Croatia

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I was in Croatia between June 18th and 27th, and it was a blast.

I started out in Dubrovnik on the morning of the 18th after arriving from an overnight ferry from Bari, Italy. After arriving, I only had about 4 hours to hang out in the city because the island-hopping cruise boat that I would be on for the next week was set to leave at 1:00. During my short stay in the city, I went to the old-town. There is basically this part of the city righ along the water that is completely encompassed by walls and forts. Everything is really old...the oldest fort was built in the 14th century. These walls are set up so that people can completely circumnavigate the city by walking on top of the walls. It was about a 1 or 2 mile loop that had spectacular views of the coast and the inside of the old town. It was really pretty and I wished I could have spent a few more hours there, but I had to get back to the port to board the boat.

At about 12:00 we got on the boat and started socializing with the rest of the people who we would be sailing with for the next week. The boat had 25 passengers, and it turned out that Greg, Hailey, and I were the only three Americans on board with a bunch of Aussies. We were all really looking forward to this part of the trip, and it definitely lived up to our expectations. To me, this week was basically a vacation among my European vacation. It was nice to know that I would be sleeping in the same bed for the whole week, and I didn't need to stress out about catching the next train or worry about planning my siteseeing. In general, the daily routine of this cruise was that the boat would sail to the next port during the day (we would always take a swim break at some point during the sailing to swim in the Adriatic Sea, and while the boat was sailing we were all just hanging out on the top deck), we would then spend part of the afternoon and evening siteseeing around the island, afterwords we ate dinner and went to bars and clubs on the island, and then we would sleep on the boat and wake up to breakfast while the boat was already sailing to the next port.

The views were spectacular everywhere we went. The Adriatic Sea is beautiful, and we always had a backdrop of the mountainous mainland and beautiful islands. The water is really clear too. Some of the highlights of the activities we did include visting the house where Marco Polo grew up, going white water rafting in the cleanest river in Europe, and playing water polo with other guys on our boat on a public water polo course at one of the ports. Our entire crew got along really well, and we all had fun every day and night.

After the cruise ended in Split on Saturday the 25th, we had to take a travel day to get to the Plitvice Lakes National Park. Croatia doesn't have nearly as good of a public transportation system as the rest of Europe, so we blindly had to get on a bus in Split not knowing exactly where it would drop us off. It turned out that after the 4 or 5 hour bus ride we got off at the wrong stop and were essentially forced to fend for ourselves in unfamiliar, rural territory, but we eventually made our way to our hotel 13 km away after a bit of walkng and hopping on another couple of buses.

We spent all day on the 26th walking around the national park looking at all of the spectacular lakes and waterfalls. This national park was definitely one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. The lakes are so clear, and the scenery around it is amazing too. We were told that the water in these lakes are 4 times purer than bottled water.

After a long day of hiking, Greg and I got on a bus to Zagreb (the capital of Croatia), where we would stay the night before catching a morning train to Budapest, Hungary. This bus ride reminded us again that Croatia doesn't have the public transportation that the rest of Europe does...we (along with about 8 other passengers) had to stand for about the first hour or hour and a half of the bus ride because there were more passengers than seats. We ended up making it to Zagreb, where we had another adventure to find a place to stay. For every day on this trip up to this point, I had made previous reservations for nightly accommodations. Instead, we decided to be adventurous and just look around the city for a place to stay. After about an hour of walking around and many failed attempts to find wifi or an internet cafe, we found a great youth hostel that was inexpensive and pretty close to the train station where we would be departing from on the 27th.

This part of the trip was really fun, and I would definitely do it over again if I had the opportunity.

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