Our departure from Frankfurt this morning was a little more chaotic than we’d hoped. We caught a shuttle from the adjacent hotel, got off at the correct terminal, and, instead of checking in and proceeding in an orderly fashion to our gate, we entered a worm hole. There are literally hundreds of check-in counters (we saw numbers over 800) and needed assistance finding the two allotted to Croatian Air. There was one person checking in the entire flight. We passed security, went through the wrong passport control and eventually ended up in a line for immigration where our passports were stamped for the second time. At this point, we were on the wrong side of security and had to start over. We finally made it to our gate as they were boarding.
Greg was also a bit flummoxed because his iPad, with all his puzzle and gaming apps, was left at Tina’s in Ronshausen. We will figure out how to get it back later.
We flew Croatian Air to Dubrovnik, an hour and a half flight. I had hoped for an aerial glance of Dubrovnik’s famous city walls, but the the closest I saw was a long dark dragon of an island, blowing puffs of clouds along the coast.
We were met outside baggage claim by a driver who collected a half dozen of us and took us to the bus where other members of our group were already waiting. It was a short drive from the Dubrovnik airport to the Croatian-Montenegro border, where our passports were collected, stamped and returned to us.
Another few minutes brought us to the outskirts of Herceg Novi. Our hotel is on the bay, with a nice terrace. There was no electricity, however, throughout the city. The hotel must have generators for some functions, as the elevators were working, but we have no electricity in our room. We were told the power will be back at 8 tonight - we shall see. Apparently the district does this on a scheduled basis, to reduce energy usage.
We had 4 hours to kill before our orientation meeting, so I washed a few clothes in the sink and we took a walk along the shore. A pedestrian street lined with shops and restaurants wandered along the coast. The 5 km (3 mile) promenade is called Setaliste Pet Danica, after five young women named Danica who died during World War II. There are no natural sand beaches here, though our hotel has an artificial little beachlet. Most of the bathing areas are cement; some are native pebbles.
View from our hotel roof. Old Herceg Novi is across the bay.
The weather was good, the stray cats friendly and the scenery lovely. But my favorite thing was this little guy walking through a long tunnel, who then purposefully crossed the walkway to climb a long flight of stone stairs. I’d never seen a wild hedgehog before and was charmed.
After an orientation/get-acquainted meeting, we had a group dinner in the hotel. We’ll be a party of 16, plus our guide, driver and occasional local guides. It should be an interesting group, as these parties usually are - some lawyers, an artist, NASA engineer, other scientists, teachers, etc.
Road Scholar has been reminding (warning?) us for months that the activity level for this tour is “Keep the Pace”. Several hours on foot each day, cobblestones, many stairs. They even emailed some exercises to prepare for the trip! It does appear to be a pretty fit group. Hoping I’m not out of my league.
We’ll be visiting the five Balkan countries circled below, zigging and zagging across borders (we’ll enter and depart Croatia three different times) as we progress. We’ll have to wait for another trip to experience Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia.
Greg thoughtfully made maps to track our progress. The black lines show the ground we’ve covered each day, while the blue lines show where we’ve already been. So, for today, we landed at the Dubrovnik airport in Croatia and were shuttled across the border to our hotel in Herceg Novi, Montenegro.
As our group leader, Srdjan Borkovic, wrote to us, the Balkans are a huge mosaic with a million pieces. Even natives can’t put them all together. The history evolved from complex interactions over millennia. It runs from prehistoric times through multiple empires and religions: Illyrian (Indo-European peoples who lived here in antiquity), Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Ottoman, Yugoslav, Croatian, Serbian, Austrian, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, etc. The various ethnic and religious peoples at times have fought bitterly; today it would be called genocide. At other times, they lived in peace. I am not going to attempt to untangle the interwoven histories of all these peoples, but look forward to learning more about them from Srdjan. By training, he is a history professor and should be an good guide to these beautiful, complicated, countries.
That hedgehog is sooooo cute! He would have been my favorite too!
ReplyDelete