Though it was now almost two weeks ago, I absolutely have to start with an incredible act of thoughtfulness, kindness, and generosity that a CouchSurfer in Serbia did for me. I had been messaging with Igor for a few days before and while I was in Serbia and though he was going to be out of town for the majority of my time in Serbia he was offering invaluable help with looking into bus schedules to Croatia for me (again, hard to get info without the language and my train pass doesn't work in Serbia though other non-global passes do).
Anyways, although I was profusely thanking him all day long as he made reservations over the phone for me and gave me all the details I needed to know about the bus ride (I had never even met him yet!) I still sent him one last text to thank him and let him know I had made it back to the Belgrade bus station safely and was just waiting for the bus to Dubrovnik. Well maybe only 20-25 minutes later as I started to re-gather my bags and walk back to the bus bay identified on my ticket, a young guy walked towards me and said "Annie?" I was totally thrown! Igor's photo on Facebook is very small and so I certainly didn't recognize him, but there aren't many people who know my name in Belgrade so I quickly realized it had to be Igor! He had come to say hello as he caught his own train to Novi Sad! But not only that, he had a bag of goodies (water and Serbian cookies) for me to take on the bus ride with me. I was just floored again! It started off the 14 hour overnight bus ride on such a positive note!
Unfortunately though, one of the next things I want to share is not quite so uplifting. There are no trains to Dubrovnik, only buses, so my two options were to take a train to Montenegro and then transfer to a bus or to get on a bus right in Belgrade that is routed through Bosnia and Herzegovina. I chose the latter. And unfortunately although I understand the trip is only about 400 miles, due to borders, planned stops, and mountainous, hilly terrain, the journey took even more than the scheduled 14 hours.
I was quite shocked when I first woke up after the sun had risen and saw this unique rocky landscape in Bosnia. I have never seen anything quite like it! Are they rocks growing in the grass or grass growing around the rocks?
It was a rough night and I did not get the amount of sleep I was expecting. I think we must have stopped for some sort of border control more than four times between midnight and 3am, but I was in and out of bad sleep. I tried to stay awake each time my passport was taken from me to be sure that I received it back, but one of the times when a border agent had all of our passports, our bus started driving away before we ever got them back! I am sure we only went about 1 km at a slow pace, but it certainly felt like 2 or 3 km! (And this little rush of adrenaline-filled mini worry/panic also made my sleep more restless.) We somehow got our passports back at the next stop and I think Croatian border agents must have hand delivered them to the Bosnian side for us, but we still had a couple more border/police stops throughout the night.
Anyways, morning finally came and we had another planned rest stop for food and restrooms and after a long night I certainly needed to go. Now I don't have any photos to show you (I thought that would be crude) so you will need to use your imagination, but I can start by saying that when I walked into this Bosnian bathroom I immediately waled back out thinking I had just stepped into the men's room. I double checked then and in actuality I was in the women's room. The toilet was no more than a sunken hole in the ground. It was the opposite of elevated. It was a sort of ceramic dish in the ground. And it did not look or smell pretty. So I again walked right back out and onto the bus not knowing how to make use of a toilet like that!
Photos from some of the small towns we drove through in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
So perhaps that was 7am and I thought I could hold out for a better toilet. I discovered around 9am at the next rest stop I actually had to change buses. I thought I had a clear understanding in Belgrade that the bus ride would be direct for me, but even with the lack of common language it was made clear to me that I had to get off and wait one hour for another bus and another connecting ticket was thrust into my hand. So there I was at another rest stop with a full bladder still. I decided to venture again inside to see if toilets in this town were any better. Sadly, they weren't. Still just a ceramic basin sunken into a half dirt-half concrete floor. It took squatting to an epic level. Hovering over a seat wasn't going to cut it - you have to get quite low when your seat is about 2 feet lower than you're used to. It was by far the most shocking surprise of my trip so far and I hope my experience can only inform your future travel. Do not hydrate at all if you are crossing through Bosnia by bus. I assume (naively?) that households have more traditional toilets if you are planning an extended stay!
But the neat thing about my one hour layover in Mostar that I only learned as my first bus was pulling away was that the next stop on my original bus was Medjugorje. Again, my bus ride was to be 14 hours and after studying a map I now see why! We certainly were not following the straightest line to Dubrovnik and when on my second bus I sensed we had totally turned around and were doubling back on our route I finally asked a young guy sitting next to me and he informed me the bus had gone that way pretty much to stop at Medugorje. I had no idea!
But I was off to Dubrovnik and after 3 more border crossings (leaving Bosnia/entering Croatia, leaving Croatia/re-entering Bosnia, leaving Bosnia/re-entering Croatia) and about 4 more hours I was finally there!
These photos were all taken from the bus window of the Dalmatian Coast...it was a very scenic drive along the water!
(Seeing this person relaxing on a raft really made me wish I had thought to pack my own yellow inflatable raft!!)
Croatia gets a fair amount of tourists, at least along the Dalmatian Coast. Apparently this is a fairly recent upswing too given all of the the not-so-long-ago wars and conflicts related to the break up of Yugoslavia. But yea, Dubrovnik felt pretty darn touristy. Tour group after tour group in the walled city (a preview, I think, of what Rome might look like) and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I estimate 1 in 5 or 6 vehicles on the road were coach tour buses.
Dubrovnik, called the Pearl of the Adriatic, is in the extreme south of Croatia (why it is so hard to reach by land) and has under 50,000 residents. The old city (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is actually a fully walled city, but of course the city has grown over the centuries and residents now also live outside the fortress walls.
It is a beautiful city with its own charm and I loved being back on the water. I learned that with its position on the water it was one of the only cities in zeurope that could rival Venice for trade in the Middle Ages and this made it a target and under constant threat from Ottoman Empire, hence the 2 kilometers of fortress walls surrounding the city.
So in Dubrovnik I spent my two short days at two beaches (very rocky and a bit disappointing), wandering the city trying to avoid the gaggles of AARP members, walking the full length of the city walls (about an $11 equivalent ticket), waiting for the perfect sunsets, and exploring the small but cute towns of Lapad and Cavtat outside the city.
Walking the two kilometers on the fortress walls... Don't do it in the middle of the day like I did!
Dubrovnik's idea of the first digital clock tower. It only updates every 5 minutes! This says it is 3:05 (pm).
It was very interesting to see signs of daily life of the Dubrovnik residents that live within the walls and o-exist somehow with non stop tourists during the summers. I would be curious to learn the percentage of residents that live within the walls.
I also pieced together my own history lesson from a wide smattering of sources. Croatia used to be an independent republic (its own country) during the Middle Ages, but it was conquered and became a part of the Austrian-Hungary empire which lasted until World War I. And then after the war it became part of Yugoslavia until it fought its own War of Independence from 1991-1995, during which there was heavy bombing of Dubrovnik but it has been fully repaired.
It was a new experience for me in Dubrovnik as I stayed with a host who wasn't a local, but instead a French guy who was working for a travel company in one of the resort hotels for the summer. So I must say I am disappointed by how little I feel I learned about the town, but I did learn a lot from just visiting one photography gallery/museum called War Photo Limited.
I also was reminded by just how much the French love France and the French language at dinner my first night when my host and I went out with two other young French people, Charles and Charlotte, who were also working for the same travel company for the summer. I think I was included for all of about 15% of the dinner conversation before they switched back to French! (I am now thinking twice about joining two of my previous surfers from Paris, Alex and Max, for a weekend in the French countryside in August with all of their friends at Max's parents' house. I know Alex and Max will make me feel included as possible, but I don't think they can guarantee that their friends will talk predominately in English the whole time and it's just not fun not being able to join in the conversation ever!). However, I was floored at one part of the conversation when we were talking about life in America and both Charles and Charlotte voiced that they would prefer to live in the US! They thought France was fine, but were just quite insistent that they thought they would enjoy life in the US more. I really didn't know what to say, but am eager to talk to more people in France next month now.
And one little, big regret was not doing the water skiing at Banje Beach outside the fortress walls when I was right there one morning. I was thinking I didn't want to have wet and salty hair the rest of the day and that either I could find the time to come back before 6pm when they closed or find water skiing at another beach in Lapad. But no luck. It cost only about $30 USD and I thought that was a good deal. It would have been awesome to ski in the turquoise water! I settled for swimming in the late afternoon at the beaches in Lapad, a resort-y peninsula just a bit outside of Dubrovnik.
Miscellaneous notes:
1. I have never been on such a busy and crowded public bus, especially on a Saturday morning. I was riding to the port to grab my bus to Split and was more than amused as we pulled up to every bus stop and had another 8-10 people board all appearing to be locals. Capacity limits are not followed, that's for sure. By the end of the route there were about 7 people squashed into the stairs below the bus driver! I might not ordinarily care, but the road we were on was as close to the edge of the very steep cliffs into the Adriatic Sea as you could get. Plus, I caught several people who were stuck standing in the aisle making the sign of the cross on their chests!
Posted capacity was either 51 or 78 and I did my best to count and I think we had close to 120 on board!
2. So in Europe you may have heard that they include tax and tip in the prices at restaurants so it's easy to know what you owe. Well in über-touristy Dubrovnik they have a way around this to squeeze a bit more money out of the tourists! Something called "couvert" is added to your bill as a per person charge! It's only about $2.50, but it was my first time encountering it. We will see if I find it elsewhere in Europe!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Anyways, although I was profusely thanking him all day long as he made reservations over the phone for me and gave me all the details I needed to know about the bus ride (I had never even met him yet!) I still sent him one last text to thank him and let him know I had made it back to the Belgrade bus station safely and was just waiting for the bus to Dubrovnik. Well maybe only 20-25 minutes later as I started to re-gather my bags and walk back to the bus bay identified on my ticket, a young guy walked towards me and said "Annie?" I was totally thrown! Igor's photo on Facebook is very small and so I certainly didn't recognize him, but there aren't many people who know my name in Belgrade so I quickly realized it had to be Igor! He had come to say hello as he caught his own train to Novi Sad! But not only that, he had a bag of goodies (water and Serbian cookies) for me to take on the bus ride with me. I was just floored again! It started off the 14 hour overnight bus ride on such a positive note!
Unfortunately though, one of the next things I want to share is not quite so uplifting. There are no trains to Dubrovnik, only buses, so my two options were to take a train to Montenegro and then transfer to a bus or to get on a bus right in Belgrade that is routed through Bosnia and Herzegovina. I chose the latter. And unfortunately although I understand the trip is only about 400 miles, due to borders, planned stops, and mountainous, hilly terrain, the journey took even more than the scheduled 14 hours.
I was quite shocked when I first woke up after the sun had risen and saw this unique rocky landscape in Bosnia. I have never seen anything quite like it! Are they rocks growing in the grass or grass growing around the rocks?
It was a rough night and I did not get the amount of sleep I was expecting. I think we must have stopped for some sort of border control more than four times between midnight and 3am, but I was in and out of bad sleep. I tried to stay awake each time my passport was taken from me to be sure that I received it back, but one of the times when a border agent had all of our passports, our bus started driving away before we ever got them back! I am sure we only went about 1 km at a slow pace, but it certainly felt like 2 or 3 km! (And this little rush of adrenaline-filled mini worry/panic also made my sleep more restless.) We somehow got our passports back at the next stop and I think Croatian border agents must have hand delivered them to the Bosnian side for us, but we still had a couple more border/police stops throughout the night.
Anyways, morning finally came and we had another planned rest stop for food and restrooms and after a long night I certainly needed to go. Now I don't have any photos to show you (I thought that would be crude) so you will need to use your imagination, but I can start by saying that when I walked into this Bosnian bathroom I immediately waled back out thinking I had just stepped into the men's room. I double checked then and in actuality I was in the women's room. The toilet was no more than a sunken hole in the ground. It was the opposite of elevated. It was a sort of ceramic dish in the ground. And it did not look or smell pretty. So I again walked right back out and onto the bus not knowing how to make use of a toilet like that!
Photos from some of the small towns we drove through in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
So perhaps that was 7am and I thought I could hold out for a better toilet. I discovered around 9am at the next rest stop I actually had to change buses. I thought I had a clear understanding in Belgrade that the bus ride would be direct for me, but even with the lack of common language it was made clear to me that I had to get off and wait one hour for another bus and another connecting ticket was thrust into my hand. So there I was at another rest stop with a full bladder still. I decided to venture again inside to see if toilets in this town were any better. Sadly, they weren't. Still just a ceramic basin sunken into a half dirt-half concrete floor. It took squatting to an epic level. Hovering over a seat wasn't going to cut it - you have to get quite low when your seat is about 2 feet lower than you're used to. It was by far the most shocking surprise of my trip so far and I hope my experience can only inform your future travel. Do not hydrate at all if you are crossing through Bosnia by bus. I assume (naively?) that households have more traditional toilets if you are planning an extended stay!
But the neat thing about my one hour layover in Mostar that I only learned as my first bus was pulling away was that the next stop on my original bus was Medjugorje. Again, my bus ride was to be 14 hours and after studying a map I now see why! We certainly were not following the straightest line to Dubrovnik and when on my second bus I sensed we had totally turned around and were doubling back on our route I finally asked a young guy sitting next to me and he informed me the bus had gone that way pretty much to stop at Medugorje. I had no idea!
But I was off to Dubrovnik and after 3 more border crossings (leaving Bosnia/entering Croatia, leaving Croatia/re-entering Bosnia, leaving Bosnia/re-entering Croatia) and about 4 more hours I was finally there!
These photos were all taken from the bus window of the Dalmatian Coast...it was a very scenic drive along the water!
(Seeing this person relaxing on a raft really made me wish I had thought to pack my own yellow inflatable raft!!)
Croatia gets a fair amount of tourists, at least along the Dalmatian Coast. Apparently this is a fairly recent upswing too given all of the the not-so-long-ago wars and conflicts related to the break up of Yugoslavia. But yea, Dubrovnik felt pretty darn touristy. Tour group after tour group in the walled city (a preview, I think, of what Rome might look like) and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I estimate 1 in 5 or 6 vehicles on the road were coach tour buses.
Dubrovnik, called the Pearl of the Adriatic, is in the extreme south of Croatia (why it is so hard to reach by land) and has under 50,000 residents. The old city (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is actually a fully walled city, but of course the city has grown over the centuries and residents now also live outside the fortress walls.
It is a beautiful city with its own charm and I loved being back on the water. I learned that with its position on the water it was one of the only cities in zeurope that could rival Venice for trade in the Middle Ages and this made it a target and under constant threat from Ottoman Empire, hence the 2 kilometers of fortress walls surrounding the city.
So in Dubrovnik I spent my two short days at two beaches (very rocky and a bit disappointing), wandering the city trying to avoid the gaggles of AARP members, walking the full length of the city walls (about an $11 equivalent ticket), waiting for the perfect sunsets, and exploring the small but cute towns of Lapad and Cavtat outside the city.
Walking the two kilometers on the fortress walls... Don't do it in the middle of the day like I did!
Dubrovnik's idea of the first digital clock tower. It only updates every 5 minutes! This says it is 3:05 (pm).
It was very interesting to see signs of daily life of the Dubrovnik residents that live within the walls and o-exist somehow with non stop tourists during the summers. I would be curious to learn the percentage of residents that live within the walls.
I also pieced together my own history lesson from a wide smattering of sources. Croatia used to be an independent republic (its own country) during the Middle Ages, but it was conquered and became a part of the Austrian-Hungary empire which lasted until World War I. And then after the war it became part of Yugoslavia until it fought its own War of Independence from 1991-1995, during which there was heavy bombing of Dubrovnik but it has been fully repaired.
It was a new experience for me in Dubrovnik as I stayed with a host who wasn't a local, but instead a French guy who was working for a travel company in one of the resort hotels for the summer. So I must say I am disappointed by how little I feel I learned about the town, but I did learn a lot from just visiting one photography gallery/museum called War Photo Limited.
I also was reminded by just how much the French love France and the French language at dinner my first night when my host and I went out with two other young French people, Charles and Charlotte, who were also working for the same travel company for the summer. I think I was included for all of about 15% of the dinner conversation before they switched back to French! (I am now thinking twice about joining two of my previous surfers from Paris, Alex and Max, for a weekend in the French countryside in August with all of their friends at Max's parents' house. I know Alex and Max will make me feel included as possible, but I don't think they can guarantee that their friends will talk predominately in English the whole time and it's just not fun not being able to join in the conversation ever!). However, I was floored at one part of the conversation when we were talking about life in America and both Charles and Charlotte voiced that they would prefer to live in the US! They thought France was fine, but were just quite insistent that they thought they would enjoy life in the US more. I really didn't know what to say, but am eager to talk to more people in France next month now.
And one little, big regret was not doing the water skiing at Banje Beach outside the fortress walls when I was right there one morning. I was thinking I didn't want to have wet and salty hair the rest of the day and that either I could find the time to come back before 6pm when they closed or find water skiing at another beach in Lapad. But no luck. It cost only about $30 USD and I thought that was a good deal. It would have been awesome to ski in the turquoise water! I settled for swimming in the late afternoon at the beaches in Lapad, a resort-y peninsula just a bit outside of Dubrovnik.
Miscellaneous notes:
1. I have never been on such a busy and crowded public bus, especially on a Saturday morning. I was riding to the port to grab my bus to Split and was more than amused as we pulled up to every bus stop and had another 8-10 people board all appearing to be locals. Capacity limits are not followed, that's for sure. By the end of the route there were about 7 people squashed into the stairs below the bus driver! I might not ordinarily care, but the road we were on was as close to the edge of the very steep cliffs into the Adriatic Sea as you could get. Plus, I caught several people who were stuck standing in the aisle making the sign of the cross on their chests!
Posted capacity was either 51 or 78 and I did my best to count and I think we had close to 120 on board!
2. So in Europe you may have heard that they include tax and tip in the prices at restaurants so it's easy to know what you owe. Well in über-touristy Dubrovnik they have a way around this to squeeze a bit more money out of the tourists! Something called "couvert" is added to your bill as a per person charge! It's only about $2.50, but it was my first time encountering it. We will see if I find it elsewhere in Europe!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
I'm sure you know by now that the "couvert" is all over Europe. It's a small charge for the use of the linens and silverware. Also, I love that you took the same photo of the little yard inside the walls of Dubrovnik with the clothesline and (I'm sure you saw it too) soccer goals. :D
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