Dubrovnik, Croatia and Kotor, Montenegro
So we head out of Venice on a cruise. A bit about cruises in a second, but a photo in my last post got formatted weird, and it was too cool a shot, so here goes again… This is us, coming around the corner of the canal, where the gondoliers have mirrors to keep from crashing. I had a second to get this shot, and you can see from the distance that it's pretty highly zoomed. I'm the guy in Black!
In Venice, we met up with some friends and their son for a seven day Adriatic and Aegean Sea cruise. Dubrovnik, Croatia; Kotor, Montenegro; Olympia, Greece; Santarini, Greece; Kusadasi/Ephesus, Turkey; and Mykonos, Greece. A seven day trip. Need to provide some background on my family and cruises… We did a Scandinavian cruise in 2001, with our then 3 ½ and 5 year old, along with my mom. The family part was great, the ports were excellent, and the food was, if not great, not bad either. I won't name the cruise line, as they they did a good job. However, it was 1600 people on a boat. And in every port, 1600 had to get off, the vast majority (including us) would then line up, get our 'colored sticker of the day's tour', get assigned to a bus, do a "tournami" for the day (this IS a word that needs to get in the dictionary), get back to the ship and move on. After 11 days of that, even with great ports, my wife said she would not get on another cruise ship until hell froze over. Which, with global warming, is extremely unlikely.
But then we planned this trip. The eight weeks in Asia, deliberately designed for a combination of faster and slower paced travel. Then we knew that Europe would be a scramble, we wanted to see Rome, we had a place in Tuscany booked for early July, we wanted to see the Greek Isles. But we knew we would be tired of lugging. The Cruise was to be our 23rd hotel since we left San Diego! And Belk's do not travel light. The more I looked at various itineraries, the more it became apparent that the only way to cover a lot of ground was on a boat. And there are jillion boats that ply the Mediterranean each summer. Go to any of the cruise sites, it's boggling. And then there are other cruise lines, small boats, big boats, charter boats, specialty boats, you name it. Some try to outdo one another, doing mulitiple ports a day, or stopping in one port for three hours so it can move on and get to more ports, more lines for their Itinerary Brochure! And then there were the kids. A bunch of boats don't like kids, others take kids, but don't have any kids activities. We figured when planning the trip that after nine weeks our kids would 1)want some other kids to play with, 2) want to get away from their parents a bit, and 3) the parents (us) would want to get away from the kids for a bit. Having our friends and their son join us was a huge bonus, and even more fun than we had planned.
So we found the right boat. About 480 passengers. Small boat, great crew. Kids club, and it turned out that there were 80 kids of the 480 passengers. Great food. Open Bar (ouch). Long stays in each port. Smaller (still big) groups, but NO STICKERS! So, we steamed our way out of Venice on our way to Croatia.
Croatia is one of those places you read about, one vaguely (as an American) remembers the breakup of Yugoslavia and the violent upheavals of the early 90's. I remember seeing Dubrovnik on CNN, under siege. This now picture perfect city was sieged, ripped up, bombed, rocketed, basically decimated. In one the museums (like most museums in Europe, no photos allowed) there were actually holes on both sides of the building with small plaques next to where a rocket went through the building. Right next to 15th century relics… It is a VERY picturesque place, but you could tell there was still an undercurrent of pain there, as for anybody 30 or under, the war would have been part of their reality for years. But for a tourist coming in on a big boat, to a now patched up city, it was a great stop.
It's a walled city, up and down hills, right on the sea. The walls (13th to 15th century) are still intact (read repaired from the war) and make a great sightseeing walk with the kids. There are various cafes on the face of the cliffs, and bunch of places where kids jump off the rocks into the water.
Almost all the 'newer' structures had new adobe roofs, but among the buildings and cobblestone streets there were other structures that were ruins of previous era's, either man or nature.
Dubrovnic, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was definitely worth a stop, so we hopped back on the boat, ate another great dinner, did NO have to pack, as my hotel room was moving at 20 knots to our next stop…Kotor, Montenegro.
Now, Kotor, Montenegro was interesting, as it has only been a country for a bit over a year, having broken away from Serbia. Another pretty fortified town at the base of hills, it's kind of interesting as a country, as it has all of about 35,000 people. The nice thing about the Dubrovnik and Kotor stops is that there were no tours needed, just manageable interesting towns to wander and explore.
Not what you would expect as an independent country, but still pretty cool. Another fortified city, the walls went up and around an extremely steep hill (note to all of us: next time, let's not wear sandals), which reminded all of us of the Great Wall of China, just with less kitsch and fewer Chinese people. So we walked up the hill on the wall, around the city on the wall, down the wall back to the city.
Still probably 150 feet above sea level, I stepped around a corner and saw one of the strangest sites in my entire life. I actually had my wife and kids cover their eyes so I could reveal it to them. There on top of roof, high up on hill, were…lobsters.
Lobsters on a roof:
And yes, off in the distance, was the lobster in a tree.
Both strange, and stinky at the same time.
This was the cruise line's first trip to Kotor, and we arrived early in the morning. The 'sail out' was wild in itself, as the pilot had to take the ship down a narrow channel with a 90 degree turn prior to going out to sea. Kotor is the most southerly fjord in Europe, just like Norway but different. See for yourself! This one look like a postcard… Right about here is where there were three young males trying to swim close to the ship. The captain made an announcement about ten minutes later that the three kids were in custody. Not too smart trying to swim close to a cruise ship.
This little Islet looked like a piece of Venice, and probably was, as Venice ran the show in this part of the world for a long time.
I gotta google this, but we went past a bunch of old naval facilities, and my wife and I both guessed that these were Sub bunkers from WWII. Sort of James Bond-like to see these built into the mountains…The boat in front gives you a sense of the scale. They are BIG.
And off into the Sunset we go. Greece next.
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