Croatia

From Stockholm we flew to Dubrovnik for three glorious weeks of Croatian island-hopping, accompanied by the three musketeers: Andreas Baumgaetner, his girlfriend Hella, and Helen Bones. Here is our approximate route (red dots are where we camped).

Dubrovnik was (unsurprisingly) utterly beautiful. It was also mobbed by tourists and cruiseliner victims. We did the town walls walk in the cool of the evening.

Mostly though, we hung out at our campsite, which came with a pool and a beach. I even participated in an aquasize class! More giggles than exercise. We managed to swim at least once a day for our whole Croatian visit.

On Mljet we hitched across the island to the National Park, famous for its beautiful lakes (which of course we sampled). They were connected to the sea and very shallow, therefore very very salty!

We then moved to Korcula. This is a typical photo of what occupied us all and every evening: eating. The restaurants were (comparatively) cheap and by the end of the trip we had sampled the majority of the items available.

We were camping out in little campgrounds like this one. Here the beach is just 10m or so to left.

From Korcula we spent a day in Split. It is the site of Diocletian's rather large retirement palace (he was a Roman Emperor in the dying days of the Roman Empire). Since then every nook and cranny the palace has been coverted into a living space, including the walls. We found this statue of Gandalf.

We moved further north to Sibenik (opps, missed a dot on the map) and did a daytrip to the local National Park, famous for its waterfalls. The park included several kms of boardwalk over magical little streams and through forest. We got hit by a major thunderstorm which added to the excitment.

Our last stop was ugly island. Upon arrival we discovered that it was a misnomer as all the people were quite normal looking.Also, we had arrived just in time for the Assumption (no, not Mark guessing things again but the religous festival). We didn't get religi-fied but we did get to participate in a really big street party.

Here is a summary of some of the delicacies of Croatia:

Burek - Mark's new favourite lunch. Cheap and widely available, it is made from lasange-like pastry and salty cheese.

Black risotto made from squid ink.

Some more seafood. Being coastal, seafood is very popular.

Civapčiči. These are little meatball sausages with aubergine and pepper sauce.

Of course, it all has to be washed down with the local lager. This beer was advertised everywhere in English with the tagline 'difficult to tell, but tastes so well'. Hmmm tastes pretty good!