Croatia

A 3am session with a load of England and Montenegrin fans in the hostel back in Podgorica meant that our intended arrival in Dubrovnik was delayed by one of those late and slow days when you never seem to make any progress at all. Slightly unfortunately this has had a knock on effect further up the coast but first after finding our apartment in one of Dubrovnik’s old narrow streets the view of the place seemed to be as impressive as expected. By night, within the walls of the old city everything seems to shine impossibly brightly, mostly due to the light stone buildings and its complete marble floor which has apparently been gradually polished glass smooth by the millions of shoes that have passed across it over the years. I’m still not sure about that but whatever; it’s a very special place to be. I also discovered that rather be left to turn into the boresome ruins that we all know and love it’s been repaired and maintained over the years, recently of course after the Balkans conflict of not so long ago. Another nice thing is that within the walls it’s pedestrian only except for a few hours during the evening for deliveries I guess.
By day it’s for me at least, not quite as pretty as it’s full of tourists but of course the coastline visible from a nice ‘wall walk’ only adds to it. It’s probably just me and my short attention span but a full day was more than enough as I quickly tired of seeing what seemed like thousands of vacant cafe tables and chairs covering huge parts of the little city.
With what ended up being a day lost it was Split that unfortunately missed out on our Kunas as we only stopped for lunch, a walk around and a few pictures on our way to Zadar. Split though did seem like more of a place that you could stay for longer than a day. With a full view of the coast and marina it’s more of a typical sunny holiday place complete with a few lively bars and an average age of less than fifty, allowing for Dubrovnik’s guided tour parties.
And so finally onto Zadar...The more youthful theme continued north this time and overall I like this place the best of these three. It feels fresh and the town sits just in between the other two in terms of niceness. Still the same marble floor but it this time it looks like it’s been walked on, some nice little trendy cafes and bars, decent shops and the highlight, Zadar’s ‘Sea Organ’ which is played by the sea’s waves and the ‘Greeting to the Sun’ which is a huge solar disc that absorbs the sunlight by day and omits some sort of weird glow during the night. I say some sort as unfortunately I didn’t get to see it by night but even by day it was far more interesting than some of the so called ‘must sees’ that I’ve had to see further up the road.