2018.10.10 – Hvar – Mljet (Croatia) – We left our apartment shortly after 8 am and walked to the harbor. A line-up had already formed for the 8:50am catamaran. Some American visitors were eagerly inquiring about everyone’s home country – although they seemed more interested in discovering other visitors from the USA. The catamaran was a larger model than our previous one. It serviced a number of island stops between Split and Dubrovnik. We arrived at the harbor of the very small town of Pomena on the island of Mljet around 11am. What a contrast with Hvar with its well developed tourist infrastructures. Pomena offered only one small convenience store, a few restaurants and equal number of apartment rentals – nonetheless a number of large yachts appeared to be attracted to the harbor. It was fairly easy to locate our apartment. Our host was just finished cleaning it when we arrived. Once again we were allowed to check-in well before the usual 2:00pm check-in time. We visited the convenience store to buy some food supplies for our evening meal and our next morning breakfast. We had to be a bit creative for our meal menu. As we had visited most of the town when we walked from the harbor to our apartment, we did not feel any great urge to head out to explore the town. Jenny kept on asking “What are we doing here?” – and I answered “Manãna, you will see!”. A group of young girls with backpacks knocked at our door in the late afternoon. They had arrived on the island with the afternoon ferry. As our apartment was on the ground level, they had thought we were the hosts.
2018.10.11 – Mljet (Croatia) – While sipping coffee on our balcony in the morning, we were somewhat happy to farewell the backpacking girls as they left for the morning catamaran. The girls had gone out “on the town” the previous evening. When they came back to their apartment around 1:30am, they had made quite a bit of partying noise. After our breakfast, we visited a couple of bicycle rental shops. The highlight of the island was the exploration of the Mljet National Park. One of the best way to explore it, was either on bicycle or on foot. Jenny was a bit nervous at the idea of riding her own bicycle. As she was quick to tell the bicycle rental attendant that she had not biked for over 10 years. Hearing this, I thought that might be all the folks we met in New Zealand and Australia last year were telling the truth when they kept on saying that Jenny was not pedaling on the tandem! After a bit of practice with the mountain bikes, we climbed up the hill out of Pomena and cycled 1.5kms to the start of the Mljet National park. We enjoyed cycling on the level and paved trail some 14kms around a big lake that was connected to the sea. The park’s entrance fee also included a small ferry boat ride to an island where we could visit a large monastery – now partly used as a restaurant. Back on our bicycles, I managed to convince Jenny to cycle some 4kms further to Polace, another small town similar to Pomena. We had a good workout cycling down and up to/from Polace. We returned our bicycles late afternoon. We felt very pleased with our small cycling exploration. In the evening, we had our evening meal at a restaurant in front of the sea. The menu prices reminded us that everything was more expensive on islands! We had noticed that some restaurants had started to close for the season. We learned that even our evening restaurant was likely closing in the next day or so.
2018.10.12 – Mljet – Dubronik (Croatia) – After some coffee and yogurt, we left our apartment to catch our 10:50am catamaran to Dubrovnik. Although the end of the tourist season was apparently upon us, the catamaran was pretty much full. Upon our arrival in Dubrovnik, we walked to a cafe nearby our apartment. Using the cafe’s WiFi, we attempted to reach our host using our VoIP softphone and we even tried the VoIP sms feature but we were unsuccessful. In the end, the cafe waitress called the managing company on our behalf. As we had showed up 30 mins before the official check-in, we were not overly concerned when the host showed up some 20 mins later. She apologized profusely about the delay as she had tried to reach us but discovered we did not have any mobile service. The very friendly and helpful host, a teacher by trade, rented out her apartment during the tourist season to supplement her revenues. During the summer months, her daughter and herself moved into a smaller apartment in the suburb. Although, our apartment was labeled as being downtown, the only sign of this was the rather large (and convenient) grocery store nearby. Late afternoon, we stocked up on some food supplies for our meals.
2018.10.13 – Dubronik (Croatia) – After our breakfast, we headed out and walked 20mins to the old town, the major tourist attraction in Dubrovnik. We paid the heft entrance fee to access the 2kms fortification wall around the old town. Although the tourist crowd was tolerable, we could not imagine what it would look like during the peak summer period. This reminded us somewhat of Split with the many cruise ship visitors. We walked to the the old city wall within 70 mins while snapping plenty of pictures. Many tourist information suggested the walk might take between 2 to 3 hrs. We saw a poor guy drop his phone over the wall and crashed some 10m below onto the rocks on the sea side. We hoped for him that he had some damage protection on his phone! Whenever we stopped for a break, we were never too far from a WiFi connection. Given our time in Croatian we had learned that restaurant and cafes WiFi passwords were never too complicated. Hence, it had become fairly easy for us to connect to a WiFi along the way. After walking several more kms within the old town, we headed back to our apartment.
2018.10.14 – Dubrovnik (Croatia) – Today, we had planned to visit the nearby island of Lokrum. After our breakfast, we walked back to the old town and made our way to the boat dock. Unfortunately, the ferry boat only accepted cash – no credit card. As our local Croatian cash reserve was almost depleted and we were leaving Croatia tomorrow, we did not want to visit a banking machine just for this island visit. We opted to spend more time walking the alleyways of the the old town. We walked back to our apartment using a different route. Along the way, we stopped for some additional grocery supplies. We welcomed spending some relaxing time in our apartment as we marked the beginning of the second half of our trip. In the evening, we set out for a walk with the goal of spending the bulk of our remain Croatian currency. We had a banana split and coffee along the way – but that was not breaking the bank.
2018.10.15 – Dubrovnik (Croatia) – Budva (Montenegro) – After a light breakfast, we took the city bus to the bus station. Although, the walk there would not have been too long but we noticed the other evening, when we had purchased our bus tickets, that the sidewalk was missing part of the way. Our bus arrived one hour late in Dubrovnik. Although normally Jenny was skilled at managing to be one of the first person to board on buses, she stayed behind this time as our bus tickets had reserved seats. We were disappointed when we stepped onto the bus to discover that there were no seat numbers, WiFi and toilet. I had warned Jenny that the tourist infrastructure would likely be more modest moving forward until Greece. The three hour bus ride felt quite long as the coastal road did lend itself for any fast driving. The bus was almost full to capacity. As we stopped at the Croatian custom, and later at the Montenegro custom, everyone on the bus had to step off and line up at a custom booth to get their passport stamped. The bulk of the passengers left the bus at the pretty town of Kotor. After our arrival in Budva, an hour and half late, we quickly bought our bus tickets for our next travel segment to Albania. Given our late arrival, we had not expected our host to be waiting for us but as we walked towards the building, our host’s mom greeted us. We quickly discovered that English was somewhat understood but it did not appear to be spoken much – or at least not as well as in Croatia. In the evening, we picked up some euros and went for a good meal at a small restaurant near our apartment.
2018.10.16 – Budva (Montenegro) – En route to the old town, we stopped at a pastry store for a light breakfast. We had already started to miss Croatia’s many bakeries. The Budva old town was said to be like a smaller Dubrovnik – minus all the tourists. And most of the tourists we heard were not English speaking. We visited the Citadel and walked on the old city wall. The alleyways of the old city were clearly not crowded like Dubrovnik. After a coffee break, we headed to one of the several beaches nearby. I had refreshing dip in the sea. On our way back to the apartment, we bought some gyros for our late lunch. After relaxing at our apartment for a few hours, we returned to the same restaurant as yesterday for our evening meal.
