An Amazing Day

We left Trieste early Friday for Dubrovnik and what a day!  We drove nearly the full length of the country, from the north to the south so were able to see a great deal of the country.

Croatia is the most amazing country, geographically.  It has mountains and over 5 000 kms of coast. It also has thousands of islands in the Adriatic Sea.  However, what really amazed us were the thick forests that covered every part of the land from the northern border down at least a third of the length of the country. 

These forests were so thick.  Some were planted but most were natural and there was no end to them- very desolate looking and with few houses in these areas.  The undergrowth was also very thick and unrelenting. We had never seen anything like this topography anywhere we had ever been.

When we thought we were never going to see anything but trees for the length of the trip, the scene changed again and for about another third, we were in a geographical area that resembled a moonscape- limestone hills and more limestone hills with great chunks of rocks that looked as if someone had tipped giant buckets of rocks everywhere.  We saw some cement works in the areas but mostly just rocks and hills.

The little towns were interesting.  All the houses looked exactly the same.  Each was two storeys high but very narrow and had white walls and an orange roof.  The industries are not attached to towns but are just set randomly all over the country.

When we were just getting used to the fact that we might be travelling through this limestone moonscape for the rest of the trip, we turned a corner and there was the sea.  It looked like a lake because it was so calm.  It was a long way from the actual sea because it Croatia has many fjords and thousands of islands, many of them inhabited with huge hotels.

The scenery was just breathtaking. We had read many documentaries about Dubrovnik and what a lovely place it is and seen photos in the travel sections of newspapers, some of which we thought may be a tad airbrushed!  But no- this was the real deal and it was absolutely perfect.

We were in for an even bigger surprise when we reached the journey’s end.