THE FERRY from Stari Grad is a whopper, a full scale car ferry. Pretty old, too, built as it was in the middle of the 1960s and probably in its last year of operation according to the purser.

It had all the signs of its era, based as it would have been on the 1950s when travel was less common and travellers less demanding. Cars had to drive in and then reverse out or perform a complicated turn in the confines of the car deck. Metal stanchions held up a curving ceiling in the passenger saloons. It was reminiscent of a nautical Orient Express.

We are by far the oldest passengers, other than perhaps an English couple in Sensible Shoes and wearing the sort of straw boater you last saw in Graham Greene novels. Our other passengers are backpackers, whose conversations suggest they are getting away from it by following the same itinerary round Europe. They can, after all, go only where ferries, trains and buses take them.

Across the aisle, an American in his early 20s, dressed in white except for black shoes, is lecturing a Londoner on his world experiences. He speaks of BELgrade and COPENhagen and RODDERdam and runs through the gazetteer placing the stress on the wrong syllable.

'I always look for places with air conditioning,' he is telling the Londoner, who is responding with comments such as 'You must be very experienced at this sort of thing', comments the American takes as flattering but which anyone with an understanding of British humour can hear is acid.

Next to us are two Finns. I spoke to one earlier, using my only word of Finnish, which is Suomi, the name of the country. The girl I spoke to, in her early 30s with short dark hair and a strong smile, is playing some card game with her companion, a man with a civil service haircut. Opposite them is a man who with long unkempt hair and round face looks somewhere between a Viking and the keyboard player from Abba. He is writing complicated capitals in black ink on sheet after sheet of white paper.

His girlfriend is tall and unbelievably slender, in a tiny mini that shows she has legs right up to her bum. She wears a tight blue top which should be printed 'Look, I've had a boob job' for the few people on board who couldn't have guessed.

They get on well, different though they all seem, and I'm impressed that their discarded paperbacks are in English. Would that I could read a book in Finnish.

We get off at Dubrovnik, having turned down the chance to disembark on Korcula and ride to Ston as the Americans had planned. We didn't have a bus to take us from Ston and we didn't fancy that coast road.

We had our fears buffered by a group of Londoners in good mood outside the tourist office.

'Serious panniers,' one said a couple of times to attract our attention. We laughed and joked with them and one brought us up to date with the Tour de France, which a British rider is about to win for the first time since 1903. After so many years in France, and remembering that the last French winner is old enough to travel free on the buses, I am less moved than they are. But it's good to know.

'Our entire gear between us would have fitted in just one of your bags,' one of the lads said. 'We've been riding across the islands and we handed back our bikes at Ston and caught the bus from there. That road is no place to ride a bike.'

Feeling justified, we looked for a room for the night and looked forward to exploring the town next day.