Croatia: A Very Sweaty Birthday Boy.

Money-saving initiative #8: When booking a night train, don’t pay the extra fee for a sleeper carriage. Instead the carriage full of non-reclining seats will be fine, right? Here is a photo of Phoebe, reading a Eurail pamphlet with pictures of what your typical Eurail customer is meant to look like. As you can see, expectation and reality are often very different things:

Needless to say, we arrived in Split at 6am bright and ready to face a day of exploring in 30 degree heat, and rapidly rising. Our decision to skip inland Croatia and head straight to the coast seemed to be a good one - Split is a pretty beautiful city. It’s typically Mediterranean in climate and culture, and has an old Roman style town centre. We went on another free walking tour, which was great for learning a bit about Croatia’s varied history. Every day we were told the next day would be even hotter, which seemed totally ridiculous when we were already consuming at least 3.5 litres of water each day, sweating about 2 litres of that just wandering around, and desperately searching for any opportunity to cool off in the ocean.

Split was originally built as a retirement palace for the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Do we get retirement palaces in New Zealand?

 

 We hobbled up this hill to get magnificent views over Split. It was too hot for anything other than hobbling.

Felix, getting really excited at the market we found inside the old city walls. In truth, the excitement probably stemmed mostly from the fact that this was a place to escape the heat for a bit.

After Split we headed down the stunning coast, to the  ‘Pearl of the Adriatic’, Dubrovnik. As anyone who has been to Croatia/any Game of Thrones fan will tell you, the old town of Dubrovnik is a place like no other. It makes Split seem like a bit of a chump. The blue of the Adriatic Sea, the striking brightness of the sandstone buildings and the orange terracotta roofs make for an extraordinarily beautiful walk around the old city walls, which entirely surround it. No, we’re not authors for the Lonely Planet, we just found Dubrovnik really lovely, ok. Felix turned 22 on our last day in Dubrovnik, an occasion which called for much celebration, and served as the perfect excuse to sign up for the Dubrovnik Pub Crawl. The 30-degree temperatures in the evening meant that crawling between pubs probably would have been the easiest way to do things. DIVIDED WE STAND, UNITED WE CRAWL.

 Our walk from the bus station to the hostel was brightened when we stumbled across a little hedgehog. Sometimes it's the little things that count.

Dubrovaz the stunner. A view from the city walls. Money-saving initiative #9: Remember your student card. In most places this will give you a half-price discount. We don’t have student cards.

Felix walked round on his knees all day pretending to be Tyrion, yelling things like "Did ya send the raven?" and singing the Game of Thrones theme music.

We managed to find a sick jumping spot, where the locals Barbeque little cevap sausages, jump off rocks and throw around a waterpolo ball.

 Hey look, it's a starfish! Lol just kidding, that's Phoebe again. (Back to our old tricks.)

 The birthday boy in his new birthday singlet, which may or may not have been fashioned from one of his old t-shirts.

 Phoebe executes a perfect scuba entry. Splish splash hohohoho. Scuba diving somehow seemed to trump the birthday singlet.

A beached whale.

Next time: Kotor, Ostrog and Durmitor.. We had no idea where these were either.