Phew… that was a day in the heat! But wow! – Dubrovnik!
We’d decided last night that we wanted to do the Dubrovnik Old Town Historical Tour. So we’d booked for the 10 o’clock tour hoping to keep out of the blistering heat later in the day…. We were partially successful.
We had a quickish start this morning aiming for a 9am #6 bus from on the main road about 5 minutes walk from the campsite.
The buses come every 20 or so minutes, and we found the Dubrovnik Libertas Bus app to be useful in telling us where the stops were. It was supposed to show us how long it was until the next bus, but that seemed a bit hit and miss. But not a big problem seeing as the buses are so regular.
It was about a 20 minute ride into the Pile Old Town stop, and the bus was full.
Then it was straight into the Old Town to wait by Onofrio’s Fountain for the tour to start.
I won’t bore you with all the details we found out about Dubrovnik. Other than to say:
- Dubrovnik seems to derive from a word meaning Oak Wood, the hills were covered with oak trees
- The city traded on sea salt, ship building
- Much the city was destroyed in an earthquake in the xx century.
- Yugoslavia meant southern Slavs
- The siege of Dubrovnik in the “war of independence” in 1991 lives long in the memories of those that were there. Younger people are not so haunted by the war but it clearly is still part of the thinking of all locals
- The cruise liners are longer than the Main Street (300m)
- Dubrovnik was never occupied except for when Napoleon arrived – at which point it stopped being a separate state. Even the ottoman empire stopped at Dubrovnik and only took payments instead of occupying the city
- Lots of other stuff
Our tour guide, Ivana, brought mixed opinions. Sue liked her, but I thought she was a bit OTT. I also wanted to hear more about the trade, families that dominated the city and what made the city so successful. We got a bit of that, but not enough for me.
Anyway the tour 1.5 hours went quickly, which is always a sign of a good tour.
I wouldn’t necessarily have called this a history tour. It seems, though, that this differed from the non-history tour in that it didn’t go into all the Game of Thrones references!
Here’s some pictures…
Stradun Street translates to “big ugly street”, clearly somebody didn’t like the look of it. Now it looks pretty amazing. The limestone tiles that make the floor are so well polished with the shoes of millions of visitors!
Touching Marin’s nose was meant to bring luck, we think! There was another jumping stone that was meant to do something with marriage, and we may have got the two things mixed up 🤷♂️
After the tour had finished we found a coffee for a few minutes and had a quick call with Harry about some house stuff at home.
Then we’d been recommended to go up the Jesuit Steps and round the back of the school to a door that led out of the city walls to a beach. The terraced cliffs led down to the see with a bar selling drinks.
People were tombstone off the cliff…
From there we wandered back to the bus stop for our number 6 home. It was still only about 1pm, but we were drained from the heat. Here’s a few
More pictures as we roamed around…
Another thought for the day… it’s next to impossible to get good artsie photographs of these places now. There’s just too many people, and in Dubrovnik’s case, just too many sun shades. If we went into the city at day-break then it might be possible to get something more arty. But this isn’t a photographic tour of Europe, the photos are just keep-sakes really.
On the way back to the campsite we stopped one stop early to find Info Planet, that does phone repairs. They said they’d take a look at Sue’s phone but it was completely dead when we left it with them and he thought it had got water damaged. He’s going to WhatsApp us in the morning to see what our options are. It never feels good to have to hand over a phone’s lock-PIN, but we didn’t have much choice. We’ll be keeping a very close eye on what gets used over the next few days. But the shop seemed legit, and you’ve got to make a judgement call sometimes! 🤷♂️
We had a chill at the van for a couple of hours and then went to find the pool of a local hotel that were supposed to get access to. There’s a whole bunch of hotels, water parks, shops and stuff near the beach we went to yesterday and the Sunny Hotel is affiliated with our campsite. The pool was pretty decent to be fair, and was well worth the effort to find to cool down.
This pool was literally just above the beach Sue swam at yesterday…
Thought of the day… there didn’t seem to be a lot of the Dubrovnik Old Town’s soul left. You get crippling sense (confirmed by our guide) that there’s nothing left in the old town except that which attracts tourists. Most of the housing is either apartments or owned by wealthy foreigners. I think you still get to see the fantastic architecture, but there doesn’t seem to be any of the life that made it such a wealthy city left in the place. It’s not that it’s been turned into a Disney attraction, it’s just that it only exists to be a tourist attraction now. Perhaps we’re being disingenuous, but that’s how it came across to me at least.
Tomorrow we’re going to get up even earlier and try to do the city walls walk before the heat sets in. We should also hopefully get Sue’s phone back, even better if it’s mended!
Harry, Hermione and Ron are just setting up Dumbledore’s Army!
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