Dubrovnik, Pearl of the Adriatic

So we've moved up the Dalmatian coast to Croatia. First point of call, the old city of Dubrovnik (formerly Ragusa) which used to be a rich and powerful place, but lost its mojo when the Mediterranean trade was replaced by the Pacific and Atlantic ones, and when it became owned by Austro-Hungary – not a noted naval power.

So it has what makes a town special for me. A rich past, so big and interesting things got built, and nothing much happening in nineteenth and twentieth centuries to spoil that.

The city has its complete city walls, of about two kilometres. Even better, they are largely original. It would have been my favourite place on earth when I was 12 if it hadn't been in Yugoslavia and out of effective sight.

Sadly, it is so wonderful that much that makes it wonderful has been spoiled.

It's not just the enormous hordes of tourists directly, because we are also tourists, but the follow-on effects.

The prices are incredibly more than we have been seeing recently. In Cetinje, Montenegro in the main street with all the tourists we could get a 500 ml beer for $4. In Dubrovnik it ranges from $9 to $12. To climb the walls to the castle over Kotor with all the other tourists cost $14, but it was $35 to do the walls of Dubrovnik (we think they might be deliberately pricing the walls very high to try to cut down on the numbers – it certainly stopped us doing them). We aren't even staying in Dubrovnik because Alison blanched at the prices, although the small village we are in is much nicer, as it is quieter and there's walks along the sea.

Too many tourists drive out the local restaurants, so that you can find any number of pizza and "Italian" or seafood places, but nothing you couldn't find anywhere else. They even tend to drive out the interesting foods in the supermarkets.

The worst thing, for me, is that the other local sights have been completely ignored – little but interesting things that smaller places would make a big deal of and are a bit different.

We thought we might like to see the amusingly named Walls of Ston (not a typo, the place is called Ston), where the Ragusans built a wall across a peninsular to protect their salt panning operations. However there's no information on it, and getting there was a total mission – despite being just up the coast.

We also thought we might like to see the Ombla River. It's 30 metres long, before it hits the sea. Yup, 30 metres. So, by some reckonings the fourth shortest in the world. But apparently such a sight is of no interest at all (probably since no-one will make any money from it). It's only just out of Dubrovnik too.

The whole coast line is lovely. If there are any walks or cycle trails along it, they keep them well hidden.

It seems odd to me that a site that is suffering from excessive numbers should make almost no attempt to deflect them away.

So Dubrovnik, which should have been a high point, has been a bit of a disappointment to me. Let us hope that Split is better. I'm not hopeful, since it has been a desirable spot since Diocletian thought he would retire there.

Edit

On the way to the bus station to take the bus to Split, our taxi driver explained that it gets much more crowded. Apparently up to six cruise ships can be docking in July and August, so close on 30,000 people, plus every hotel is full. The thought of 50,000 all trying to fit into the old town is horrifying.

So if you do want to visit Dubrovnik, do so in May or October.

It's also a lot cooler then. I know this year has been unseasonably hot, but people were melting in the heat as we walked round, and it's not yet the hottest part of the year. Spring and Autumn aren't exactly cold, though I suppose if you come for the swimming and sunbathing rather than the sights it isn't really warm enough for that. 

Planes, trains, buses and automobiles

Alison and I decided early on that we would try to travel by train as much as possible. We haven't relented from that, and I thought I would share our reasons why.

Trains are generally the cheapest form of transportation in the Balkans.

Most of the countries have networks that link the major cities, with the Montenegro/Croatian coast being the exception due to its exceptionally awkward geography, so when we shifted base cities we did so by train. We also used them for day trips

On the plus side for trains: 1) train stations are easy to find and there's only one, 2) they tend to be close to the centres of towns, so schlepping our bags there is much less hassle, 3) train stations are more pleasant to wait at than bus stations or airports, 4) trains are a reliable smooth ride, 5) you can have quite a civilised meal on them, 6) they have toilets, 7) the views tend to be better, and it's possible to take photos from them if they have opening windows, on both sides, and 8) you can shift carriages if your neighbours are particularly irritating.

On the downside, trains are often slow. This is made worse if you have to wait for a connection, and we quite often need to do that.

We found that the trains kept to scheduled departures and rarely arrived very late.

Cute Hungarian short distance train. I like trains.

Buses are not generally much more expensive, except Montenegro. We use them for day trips to distant towns if the trains don't go there or run too irregularly.

On the plus side for buses 1) there are far more extensive networks, so that it has so far not been necessary to change mid-route, and 2) they go to a lot of the smaller towns and villages that don't have railway stations.

On the downside: 1) often cities have multiple companies with different stations, and it can be quite hard to work out which company and which station to go to (in a couple of cases, basically impossible), 2) bus stations are often quite a long way from where we have been staying, 3) are often really quite skeevy places to wait at, 4) the quality of bus varies wildly, with some of them being really quite nasty rides, although others are air-conditioned and comfortable 5) eating on them is often frowned on, 6) they don't have toilets, which can be irritating on a six hour trip, 7) you can almost never take decent pictures from them due to window reflections, and even if you can it is only one side, (see photo below) and 8) when you are stuck beside three obnoxious teenage boys on the way to the beach in Sutomore, as much as you would like to move away from them, you can't.

So they take the good side to view the sea, and then pull the curtains!

Buses have tended to be on time too.

Their timetables are more difficult to find than trains, change more often, and many are unclear about where they stop along the route.

Planes are a last resort for me. Generally much more expensive obviously, although not always for longer distances. And what with getting and from to the airports not necessarily all that much quicker.

The killer though is that they aren't very scenic. Half the point of travelling this slowly is to see the places in between the big name towns.

Automobiles haven't featured much. We have hired ones briefly in Jordan, Romania and Serbia.

While I drive faster than the average bus or train, in the end cars tended not to give as much more time as you might expect. Firstly, you have to spend an hour or more finding a rental place close enough to where you are staying and booking them. On the day of the rental we had to wait for opening time, then inspect them and sign the paperwork, meaning a reasonably late start. Then we had to get the car back in working hours, and in a big city that means quite a lot of time allowed for crossing it in traffic. If you keep them overnight, you need to find somewhere to park (which in many European cities isn't a trivial task).

On the days we took them, the hire cars did allow us to get to places that public transport were awkward for. But we found that we were, if anything, more pressed for time there than in places where we could reach by bus or train.

Sometimes things were really awkward. We declined to hire a car in Cyprus because everyone basically insisted on three days as a minimum, which we weren't interested in. We have no idea how much they cost in Brasov, because no-one was in the offices when we visited (four times!).

For us, changing cities and countries on a regular basis, and wanting to be staying downtown, it generally isn't worth the bother to hire cars. A 30 minute wait at the bus station may seem a hassle, but it is actually much less time than walking across town to the agency and organising a vehicle. And if we want to return late, then we can just catch a later train, rather than have to fret about return times.

If you are visiting one place for a while, then hiring a car becomes effective. You pick it up at the airport and return it there. That means you can stay a bit further out of town too, which can be cheaper. (But before you do that, remember that driving in these countries can be pretty rough. The road surfaces in Romania and Jordan were terrible, and Serbia was marginal. Everywhere the locals overtake with glee at the first opportunity, happily doing so into the face of oncoming traffic on a narrow road, because there are no passing lanes. If you want to drive slowly, expect to be overtaken by everyone all day, including heavy trucks and buses. Driving in the Balkans and Arab countries is not for the faint-hearted!)

And, of course, hiring a car for a week seems reasonable, but over six months that would really start to add up!

So, it's trains for us, wherever possible.

Balkan Safety

We're in Montenegro at the moment, having seem most of the coastline now, and a bit of inland.

Montenegro, it turns out, rivals Switzerland for lack of flat land. It doesn't have mountains the size of the Alps, but it makes up for it by not having the nice farming land down the valleys that the Swiss have. And the Montenegrin hills aren't rolling, they are pretty much all steep.

There is one large plain around Lake Skoder, which is mostly swamp and half in Albania anyway. It seems there is some flat land round Nikšić, but we didn't go there, because it is seriously out of the way.

So we have been treated to some fairly hair-raising rides, by bus and train, to get around. The bus rides have been particularly troublesome as the drivers exhibit safety standards that aren't quite what we are used to.

The driver today on the drive to Cetinje made a couple of phone call while we were driving along the edge of quite a substantial cliff.

Photos taken seconds apart, of driver on phone and quite a large drop

One of our previous drivers literally held his phone in his left hand the entire trip. A driver yesterday was weaving all over the road as he drank from his water bottle. Alison has gone off sitting at the front of buses, because watching the drivers not concentrating on mountain roads is so alarming.

Oddly, the roads themselves are quite good, with decent surfaces and relatively wide. Much better than the roads in Serbia, Romania or Bulgaria, which were narrow and full of patches and holes.

Of course it is the very nature of the land which draws the tourists. The dramatic way the land plummets directly into the sea along the coast is quite something. Little islands and headlands poke out from the bays, often with medieval castles, walled towns or cute churches on them'

The beaches aren't much good, being largely rocky, but the water is crystal clear and reasonably warm. There is zero tide and surf, of course, being in the Med.

We started in Bar, which is fairly unremarkable place, full of hotels and apartments, but with an interesting old town back from the sea. We then moved to Kotor which is definitely nicer. Every day here a large passenger vessel has sailed in, so the cruise lines seem to think it worth a visit.

Kotor old town itself has most of its medieval walls remaining, and the castle above the town is something to behold, being perched unbelievably high above the town. You can climb the 1,350 stairs to the top, much of which is effectively cliff, if you like a challenge. Of course there are no safety rails even when the path is straight off a ledge. Much of the path is even marked as dangerous (due to falling rocks, I suspect). We chose to only go 2/3 of the way, because even from there you get a magnificent views of the town and harbour.

The bay the town lies on is a sheltered fjord off another sheltered harbour, and was an important Venetian possession.

In the outer bay is Porto Montenegro, a hangout of the types who like to sail large yachts, many of which are enormous. Nearby are Perast and Sveti Stefan, which you have very likely seen in tourist brochures or similar, even if you didn't recognise them at the time. It's becoming quite popular, for good reason, and is probably heaving with tourists in the height of the season.

Being the way it is, the best way to see the Kotor area is by sea. There's lot of ferries and cruises to choose from, but we took a three hour boat trip that went out into the Adriatic Sea itself – passing by the coastal defences along the way. I took a selfie in a cave we stopped in.

You will notice we have on our Balkan life-jackets in the picture. These are standard issue Balkan life-jackets, judging by the other boats.

To be fair it was an absolute mill pond – absolutely zero swell and zero chop – so we weren't in any danger of being swamped. I asked the skipper if it was always like that, and he said that they could get up to 3 metres of swell easily. I looked around for the life-jackets for those days, without much luck.

Montenegro has been well worth the quite sizeable detour it took to get us here. The level of English here has been very good, which helps. Costs are higher than most of the Balkans, but still cheaper than the equivalent places in western Europe. But it is hilly. Very hilly,

Why come to Slaka?

For those of you not in the know, which is probably most of you other than my children, Why Come to Slaka? is a book by Malcolm Bradbury. Learned heads have suggested that it was a pastiche of Communist Romania or Bulgaria. Personally, I always felt it was more like Yugoslavia, as it lacks Romania's cult of Ceaușescu and Bulgaria's brutal secret police, which were defining characteristics for the people living in those countries.

Anyway, as a result of reading that, "Slakan" has become the code-word Alison and I have for some of the more external elements of European Communism – covering Socialist Realist art, Brutalist architecture, excessive and overblown industrialisation, crazy and inefficient economic techniques, appalling living accommodation and poor living standards. Anything that defines the East under Communism relative to the West. One of the reasons for spending so much time in the Balkans is to get to see as much of Slaka as possible.

So we went to the Belgrade modern art museum. I don't generally like art museums of the twentieth century that much, but I am an absolute sucker for Slakan art. I went happily, expecting pictures of happy workers, resolute farmers and staunch women in simple Socialist Realist forms. It turns out that the artists of Yugoslavia were basically completely in line with Western Europe and there wasn't any sign of the stodgy Communist art I had expected. 

Some of it astounded me. Pieces that would have sent an artist to the Gulag within minutes if produced in any other country in the Eastern Bloc.

Comrade Tito, White Violet, Our Youth Loves You

It seems that Tito's very early falling out with Stalin meant that Yugoslavia never experienced anything remotely resembling Stalinist methods. Tito was still a dictator, and the economic system wasn't Capitalist, but the Yogoslavs didn't suffer anything like the same repression as the Soviet bloc. Art was not constrained to ideological straitjackets, religions were allowed to operate and there was freedom of movement.

However, all was not lost on the hunt for things Slakan. It turns out that our last day in Belgrade was Tito's birthday, 25 May. It seems it was his "birthday" in the same way the Queen luckily has a birthday on Queen's Birthday. Anyway, it is the day they celebrate him. So we trucked along to his tomb – fortunately he wasn't embalmed in the Lenin manner, but instead has a sarcophagus in one of his former residences.

Some people obviously miss the old man, and were there in their red caps and scarves, to pay their respects. Not that many, and almost all quite old, but certainly in the hundreds. We avoided paying our respects at the sarcophagus itself, and tried to keep our amusement quiet in the circumstances, but it was definitely a good day to visit the museum.

Tito fans. Not young. 

(For the record, although Tito certainly still has his fans, we saw no other sign that Belgrade and Serbia had ever been Communist. Some of the statues and monuments from that era remain, but all hint at their meaning has been removed from view. There's a statue downtown to Gavrilo Princip, the fool that shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and started WWI, but we saw not a single one to any political figure from 1945 to 1990.)

However, while Yugoslavia was spared the worst horrors of political Communism, it most certainly was not spared the architecture. Huge concrete tower blocks, most often in groups of three, dotted the skylines of Belgrade. The new suburb of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) is a delight in that regard – for a certain meaning of delight.

Whole blocks, with imaginative names like Block 42, Block 43A and Akademika, are built entirely in a single style of concrete apartment building. Most not aging particularly well, it has to be said.

Block 33A. There seemed like half a kilometre of this style building, over several blocks.

To be fair, some of the public buildings from this era are remarkably successful, despite their Brutalist concrete techniques. The Modern Art Museum building is fantastic, and the Military Hospital is quite striking. Some of the others would be fine if they were maintained better.

We made a bit of a pilgrimage to the most famous of all the buildings from that era, the Eastern Gate. It's hard to judge really whether it is successful or not, being very much of its time, but it sure is quintessentially Slakan.

The Eastern Gate. The left half is residential, the right half is business (currently largely empty)

So, Belgrade was fun for us fans of Brutalist architecture.

I might get round to describing the modern city that the rest of you might visit. But probably not. 

The Great Hungarian Plain

Alison, the kids and I spent a week in Budapest a dozen years ago, so we decided that we would not go back there, because we felt it wasn't the best use of our time to repeat places. Budapest was a good place to visit, so Alison booked us in for two weeks in Hungary. We were coming from Romania, so it made sense to stay in the eastern side.

Now most of you won't know much about Hungary, but it was settled by the Huns after Attila's death. They liked it, and were able to conquer it, because the open spaces suit a horse nomad nation. Later their medieval descendants were able to conquer the hilly parts around, but the east of the country is pretty much entirely the Great Hungarian Plain.

And it is pretty planar. There's none of that "rolling" plain nonsense. It's just flat.

Hundreds of kilometres of this.

However, while the countryside doesn't vary much in height, it is quite pleasing on the eye. It is far from empty – being fertile, it is full of towns – and the farming is mixed, rather than miles of just one crop. There are trees and forests too.

It also doesn't drain very well and there are only a couple of rivers, which means that there are frequent marshy spots, both big and small. I suspect most of the forest areas are left in trees because they are too wet to farm well. These wetlands areas support quite a lot of bird life, and we saw from the trains a whole host of bird species, as well as the occasional deer. The large number of shooting huts, raised on piles, reflect that abundance.

The towns we went to were a mixed bag. Hungary was long prosperous, didn't get too badly damaged in WWII, and the Communist government didn't build too many ugly tower blocks or boastful central city palaces. The result is that most of the town centres remain quite pretty.

Szeged, was particularly nice, as the centre is full of Art Nouveau buildings due to a flood in the late 19th century that required the rebuilding of almost the entire town centre. Almost all the government buildings were built in a consistent style of brick and plaster from the rebuilding that I found very pleasant.

Not many NZ high schools look this good. The inside is also Art Nouveau.

The towns we went to differed in their interest, but sometimes if they were weren't very interesting we were able to see some places nearby. So when in Eger, which has a famous castle and a few churches, but little else, we went to a a couple of nearby places.

However, it did depend on where the towns were relative to the plain. Eger is on the northern edge, so it backed onto hills, which meant vineyards and forests to walk in. Pecs is on the southern edge, so there was a castle on a hill in a nearby village and vineyards again.

However Szolnok is in the middle of the plain. We ran out of things to do there quickly, and everywhere around was also in the middle of the plain. It's not the worst place we have visited – Biela Podlaska in Poland (in the middle of flat Poland) takes some beating – but it is up there.

For us on this trip, days with not much to do aren't that much of a problem. Since we had spare time I had my hair cut, we got some washing done, and generally we caught up on everyday things that still need doing. Travelling for so long is exhausting, and it is actually quite a relief to have days when we don't charge from sight to sight.

For a short trip where using your time efficiently is important it would be different. If you do visit Hungary – and really there is no reason not to, apart from their bizarre language – it's probably best not to spend too much time in the towns in the middle of the Plain. The ones on the edge are where the interest is.

Travelling. Always travelling

One of the things that concerned us before planning a six month trip of Europe was that we would tire of all the travel – that we would get a couple of months in and have had enough. Well, fortunately there's no sign of that yet, and we are past a quarter of the way in, so I can't see it being a major concern.

Shifting towns every three or four days is less hassle than I thought it might be. Modern phone technology means it is hard to get lost or struggle to find things because we always know where we are, using GoogleMaps or equivalent. All our accommodation is pre-booked, so there's no problems on arriving (and we aren't generally going very far each time, so we arrive at a decent time and not tired). The local transport has proved to be very efficient and we haven't had too many dramas about buying tickets.

Changing towns might not be so bad, but changing countries is a pain. You just start getting comfortable with one place –  learning the currency, how the transport systems work, the key terms you need, what foods they have in the supermarket –  and then you move to another country. and have to start all over again.

Hungary has been terrible like that, because the language is so different from any we have any previous knowledge of. We haven't eaten at McDonalds, but I have shown a sample of a advert below to illustrate the problem – even though I know what they serve pretty precisely, I still cannot make out a single word other than "burger".

This is not helped by Hungarians speak surprisingly little English –  doing German at school from what we can gather. There is a lot of pointing, and some guessing. Sometimes pictures are helpful – getting the battery changed in my watch was quite easy once I used a picture of a watch battery to hold next to it.

A few sacrifices have been made. We didn't have a lot of stuff even from the start of the trip, because we had only a 28 kg limit on the flights to and from Cyprus (bag and hand luggage combined), but quite a lot has been shed since then. Lifting heavy bags to overhead storage on the trains and up and down stairs got to be a bit too tiring. I chucked out a whole bunch of clothes, shoes and books that still had a bit of life in them, but were six kilograms I didn't have to cart round. Alison shed our emergency towels and a couple of other things at the same time. A useful side-effect is that my bag is now extremely easy to pack each shift of town, because it has room to spare, rather than a puzzle about how to fit it all in.

We have also been walking quite a lot – Alison's phone thinks she has done 1,000 km since we left NZ, and that seems about right –  with a cost in blisters and worn out shoes.

Today's our last day in Hungary, as tomorrow we go to Belgrade. I'll write up something on Hungary when we get there, as it is a week's stop, so time to catch up a bit on things. 

Unfortified Transylvania

Transylvania is really quite pretty, and deserves to be better known as a tourist destination really. Its quite easy to get around and because Romanian is far easier to deal with than the surrounding languages for a person with some French or Italian shopping and ordering food is much easier than Bulgaria or Hungary.

The Carpathian mountains are nice to look at and relatively easy to avoid having to go through too much. The rolling hills do slow down cars and trains, but are far more interesting than the great plains of some of the neighbouring areas. Bucharest is quite cool to visit, but the surrounding areas isn't just flat, it's also more or less empty of anything much interesting to look at.

I've mentioned in the previous post about how it is loaded with the remains of military architecture. Well it's equally stacked if you are into churches. There are large numbers of adherents of Romanian Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran religion, as well as a few smaller branches, and each village tends to have a church in more than one of the flavours, most often all three. Since the building traditions and interior decorating for each is wildly different it adds a variety not found in areas of Europe where the winners of the Wars of Religion imposed far more uniformity.

The Lutheran churches are the ones Alison and I prefer aesthetically. They are basically identical to their North German and Scandinavian models, with quite stripped back interiors. I kept thinking that their steeples are taller than I'm used to though.

The Catholic ones are generally like French ones (nothing too Baroque or Rococo) except for the ones that changed affiliation and lost their decoration during their protestant phases. (Cluj cathedral went from pre-reformation Catholic, through Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian and back to Catholic again). Again, there seems to be an emphasis on height.

Cluj Catholic Cathedral. That is one tall nave.

The Romanian Orthodox are in the standard Orthodox tradition. Generally a Greek cross floor plan rather than a nave and topped with domes. Many of them are considerably taller than they are wide, which leads to a sort of reverse vertigo in the biggest ones -- they are just too tall to be pleasant.

Cluj Orthodox Cathedral. The central dome and pillared support 

would be a decent church height in its own right.

I wonder if the height of the local Lutheran and Catholic spires and naves isn't at least in part a response to these enormously tall competing buildings being built across town from them.

The interiors of the Orthodox are all much more heavily decorated than any western church. Icons are present in large numbers, and believers pray in front of them as a matter of course (often giving them a kiss on the way out). The very best ones are covered entirely in highly coloured pictures on every flat surface (usually saints rather than scenes from the bible). Alison and I had seen Orthodox churches in the Baltic, but these are much more decorated.

The Romanian Orthodox was favoured by the Romanian Communists relative to the other religions, although any genuinely religious clergy faced repression. It therefore came out of that era much wealthier than the other churches and they seem determined to show it. Cluj has a monstrous new cathedral being built which seems far larger than anything it could actually need.

Cluj new cathedral under construction

But the most dramatic is the cathedral being built in Bucharest. This new church, which is near completion will be the largest Orthodox church in the world (currently the holder is one in Moscow which is so heavy it is sinking into the ground). Vast doesn't begin to cover it.

Amusingly it is behind Ceausescu's ridiculously large "Palace of the People" (the second largest administrative building in the world, behind the pentagon, and a ridiculous white elephant). Well, many people don't think it particularly amusing, including quite a few Romanians, because it is just too big and expensive to be justified in any reasonable way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_People%27s_Salvation_Cathedral