Next up was Split, back to tourist central. I booked 2 nights here, probably should have just booked one. Same drill: nice pretty, cutesy, old town, absolutely filled to brim with people. Once you walk around the old town for an hour, you’ve basically seen everything. It’s most famous feature is Diocletian’s palace, the Roman Emperor who built this palace for his retirement in the early 300’s AD. The word palace is also misleading because about half of the old town makes up what once was his palace, but you wouldn’t really know that from just walking around, as everything is interconnected. I stopped in some tourist agencies to enquire about a multi-day island hopping trip, but most of those trips were pretty booked up, and if I wanted to get on one, I’d have a to wait a few days, plus they wanted a single person surcharge, as the bunks are for two people, so I’d end up paying like 50% more. Yeahh, not doing that. It’s easy enough to hop on the ferries and get to them yourself.
I do love the arches
So for my one full day in Split I did the usual, find one of the swimming spots during the day. Split is on a little peninsula, and at the far end there’s a tree lined park area with a rocky shore where people find a flat spot to put their towel , which is kind of challenging because all the nice flat spots get taken early. But as always, the water is gorgeous, looking over the bay, with mountains in the background. So that’s where I hung out for a few hours before eventually walking to the other side of the peninsula, which is the more popular, happening side. Designer clothes, 8 Euro beers, the gravel beach has sunbeds that cost 30E to rent out each, and most of them were taken. It was hot as hell, so I did stop in the bar/restaurant for a beer and did some people watching, but I was happy to get out of there pretty quickly.
The cool beach spot
That evening I took a bus outside of town to the Klis fortress, which is up high on it’s rocky outpost is extremely difficult to attack. But even so the town of Split and surrounding areas have been conquered at many different times in history, the Venetians, the Ottomans, Austria-Hungary, the Germans/Italians etc. These Balkan countries have had a pretty rough go of it. I’m currently reading a book on the Balkans from 1800 to present, and it’s basically just a long list of various factions competing for power, someone getting power, killing lots of people, displacing lots of minorities, making some alliances, backstabbing, other groups taking advantage of any possible power vacuums, more killing, raping, pillaging etc. And it only gets more depressing the further you go, I thought WW1 was bad, WW2 was much worse, and there’s still the Yugoslavian Wars to go.
But anyway, I was a bit split on Split, it’s a gorgeous city by any measure, but just not for me. Next up was taking the ferry to Hvar, probably the most popular tourist island in Croatia. Once again, a gorgeous old town, and people just put their towels down right on the limestone pathways touching the water and sunbathe and have a swim. I keep saying this, but everywhere in Croatia is swimmable. You might as well just live in your swim trunks. The hostel I was at was up on a hill, which is not a pleasant walk during the middle of the day, but the amount of open space and the views made the small trek very worthwhile. Plus they had a big BBQ dinner thing going on that evening, which is always nice. I met some cool people there. We hit the bars for a little bit afterwards, Hvar is known as a party island, but I was happy to pull a Ryan Wiet, be home by midnight :)
My one full day there was just doing a bit of island hopping. Hvar is actually a huge island, but there are some smaller, nicer islands a short boat trip away, and you can take water taxis to get there. But honestly there isn’t THAT much difference between these islands, mainland Hvar, or really anywhere else in Croatia. Rocky coast, blue water, very pretty, etc etc. But just look at photos, it’s super nice!
And after one more night in Hvar it would be off to Bosnia for the next week.
