are newer. At the check point out of B-H, there were three trucks in the only lane that looked manned, but the next lane had a green tick above it, so I very slowly inched forward past the trucks to find the security guard, but he wasn’t there, so we just drove off. The return visit was less formal than that.

We got to Dubrovnik just after 9am, which must have been the perfect time because we got one of the last parks just outside the city wall and took a 4 hour ticket.

Dubrovnik is a beautiful city (see the photos) and has almost been fully restored since the war of the 1990’s. As we arrived at the city gates at the top of the city we could see the life boats from a cruise liner anchored in the bay ferrying its passengers into the town, so we decided to do a quick recky around the city before it became too over crowded. It is possible to walk round the marina on the outside of the city to get a view of the walls and ramparts from the water level, as well as walk around the entire city at the top of the walls. It would be interesting to know how much restoration had to be done, but we suspect an awful lot, as some of the centuries old wall is brand new and there are virtually no old roofs in the old town. Some of the shops have pictures showing boats burning in the marina and rubble strewn streets.

We started our walk around the wall at about 11:00, and it talk an hour and a half at a gentle pace that left lots of time for photos and staring out over the ramparts. When you get to the sea side of the wall, the walk way gets a lot narrower and the height a lot greater, so I made sure I walked on the city side of the walkway, as I can get queasy just thinking about heights. After walking round the walls, we settled down for a relaxing lunch to avoid some of the heat of the day.

We left Dubrovnik at 3:30 to get back on the road before the buses again. Other than being sandwiched between two empty car carrier trucks, narrowly avoiding a head-on with a car on our side of the road as we came round a corner (we now expect this, as it is our third near miss since we've been here) and seeing two cars parked on opposite sides of the road, heading in opposing directions and with the outside front wheels ripped off each car, it was an uneventful trip home. You’d never accuse the Croatians of being good or sensible drivers, so driving at about 80kph seems like a good defensive option. At the border crossing this time they were stopping all the cars and checking their passports – so we paused, handed over our passports and before he even touched ours he said….OKbye …meaning “Don’t waste my time”. Having a French car with red number plates and Kiwi passports, we thought this may be an issue….but not at all. Our last border crossing is on Saturday – back into Italy by fast catamaran.