Catching the overnight ferry from Bari to Dubrovnik was no fun. I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say the Bari Port Authorities don't appear to have ever run a port before, and the reclining seats on the ship are about as comfortable to sleep on as bicycle seats. If we'd been travelling without a dog we'd have been able to take a cabin, which presumably would have been much better, but also more expensive. We ended up spending the night dozing fitfully on the quivering carpet tiles of the passenger lounge; another passenger lay on a metal shelf and tried to sleep there.
After that, arriving in Croatia was like returning to civilisation. The customs and immigration people gave us a quick check over and a warm welcome. Scooby (“Stari pas”) got his ears rubbed by a burly border guard and we were on our way. We stopped near the ferry port to get cash and catch our breath, and found the sleepy early Sunday morning town to be so inviting we spent a couple of hours walking around the coastal path. After that, we drove about ten kilometres down the coast to a tiny welcoming campsite at Srebreno (Autocamp Matkovika) and settled in for a lazy first day. The following day we visited Dubrovnik's old town, then Cavtat, and today we had another look around Dubrovnik and then drove a little way north to the Pelješac peninsular.
It was startling after southern Italy to suddenly find ourselves in this orderly, clean, prosperous, spick and span place. No litter, no graffiti, people obey the traffic laws, park in the designated bays, stop to let you cross on pedestrian crossings and don't ride their scooters on the pedestrianised streets. Even the port area is clean, tidy and well maintained – how many towns can say that?
The area is as incredibly beautiful as everyone told us. Grey limestone crags, speckled with sparse herbs and trees, tower over the coast. The sea is impossibly blue and clear, and strewn with wooded islands. The buildings of Dubrovnik and nearby towns are quite unlike those of Italy just across the Adriatic. They have a homely central European air, a whif of gingerbread and fairy tales. Parts reminded us of old Prague, but like a cleaned up Prague with blue sky, turquoise sea, fresh fish, lemon trees and warm sunshine.
Our guide book's summary of the area's history started off with a warning that it's complicated, and so it is. Dubrovnik was a trading town that made its fortune by managing to remain on good terms with both the Ottoman empire and the Europeans, so had a virtual monopoly on trade between the two. It was effectively independent until the nineteenth century, and developed a complex cultural mix of Italian and Slav, with Latin speaking Roman Catholicism and strong links to Austria and Hungary. Today's Dubrovnik is cheerfully Slav (to a foreigner the language sounds very like Czech and there is plenty of pickled cabbage in the supermarket), but it's Slav with sunglasses, speedboats and a good selection of Italian recipes.
But of course there's been a serpent in paradise. It was a shock for us when we walked from our campsite down to the bay and found, behind the cool coffee bars, a series of gutted and shell pocked concrete hotels. A pretty nineteenth century house on the waterfront was peppered with bullet holes, roofless and abandoned. In the next bay a huge complex of what had clearly been smart hotels with landscaped gardens stood wrecked, desolate and overgrown.
We expected to see evidence of the war at some point during our visit, but not to see prime beachfront property in such a beautiful location still untouched after two decades. We found out that this part of the coast had been occupied in 1991 by a Serb, Montenegrin and Bosnian army, who used it to shell Dubrovnik. They smashed everything they could before being driven out by a Croatian counter attack the following year. The density of the bullet holes bears witness to the intensity of the fighting. The repair work has just been too big a job, and the old hotels have naturally been in the back of the queue behind homes, bridges and roads.
That's the sad explanation for why so much of this area looks so spick and span. Much of it has had to be rebuilt and repaired over the last two decades, and there's still work to do.
From Dubrovnik's ancient city walls the city looks perfect at first glance. It's only when you notice a mossy old terracotta tiled roof you realise that around nine tenths of the roofs of this mediaeval city are brand new. You notice other things; a carved monument that looks far too fresh to be mediaeval, a wall dotted with patches of not quite perfectly matched mortar, an old shop above which the upstairs rooms are lined with bare plasterboard, and everywhere the star shaped indentations of shrapnel in stone.
Neither of us saw the area before the breakup of Yugoslavia, so we've had to get a sense of it from indirect sources. In the late nineteenth century Dubrovnik and the coast around it was a popular holiday destination for wealthy people from the Austro Hungarian empire. It had smart hotels and spas. Rebecca West described it as “Too perfect and self satisfied”. This has clearly been an orderly, prosperous, comfortable place for many years.
Apparently it didn't have ethnic conflict, and wasn't militarily significant, so it didn't expect to be drawn into the conflict. The shock seems to have been something like the shock people would feel if arguments over Scottish devolution led to a series of events that somehow led to the city of Bath being shelled by Welsh artillery.
We remember being shocked when we saw it on the news at the time, and it shocked us again now to be reminded how close we can be to chaos as we go about the familiar routines of our lives.
That's a misleadingly gloomy note to end on. It's certainly no reason not to visit. This is a beautiful, comfortable and welcoming place. Maybe all the more reason to visit, as it's quite inspiring to see what the Croatians have built for themselves in twenty years. Not just repairing so much of the war damage, but building all the services and facilities of a modern independent state.
Also, everyone we have met here so far has been unfailingly polite and helpful (and has spoken good English, which is a relief as we haven't got very far with learning Croatian) In fact the owner of our first campsite was so kind that she drove us the 10 km into Dubrovnik, then returned later to pick us up because Scooby wasn't allowed on the bus.
All in all, it's early days but we're loving it so far!
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