By Babs
Just a quick update – we reached Dubrovnik on Wednesday morning after a busy week of travelling, and are really enjoying it here! Admittedly on the basis of just two days in the country, I’d recommend anyone to visit Croatia and holiday here – good, inexpensive food, a beautiful coastline and city, the Adriatic is amazingly clean and clear and lovely for swimming in and overall it’s very relaxing here.
We left the farm at Orgiva a week ago on Tuesday, exactly three weeks after we arrived, and got a bus to Granada, from where we took a train to Barcelona, the first of several overnighters of the week. The Spanish train was comfortable though the cheapest tickets were for bunks in four berth single sex compartments. We stayed a night in Barcelona, ate some good tapas (lots of pulpo/octopus) and read by the beach. We skipped sightseeing as we’d both visited the more famous landmarks before and only had a day to spend in the city.
From there, we took a 20 hour overnight ferry (seats but no bunks this time!) to Civitavecchia, Italy then a train to Rome. We stayed in Rome for three nights and saw a few of the obvious things to see in Rome – the Colosseum, the Forum and the Vatican as well as too many other ancient monuments to list here! It seems you can’t walk anywhere in central Rome without bumping into either a two thousand year old monument or a renaissance building designed by Michelangelo. The sights were very impressive, but unfortunately we were put off by the extremely touristy feel of central Rome – it was very hard to find any shops, cafes or restaurants that weren’t trying to rip you off.
We spent a day in Bari next, having arrived on an overnight train from Rome, and took an overnight ferry that night to Dubrovnik. Not spending the night in Bari was a bit of a shame, because it turned out to be a really nice town. I had been assuming that it was just a port town but it had all the nice restaurants and pleasant Italian feeling that I’d been missing in Rome! We also discovered that travelling two nights in a row without anywhere to shower in the middle of summer tends to make one quite grouchy 🙂
Anyway, now we’re happy to be in Dubrovnik, and might even stay another night here!
Wabs looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Lovely reading again. Need more pictures of you.