Friday, May 22, 2015
We spent the morning exploring Split. It was still raining, but that mattered less strolling through a city than it did the day before when we were at Plitvice National Park. Grace navigated our walking tour through Split based on our guide books, and we covered the cathedral:
Below, the crypt of the cathedral, where Grace is reading the prayers left by visitors in dozens of languages.
We climbed the bell tower, which provided a nice view of the town and surrounding area.
Next we explored the basement of the palace, which used to house several centuries of ancient trash (literally, garbage) but they have excavated it and on this particular day it was housing a large wine tasting festival. None of it was for tourists – this was purely a local event, and once again I appreciated the way Split has repurposed its ancient palace to make it quite useful in today’s world. We didn’t taste any wine — much as I like wine I draw the line at drinking it at 11 in the morning — but we did sample some cheeses. For two days Grace had been wondering why all the cheeses everywhere were labeled “Sir Cheese,” so she looked it up and found that sir means “cheese” in Serbo-Croatian. Nevertheless, we found it amusing to buy some “Sir Cheese” – actually several Sir Cheeses, which later turned out to be overkill when they got smelly in the bottom of Grace’s backpack a few days later.
Although I deemed it too early for wine, it’s never too early for gelato. We sampled some on the Riva, which is Split’s waterfront promenade. Split, and indeed other parts of the Dalmation Coast, have a slightly Italian feel, which is not too surprising because Split is not all that far from Venice.
Below, walking through the Palace’s many alleyways. Our sobe was above a gift shop in an alley like this.
Above, the center of Diocletian’s Palace, where the band had been playing the night before.
Grace would have been content to spend more time walking around Split, but I was eager to get on the road because we had a long drive to Dubrovnik. Moreover, the weather report showed that Dubrovnik was only cloudy, not raining, so I thought the weather would improve as we drove south (this turned out to be wildly inaccurate). This was to be our big scenic drive along the Dalmatian Coast. Directly south of Split, it was not especially scenic driving through a series of tacky beach towns. But then it opened up, and the road went higher into the cliffs.
As we drove south the cliffs got steeper and steeper. For some reason I had pictured this road to be at sea-level, so I was not mentally prepared for the challenge of winding roads with a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the water on my side of the road. Picture the Pacific Highway…except that it was raining and kind of foggy. I have no photos because I was clutching the steering wheel in terror, while my trusty navigator napped. (Once again I cursed myself for not having taught her how to drive a stick-shift.) So what should have been a spectacular cliff drive was borderline petrifying.
We stopped in the town of Makarska for lunch. I had to park on an extremely steep hill facing downward. Grace got a little freaked when I told her that in order to back the car into place, I was going to have to rest it gently on the car in front of us…better that than smashing into it. It was not a pretty parking job, and I got an earful from my daughter. At lunch I had a Croatian specialty, squid ink risotto, but was disappointed that it didn’t turn my teeth completely black, which was rumored to be the result of eating this dish. I will spare you the photo of my teeth faintly black, with pieces of squid stuck between them.
Above, Grace in Makarska. Eating squid and hoping for better weather.
There’s an interesting stretch on this road where you have to cross through Bosnia-Herzegovina. You cross the border (full-blown passport check and all), drive four miles, then cross the border again. Apparently the Croats are considering building a bridge parallel to the coastline just to avoid the border crossing. That four miles is pretty built up; the Bosnians have to make the most of their tiny stretch of coast. Here’s our one photo to prove that we drove through the country of Bosnia-Herzegovina (our only proof because they didn’t stamp our passports):
On to Dubrovnik. The old part of Dubrovnik is a walled city that cars cannot access. The host of our sobe had led me to believe (via email and texts) that parking would be a snap, as there was a big lot just outside the old city walls very close to the sobe, which was inside the walls. The (first) problem was that the lot was full. We drove around for a while and found a space on a street about two blocks away. The meter required 6 kuna, but we had only 4. We decided to leave the car there anyway – who would be giving out parking tickets in a torrential rainstorm? Because it turned out that the weather was NOT better in Dubrovnik; it was raining cats and dogs. We started walking down the hill toward the old city. Down some steep steps, on a street below the car, we spotted an empty space in a parking lot. This gave us a brilliant idea – Grace would save the spot and I would run back to the illegally parked car and move it to this ideal spot much closer to our sobe. But when I got back to the car I realized that I was parked on a one-way street, and it wasn’t obvious how to get back to Grace. I took the first left, thinking it would wind back around, but it quickly turned into a steep residential street with switchbacks. Then the road simply ended in a dirt pile. It took me about ten maneuvers to turn the car around on about a 45 degree slope. The car started making burning smells, but I got it back to the original one-way street and looked for another out. Soon I came to a fork in the road, and I took it (to quote Yogi Berra). This was perhaps the most alarming part, as the road – one lane and one way – started heading out of town, up higher and higher on a cliff, with no chance of turning around. I should say at this point that I could not call Grace; while I had cell service, she did not. I was screaming curse words but at the same time trying to stay calm because (a) I had abandoned my daughter in the pouring rain in an unfamiliar city with no way to reach her. If she left that spot, we were doomed. And (b) the road was really scary, and if I didn’t concentrate I would go sailing off the cliff. After several miles the road finally connected with the main highway well south of Dubrovnik. I headed back toward the city, missed the exit for the old city (not knowing the Croatian words for “old” versus “new”), pulled a U-turn and found my way back to the lot. Mind you, I had now been gone for a long time. Grace was not in the parking spot. She was hiding nearby. It seems that the spot was in a lot for which people paid money (we had not noticed this earlier), and those people were not pleased when she tried to physically block them from parking. They screamed and called the parking lot attendant, who threw her out (which is why she was hiding). Of course, we still did not have a parking spot, so we got in line for the paid lot (with Grace ducking down in her seat so the parking lot attendant wouldn’t spot her). But the line was long, and while we were waiting Pero, our sobe host who had been texting me wondering what had happened to us, jumped inside the car, which was a bit startling. He directed us back up the dreaded one-way street to that same fork. I learned that if I had only taken the right fork it would have led me right back around, pronto. This time we pulled into a hotel lot where Pero knew someone and arranged for us to leave the car for the rest of our stay in Dubrovnik.
When we got to the sobe we discovered that we’d left our passports in the car – they had been taken out because of that damned Bosnian-Herzegovinian border crossing – so Pero had to drive us back to the hotel to retrieve them. Grace left her umbrella in Pero’s car. We were frazzled, to put it mildly. I share this long tale of woe because it was one of the very low points of our trip, and I want to remind myself when I read this again that most semi-adventurous travel has some rough spots.
But we pulled ourselves together and went for a dinner of oysters and octopus burgers at Barba, a counter-service place probably better suited to lunch but still good. Then we had a nice cocktail under a canopy, safe from the rain:
followed by a very nice bottle of Croatian chardonnay at the Festival Café, right on the Stradun, which is the main drag of the old city. A bit (quite a bit) of alcohol made us forget the tribulations of the day. And the weather report for the next day: promising!