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Another Week In Pictures: Homeward Bound
Our last full day in Mostar brings what is easily the best weather for quite a while, a beautiful sunny warm day to give us our last views of this remarkable city. Tuesday morning sees us hauling the backpacks through pre-dawn dark streets to catch the early bus across the border, arriving in Split before lunchtime. Split is a city we last saw just over five years ago, and we have good memories – well, apart from when we got stuck in a lift. Anyway, this week we’re granted two days of sunshine to enhance the city’s engaging seafront. Cruise ship passengers pour through the city as we enjoy the…
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Michaela’s Favourite Photographs #8: The Sky On Fire
Jarun Lake, Zagreb, Croatia. 2015. Towards the southern end of Croatia’s capital city lies a large and relaxing green space, where the nation’s sporting heroes are commemorated with murals, photographs and plaques around the beautiful parkland. As the winter afternoon neared its end, so the setting sun began to bring a fiery orange to the sky. This photo opportunity, as the blazing sunset bounced its reflections off the silent lake, was too good to resist.
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Photographic Memories #16
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #16: Sunset & Reflection Spectacular sunsets are always popular – there are places across the World which attract an army of camera carrying enthusiasts to capture that special moment as the sun goes down and fills the sky with colour. A great many such places are coastal, of course, but this one was different on both levels: not coastal, and, certainly as far as we…
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Making Roots And Planning Routes
It’s fair to say that we’re getting a bit restless. Here in Side it’s a little bit like becoming becalmed at sea, eager to press on with this voyage and even more eager to make more voyages in the future. Settling into a single place for an extended stay was always on our agenda, but probably not for several years yet. It’s an experience we’ve added to our repertoire rather earlier than intended, but then our travel in 2020 has been a very different shape from the original picture. Until COVID intervened and blew our plans apart, our intention after retiring last Christmas was to travel for around four months…
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Escaping COVID: Our Next Move
Our regular readers will know that we retired at the end of 2019 to pursue our long held dream of full time travel. Unfortunately the obvious intervened and we were forced to abandon our trip after just 7 weeks of what should have been endless exploration. UK lockdown followed. As the slight easing of restrictions started, we took full advantage of the so called travel corridors and have just returned from 5 weeks touring Croatia, which was more than fabulous. We’re now nearing the end of the 14-day quarantine which was imposed just a few days before our return from that trip. These 14 days have naturally felt pretty dull…
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Last Days In Croatia: Back In Split
For the last time until we start the journey home, we don the backpacks and trudge through the streets, this time in the half light just before dawn. Korcula rubs its eyes and awakens, swifts and swallows start to swoop and call, the Adriatic is as calm as a lake as our catamaran pulls away from the quayside. Korcula Town looks beautiful as we wave goodbye to the islands, as alluring at dawn as it is as evening falls. Just under three hours later we are in Split ferry port, breakfasting alongside the ferries for the third time in these past five weeks. It feels good to be back here.…
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Split: The Role of Hajduk
Being a big football (soccer) fan, I’ve always been fascinated by the role of a football club in cultural history: there are great histories here which tend to pass unknown to non-football fans, stories which far transcend the game itself. The reason Barcelona became so big, and the part Espanyol played in that story, is a stirring tale on its own. The history of Hajduk Split tells a parallel tale to Barcelona, in as much as, during times of extreme political oppression, the football club became a critical point of identity when such individual nationalism was prohibited. During the long years of communist rule and the enforced unification of Yugoslavia,…
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Croatian Islands: Korčula
It’s only 6.20am in sleepy Stari Grad but there’s drama at the bus station as we await our early morning ride. An irate elderly couple pull up in their car and accost two females waiting for the same bus as us; a row ensues, money changes hands and the couple speed off. We can only conclude that the two females have exited their guest house without settling their debts: how incredibly rude, if we are right. Drama over, it’s breakfast at Hvar Town port and then the early catamaran to our next island destination, Korčula, where we are met by our next host Tonci and taken to our seventh home…
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Croatia Island Hopping: On To Hvar
Our departure from Bol is so cool that we can’t stop smiling. The only boat service from Brac to Hvar is a catamaran which sails in the evening, a bit later than we would like, and with no outside deck to enjoy. But our wonderfully helpful hosts tip us off that one of the excursion boats, the Andrija, is skippered by a guy who lives on Hvar, and so, each afternoon when his excursions for the day are done, he heads home with his boat. If we can catch him, he’ll give us a lift. And so it is that we find the Andrija, cadge a cheap lift on a…
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Croatia, COVID and other tips
Entering our fourth week of this Croatia odyssey, we feel qualified to offer some advice to anyone thinking of heading out here, so here goes… COVID If you think you’d feel threatened or vulnerable due to a lack of COVID rules, then it’s probably best you stay at home. If however you feel there is some overblown mass hysteria afoot, or just want to escape the “new normal” for a while, then Croatia is for you. It’s masks on buses and trains, and inside shops and public buildings, but otherwise life is absolutely normal. Locals do have a tendency to wear the mask only over the mouth, and leave the…
