Over dinner tonight, Rachael and I marveled together at where we are and how much it feels like we’ve experienced in the very short time since arrival. Bike travel is so remarkable - each of these days has felt utterly unique, unmistakably different from like any we’ve experienced. Not just another day at the office, for sure.
The day began with us checking out of Matea’s place, after making last minute decisions about what to take with us and what to leave behind in our suitcases. After going back and forth on it, I decide to leave the sandals behind. My walkers work much better for me on any real hike, so I’ll want them in the Dolomites for sure. I know I’ll miss my sandals, but we just don’t have the packing capacity.
We’re just leaving the suitcases in the room. Matea has it all worked out for us, and will mail them to our hotel in Girona later this week. She’s really been accommodating. This was really a good time to use Airbnb, so I could interact with an individual to plan this out. We’ve probably had a dozen exchanges about this over the last few months.
On our way to breakfast we stopped at an Intersport store, which we were surprised to find open at 8 and happy to find had water bottle cages. So that’s a non-issue now. We still are down to a single iPad/SD card adapter and current adapter, but we can live with that if we’re careful and don’t lose another one. Perhaps I’ll order backups from Amazon and have them shipped down the road a ways. Also, we found today that I left a bottle of my thyroid pills at home, so we only have about a two month supply. Annoying, but not critical either -we’ve found from past experience that we can just buy them over here at a pharmacy without a prescription.
We had breakfast at a cafe down at the port. While we were leaning our bikes against the wall, a diner asked in excellent English where we were from. She brightened up when she heard we were from Portland, because she had thought so. She recognized us from the flight to Frankfurt, and I recognized her - she was in the line next to us at the security gate, and I had overheard her discussing her planned tour of Croatia with her friend, I almost crowded in at the time but decided against it. She’s here with friends helping her celebrate her fiftieth birthday.
Our bike ride today is a loop into the hills behind the city, possibly as far as Trebinje. We’re not really sure when we set out how far we will go -the essential thing is to make sure we make it back in plenty of time for our 4:30 ferry to Korcula. We’ve mapped out a 50 mile loop, but it can be easily shortened if need be.
The first few miles aren’t really that pleasant. We follow the course of yesterday’s walk, but the road is narrow and winding, shoulderless, and busier than we’d like. After about four miles of that though we leave the highway, turn away fripom the water and start climbing. The climb isn’t bad at all -maybe a thousand feet in four or five miles, ending at the international border - I’d forgotten about this, and it’s a good thing we brought the passports! We had almost decided to leave our luggage behind at Matea’s place to lighten our load for the day.
I don’t even know what county we are crossing into - at first I thought it was Montenegro, but I’ve misremembered the map here, and is Bosnia and Herzegovina. Very complex and confusing boundaries here.
We ar only in Bosnia and Herzegovina for fifteen or twenty miles, but they’re very memorable miles. For most of the way we’re biking through a barren, war-ravaged karst landscape on the Ciro bike path, established a few years back along the cours of the old narrow gauge rail lines that connected Dubrovnik, Mostar and the Bay of Kotor. It sounds like it was established partly to encourage tourism, but perhaps mostly to help reintegrate the war-ravaged communities - we’re passing through a border area between Croatia, Republika Srpska, and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the principals in the horrific Bosnian War.
I wish I had been aware of this bike trail when we planned this trip. It continues all the way to Mostar, but we would have had to allow four days for the round trip. It would have been worth the time, if I’d known. Here’s a good first hand account of riding the whole route to Mostar.
I’m a bit confused by the signage here. We’ve just left Croatian customs, and around the corner ahead is Bosnia. So why are we being welcomed to Croatia?
We’re traveling through the war zone of the Bosnian war. There are indications of the war everywhere - including many ruined houses, signs warning of uncleared mine fields.
We’re still on the Ciro Route, but this section is a very lightly traveled single track road. There is the occasional slow-moving car you have to give way for, so pay attention.
A very confusing region. We’re in the entity Republika Srpska, within the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The country is divided into two sub states: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Republika Srpska. They were joined under the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war, but it doesn’t feel like it’s really at peace yet. I can’t tell for sure, but I think we’ve been biking along the border between the two warring halves.
We haven’t been moving that quickly, and decide to shorten our day and drop the fifteen mile out and back to Trebinje. We don’t know if we’ll be delayed crossing back over the border, and it would be terrible to miss our boat. We outdone have had time as it turned out, but if it really matters to stay on schedule it’s always better to leave room for error.
Dropping back to Dubrovnik, I’m delighted to find that we’re passing by one of the best known overlooks of the city. From a distance, you can admire it without the crowds - other than the crush of cars jamming the highway below, trying to turn onto the road up to this viewpoint. When I first looked down at this crazy road I thought we were screwed - it’s narrow, shoulderless, and looked unbikeable. It turned out fine though - it’s downhill all the way to town, and traffic isn’t moving very fast anyway so you can just coast along in the middle of the lane.
We arrived at the port about two hours before scheduled departure. We ate our lunch in the shade at a park bench and then went back to the same cafe we had breakfast at and nursed cold drinks until departure.
The catamaran was completely full. The last run of the day is the only one that takes bikes, and we were the only bikes to board. We just leaned them against a railing, hoping they wouldn’t fall over in the crossing (and they didn’t). We arrive in Korcula at about six thirty, and I won’t say much about it now because it’s time for breakfast and we’ll be here again in a couple of nights. I’ll catch up later.
I will say something about the arrival experience though. It took us about a half hour to find our room, which in the end proved to be just a few hundred yards from the ferry terminal. I had mapped this route out in advance, thinking we were arriving at a different port two miles away. We couldn’t make any sense of the route though, which flashed briefly and then disappeared - because we were already at its endpoint.
Fortunately we were able to look up our room’s location on the phone, and navigated to it. It led us though to a place that looked nothing like a room, and had the wrong address. Frustrated, we were not sure what to do next when a slender young man carrying an infant walked up the street and asked where we were going. Surprisingly, he was going to the same place, because he lives there. He’s our host. His mother said we were arriving by bike, so he was wandering around watching for us. He said no one can ever find the place, because the street doesn’t really exist as such - it’s just a network of stairs.
We enjoyed a delicious meal at a quiet outdoor restaurant overlooking the harbor. Our charming waitress tells us that the fish of the day is swordfish - the pointy-nosed one, she says, pantomiming with her hands in front of her face. The climate too is delicious - mild, warm, perfect.
I love this place.
Reentering Croatia. It’s a slow moving line, but fortunately bikers and walkers can go to the front.
Dropping back toward Dubrovnik, just before joining the narrow, jammed highway. There isn’t nearly as much traffic as it looks like here. It’s bottlenecked by tourists trying to make a left turn to come up to where we are, with its famous overview of the walled city.
The pedestrian-only catamaran to Split, with stops along the way on Mljet, Korcula, Hvar and Brac. We’ll be on it three times before we’re done, and board or disembark at all the stops except Hvar. If you come here, be careful and plan in advance - it sells out, and only one sailing per day allows bikes (ticketed separately). Bookable online - we bought our tickets in Portland.
The Norwegian Star, one of the megacruise ships that flood the city. By my rough estimate, it looks like it has about 1,500 cabins. It wasn’t here yesterday, so I think we may have been lucky and arrived at a fairly quiet time.
On Korcula, and a bit lost. I mapped the route to our hotel, but got it wrong - I hadn’t realized that the catamaran and car ferry arrive at different ports a few kilometers apart.
I took this photo so we could find our way back. Our room is in the second tier building in the back, and reached by the stairs to the left of the red truck. Our host, in the white shirt on the left, is coming back from showing us to the room so he can help with our luggage.
