Midlife Hobos

We had heard that the intercity buses were unreliable, even that you’d be better off walking so we weren’t surprised when it was 35 mins late but the toilet on the bus being out of order on a 4.5 hr journey was a bit off, I thought! So when we stopped and I saw people getting off to smoke I ran for the toilet then saw I needed a 50c coin so ran back to the bus and got all my coins then ran back and as I was realising I didn’t have the right coin, Sean shouted “Lisa we’re leaving and you can use the one on the bus” and just as I got on the bus took off. There was no light in the toilet, there was a roll of toilet paper that was soaked right through. It was really hot on the bus. The roads were winding and cool to see the different scenery. There just seem to be so many abandoned old houses and buildings everywhere and homes in the middle of nowhere. It’s a shame that we arrived an hour late because it was dark as we hit the last hour of the trip which was all on the coast but what was lit up looked amazing.

Our host Jelena kindly picked us up from the bus stop. This airbnb is a downgrade from the last but much cheaper, the same price for a month here as what we paid for 5 nights in Vienna and on the upside we can see the harbour from our window, always a stunning sunset, even on a cloudy day. In Split and most places we’ve stayed so far, there was heaps of graffiti. Hardly any here. Dubrovnik is smaller, wealthier and they don’t tolerate it. 

Sean and I knew we would have to deal with less than ideal situations and we are becoming less high needs. The heat pump here makes clicking popping creaking sounds all night which kept waking me, that and the fridge turning on. But after the first few nights we stopped noticing. 

We found an outdoor gym 5 min away. Right next to the harbour. 

We saw a funny thing, a guy parked in a stupid place, diagonally on the footpath and the road and was holding up a bus that started tooting and someone else was tooting and then a pedestrian shouted at him (I assume) “you’re holding up the bus” and he shouted back and finally drove off but not until they’d argued back and forth while the bus continually tooted. We saw a lot of that in Croatia, people parking where you would not dare in NZ because you’d be ticketed immediately. Most people have small cars here for obvious reasons.

We feel like making a “must haves” list for airbnb hosts because we have ended up buying things like soap dishes, knives that actually work, bread knives, plunger, a toilet brush that actually reaches the bottom of the toilet and a lot of these places have handheld shower heads with flexible hoses and nothing on the wall for it to fix to so you can stand under it so you have to try and hold it with one hand and soap or whatever with the other and so we cheated and bought a wall thing we could put it in. I guess they do it for energy efficiency. They also have little hot water cylinders in the bathroom usually hanging on the wall so you have to be quick and then wait a while for it to heat up again before the next person can shower. 

Anyway, we decided to walk the 3km to Old Town which is where a lot of Game of Thrones was filmed. Just the walk there was awesome, the sea views and houses. No graffiti, orange trees, kiwifruit vines! nicer gardens. I think people take more pride here than Split, first we saw Lovrijena Fortress and then we came upon the stunning sight Pile Gate, the main entrance to Old Town and the walls of Dubrovnik. So we walked through and patted cats, viewed alleys, amazed that people live there. Eventually we had a burger and yummy kumara fries followed by gelato then walked home stuffed, seeing the sunset as we went. We will return because we didn’t see it all.

More Dubrovnik to come 😉