The Return of Calamity Popkin!

Traveling with an ear infection is never fun so rather than taking the 5 hour bus ride down the windy coastal road we opted for a private transfer car and 3 hours on the motorway. Cost about the same as flying but took us right to the gates of the old town (and no painful air pressure!)

We arrived in the late afternoon and after the apartment manager finally turned up and gave us the keys we went out for dinner and had a walk around the old town.

Dubrovnik is a bizarre place, most  of the buildings date from the 16th century (after a large earthquake...) but the city walls were originally built in the 13th century. If it wasn't for the hoards of slack jawed tourists pouring off the cruise liners (7500 a day!) you might mistakenly think you'd slipped back in time.

With me feeling miserable we got an early night.

We slept in late, first visiting a gallery of photos taken by an Auckland photographer Wade Goddard at Mostar during the Bosnian civil war. it was sombre and eye opening. later we climbed up to the nearby Lovrijenac Fortress (St Lawrence in English) which had a great view of the city walls and was also a location used in the filming of many scenes in the Game Of Thrones TV show! We waited till the drones shuffled back to their cruise liners by visiting the city archives and the remembrance room for the citizens who died defending the city during the disintegration of Yugoslavia (and subsequent Serbian invasion). Once the city cleared out we climbed the city walls, it took us a good couple hours but the views were worth it :)

The following day we got up early planning to head out to the island of Lokrum bus we missed the boat so visited the aquarium while we waited. Sea turtle was cool, Cee was scared of the big fish... We caught the boat and started to explore the island, got a bit lost and nearly ended up on the nudie beach! But we found a salt lake called 'dead sea' and went for a dip, Cee (henceforth referred to as Calamity Popkin) accidentally trod on a sea urchin and got quite a few spines imbedded in her foot :( (kind of like brittle splinters) she took it in her stride and we visited monastery ruins and grabbed some lunch, visited the Botanical gardens and saw some biggish lizards, climbed a steep hill to get some photos from Fort Royal at the top and then climbed back down for a swim in the bay (urchins avoided this time!)

The last day we rode up the steepest cable car in the world to another castle 'Fort Imperial'(?) Cee was worried she'd panic but she loved (almost) every minute ;) the fort holds the 'Museum of the Croatian War of Independance' which had lots of photos from '92 - '95 but wasn't so well translated but it was still interesting to see as I remember seeing it on the TV as a child.

We then dragged our bags out of the old town in the 36 degree heat and took a taxi to the airport headed for Vienna