Saturday in Dubrovnik, Sunday in Korcula

 

Whenever we visit a new town, I love to get up at dawn and explore the city while everyone else is still asleep. That's doubly true in a city like Dubrovnik, whose crowds rival Disneyland's on Labor Day. There's something special about being the only one around to watch the Dubrovnik Zamboni driver polish the marble on the Stradun.

Thunderstorms were expected Saturday afternoon. It was windy, the Adriatic was choppy, and the swimming beach by the old port was unusable, which left me a little apprehensive, worried that our Sunday ferry to Korcula might be cancelled.

There were a few other early risers about, but mostly we avoided each other, looking for the solitude of having Dubrovnik to ones self. ( I caught this gentleman walking down the stairs of shame from Game of Thrones.)

At eight, I was back in our room, having breakfast with Kathy. I told her about my scouting trip around town, and we decided to go out together, before the cruise ships emptied into town. 

At the Arsenal we sat on a bench at the end of the quay, avoiding the spray from the waves, and looking out at Lokrum Island while I told her about the curse. In 1023 a Benedictine order established the Abbey of St. Mary's on the island. Seven centuries later, after a devastating earthquake, the monks were evicted by the Dubrovnik authorities. The night they were to leave, the monks circled the island three times, carrying upside-down candles, leaving a trail of wax and cursing those because of whom they were expelled after seven centuries. The monks never returned, but everyone who took possession of the island died in macabre and mysterious ways.

That's the story at least. Back inside the city at 9:00 am, many of the back lanes were still empty, and Kathy and I tried to methodically visit each one. 

By 10:30 am, however, the main street (the Stradun) of 6:00 am ...

... had turned into this, and we decided to use our bus pass to get out of town again. Using the bus map, we decided to visit the area north-east of Dubrovnik, called Lapad. After about a half hour waiting for the #2A bus, we asked at the ticket booth, and were told that the #2A bus didn't run on Saturday. That information was probably on the ticket in Croatian.

So, we picked another bus to the north. When we got to the end of the line (Babin Kuk), we got out and kept walking. We finally ended up on the coast at the Coral Beach club. My trunks were still back at the hotel, so we couldn't swim. It was nice, though, to eat some fries, drink some sparkling water and a spritz (for an exorbitant 40E) and get out of the sun.

We got back in the Old Town about 4:00 pm, just as the thunder and lightning started, which had the positive side-effect of sending the throngs back to their ships. It was over by about 8:00 pm, so we went out for some pizza at Oliva Pizza, recommended in our guidebook. Neither of us were impressed, so it's just as well that I didn't take any pictures. By ten, we were asleep, exhausted.

On to Korcula

Checkout time was ten o'clock, and, as we left, we enjoyed talking with Elizabeth, an American working at our hotel, who married a Croatian and now makes her home in Dubrovnik with her four children, and another on the way. She's the one who made our delicious breakfast each day. It's so interesting to meet new people and to hear about their lives.

Our ferry didn't leave for Korcula until 3:00 pm, so we decided to visit the Red History Museum across from the ferry port. The museum is about the history of communism in Yugoslavia, presented as the inside of a Yugoslav house in the Tito era. There were a lot of interactive exhibits. The poster above is about the "five-year economic plan". I'm pretty sure that I found it more interesting than Kathy did. (You can see all our pictures here.)

The museum killed two hours and we still had three more to go (or so we thought). While we were in the museum, the Krilo Catamaran ticket office opened up and we stopped to make sure that everything was OK, which it was, sort of. Apparently the ferry we were travelling on was cancelled and Krilo had sent us a message to that effect weeks ago. I had apparently confused it with a different message, and ignored it. The good new was, we could still use the old tickets on a different ferry. The bad (well, not very bad) news was that the new ferry didn't leave until 4:00 pm, so we had four hours to kill.

In the end, we just sat on a bench in the park, bought a couple of Cokes and some chips, and tried to while away the time. I read to Kathy for a while from a book about a Croatian slacker, named "Our Man in Iraq." She didn't like it as well as I did. We tried feeding the birds, and I tried to nap on another bench. Finally, though, 4:00 pm rolled around and we got on the ferry for Korcula.

At 6:00 pm we pulled up to the dock and went searching for our hotel, the Fabis, (the WiFi password is "youarefabulous"), one of only two non-chain hotels on the island. Our room is very nice, with a view of the water.

We've only been here a few hours, but already Korcula has made a good impression. It's much less crowded, for one. Since we had only eaten chips and trail mix since breakfast, we took off at 7:00 pm looking for dinner. Along the way Kathy was taken with the sunset.

We had a great dinner at an Asian restaurant on the promenade called Silk, which seems to be a Croatian chain. We really enjoyed the food. On the way back, we stopped for gelato: limon, watermelon and canteloupe. Tomorrow, we'll catch another ferry to Split.