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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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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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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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Our Split Shift
Red tiled rooftops descend the slopes down towards the sun soaked bay of deep blue waters, restaurants and bars line the well heeled seafront promenade, ancient characterful buildings speak of troubled pasts and fierce pride in equal measure. The labyrinthine old town, nestling between the mostly still standing walls of the ancient palace which form a perfect square around its perimeter, oozes spirit and character from its every stone. Tiny cramped streets lead you to inviting piazzas, the crumbling stone gates of the old city open out on to the waterfront esplanade known by locals as the Riva, swifts fill the warm air feeding their young nesting in holes in…
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Croatia: The Adventure Begins
The city of Split is said to have first become a major settlement when the Roman emperor Diocletian stood down from his role and retired here in 304AD, the magnificent palace built for him in this stunning bay was therefore effectively his retirement home. We don’t suppose our arrival here on the second trip of our own retirement will create quite such a stir however; in fact, we couldn’t even get into our room. Back home in the UK we are all still being encouraged to avoid unnecessary use of public transport so it’s a cab rather than the customary train which takes us to Gatwick. It costs £80. The…
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Split Decision
It’s four months now since we escaped Vietnam as the world closed its doors and our dream year of travelling fell apart after just 49 days and 3 countries. For the most part we have spent the intervening 123 days keeping ourselves safe and watching developments, always with one eye on borders reopening and controls loosening. And at last things are moving. The UK now finds itself at the pinch point of weighing up a virus which has not yet gone away against a pressing need to reboot the economy, with the travel industry at the forefront of that reboot. This has seen the creation of so called “travel corridors”,…
