Dining on Rocket Fuel


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Europe » Croatia » Dalmatia » Dubrovnik
September 3rd 2016
Published: June 14th 2017
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The neighbourhood cats decide that 2am is a good time to have a full scale dispute outside our bedroom window. Some of them don't sound very happy. I'm not very happy either. Issy sleeps obliviously on. I'm now very awake so I decide to read up on Dubrovnik. According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia its population is only a bit over 40,000. I had no idea it was so small. I thought it was a major city, but it's not much more than a village. It self ruled as the Republic of Ragusa for almost 500 years until it was captured by Napoleon in 1806. In 1814 it was liberated by British and Austrian troops and became part of the Austrian empire, before becoming part of Yugoslavia in the aftermath of World War I. It seems to have suffered its fair share of calamities over the years. Much of it was destroyed by fire in 1296, and then by a massive earthquake in 1667 which killed more than 5,000 of its citizens.

We meet Sally and Barbie down at the Old Port for our trip to Lokrum Island, which is a about a fifteen minute boat ride away. The man at the gangway tells Barbie that she's got the wrong tickets. He doesn't want to let her on, but she walks past him and sets up camp near the bow. The rest of us follow. The man looks angry, but Barbie stands her ground. She tells him that another man told her that we do have the right tickets. Angry man doesn't look quite angry enough to throw her overboard so he takes her ticket and replaces it with another one. He doesn't look much happier. I hope he's not angry enough to get the crew to throw us all overboard.

Lokrum Island looks like it's about a kilometre long and a few hundred metres wide, and it's heavily wooded, mostly with pine trees. There are signs everywhere saying that you're not allowed to smoke anywhere on the island, including a specific prohibition on pipes. I wonder if pipes are more likely to set off bushfires than cigarettes. I also wonder if a lot of Croatians smoke pipes; I don't think I remember seeing anyone smoking one since we arrived here. Maybe the signs are old. We see fire hoses laid out on the ground along most of the many hiking trails, so they must be really worried about the whole island going up in smoke. I'm now worried too. I think we should try to stay very close to the shore.

We walk past an old monastery that looks like it's currently being reconstructed, and then on into the botanical gardens. I remember again the botanical gardens in Madrid where it took me two stressful hours to find a single plant from Australia. The first plant I go up to here is from our homeland, and so are the second and the third. About ninety percent of the plants here are from Oz, mostly gums and wattles. I start to feel homesick. Signs tell us that Dubrovnik's climate is very similar to that of the east and south coasts of Australia, and that's why there are so many of our native plants growing happily here. Surely the climate in Madrid isn't that dissimilar. I still think there must be some sort of long running dispute going on between the Madrid and Australian Botanical Societies, or maybe the residents of Madrid just don't think that our plants are good enough. Signboards tell us that the Lokrum gardens were bombed during the Homeland War. We wonder why. The island doesn't have any permanent residents, and there wouldn't seem to be a lot of point in bombing plants. I wonder if they meant to bomb them. I think that maybe they were just really bad aims.

There's no shortage of peacocks and cute black rabbits wandering the parklands here. I'm not sure I've ever seen a black rabbit before. I thought all rabbits were either brown or occasionally white.

We decide to go swimming. To access the water we first need to scramble across jagged and slippery rocks, and then climb down a ladder. I again make a mental note to never take sandy beaches for granted. It seems that our problems have only just begun. To get to open water from the base of the ladder we need to time our efforts with the swell to avoid getting smashed into more jagged rocks just below the waterline. I wonder if there's a hospital on the island.

We have lunch at a restaurant in amongst the trees. The food's good but we're besieged by wasps. One of our fellow diners is waving what looks like a yellow tennis racket at his wasps; Sally tells us that this is a portable bug zapper. I don't think these have made it to Australia yet. Issy says that we should get one. She says that she'd like to sit on our back deck in summer constantly waving a large yellow tennis racket in front of her face, untroubled by marauding mosquitoes. I think I might prefer the mosquitoes. Barbie warns us that bugs don't smell very nice after they've been zapped, so we might need to invest in some nose pegs as well.

Sally and Barbie decide to look for somewhere else to swim while Issy and I climb up to Fort Royal on the island's highest point. The trail is again lined with fire hoses. We're now nowhere near the shoreline and I think we'll be in a lot of trouble if a bushfire breaks out. There are lots of other people here, but none of them seem to look overly concerned. I wonder if it's only us Aussies that worry about being burnt alive. The fort's currently being reconstructed, but we can still walk up to the top, where we get excellent views over the island and back towards the mainland.

Issy says that she really likes Lokrum Island, and if she lived in Dubrovnik she'd come here every weekend. She asks me if I know of any islands like this within fifteen minutes of home. Nothing immediately springs to mind.

Back in Dubrovnik we treat ourselves to drinks and nibbles in a park overlooking the water, and then in the garden of Sally and Barbie's nearby apartment. We move onto dinner at a seafood restaurant in a laneway up the hill from Stradun. At meal's end we're given complimentary drinks in very small glasses. Mine tastes like rocket fuel; I think it might be rocket fuel. Issy says that she likes it, so I give her mine. She says that I'll now need to carry her back to the apartment. We've walked up a lot of steps today. Issy says that she wants to walk up as few more as possible so we try to find a shortcut. We walk up several flights of steep steps along a dark alleyway. Issy has my hand in a vicelike grip. I think she might be cutting off the circulation to my fingers. I hope I don't get gangrene. The alleyway ends at the highest point on the town wall, but there's no gate. We trudge dejectedly back down to the nearest gate. We're now faced with even more uphill steps. Issy's not happy. She calls me "David Sheehan", and I think I'm now in serious trouble. My only hope is that she's drunk enough rocket fuel to have forgotten about all of this by the morning.


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