I took the midday bus down from Split yesterday and boy are my glasses dirty... Sorry, where was I? There's a large cable-stayed bridge outside of town on the highway in. Or rather, the highway is on the bridge. I walked back this morning to take a picture.
I checked in at the hostel and then headed for the starigrad (old town). Cruise ship tour buses swarming all over outside the gate. I quite like being solo around large groups. It makes me feel superior to them, almost, like I'm a wolf and they're just sheep. Baaaa! The city walls are quite high and impressive.
The terrain around town is quite impressive too. All the way down the coast, actually, tall rocky mountains plummeted down the ocean with cliffs and crashing surf and all that good stuff. Even in the city (but outside the old town) there's a lot of cliffs and trees.
You can see the old town in the distance there, that rectangular brown blob just below the horizon. I walked there once, but have taken the bus since. Buses are quite nice when your feet hurt.
Ah, but back to the old town. Quite a bit like Diocletian's Palace in Split, Dubrovnik's old town is mostly a maze of narrow back streets (see photo) with the occasional plaza. But Dubrovnik is cleaner. In both, though, people are still living their normal lives, just like they've been doing for centuries, hanging their underwear out to dry in the street.
This morning, I took the ferry to the island of Mljet, to the town of Polače. From there, I took a minibus to the national park (which covers a third of the island). Some tourists (French) on the ferry didn't want to pay the 90 kuna entrance fee which included the bus ride and a boat ride to the island in the lake in the island. I think they just walked and entered the park and didn't pay anything. A couple rented bicycles. I don't think they paid the entrance fee either. But I paid without complaining, as did two Irish women. We ended up being the only three going to the little island (little: walk around it completely in ten minutes, five if you hurry). On the little island, there's a monastery (of course!).
After a half hour, the three of us hailed the boat driver from where he was hanging out by the dock and he took us across the lake to the point where it joined a smaller lake. Both lakes are saltwater, since the bigger lake is actually a bay with a narrow strait to the sea. The smaller lake is only connected to the big lake. The connection between the two is only ten feet wide, though, and the water was flowing fairly strongly from the big lake into the small lake, which seemed entirely backwards. Maybe a high tide was flowing into the big lake, which then spills over into the small lake? Dunno.
The two women and I walked around the small lake, varyingly together and separate. One of them kept staring into the water. She spotted many fish and some sea cucumbers! Other animals spotted were lizards, butterflies, and birds big and small.
It was a bit cloudy out (but still bright - thin clouds), but I deemed it was warm enough to go swimming, so I did. I dove off the white rocks into the clear blue water and scared all the fishies away. The water wasn't too cold. I could still breathe normally. But Christina and Anne didn't join me. It wasn't sunny enough for them.
We continued along, stopped for a beer at a small town, then caught the minibus back to the dock. The last bus left at four (they were waiting for us to show up, since we were the only ones, so I don't know if they'd've actually left without us) and the ferry left at five, so that meant another hour in Polače. So we had dinner. I had wild boar (apparently Mljet has about 2,000 of them critters running about) and the lasses had tuna salad. The boar was succulent, tender, juicy, and tasted more like beef than pork. Served with dumplings. More beer. The sun came out.
The most difficult thing today was finding an open internet cafe! There's one right near the hostel which is open 8-17 (I got back at 18:15). There's another by the gate to the old town which was closed with no hours posted. There's one listed in Lonely Planet just a little bit up from the old town gate which says it's open 8-21, every day. It was dark and locked at 19:00. I guess today wasn't an everyday day. So I went back to the hostel and was about to give up for the day when I asked the concierge and she had info for a fourth, in the old town, which is where I am. Whew.
Last night, I went to bed at 21:30, I was so tired from my boat rides. Tonight, perhaps, I'll go out. Maybe. (And here I promised myself I wouldn't talk about the future on this journal!)
