Exploring Trogir and Split

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This morning I was woken around 6:30 thanks to the noises coming from the room next door. Eventually got out of bed, showered and headed down to the restaurant for breakfast. It was lovely sitting in the outdoor terrace to have my breakfast, which is included in the booking. At 8:30 I went to the reception area to meet our tour leader, Melinda, and the rest of the tour group. There are 14 other people on this tour and they are all couples and older than me, which seems to be common on these tours. Most of them are Aussies although there is a couple from Atlanta in the US and a couple from New Zealand. At 9am we met our local guide, Ana, and proceeded on our walking tour of Trogir.

It was very interesting to hear what all the different buildings were - there are many, many churches! We saw the main church (church of St John and At Lawrence), the oldest house in Trogir which dates back to the 900's, the north gate and the south gate and where they chained people who had been bad, in the main square. The walk took an hour and we actually saw a few places that I hadn't seen the previous evening! At 10am we got onto our bus for the 40 minute drive to Split. Our first stop was Diocletian's Palace. This is an ancient palace built for the Roman Emperor Diocletian at the turn of the fourth century AD, that today forms about half the old town of Split. While it is referred to as a "palace" because of its intended use as the retirement residence of Diocletian, the term can be misleading as the structure is massive and more resembles a large fortress: about half of it was for Diocletian's personal use, and the rest housed the military garrison. Diocletian built the massive palace in preparation for his retirement on 1 May 305 AD. We first wandered through the underground section of the palace. Back in the day they actually chucked all the rubbish down here and this meant it became very preserved. When it was discovered they slowly excavated and you can see the columns and brickwork from when it was first all built. Game of Thrones has used this area to film in the past. This was the dungeon where the dragons were kept. After exploring the underground areas we headed out into the light of the Roman Forum. This part of the palace was where all the activity happened, a very social place. There is a open top dome and beautiful buildings surrounding this square and lots of people activity.

From here we walked through the old town and Ana pointed out different buildings and more importantly, the best ice-cream and coffee shop in Split! Our walking tour finished back in the Roman Forum area and from here I tried retracing our steps through the alleyways until I eventually found the coffee shop again! Yay me! The coffee was awesome, the best Ive had in Croatia. After enjoying my coffee I decided to continue exploring and walked further towards the area the locals hang out on a Sunday. I then walked down to the waterfront and along the marina until I came to where they honour the 79 Croatian athletes that have won a medal at an Olympics. Croatia has the highest number of Olympic medals per capita than any other country. I reached the end and turned around and headed back to the town. By this stage I was starting to get hungry and eventually found a nice place right on the main square and had a tuna salad where the tuna was shashini and dipped in seasame seed. It was very nice. Soon it was time to head back to meet up with the rest of the group for our drive back to Trogir.

We then met down in the bar for group drinks at 6ish, which was lovely as we got to know each other a bit better. Close to 7 we headed off to dinner at a really nice restaurant where we enjoyed a wonderful four course meal, each dish was accompanied with a different glass of wine. I had the meat option so the first course was foi gras on toast, second course was meat and veggies bbq'd on skewers and then the main was lamb chops. After dinner Kym, Don and I went looking for a wine bar, just to have a glass of wine to finish the night off. After a bit of fun trying to find the one that had been pointed out to us, Melinda came to the rescue and helped us to find it. Fun night.

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Photos

Underground in Diocletian's Palace
Used to film the dungeon scenes in Game of Thrones