Last week I took a well-deserved holiday in Dubrovnik, Croatia. What a beautiful city, but damn they have so many stairs. They also had many cats so that kind of made up for it 😺.
A newer part of Dubrovnik, as seen from the city wall surrounding the old town
Also I found out that Game of Thrones was filmed there. I don't watch it so I had no idea, but it's not something you can get around when exploring the city. It seems 90% of the town revolves around tourism in the first place, and from what I saw around me at least 75% of that tourism nowadays revolves around GoT.
I can't blame them from exploiting the series' popularity of course, but even for people who aren't fans of the series Dubrovnik is a beautiful city that's definitely worth visiting.
Dubrovnik as seen from the island Lokrum (city wall visible on the left)
Some highlights of my trip:
- The "old city" is really beautiful. It's surrounded by a big wall which you can climb, allowing you to walk around the entire old town and have some great views (see photos below).
- The island Lokrum (visible from Dubrovnik, 15 minutes by boat) has beautiful nature and is amazing to walk around or just sit around and chill.
- The town of Cavtat (20 minutes by bus) is smaller and older than Dubrovnik. It's also less touristic, and has a lot of great restaurants. Great if you want to escape from the mass of tourists in Dubrovnik.
Cavtat, a quaint little town not far from Dubrovnik
Some more upsides of going to Dubrovnik:
- It's cheap. Due to circumstances my girlfriend and I had to make do with a shoe-string budget. We managed to keep a 7-day trip for two just under €1000. That includes flight, apartment, travel expenses, everything. Not bad!
- Despite the city being very old, it seems quite modern in a lot of aspects. Public transit is decent, the city is clean and well looked after, a lot of stores are open 7 days a week and often until late at night, and even an emergency visit to a dentist for my girlfriend was no problem at all and actually a better experience than at home.
- Croatians seem to love animals and take care of them very well. There are a lot of pets, and they all look groomed and well fed. We did see quite a lot of homeless cats and some stray dogs, but even those looked pretty good.
- Everyone speaks English.
Cat enjoying the view of the old town (taken from the surrounding city wall)
There were only a few aspects of visiting Dubrovnik that could use some improvement, if you ask me:
- Bus schedules are hard to find, and seem more like a rough guideline than anything else.
- Similarly, prices and details of sightseeing attractions are also rather unclear. Ask three different tourist information centers the price or opening hours of an attraction and you get three different answers, none of which exactly matches reality.
- The service is horrible in many places. Waiters seem offended if you try to order something, bus drivers are completely unwilling to answer questions about where they're going (a shrug was the most common response) and smiles are rare. The times we did find decent service we made sure to tip well and visit that place again if we could.
All in all we did have a great time though, I'd definitely recommend Dubrovnik if you're into city trips. Even more so if you're a fan of Game of Thrones.
I'll finish with some photos that further demonstrate the title of this post. Stairs, cats and sometimes both:
