All right Game of Thrones fans, your time has finally come – we go now to Croatias’s most famous city of Dubrovnik! There are dragons lurking in every dungeon and GOT set pieces on every gleaming white street.
Spoiler alert! We didnt actually do any GOT stuff at all except for an incidental staircase here or there (SHAME!) Instead,of course, we did our typical semi-guided blundering through the city while doing our best to figure things out. So hold onto your butt, dear reader, because Jon’s still writing another blog section and you’re stuck with me again.
We rolled into Dubrovnik by bus from Mostar. No late night rouge taxi drivers this time, just a pleasant port side walk flanked by giant cruise ships disgorging their tourists by the thousands. Our Airbnb was about 40 minutes walk East of the old city, so we just stayed on our side of town the first night and had a few beers at the Dubrovnik brewing company and caught up on our sleep. It’s a great place to pour half your flight of beers on yourself while mocking a Scotsman for drinking 2 beers at once.
The next morning, as usual, we got started in the old town with a free walking tour. Now it turns out Dubrovnik actually has some really interesting history – they were a semi-autonomous republic that operated like a miniature Venice named the Republic of Ragusa, and over about a thousand years they were conquered by the Venetians, Austrians, Ottomans, and finally the late Yugoslavia before finally joining up with Croatia. And the whole thing is right across the Adriatic from Italy, whom you might know had some pretty potent culture over the years. Sounds cool right, like you’d think there’d be more ancient buildings and multi-cultural artifacts than George Martin plot points.
Well there aren’t. Thanks to a combination of massive earthquakes (which leveled all the oldest buildings) and shameless tourism, there’s not much left of old Ragusa except the city layout and the walls.
Incredibly though, that’s about all you need. The old town has such a charming and picturesque spot by the water, the streets are so beaming white and cute, and the walls are so magnificent, that you can peer over the heads of a zillion other tourists and still be happy. Sure, there are a couple historic things like the aqueduct or the trading house or the church you can go into, but it won’t be long before you want to go back out and gape at the walls some more. I’m sure there’s some deeper history in there somewhere for those willing to dig, but our style is more climbing than digging.
So naturally after touring the old town we followed up by climbing the nearest mountain. In Dubrovnik that’s Mt. Srd (vowels and chair lift not included). At just 400m it’s pretty modest, but when you’re staring down a sea level right below you it feels taller than that. The view up top was great and you can really appreciate the layout and position of the old city along with the whole section of Croatian coastline. We commented more than once that it looks like a whole ‘nother planet to us GA boys.
After the walk back down we decided to go have a beer by the water, because, as mentioned, it’s rather scenic. And while sitting there sipping our beers in the shadow of Fort Lovrijenac (sometimes the Red Keep to you GOT fans), we saw a group of kayakers paddling out of the cove towards open watet. Now that looks cool, we thought, and wandered over to check it out.
One spontaneous kayak rental later we were paddling out into the Adriatic ourselves. The woman didn’t even bother to check IDs or give directions – she just took our money, pointed out the kayak, and went back to chain smoking. As you may have guessed, Dubrovnik is just as photogenic from the water as it is from above.
There’s also a rocky island to explore and some neat little swimming caves full of college students, as well as a husband to splash. The walls are quite imposing from the water, and it’s easy to imagine how effective the cannons would have been at sinking Venetians and Turks alike. The hill looming there over the city is Mt. Srd.
The next day we were a bit worn out so we decided to just walk over to the local park before going into old town. Fortunately, the Croatian coastline is so impressive that you can just about stagger over to any section without a plan and see stuff like this. We were suitably impressed, both by the view and our own dumb luck.
After that we took the bus back to old town and hit the museums, a shameful staircase, and (most importantly) we paid the staggering cover charge to walk along the walls.
Its not but a few kilometers to walk the circumference of the city, but you have to stop every few feet to take a picture or stare in amazement cause hot damn this place is good lookin.
People told us this and, since it’s true, I will in turn tell it to you, dear reader – the wall walk is stupid expensive but you can’t go all the way to Dubrovnik and not do it.
The walls are more or less the defining thing in the city and the couple hours spent up there are grudgingly worth the price tag.
Finally, we set out on a short quest to try the defining culinary thing in the city, nay in the whole of Dalmatia – the aptly named black risotto.
How do you even get that much ink from a squid? Are there squid farms? And even after you somehow got the requisite ink, why in the name St. Blaise would you put it on risotto? I can’t answer any of these questions, but I can tell you it tasted like slimey black pudding to me, but Jon liked it.
After all that Slavic fun we decided it was finally time to get back in the mountains. We set out from Dubrovnik on an 11 hour bus to the completely irrelevant costal town of Senj (before you ask, no, no one knows how to pronounce it), but that’s a story for another day.