After we left the shopping center the Polish girls and I headed to Trebinje a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, propelling B & H ahead of Croatia on my list of countries I have visited. We walked around the town for a little bit and saw pretty much all it had to offer. We then went to a café and had a drink. When we left the café the girl I had been chatting with at the shopping center asked me if I was hungry. I told her that I could definitely eat, so we found a little place that sold cevapi (several small kebabs wrapped in dough with onions), which she told me that I had to try. The other two girls weren’t hungry so they went and got the car while we waited for our food. We ate on the short drive from Trebinje to Dubrovnik and while I thought it was quite delicious she informed me that they actually weren’t very good compared to how they could be and told me that I would find much better cevapi when I went to Sarajevo. After our second border crossing of the day we arrived in Croatia and a short while later I was dropped off near my hostel in Dubrovnik. I thanked the girls, said goodbye, and headed up the stairs to the hostel.
Dubrovnik is absolutely gorgeous. It doesn’t really matter where you are in the city, you pretty much always have a great view. It is definitely the most touristy of the places I have visited so far on this trip through the Balkans, and as a result it is also the most expensive stop I have had so far. After having my money go so far in my previous destinations I found the prices here to be outrageous. I tried to look at it objectively and compare it to the prices I have been used to the majority of my life living in the U.S. and when I did that the prices were actually quite reasonable, but it was still tough to go from being able to have a nice meal for $5 USD one day to an equivalent meal costing $10-12 USD the next. I definitely was forced to be a little more mindful of how I spent my money while in Dubrovnik. One thing that helped keep my sightseeing costs reasonable was buying the Dubrovnik card, which got me three days access to several museums and the Dubrovnik city walls. Also included were bus tickets, but the town is small enough and I prefer to walk, so I never ended up using those.
The combination of Dubrovnik being such a big tourist hub and such a small town unfortunately led to several things being shut down in the winter. Including a restaurant that had been highly recommended to me. Tragic. The one thing unaffected by the offseason were the very large tourist groups from Asia. Every day there was another group of two hundred or so people touring the old town. Well, I assume it was a different group every day, either that or they were just viewing the same things over and over again. Aside from these giant groups though I did not run across that many other tourists and the restaurants that remained open during the offseason also remained empty for the most part with the owners out on the street desperately trying to convince any passerby to come and eat at their establishment.
My first full day in Dubrovnik was welcomed with absolutely beautiful weather and I spent the day exploring the city. I found the perfect spot for watching the sunset and decided I would return there later in the day to get some great pictures. I also climbed the city walls that surround the Old Town. The walls run almost 2000 meters around the Old Town and I spent almost two hours on top of them slowly making my way around and admiring all of the amazing views while taking some great pictures. It was easy to see while walking through the Old Town and looking down on it from the walls why it is such a popular location for television and film, including Game of Thrones, The next Star Wars movie, and while I was there they were building the set for the upcoming Robin Hood film.
After I finally came down from the city walls I headed back to my hostel to drop off my day pack and then head down to the spot I had found to watch the sunset. I got there about twenty minutes before the sun was supposed to set but low lying clouds on the horizon had already hidden the sun away. The next day I was determined to try again but early cloud cover left me a bit skeptical. The cloud cover did make me optimistic that I wouldn’t get too hot as I hiked up Mount Srđ that afternoon though. I was met outside of my hostel by the Polish girl who I had gotten to know on the trip to Dubrovnik, and we set off to climb the mountain. It took us a while to find the starting point but we finally managed to locate it and began to climb. It is a pretty easy climb with a stone path switchbacking up the face of the mountain and providing incredible views of the city and Adriatic Sea down below. As we climbed the clouds were breaking up a bit and the sunlight broken up by clouds along the water was quite beautiful.
I was glad the sun started to come out because of this but it did make the climb a lot hotter than it would have been otherwise. Along the path at each turn there was a marker for the stations of the cross. I don’t know if they were just done by different artists with different styles or if some of them had been there far longer than others and had been worn down with time but they definitely were not all uniform. When we got to the top we went and sat on the rocks for a while admiring the view and enjoying the peacefulness that comes from offseason travel. After hiking I went down to the beach and played around in the sand, gathering rocks together to make a big HD for the new symbol for this website. There were still clouds in the sky but the horizon was clear and I began to get my hopes up that I would get a good view of the sunset later that afternoon. I went back out to my sunset spot about a half hour before the sun went down and this time I did get to witness a beautiful sunset.
With my Dubrovnik card I ended up visiting a few museums while in town. I went to the Maritime Museum which was a really neat museum with a lot of cool nautical items and several large wooden models of ships from Dubrovnik’s history. Another museum I checked out was the house of Marin Držić, who has been dubbed the “Croatian Shakespeare”. Part of the house is devoted to Držić and his works and for some reason the rest of the museum is about the history of glasswork in Dubrovnik. I’m not sure if they just didn’t have enough stuff about Držić to fill the whole house or what. I briefly stopped in at the Natural History Museum, but after three rooms about nothing but turtles and peeking into the next room and seeing more turtles, I decided that while I like turtles okay, if I really want to know all about turtles I can read a book about them. So, I left the Natural History Museum and headed over to the Art Gallery Dubrovnik or the Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik. I am always a little weary about visiting museums of modern art. I’m a big art fan and there is some really great modern art, but there is also a lot of crap that any five year old with a box of crayons could draw, or shit like a solid blue canvas. Fortunately this museum had a pretty decent selection of what I consider to be good art to offset the art that I consider to be unworthy of display in a museum. Maybe fridge worthy (maybe), but not museum worthy. Unfortunately, due to being there in the offseason, the Cultural Historical Museum was closed for renovations, so I was unable to view what it had to offer.
Dubrovnik is built on a hillside as Mount Srđ pretty much rises straight out of the Adriatic, which means that when walking around the city you are climbing a lot of hills and stairs. I don’t mind this at all. It’s great exercise. Although at the end of my second full day in Dubrovnik after climbing the mountain and going down to the waterfront a few times and then heading back up the hill to my hostel I admit I was feeling pretty beat. What I didn’t like about the extra exercise though was that it was accompanied by a location with higher prices and no free breakfast at the hostel I was staying at. Not wanting to spend too much money, I was faced with a choice between being hungry (not an option), or not eating as much traditional food as I would have liked. Since there are a lot of common traditional dishes throughout the Balkans and I was going to be returning to Croatia soon anyways, I decided to limit my traditional food intake and go for some cheaper options like pizza. I ended up getting two pizzas while in Dubrovnik from a spot near my hostel. They were different kinds of pizza but one topping that they had in common was olives. Well, kind of. They both listed olives as a topping but when I opened the box on my first pizza there was ONE olive. A single olive for a whole pizza. I was a little disappointed. When I got my second pizza I forgot to ask for extra olives, but fortunately this time they had me covered. My second pizza had TWO olives. Both on the same slice of pizza. Thankfully the pizzas were both delicious even without the olives. The one night that I did try to get some traditional food I found a restaurant online that looked good, had great reviews, and wasn’t too expensive. When I got there however, it didn’t just look like the place was closed for the season, there was no indication that it existed at all. So, instead I hunted around for a little bit until I found a place that looked decent, but after receiving four little kebab sausages, some fries, bread and a Coke and paying almost $20 USD for a mediocre meal, I left the restaurant feeling quite disappointed.
I was left with very mixed feelings at the end of my time in Dubrovnik. On the one hand it was the most beautiful destination I have been to on this trip so far, but on the other hand it was the worst food destination to date.
While waiting at the bus station to catch my bus to Sarajevo a police officer kept eyeballing me. Once I had boarded the bus and taken a seat he came aboard the bus and asked to see my passport. I showed it to him and apparently he was satisfied with whatever he saw because he returned my passport to me and disembarked the bus. I don’t know what it is about me that cops don’t like. It doesn’t seem to matter if I’m barefoot and wearing six watches or nicely dressed with a tie and a sports coat. There just seems to be something about me that rubs them the wrong way. Maybe they can smell my contempt of authority. Who knows? It’s a mystery.