Dubrovnik – the expensive vitamin “sea”

Leaving the lovely house of Mlini in Hutovo, we headed to Dubrovnik, one of our dream destinations. This means that we had entered Croatia the second time on this trip. The way to make dreams come true is never easy, therefore we had a very hard day getting to Dubrovnik. The first 5-6 kilometers were totally uphill without any signs of human and we saw just a few houses among the mountains.

In the sweltering heat, it was very challenging for us to overcome the hills and arrive at the national road. Coming closer to the beach, the road became mostly downhill and very easily, we arrived at Stola beach for our lunch break. Finally, after 2 weeks of cycling, we could have lunch right in front of the sea, watch the lovely fish and enjoy the cool sea-wind.

But then I had a not so enjoyable ride as the road became uphill every now and then. I am very much afraid of height, and the road from the mountains to the sea was scary as one side was the cliff and the other side down there was the infinite deep ocean. The strong side-wind made me struggle to all sweaty and nervous. 

The next day, we had a quite bad time in Dubrovnik. We arrived just at mid-morning but it was already very hot and the streets were stuffed with tourists. Going around the city for almost an hour, we gave up searching for a parking place for our bikes. This time, the fire-fighters were our saviors as they offered us free parking, drinking water and even a toilet at the fire brigade.

Dubrovnik is essentially beautiful, but its beauty has fallen into touring businessman’s hands. Nowadays, the whole city becomes a complex of expensive services. It’s really hard to meet a local as they all sold or rented their pieces of land here and moved to another place where there are less tourists. One more thing that we disliked at the coast was that the more downhill the road, the more expensive the prices. It was quite a pissed moment when you have to pay double or triple price for the same thing which was available just some tens of kilometers before. That’s the reverse side of the famous destination that poor backpackers like us don’t want to see.

After almost 2 hours of walking around the old town of Dubrovnik, we decided to leave as we couldn’t see much besides big tourist groups, souvenir shops and expensive entrance tickets that equals 5 days of our food expenses. This dream destination turned out to be unsuitable with our “travel like locals” trip as even the real locals had left the town behind. Seemed like Dubrovnik liked us more than we thought as we couldn’t go too far from it. To be more precise, I got a terrible sunstroke when we were about to leave! 

Péter let me sit under a shadow of a tree and ran around to find help. After 40 minutes, he found a friendly artist, who owns a nice gallery and I could rest a bit there. Meanwhile, she arranged a discounted slot at her friend’s campsite which is 10 km from Dubrovnik. Unluckily, that night was horribly windy and I couldn’t sleep and recover. The next morning, we tried to continue but I couldn’t make more than 5-6 kilometers. A couple let us stay at their apartment without asking for anything and this time, I could finally sleep and rest. After a resting day, we continued our way towards Montenegro where locates one of the most beautiful bays in the world – Kotor Bay...

(To be continued...)

Linh