On Croatia

Croatia is warm. Very very warm.

We’re in Dubrovnik, the most touristed place in all of Europe. Estimates are 36 tourists per each local resident and we feel it when we first arrive in the Old Town. There’s a literal swarm of people walking every direction, icecreams held high above the crowd. There’s icecreams everywhere – every second shop is an icecream shop, which makes sense in a week where the temperature is 35 when we arrive and bottoms out at 30 degrees overnight.

The city is glorious – giant stone walls, ramparts, skinny laneways with tiny tables laid out. Our host suggests we dine at the Stara Loza restaurant, but that we’ll need to book in advance. We stumble in by accident and manage to get a table for two on the street, finding out in the process that this is a Michelin-starred restaurant and the food is on the expensive side. Splash out, its not a honeymoon is the call of the night and I order the beef ribs which melt away as I eat them. We spend 150 Euro on one meal and promise that we’ll have breakfast in for the rest of the week to compensate.

We find a tiny supermarket tucked down an alleyway and wander into pandemonium. Almost a hundred tourists trying to buy cheap beers and breakfast materials. Part of the travel experience is buying silly snacks everywhere we go – the sillier they are the better, so I come away with a six pack of ‘Cuba Libre’ which I assume were rum and coke, but find out later is actually apple and lime wine. Grace spends most of the supermarket time Google Translating the back of the icecreams to see if they contain nuts, and when she finally finds one she thinks she can eat she asks the shopkeeper if its ok and he takes it from her hand and promptly puts it back in the fridge.

We despairingly take a tub of chocolate muesli home for breakfast. All the cereal here is mostly sugar, and I’m missing my Weetbix. We can’t find the milk – the fridge is full of milk containers full of yoghurt, but we manage to get some instant Turkish coffee sachets that really kick start the mornings.

We wake to warmth and sun and bliss and toddle down the hill to find Šuli? Beach – a tiny cut away beach block on the edge of the Old Town. It’s probably the most picturesque place I’ve ever swum, sheer cliffs meeting at the water, a gentle pebble beach disappearing into brilliant clear blue water, the endless ocean at the end of the cut away. Hordes of people lie everywhere, deflating in the sun. A beach bar plays inoffensive background dance music. Everyone talks in various languages about how beautiful the whole experience is, imagine the Tower of Babel but positive vibes on a pebble beach.

I dive off a cliff into the water with my camera which promptly fills with water and stops working. I bought the camera second hand off Facebook Marketplace, so I message the guy I bought it from and he, very obligingly, sends me his original receipt. I drink a Cuba Libre and try to file an online warranty claim.

We buy ‘Dubrovnik City Wall Tickets’ for 25 Euro each and decide to walk the walls at the hottest time of day because that’s when the least other people will be up there. Google reviews tell us ‘it’s a slow moving conga line, leave at least two hours’ but I’m battling my fear of heights so we manage to do it in less than one. This includes hanging off the parapets to get a selfie, pretending we recognise all of the bits from Game of Thrones, and me incessantly pointing at people kayaking in the bay below us and asking Grace if she’d like to do that. Grace can’t swim, but I managed to get her into a kayak once in Vietnam. A lot of crying and nervous shrieking later we were paddling joyfully through deep water and one of my life goals is to relive the experience. I don’t think it’s going to happen this trip.

We retreat to our hotel for a shower and a nap, then head back to the Old Town for a concert. Unsure what to expect, we’re ushered in to the Rector’s Palace, a giant open air courtyard in the middle of the city. It’s stiflingly hot and there’s a hundred chairs arranged in a big square around the courtyard. Above us there’s a staircase with people sitting stairing down in the square. Everyone is fanning themselves with their program and sweating. From somewhere in the back a solo female voice starts and the Antiphonus Vocal Ensemble are on. They’re playing a program of Spanish works but the program confusingly has all the lyrics written in Croatian and English. I try to follow along but spend most of my time trying to eyeball the program while also fanning myself.

The highlight of the show is Petrit Ceku, a stunningly good Albanian guitarist. We can’t quite see him from where we’re seated but it genuinely sounds like three or four guitarists are playing at the same time. The concert is a mix of solo guitar pieces, acapella vocal pieces and vocal ensemble with guitar backing and the solo guitar pieces are my favourite. At the end of the show the ensemble come out for two bows and then perform an encore – an excerpt of one of the pieces from earlier in the show. I wonder if I should spend more time practicing my banjo.

The next day we head to Bar Buza – a hidden bar on the edge of the sea wall. You have to clamber through a tiny hole in the wall that opens suddenly to a bar that clings to the side of the cliff. Underneath the bar is a ‘beach’ which is really just a ladder straight into the ocean. I leave Grace at the bar and join the throngs of people diving off the cliffs, swimming for a minute then climbing back up the ladder to dive off the cliffs again. It’s glorious. If my camera was working I would have used it here too. Ah well. Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but splashes in the ocean.

We get overpriced calzone, and have an afternoon nap. I wake up to thunder and pouring rain which lasts for fifteen minutes and then morphs into brilliant sunshine again. We walk up the hill away from the Old Town and find a Mexican restaurant full of Australians. The meals are comparatively cheap and Grace gets a margarita that has an entire Paddle Pop floating in it. Early night tonight as we have a 7 am bus to Montenegro tomorrow.