Croatia

Our next planned stop after Athens was Croatia. My American intuition told me that the fastest and easiest way to get between the two would be by road, but from what every travel agent in Athens told us, I was wrong. Apparently, the infrastructure in the former Yugoslavia is still developing. So the best way to get from Greece to Croatia is a night ferry to Italy and then another night ferry to Croatia. The night ferries were surprisingly nice, especially the one between Greece and Italy. And since it was off-season still, the ferries were empty and there was enough space for getting a decent night's sleep.

Croatia turned out to live up to all the rave reviews we read in the guidebooks. Personally, I prefer it to the Greek Islands because the more temperate (and rainy) climate allows for many more big trees. Also (at least for the time being), Croatia is cheaper.

Here is a picture of the sun setting over the Adriatic Sea as seen from the ferry between Greece and Italy. Rather nice I would have to say.

The ferry between Italy and Croatia left us in the Croatian town of Split. Split's claim to touristic fame is the ruins of Roman Emperor Diocletian's retirement palace. It's completely integrated into the town, with shops, restaurants, and hotels inside many of the remaining structures. It's free to walk around the open air sections and the picture below shows a number of tourists doing just that.

From Split we took a ferry to the island of Korčula. Korčula is also the name of the main city on the island, and a cute little walled city at that. I didn't get a great picture of the city, but this picture should give you an idea of what it was like to walk along the main road that goes around the island. There were lots of pretty houses with red-tiled roofs and a number of church steeples.
The main activity on Korčula is walking around and looking at the scenery. We had two days to do so, and on the second day, as the result of a dearth of good maps, we got lost on the way to a highly recommended cove. We decided to hike to the water and walk along the coast in the direction of the cove (even though there wasn't a path, we knew the direction of the water and of the cove). When we got to the water, we found ourselves on the spot from where I took the picture below. It's hard to see from the picture how steep the coast is, but you can get an idea. Needless to say, it was quite a tedious walk to the cove. We did finally get there, and were rather relieved to have done so.

This is a view of the cove I told you about above. I took this picture on the way back, which turned out to be a difficult climb, but still a much easier route than the way there.
From Korčula, it was a short ferry ride and then a windy bus ride to the much vaunted tourist destination of Dubrovnik. It's understandable why so many tourists visit Dubrovnik and also understandable why the entire old town has been turned over to tourists. While at times it felt just barely more real than Disney World, I did really enjoy walking along what our guidebook claims are the finest walls in the world. Below is a picture looking east over a large swath of the old town.

This is a picture looking south taken from the tower you can see in the above picture. On the left side of the picture, you can see the path that goes along the top of the wall.