And then...

I´m sitting in the net cafe section of our hostel in Berlin in which we recently arrived... and it seems that the internet/computer fascism has reached here also so no photos right now.

It has been a while since I posted last, but I assure you it´s not through laziness, but absolute lack of time. Since then we have spent time in Croatia, Budapest, Prague and now Berlin and we have just been flat out.

I´m not gonna write in detail about any of these places or I´ll be forever behind on my posting so I´ll give an overview of each destination.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

A great little city on the very southern point of Croatia, the old town is built around a port and ocean life is what it´s all about. The old town is an immaculately preserved - execpt a few destroyed sections left that way since the troubles in the late 80´s early 90´s - Venetian walled city, and everything is built of these white shiny (marble?) bricks, which gets way too bright in the summer sun, but quite stunning none the less.

We took a walk around the top of the city walls (1.7 km´s) and took in some extraordinary views, and got to see some of the city that is off the beaten track.

We also took an afternoon boat ride out to Lokrum Island which is about a 15 minute ride from the old port in Dubrovnik. Lokrum is quite a small island which used to house a Monastery and a couple of other old buildings, which have all since been abandoned.


Now a bar/restaurant occupies part of the monastary, but the rest of the grounds are free to explore...awesome.
The rest of the island has a couple of beaches, an ocean-fed natural pool with a sweet rope swing (we forgot our swimmers that day... NOOOOOES!), and a bunch of areas set up for picnic-ing, sports, and walking to check out the other ruins and stuff of the island. We ended the day sitting under some nice trees on leather armchairs looking out over the gardens of the monastery to the ocean, with a cold beer. All in all, a good day out.

After out time in Dubrovnik, we set out by bus for Split, catching some unbelievable views of huge rocky mountains along the way. It´s only about a 205km trip but takes about 5 hours due to the terrain.

Split.

We had a great room in a hostel right in the heart of the old town in Split, which was a nice change from Dubrovnik where we had to catch a bus for 10 minutes to get to the good stuff.

The old town is situated in what used to be the "Dioclesian´s Palace" (800 years ago?), and as you can maybe imagine, is quite a cool place. It too is built from the same white bricks as our last location, and in my opinion was much better looking when the sun went down.
We managed to meet up with my cousin Steve and his wife Kat for breakfast/brunch one morning as they have been living in London for a while and were doing an organised sailing tour around the Croatian islands. It was great to catch up, but it won´t be too long till we´re crashing at there place in London anyway!
We took a ride out to Hvar island off Split (one of the most famous Croatian islands), but due to lack of organisation and public transport, it wasn´t quite as it could have been... but we had a swim which made it OK.

Zagreb.

We traveled up and stayed one night in Zagreb to break up the journey to Budapest. Due to a bum steer from a travel agent in Split we didn´t end up seeing the Plitvice Lakes which are about 2 hours from Zagreb as previously planned... but oh well... next time.

Due to the lack of accomodation in Zagreb we stayed in our first hostel dormitory, with about 6 other people. It wasn´t too bad, but the bathrooms were seriously grotty...you win some and you lose some I spose.

Budapest, Hungary.

We spent four nights in Budapest. We had booked a private room in a hostel, but when we got there, we were taken to a little apartment instead which we were assured was better, paid our money up front, and went to bed...
Unfortunately the apartment resembled none of the nice looking photos on the website, and didn´t even seem to have been cleaned since the last guests. Long story short, we moved apartments after two nights in the dump, and will be giving the hostel a very bad review on hostelworld.com.


A highlight from Budapest was getting to the impressive Parliament building, but finding out it was closed to visitors that day. There was however a dress rehearsal for a concert that night by an entire orchestra plus opera singers out the front of the building, which we sat and watched for abour half an hour, and was well worth not seeing the enterior of the building.

We also trekked out to a place called statue park which is in the middle of nowhere (just outside the city) where they have a collection of statues from the communist era. Very cool.
'OWZAT!

Prague.

Prague was awesome also! We did a walking tour around some main historical sites with a small group, which was meant to take 3.5 hours, but went on for about 5! It was great to be taken around by someone who really knew the city, and also meant that we didn´t have to figure it out by ourselves!

On our last night in Prague we went and saw Pirates of the Carribean. A nice break.

I also bought a pocket watch... it´s way cool.

Photos to come...

Edit: Photos up now!

laters

J

Since then...

I apologise to my loyal readers for not posting for so long, but we have been quite busy getting from place to place... but more on that later.

We spent 5 nights in Assisi which is in the Umbrian region of Italy. It's a very nice place... good for a relaxing getaway, which is what we needed. Unfortunately Lucy fell ill just coming out of Venice and was sick for the first couple of days in Assisi, and I caught it off her and was sick for the last two days and the trip to Croatia. Sickness aside, we managed to squeeze in a bunch of the things to do and see in the town, including checking out the fortress on top of the hill which was quite cool. The view from the top of the watch tower was an amazing 360 degree panorama of Umbrian countryside which has to be seen to be believed.

A mention must go out to the guys who ran the hotel we stayed in. Basically it was three young men, one who was in charge and organised the rooms and did most of the cooking for the restaurant below, another who was the waiter, and another who helped cook. The boss was very much into Celtic music and took every opportunity to play it loudly over the restaurant sound system... which was OK, but got a bit much as he did the washing up late at night and our room was right above the kitchen.
The other two were brothers, and were both a little odd, but their drinking on the job and trying to pick up american backpackers was always good entertainment.

Which brings me to the next leg of our journey, which I can assure you was not the finest. I was in the height of my headcold on the last night in Assisi and had slept all afternoon after a large pizza lunch. We headed downstairs for dinner, and I proceeded to order what turned out to be a very large pasta dish, and salad, and was forced to have some wine and Limoncello too...

Thus began one of the worst 48 hours of my life.

To cut a long story short, I went to bed feeling very average and with a very large lump of food in my belly (which in case anyone doesn't know, tends to lead to insomnia in my case).
So I didn't get to sleep until 4:30 in the morning, and had broken sleep until 5:30, at which point we had to get up to go catch a train (3 trains really)to Bari, which was to take us all day until we arrived at about 5:30 in the evening. It didn't end here though. In Bari we hung around for a few hours (and ate extremely dodgy food from the Bari ferry port) until we got on to the overnight Ferry which would take us to Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Now you might think that the story ended happily here with a nice relaxing cruise... little did we know that due to our frugal spending habits, the 'deck' tickets we had purchased for the ferry as they were the cheapest, literally meant 'deck'. The deal is, you get on the boat, stick to the public areas, and crash out where you can.
At this point I still hadn't slept apart from maybe an hour where the Italians across from us on the train weren't talking loudly as only Italians can. So that's a total of about 2 hours in the past 36 hours, plus being sick.

So there we were on the ferry. I quickly scouted around and found some nice padded benches arranged in the usual 'booth' style configuration, and some other Aussies joined us for a night of mixed emotions. We had a small glass of red - which was kindly offered to us by the occupants of the next booth - put on a couple of t-shirts, a hooded jumper (did I mention that the air conditioning was not adjustable and was blasting freezing air at us all night?) and got in our silk sleeping sacks (designed to keep you separated from dodgy hostel sheets, but surprisingly warm also), put on our eye covering devices (as the lights stayed on all night), and finally went to sleep.

Moral of the story is don't travel by ferry. If you do, don't be stingy and just shell out the extra 74 euros and get a cabin.

Anyhoo, we're both feeling much better now, and have just arrived in Split after spending a couple of awesome days in Dubrovnik.
I will report on these asap.

Word out.

J

Hello Venezia!

Well I'm gonna try to make my blog posts a little shorter as they take quite a while to write, and I'd rather be out and about! (plus we've got alot of stuff to organise for our next few stops).

We spent the last 4 days in Venice. It really is an amazing place. We started off being shown to our apartment by a young lady who spoke not a word of english, which made for some interesting conversation... but it worked out in the end. There was only 41 stairs up to the room this time, which was a nice change! The apartment was great. Pretty much smack bang in between the Rialto Bridge and St Marks Square (Piazza San Marco). There are no cars or even scooters in Venice as the streets are just too small and full of people, so you walk everywhere or catch a Vaporetto (water bus). We checked out a couple of museums including the Peggy Gugenheim collection which was full of Dali and Picasso and others of similar ilk.

Caught the ferry out to Murano for a day to check out the famous glassware that comes from there, and the glass museum of course. Lots and lots of glass. Everything from small trinkets and beads to massive chandeliers and sculptures. We managed to find a factory with an open door policy so we could have a look see at how it was all done.

We went to a famous Cafe in St Marks Square back in Venice. It's called Cafe Lavena and has been in the same family for hundreds of years. The service was excellent, as was the hot chocolate and beer (which is all we ordered), but the bill came to a small fortune, so do it for the ambience(live string quartet) and then don't go back again for a while!

Well thats a taste of our adventures in Venice!
We've just arrived in Assisi, so I'll post more when we've done some stuff.

J