To Bled, Slovenia

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

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It was another short night last night. We have had some really busy and long days and been up late and going early. I have to say that today we signed up for 2 optional excursions tomorrow so while Thursday could have been a restful day, it won’t be for us. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the river cruising portion will be easier and more restful.

Anyway, back to today. It started out much cooler this morning. So far, everywhere we have been it has been surprisingly warm. The local guides have all commented on the high temperatures and cloudless skies and how summer is lasting so long this year. (Except for the day it poured in the morning in Dubrovnik and was windy the next morning when we departed.) Anyway, today the pattern broke. It was cooler and cloudier. Late this afternoon it started raining and it poured all early evening. The temperature dropped from 21C to 9C over the course of the afternoon and evening. The high tomorrow is not expected to exceed 17C. That will be in the upper 60sF. It is supposed to keep raining until about 9am. We hope so we booked the full day tomorrow. So, I guess fall has arrived with a vengeance at long last. I am hoping that part of the temperature drop is that we are in the mountains again. We are also hoping that this rain we’re getting is somehow making its way to the Danube so we can sail when we get there in October! Assuming we can find a way to get between Zagreb, Croatia and Budapest, Hungary which we did not foresee being a problem months ago when we booked all this!

Today we had another early start. We had breakfast and got bags out and checked out and on the bus for 8am departure. We have a full day ahead on our way to 2 nights in Slovenia, the last country on our tour of ex-Yugoslav republics. We drove for about 2 hours to get to our morning stop on the coast in Senj. We had one quick photo stop from the mountain top overlooking the Adriatic Sea before driving down there. We had about a half hour stop in a scenic little seaside town with an old stone fort standing over it. We went into a café and ordered drinks and used the restrooms before wandering and getting some more photos. We drove about another 2 hours to Opatija for lunch. It was raining by then. Opatija is a much larger seaside town still in Croatia. We were on our own for lunch. Since it was raining hard, we walked to the first place with available covered open-air seating that we found. They served pizza so we sat. It was the quickest service we’ve had in a restaurant here. We shared another good pizza and then we shared Nutella crepes. It was 96 kuna for the meal with drinks. It was perfect. We walked back to the bus through a park along the seashore since it had stopped raining for a while. It was a pretty town. Next stop, not long after we set off again was the border between Croatia and Slovenia. According to Gabriella, the border crossings are becoming unpredictable in the face of the immigration crisis in Europe right now.  We did not take long to get out of Croatia or into Slovenia, but according to Gabriella they were being much more thorough than usual. An officer came onboard the bus in each place and check each of us and stamped our documents with us in our seats. The Slovenian guard was armed and that is the first time we’ve seen that since we got here. But, there were no lines this time and it went pretty quickly all things considered. Of course, we still have to get back into Croatia to finish this trip on schedule. So, now we are in a new country, Slovenia. We had to drive about an hour I think to get to our first destination, the Postojna caves. It was really crowded just like the lakes yesterday. You’d hate to be here in August! There were probably dozens of tours buses. But, they were set up to move large numbers of visitors. You get a timed ticket and then you join the line for your language. Gabriella had told us to expect 70 people in our group but I suspect it was closer to 100. They take you through only a fraction of this giant cave system. You travel over 5 km of caverns. There are a series of small electric trains on tracks for the first 2 km in and back out, the rest is a paved and sloping and curving and crossing pathway. The lights all went out as we reached the furthest and deepest point! It is supposed to be a fun surprise. Geez! We both nearly panicked until the lights came back on. I turned on the flashlight I have on my purse immediately but still without that train running, I figured it would take us overnight and into the next day to all walk out of there! Good news, it was just a little joke so we could see how totally dark it is underground. I think we already got that memo. It was really incredible and we were both thinking, Poor Carlsbad Caverns, as we walked through. I don’t know how the 2 actually compare, but even though Carlsbad has a cafeteria at the bottom they don’t have a train and this one seemed larger. It was spectacular. We were in there for about an hour of walking and however long the quite exciting train rides were. The trains went faster than we had expected and at a constant underground temperature of 9C, it was a chilly ride. Since it had been raining heavily all day, it was also raining inside the cave!

It was at least another hour drive in heavy traffic and heavy rain (on the freeway this time!) to get to the Park Hotel in Bled. Our home for the next 2 nights is on Lake Bled. We finally scored view rooms! We are on the 2^nd floor in 221 overlooking Lake Bled and Bled Castle above it. We have a balcony! The hotel must be huge though since we arrived in the dark and in pouring rain, we haven’t seen it outside. Gabriella advised that the rooms were again in need of refurbishment but it looks good to us. It is a good sized room and clean. Dinner tonight was included and since the same dozens of tour buses that we at the caves seem to have all arrived here at the same time, the Park Hotel is doing a great job. For sure the same Gate One group that we have seen everywhere every day since Tirana is still with us here. They still seem as unhappy with their group! We got lucky. Our group is not so bad! Dinner was crowded and frenetic and a little poorly organized but we all got fed and the food was varied and tasty. Gabriella had advised us to make sure to have the barley soup tonight and the barley coffee in the morning and to cross the way to the hotel’s terrace café overlooking the lake for their signature Bled Cream Cake. But, there was no barley soup tonight! We see about the other recommendations later I guess. I had hoped it might be on our buffet dinner dessert display tonight and it might have been but there were no labels and too many things on it to try our way through hoping one was it. Clay feels certain since they sell it especially that they wouldn’t offer it on the buffet. We just don’t know. Well, once again I am up past my bedtime with this. At least I can sleep in until 7am tomorrow. The bus doesn’t leave until 9:30am for our included tour of Bled Castle. Hopefully the rain will have stopped for the day by then. I plan to wear socks tomorrow for the first time since we got here!

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To Plitvice Lakes, Croatia

Tuesday, September 22. 2015

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Clay was up several times during the night checking the time. I guess I should have shopped for a local plug nightlight for the remainder of the trip. If I bring one, there are no 110 outlets in the bathrooms. If I don’t there usually are. I didn’t bring one this time and we have sorely missed it. The other thing was that the AC blew right on our heads. I was afraid of it making us sick, so I turned it off, then it got too hot. Lastly, what is up with the bed making in the Balkans? They put a sheet or duvet cover or duvet in cover over the bed. They don’t tuck it in at the foot of the bed so you can just keep pulling the cover up under your chin and it gets higher and higher up from the foot of the bed. Well, mostly that is what Clay keeps doing. Anyway. I might be a little sleep-deprived and cranky now. Where’s that moody wind today to take the blame?

It is cooler today. I think in the low to mid 70sF and not a cloud in the sky and a slight intermittent breeze. We set off early after some seating assignment difficulties. The back row of 4 is unassigned. Gabriella will not assign it as see thinks it undesirable and we have enough seats without it. One couple has claimed it and say they are opting out of enforced rotation. That worked yesterday, but today before they got there a woman who had graduated to the seat directly behind the driver came back and claimed the back row. She said she either had food poisoning or a stomach flu and did not want to be vomit behind Valentino and wanted to lie down. The couple who had claimed the 4 seats wouldn’t give them up and neither would the sick woman. We are 3 rows in front of this today. This also messed up the rotation for some of the other people on the left side. The recalcitrant dug in their heels and Gabriella couldn’t budge them and when she realized it was past time to leave, she gave up. Eventually, the man of the back row couple went up to a single woman with an empty seat beside her (where we sat above the back door yesterday) and asked her to move her bag so he could sit there. She shared her row with him the rest of the day. Geez.

We drove about 40 minutes or so around the bay at Split to get to Trogir, our first stop of the day.  We did not have a local guide here. The old town that we visited is on a very small island connected by a very small short bride. We left the bus at the bus station and walked with Gabriella. We did not use the headsets we just had to cluster around her to hear her. She led us to an old church with an especially ornate entry arch and talked about it before telling us to come back in our free half-hour for photos. She walked us out to the tiny waterfront and to the other end of the island with an old stone fort. I don’t know what she did later as we left for free time. We wandered back through the little alleys and found the mainland side of the island again and found the church to get the photo. Then we made our way back to the bus without ever finding the 7 kunas pay toilets as advertised. Since all the others have cost 4 kunas, we thought these must be special but who knows. We got back in the bus and drove to Skradin for a snack and bathroom break. This is a tucked away little port town inland past a big bridge and around a corner. It was very scenic and there was a big parking lot with shops, cafes, restaurants and most importantly restrooms at the extensive overlooks.

We drove on through much less scenic country and much less densely populated into the mountains. Gabriella used this hour and a half or so to give us a condensed history of humanity and conflict in the Balkan Peninsula from the first recorded Illyrian tribes to the present. I confess to dozing off several times and Clay tells me I missed a huge flock of sheep, some other livestock and a bus full of soldiers that we passed. We stopped around 1:15pm at a highway restaurant/hotel/attraction in Korenica. It was a self-service cafeteria type place that was serving several bus loads with no problem. There were restrooms and finally an animal park out back. They had penned deer, small goats, a wild boar and sow, a Shetland pony or 2 and 2 big brown bears. I guess they used to have a lot of wildlife around here because at the restaurant and the hotel there were lots of taxidermied bears and other animals. We have hardly even seen any birds and only a few squirrels but none in Croatia. Plenty of seagulls, but I am talking about in the mountains.

Our hotel was less than a half hour drive further in the Plitvice Lakes National Park, Hotel Jezero. We got in around 2:30pm and had to leave on the bus again at 3:30pm. Our luggage arrived shortly before we had to go. We drove about 10-15 minutes to entrance 1 of the park. Gabriella bought our tickets there and we met our local guide. Plitvice Lakes is a UNESCO world heritage site. It is a natural set of 16 tiered lakes fed by 2 rivers. Half this formation is limestone and half is dolomite. It is unique. We walked down to the lowest of the 16 lakes, to the bottom of the tallest waterfalls. Then we started walking up along dirt, stone and rough boardwalk paths. The water was crystal clear and full of fish. (Clay is having trout for dinner! Really.) The entire walk was about 2 hours. We had a 20 minute break with bathrooms at the boat landing. We didn’t walk the biggest lake but took a 100-passenger electric boat to the other end of it. There we got off and climbed 215 stairs to get back to the hotel. Some people only walked to the big falls overlook and then could take what was called a canyon walk for about  an hour to an electric tram ride back to the bus stop were we started at entrance one and then catch a shuttle bus back to the Jezero Hotel at entrance 2. I guess some people did that. Some just stayed at the hotel in the first place. So we saw 4 of the lakes.

The Jezero Hotel is what Gabriella considers our worst hotel of the tour. Built in the 1950’s, she said it is old and tired and all original with no further investments made in it though it should be renovated at the end of this season. She says though that it is the only hotel of this size in the park and therefore all the tour groups use it. I think it is fine. It is dated obviously, but it is comfortable and clean. It is more conveniently located than that Dubrovnik hotel and has more character. It doesn’t have the character of the last woods resort we stayed in though. It is adequate and a good location.

Dinner is included tonight.  We drive to some restaurant on the bus and we have a band. I ordered the veal and Clay the trout. I need to skip a meal and I’d really like to skip this one. But, I’m going in about 15 minutes.

Back from dinner. It wasn’t bad! I actually tasted the veal and I didn’t like it or finish it, but it was tasty. They served appetizers, soup, salad, main, dessert and coffee or tea. There were 3 musician/singers and people were really into it as they strolled from room to room. They played American folk songs, country and 70’s rock. I think they played a couple of local songs, but who knows as they weren’t in English. It was a bit of a drive. It was, I think, in another town of Grabovac. The restaurant was called Turist Grabovac.

It is past my bedtime and we have another early start and long day tomorrow. Bus touring is not for people needing a restful vacation. It reminds me of one of Gabriella’s Montenegrin sayings. Rest during the day so you can get some sleep at night.

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To Split, Croatia

Monday, September 21, 2015

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It seemed like a short night last night. I don’t know why. Our side of the hotel was quite quiet. Evidently, those with the sea view also had a bar open with loud music til after midnight. Poor things. The good news was that a large percentage of the hotel’s guests must have left on Sunday because breakfast was quite civilized this morning. We put our luggage out at 10 of 7am and went to breakfast. We came back and brushed our teeth and used the restroom and by 8:12am were walking out to checkout and be on the bus by 8:30am. Our bags were still there. We assumed we had been skipped somehow on luggage pickup and just took them out to the bus. No one else’s bags had been picked up either. Gabriella blamed the wind. We could see that it was very windy outside and still not as hot as it has been. It is still warm. I am still wearing sandals. But it is not hot. Anyway, there were waiters outside this morning taking down the terrace furniture and rolling up awnings like it was a hurricane or something. Now, it was windy. I won’t take anything away from that but it was not severe weather. Anyway, Gabriella told us it is a famous wind in the area. They call it the moody wind or the Yugo wind. She said since ancient times through to Tito’s time that for example crimes committed during this wind are not punished as severely because it affects people. I guess just people who live here because we didn’t feel anything different. Interesting though. So we were a little delayed at the bus setting out. It was another spectacular, world class drive. We followed the coast along the Adriatic Sea north to Split. We had a few adventures on the way. For example, there is about a 20-kilometer section that is in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We had to stop and get our passports stamped. A guy came onboard and walked through checking and stamping passports. We haven’t gotten a single passport stamp yet on this trip that has anything recognizable to the place. Anyway, about 5 minutes later we had a stop in Neum at a hotel/restaurant/toilet/shop. So, a bonus country! Gabriella says the part we were in is Herzegovina. A little while later we crossed a river and then drove inland for a while because there is a kind of delta where the road is not on the coast. We had a photo stop there overlooking the Bacina Lakes. They were scenic but also very interesting because they are crypto-depression lakes. That means they are deeper than sea level which because of the karst geology means that the water at the bottom is brackish and mullet live in there. We stopped in a pretty little coastal town called Makarska for an hour or so for lunch. Clay and I went to a place about a block from where the bus dropped us. It was right across from the harbor front so we had a great view. We weren’t all that hungry so we just shared a pizza. The pizzas have all been good. Clay had a beer and I had a Coke Zero with ice! I wanted the sour cherry crepes for dessert that was what I saw on the menu that made me pick this place whose name escapes me. But, Clay asked for the check, paid it and set out away from the bus. He made a beeline to an ice cream stand, so that was dessert. Then he kept going the same way until he found the one ATM in town with a line. I didn’t realize he was looking for an ATM because we had walked by one right outside the bus. Anyway. Back on the bus for another few hours to Split. We are staying at the Atrium Hotel. It is right beside a large modern shopping mall. It is supposed to be a short walk to old town, but they drove us there on the bus and it took about 10 minutes. We checked right in and got a sea view room (a little piece in the distance!) on the 7^th floor. It is a nice room. We had about 30 minutes to drop our hand luggage and use the restrooms and then we left for our Split city tour. We really only had a guided tour of Diocletian’s Palace. Diocletian was the last pagan Roman Empire Emperor.  He was born about 5 miles from here.  He is the only Roman Emperor to retire from his post. He planned it and built this huge palace as his retirement village/home. He did live out the end of his life and died and was entombed here. After he died, people left and poor people squatted there for centuries. In the 14 and 15 hundreds rich people started building inside there and now those buildings are also preserved. It was all quite unexpected, unique and amazing. They have filmed a lot of Game of Thrones here in Croatia and specifically in Diocletian’s Palace. Our local guide today told us that Spain had offered the production 2 million dollars to move production there next season, so it is gone from here now. It is too bad we are only here for a half day. I doubt we have done justice to Split. We walked over to the mall during our free time to get me a replacement toothbrush since the switch broke on my last powered travel toothbrush. I like this new one better. We’ll see how it lasts.

Dinner was included at the hotel tonight. It was at 8pm! It has been a long day. It was a set menu so we had to order this morning. I ordered beef with gnocchi and Clay ordered vegetarian because he didn’t want salmon. Vegetarian was fried cheese and risotto. He didn’t want that either. I switched with him, but he didn’t want the beef either because it was covered in a local sauce of some kind that was kind of sweet. They served a minestrone type soup. Clay ate both bowls. They served some kind of salad that I didn’t touch and he ate his. They served some weird dessert with 3 layers that neither of us could identify but we mostly ate it. Now it is past our bedtimes.

We have our earliest start tomorrow for what Gabriella calls our most physically demanding day. We have breakfast from 6am to 8am. Bags out at 7:15am. Bus leaves at 8am. We go to Trogir in the morning. We stop somewhere for free time for lunch. In the afternoon, we arrive at Plitvice Lakes and spend about 3-4 hours hiking 4 of the 16 terraced lakes. She says it is over 200 steps back to the hotel at the end of hours of walking. She didn’t specify if it was up or down the stairs! I can’t imagine that it will be more strenuous than the Dubrovnik city walls walk, but I’ll let you know tomorrow.

Photo Slideshow

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Sunday, September 20, 2015

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Clay was up before the alarm again and woke me at 6am. We were at breakfast at 7am. As the guy behind us on the bus this morning put it, he had to fight for breakfast. Kompas gets serious points off from me for putting us at this distant mega-hotel for 2 nights in Dubrovnik. And the guy that said it has an Adriatic view with a balcony! We have a view of another wing of the hotel with 3 stories of balconies that are all looking into our windows about 20 feet away. I don’t think he can imagine how disappointed and unhappy I am about Lacroma Hotel! The bus was loaded and left for our morning Dubrovnik tour at 8:15am as scheduled. Gabriella told us last night that she was going to note where we are sitting this morning and we must rotate clockwise 2 seats every day we get on the bus thereafter. We’ll see how this goes. Our first stop was south of the old city to get a photo of it in its entirety. The bus stopped about a block from where you could actually take a photo and after we all unloaded 2 more buses parked in front of ours and everyone had to get past those buses and their passengers to get a photo. This was what prompted the fighting for breakfast comment since he had to fight for a photo as well. I have no idea what that was about. To be sure they always do the same thing and they had to know. Anyway…

We drove about another 2 km past that spot to get to a roundabout to drive back to the old walled city for our walking tour. It is cooler and windier today but it hasn’t started raining yet. We got dropped at the bus stop and saw where to get the number 6 bus back to the Lacroma this afternoon/evening for 15 kuna each. That is a bit over $2pp. It sounds easy enough. Our guide today was Zoran. He was 23 and a soldier during the 1991-1995. Dubrovnik was destroyed for the 2^nd time in its history then. We did see a missile hole they left in the Franciscan Monastery when they rebuilt it and one other corner that has not been restored but the city walls are back intact. He pointed out that the Croat soldiers were armed only with pistols or rocks and were not allowed in Dubrovnik in uniform so the shelling was strictly of civilians. It is hard to imagine. So by the time we entered the Pile Gate it was raining.  I learned that the flimsy windbreaker I brought as an outer layer this trip is not waterproof. I didn’t want to use an umbrella in a crowd of 38 people for the very reason that I had people’s umbrella hitting and poking me as well as they’d stand close and let their umbrellas just dump water on me. No point to my thoughts of courtesy to others. The good news is that it was not cold so it didn’t matter that I was soaked to the skin. When the sun came back out in the afternoon, it was clearly the back end of a cold front since it was not near 100F today but closer to 80F. Without the breeze it was still brutal in the sun again today though. We visited the Rector’s Palace last after walking a big loop inside the walls. This is a UNESCO World Heritage site so evidently they were pretty strictly controlled on rebuilding and it shows. It looks amazing. It reminded us both a lot of Sarlat. After the tour ended around 11am, we went in search of lunch. We weren’t that hungry yet, but figured a dry place to sit inside while we waited for clearing (or not) and time to decide how to proceed with the day. We were appalled by the prices and the heavy food on menus. According to Zoran there are only 800 inhabitants remaining in the walled city. Every building is now either a bank, a shop or a bar/restaurant or a church. He says locals almost never go there and it exists as a tourist attraction only now. So, there were tons of expensive restaurants. Also the menus were heavy on seafood. For some reason in Kotor, Gabriella had advised to avoid the seafood and she didn’t say anything about it here so we didn’t know if the warning had carried up the coast. We finally found a sandwich place. I don’t have a receipt from there so I don’t know the name but it had buffet in the name. I don’t know why. It was a tiny place with a very limited menu. We shared a Dalmatian platter of salad, bread, oil cured cheese and local ham like prosciutto. Clay had a beer and I had a Coke Zero. We got mostly dried out and by the time we left the sun was out. So, it was decided we wouldn’t take the 2pm tour bus back to Lacroma Hotel, but stay in town. The 2 things we had been advised to do here were walk the city walls (900 steps) and ride the cable cars to the top of the mountain over Dubrovnik for the view below. Neither of these things was advised in the rain and lightning, so once it cleared we were back on track. We started with some delicious ice cream cones.

They were not cheap. Then we found our way back to what Zoran had pointed out as the lowest/fewest stairs point to get up on the city walls. It costs 100 kuna pp to get up there and you have to have your ticket to get scanned at one more point after entering at least. After that we came back down and did some shopping and some scouting for dinner on our way to the other side of the walled city and a gate out to get to the lower cable car station. It was 108 kuna pp for roundtrip tickets. Both of these are flat out money makers. We know there must be dozens of tour groups in town today and we saw at least one cruise ship docked. There were loads of people and they were all doing the same things! Lots of crowds and long lines. We like the views from up there though. We didn’t realize that if you want to visit the remains of the fort up there that you need to buy a combination ticket at the bottom, so we skipped the fort. It houses a photographic exhibit of the 1991-1995 war and Clay didn’t want to see that anyway. We came back down around 4pm. Around 4pm -4:30pm, we picked Ragusa 2 as our dinner spot. They had outdoor seating that felt comfortable and she talked to us about the menu as we were looking at it. We were about half way down a steep hill and it was a good place to take a break. Plus the steak with peppercorn sauce I had noticed 2 corners down the alley was 40 kuna cheaper here. I got that for 140 kuna plus a 1 liter pitcher of tap water with ice cubes! It was very exciting. This is the first ice we’ve seen since Gatwick Airport. Clay got a big draft beer and a sea bass dinner. It was good. My peppercorn sauce was fiery hot and we still can’t figure that out! I had some nice twice fried fries with it. It was 320 kuna for the meal. Even though we sat down pretty early for dinner, it was after 5pm before we ate so while we usually eat an early dinner this wasn’t too early. They also brought us each a glass with 2 ice cubes and about 2 fingers of chilled raki after we ordered along with a bread basket and olive oil with garlic and red chili peppers in it. Clay really enjoyed the raki and now he just needs to find an ice source to enjoy the small bottle he bought in Kruje Albania!

We thought about having dessert somewhere else but after sitting without ordering I decided I’d rather just take the 6 bus back rather than spend another hour sitting outdoors. Clay got another ice cream cone and we left Old Dubrovnik. Bus 6 runs every 10 to 15 minutes. By the time nearly everyone in line had squeezed into every available inch of space on that bus, we left as the next one approached and probably came along behind us almost empty! We did spot the big parking lot full of tour buses behind oleander bushes as instructed and exited with most of the other people left onboard. Zoran had told us that there was only 1 stop past ours and then bus 6 headed back to Pile Gate so we couldn’t miss our stop either coming or going. He was right.

We got back around 6pm. It looked like behind the hotel on the Adriatic view side there might be a good view of sunset. So we went out and spent about a 30 hour looking for a good place to sit and view it. We didn’t find one and came on back after sunset. We did not go down to the beach. The literature in the room says it is 250 meter walk from our hotel to another neighboring hotel where we have complimentary privileges but you couldn’t see it from here and there were a lot of stairs to get down there and back so we stayed put. Plus the sun was setting behind an offshore island so higher would be a better view than sea level. We couldn’t get higher so we stayed put.

A final comment on toilets. I know people always want to know. Toilets have gotten consistently better in each country. They have also gotten more expensive. The only free toilets we are finding now are in restaurants or museums. In Albania, where some were frightful they were also all free to use. I’ll end here. Tomorrow breakfast is at 7am again. Bags out at 7:45am. Bus leaves at 8:30am. We drive to Split for one night. We should be there sometime in the afternoon. There will be a lunch stop at some point near where we cross into and out of Bosnia-Herzegovina for about 20 minutes of our drive. It seems that Dubrovnik is only connected to the rest of Croatia by the sea. Interesting. We ate dinner last night with a couple who had toured there already and had crossed through the same place to get here to meet us. They said they did not get passports stamped there though they all had to show them as a border guard walked through the bus. Oh well, the stamps we’ve gotten so far have all been illegible and we’ll never know where we got them anytime we look through them in the future anyway.

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To Dubrovnik, Croatia

Saturday, September 19, 2015

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We were up at 6am again today. It was the first time that the alarms Clay set went off. I think he has been up earlier every other day and I think this was the first day that the alarms actually worked. I think he was up 2 or 3 times during the night resetting the Surface which won’t stay on all night and the other tablet was so quiet it would never have woken us up anyway.  Oh, well. Breakfast was at 7am and the buffet was an absolute nightmare. Gate One was leaving a half hour before us and the restaurant should have asked the other groups to start a half hour later but since they didn’t everyone showed up at the 7am opening and fought it out. The coffee area was particularly vicious. Had we realized that at 7:45am there would be no line at all, everything on the buffet would have been replenished and there would only be about 8 people in the room, I think we’d have all been willing to wait!

It was another spectacular driving day. We set out back down the Moraca River Canyon road to Podgorica then on to Cetinje, the historic capital. We were there to visit the last royal house museum. It was very nicely restored and refurnished with the former royal family’s possessions as it was before they went into exile. We were supposed to have a local guide here. Yesterday’s guide, Zorka, declined to talk at all about Montenegrin history as she assured us our guide today would overwhelm us with it. Or not. Gabriella walked us through the house museum and told us about what we were seeing, but I would say overall the day was a little short on history. We had about 30 minutes of free time to walk around. We walked up to the square and the pedestrian area then across the street to look at the outsides of a monastery, another former palace and the former royal chapel. It is terribly hot. Near 100F.

We rode on towards the coast and eventually left the mountains, then the foothills and finally rounded a corner to a view of the Adriatic Sea. We were on our way to Kotor. First, we had a photo stop at Budva. It was like Naples Bay without the volcano. The bus dropped us right at the harbor and the Sea Gate to the old walled city. (Ponant’s Le Lyrial was docked right there!)Gabriella walked us through the Sea Gate and provided us with Old Town maps and advice on what to see and where to go and where to eat. She issued another slow service advisory, but we found it much quicker than last time in Albania. We shared a pizza and Clay had a salad and a Nikosicko Beer. I about $2 for a tiny slightly chilled bottle of water. The food was good and we did get to spend an hour indoors in air conditioning and smoke. The smokers weren’t sitting out there under the canopies and misters! We were already so wet from sweat that I don’t think getting wet from the fan-blown misting would help at all. The food was good and less than $20. Afterwards we walked over to Gabriella’s favorite sweet shop, Forza, and got 2 2-scoop ice cream cones that were delicious for 4 Euros! Then we had less than 30 minutes to wander and get back to the bus. It was so hot! We did a short quick circuit of the lowest section of the walled old city of Kotor. They have a lot of churches. It would have been nice to have more time and a cooler day to walk up at least part of the high part. It was crazy to see the walled city going almost straight up a vertical mountain wall from the sea (which is apparently a bay of a fjord!).  It made me think of Minas Tirith from Middle Earth! The whole sea side drive was very scenic and again in many places reminded of the Amalfi Coast drive.

Back on the bus and we drove for over an hour before we made a truck stop to use the restrooms before we got to the border since we might be there for a while. Once we reached a manned checkpoint we went right through. That was to leave Montenegro. We drove for at least a couple of miles before we reached the Croatian entry point at their border. I don’t know what was up with the no-man’s land in between.  At the Croatian check point, we were there for a while. We got behind an ordinary transit bus and it had come from Albania through Montenegro. Gabriella said those buses are really being thoroughly checked now because of the immigrant crisis in Europe. So there were about 8 tour buses waiting and that bus was being emptied of people and luggage. Eventually, another line was opened and busses drove past us to get first in line there, so we slipped even further back. From there it was about an hour drive to get to our hotel Lacroma. It is out on a peninsula with a bunch of other new beach resort/spa/conference type facilities far from the old walled city of Dubrovnik that I am sure we all came for. It is supposed to thunderstorm tomorrow so no one will be enjoying the beach here. We have a walking tour in the morning and the rest of the day free. There was an afternoon/evening optional tour that we had planned to take with a Dubrovnik harbor cruise and dinner at the beach overlooking old town, but that has been cancelled due to the inclement weather forecast. My only hope is that it pours in Germany, Austria, Hungary, etc. so we have enough water to float river boats in a few weeks! So, we are miles from the old city of tourist attractions and it is supposed to storm but at least it is supposed to be cooler and we have been told there is a public bus that we can take back to the hotel after our 1-2 hour walking tour so we can choose to spend the day out and get back for 2 Euros each. We’ll see.

Tonight we gained 22 people. Now instead of a group of 16 we have a group of 38. Most of them have been touring together already through Sarajevo and Bosnia. We booked through Celtic Tours for example, but at the welcome cocktails and information greeting meeting at 7pm, Gabriella read off a list of at least 8 different tour companies that had sold this tour offered by Kompas Travel. I am not sure how that works because one she mentioned was CIE and when I called them (because we had used them before and would like to again) they told me they didn’t offer it. But, now I think he must have meant the whole thing that we’re doing because at least some of the 8 people who flew in to begin today must have been on CIE. Anyway, now we have a really large group for the rest of the tour! We weren’t expecting that.

Dinner tonight was included and at the hotel. This place is huge and feels like a convention center hotel with a giant food court. There must be about a dozen tour groups here tonight based on the tour group’s signs by the elevators like ours is. I think they all had dinner tonight here! Gabriella had told us that when we have included dinners that they always include water, coffee and tea and if we don’t get it to ask for it. So, last night we had to ask and even though it was the same exact bottle that was placed on our table gratis the previous night, the waitress billed us for it. I had to get up and go get Gabriella to get it removed from our bill. Tonight, water was already set on our tables and then Gabriella came around and told each table that beer and wine were included. She failed to mention to the newcomers what she had told us, when beer and wine are included you can ask for sodas or something else non-alcoholic instead. I told the newcomers that. 2 of them wanted Cokes and Clay and another man wanted beer. The first waitress that came wouldn’t take our drink orders because we didn’t have drink tickets. I went and found Gabriella and she said she’d sort it out. More than half the meal was over before another waitress came over and offered red or white wine. She said no sodas, no beer, nothing or red or white. So, our table of 6 ordered 3 whites, 1 red and 2 nothing. When Gabriella came by during dessert to see how it was going, I told her about the drinks. I hate complaining but this was 3 included drink problem reports from me in 2 nights. That seems excessive! In a matter of minutes, a manager came over and offered juice or soda to the folks who wanted Cokes. The tickets waitress came a few minutes behind him to offer them soda and finally right after the Cokes were delivered the waitress who refused their first orders came back to apologize. That is all well and good but better service would have handled it more courteously and professionally in the first place without all the confrontation and complaints and need for apologies!

It is past my bedtime now and we have another early morning. So I’ll end here.

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National parks of Montenegro

Friday, September 18, 2015

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We had an earlier start today, but it put us an hour ahead of the big Gate One group all day, so it was worth it. Breakfast was a buffet at 7am. There were no eggs cooked to order here, but it was fine. We didn't get much sleep last night for howling dogs! We reckon we've only seen about 16 dogs since we landed in Tirana on Tuesday and there were probably 18 dogs howling all night all over the tiny town of Kolasin!

We were in the bus rolling by 8am. Gabriella has started our rotating seats so Clay and I grabbed the right front today. That was our turn. I think it was a good day for it because we had a long day in the bus and it was another cliff-hanging road with lots of hairpin turns, switchbacks and tunnels. Today we were in Tara Canyon driving alongside the Tara River. It is supposed to be the 2^nd deepest river canyon after Colorado. We learned that Montenegro has a population of about 650,000 people. Montenegro was the last country formed from the splintering of former Yugoslavia in 2006. We had our first stop for a 30 hour lake side walk (if we wanted) at a National Park Biogradska Gora. It was the first national park in Europe declared right after Yellowstone. Then we drove to Durdevica Bridge spanning the Tara River Canyon along with a couple of ziplines. We had another half hour there to visit souvenir stalls, walk the bridge, take photos or go to a café for a drink and the view. We did all that. The bridge is famous for the architect of it blowing it up in WWII to prevent an invasion. It is rebuilt now. We had lunch in the Durmitor National Park. It was salad, a potato based moussaka and the local fried bread. Our final stop of the day was still in Durmitor (where we drove most of the day) at Black Lake. We had over an hour here. It was a long hot walk just to get to the lake which was very low water due to the long hot dry summer they’ve been having. So, I just parked it on a bench and enjoyed the view and the breeze in the shade while Clay walked about a ¼ of the walk around and back. I had a view of the highest peak in Montenegro and I could really feel the altitude where I sat. I guess now I understand what Gabriella meant when she said that Montenegro has no plain. It is really mountainous!

Dinner tonight is at 7pm at the buffet restaurant again. Breakfast in the morning tomorrow is 7am. Bags out at 7:45am. Bus departs at 8am. We should have our last hot day of the summer tomorrow according to local forecasts. It was over 100F down at the coast today and that is where we are headed tomorrow for our hottest day yet. Sunday a cold front is coming through with the threat of thunderstorms and rain. So, good for them as they say they haven’t had measurable rain since July and good for us that it won’t be quite so hot, but hopefully we won’t get too wet. We have another full day on our way to Dubrovnik, Croatia. We will drive back the way we came (!) to Podgorica (the capital, formerly Titograd) then on to Cetinje (formerly the capital). We will have a local guide for a museum visit there. Then another thrilling drive down the deepest fjord in Southern Europe to Kotor. In Kotor, an old walled city, we will have free time to get lunch. Then drive across the border to Croatia and our hotel for the next 2 nights in Dubrovnik. This is where we will have a 2^nd welcome meeting and pick up 20 or 22 new tour participants that will overwhelm our little 16 person group.

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To Montenegro

Thursday, September 17, 2015

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Breakfast buffet started at 6:30am and bags out by 8:15am and the bus left at 9am. We drove just about one hour before our first stop along the road at a truck stop kind of place. They had about 2-4 toilet/bidet stalls if you can call them that. They were squatters. A ceramic hole in the floor with ridged foot wells. Clay said the men’s room was clean and dry. Not so the women’s. There was no soap or paper products and the Gate One bus with a large group that is either always just ahead of us or passing us and gotten there first. There was solid stuff protruding out of the floor hole along with paper and the paper bin was overflowing and there was toilet paper in the bidet bowl. The floor ridges of the squatter were filled with urine. The most horrifying thing was that Gabriella had told us she would only stop at nice bathrooms! As Clay pointed out to me, the men’s room would have qualified as nice. He blamed the Gate One passengers when I described the women’s room condition. About 11:15am, we stopped in the town of Shkodra. We had 2 hours of free time here. The bus dropped us near a couple of pedestrian streets that had banks, jewelry stores, cell phone stores and bars and restaurants. She advised that service was very slow in this town and prices were low so it was a good place to get Euros (the Montenegrin currency) and have lunch. She advised us to look for the San Francisco or the Colosseo Hotel. We went to the San Francisco. It was indeed slow and inexpensive. We sat on the upstairs terrace in the shade with a view of the street. That was nice. It took about 20 minutes for a draft beer and a Coke Zero to come. Then he confirmed what we had ordered so he could give it to the kitchen! He told us when we ordered that Clay’s oven broiled lake carp would take about a half hour to prepare and we said ok because we figured we still had an hour and 45 minutes. My pizza came about 12:30pm and Clay’s fish cam about 15 minutes later. The bus was leaving at 1:15pm. When he brought Clay’s fish, I asked for the check. Clay’s dish was carp from the local Lake Skodra. It was cut into large cubes and covered in a chunky spicy tomato sauce and baked. It was full of bones. The tab totaled $17.64USD or 14.92 Euros or 1940.00 in whatever the local currency really ought to be. The waiter worried that we tried to eat too fast to enjoy it. He may have been right, but he let us sit there for a half hour before he put the order into the kitchen, so whose fault was that. At least they all spoke English there. We found few other people in Montenegro today that spoke English, unlike Albania! Other than lunch, we had no other time here. Clay did get an ice cream cone for 30 Euro cents while I dashed up and down the block looking for a souvenir shop since I had lost my Albanian patch. There were none.

We drove for some time in view of or alongside Lake Skodra today. It is very low now so did not seem too impressive. It is the largest lake on the Balkan peninsula. We crossed the border from Albania into Montenegro alongside the lake. It took a while to get out and then get through the herd of free range goats that live between the 2 border checkpoints. The good news was that unlike clearing a tour bus into the USA, they let us stay aboard the bus and Gabriella took our passports in on each side. We have stamps from Albania and Montenegro now that have no meaningful information on them other than the dates. Very disappointing!

We drove about another 2 hours before another potty stop. This one was inside the Moraca Canyon. It was a wide spot along the cliffside and consisted of a row of quite nice toilets lined up along the cliff rim. It was a little scary to think about that in there! I will say that so far all toilets have been free and that cannot be said of the northern former Soviet bloc states we visited earlier this summer. We had 30 minutes there as there was a café and a snack stall. Clay bought a bunch of locally produced dried figs. He thinks he gave himself the runs. They were 6 Euros. His big fish lunch was probably the same amount. We drove about another hour before our final stop before the hotel for the night. We had less than 30 minutes to tour the Moraca Orthodox Monastery. There has probably been a church there for over 800 years. It is not clear how old the present structures are but the style is from the Ottoman Empire occupation. It was interesting and impressive. The real impression of the day for me though was not mentioned in the tour literature for today and that was the road, E65. It ranks up there with the Amalfi Coast, the coastal road to Hana in Hawaii or a couple of the roads we drove last year in Utah and Wyoming. It was even more exciting than the mountain road we zigzagged up yesterday! It was crazy scenic with a blue and green river at the bottom. This is the Balkan Alps or the end of them. I think Gabriella said we are at over 3000 feet elevation at Bianca Resort & Spa in Kolasin.

We arrived again just behind the Gate One bus with its giant group. (We will be sad when we go from 16 to the big group we’ll have when we add 22 people in Dubrovnik!) After they got cleared out of the lobby, Gabriella was still on her phone and having a dire discussion with a bunch of folks now behind the desk. She came over and updated us that the Kompas Tour company had sent 2 emails regarding our reservation and they had only opened the attachment on one of them so they did not have our guest list and had not assigned us rooms. She was more unhappy than us right now. She came back and said that everyone in our group would be upgraded to a suite from a standard room for the 2 nights at no charge. It is nice to have the space. The town of Kolasin and the exterior of the hotel seem a bit bleak. The inside of the hotel is very National Park style raw wood and it is huge or seems like it rambles forever. We are on the 4^th floor and I don’t actually know how many floors there are. There is no air conditioning! It is still hot here even at the higher elevation. I think it has been hovering around a high of 90F since we arrived. Clay is glad he decided to leave home in shorts!

Dinner tonight was included as are all 3 meals tomorrow. I don’t expect there is anywhere else to eat here in Kolasin so that is probably why. Dinner tonight was a buffet. It was varied but I didn’t really like anything I picked. I don’t think Clay did either but we each ate a plate of cold and hot food, some fried breads and some desserts with a liter bottle of water. I did some hand laundry since we have 2 nights and a free standing shower and a tub where I can string my laundry line. (The last 2 nights’ hotel had a laundry line in the shower stall! Go figure.) We have an earlier start with a full day tour of the Durmitor National Park tomorrow, so it is bed time!

One last note. Our group has luggage porterage included but Gate One does not for those keeping score. 

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