This morning I left Kotor at 10, getting a ride from the French couple I had met yesterday.
We drove along the coastline for a while and then crossed the Croatian border which took 1 hour of waiting. The trip gave me the opportunity to polish up my French a little.
I arrived at Dubrovnik around 1. Dubrovnik lays on the very end of the narrow line of Croatia that spreads along the coastline, surrounded by Bosnia. It is a city built like a fortress on the rocks right next to the coast and surrounded by huge city walls.
It would be a lie to say that Dubrovnik isn’t incredibly beautiful. It would be also a lie to say that I enjoyed being there. The narrow streets of the old town were packed with tourists from all over the world, most of them streaming out of two enormous cruise ships that had landed there before. Also, everything was extremely expensive, for one night in a 12-bed dorm I would be spending the same money as for two nights and laundry in Montenegro.
Basically, Dubrovnik represents everything I hate about typical tourist destinations. A stroll on the city walls would have cost me almost 30€, in the entrances to the old town, signs would be indicating where to walk, creating lanes like on a motorway and I wouldn’t see even one local person during the whole afternoon.
Indecisive and bored, in the end I decided to join the free walking tour and it was actually pretty good. The guide had been personally fighting in the Dubrovnik Army in 1991 when the Serbs invaded Croatia and destroyed most of the city. He partly focused the tour on that part of the history, showed us the bullet-holes – still visible in many buildings – and explained that only very few buildings were actually old.
He also provided a more critical view on the massive tourism invading Dubrovnik in the last years, mainly coming from cruise ships and film industry tourism (Dubrovnik is one of the main settings of Game of Thrones, among others). Thanks to this invasion, Dubrovnik is being converted into a ghost city like it is happening to so many other places in Europe. From originally 5000 people living in the old town, there are only 500 left.
You are probably very tired of reading about my opinions on mass tourism, so I’ll leave it here; I think it has become pretty clear how little I enjoy being in these places and Dubrovnik is clearly the worst yet.
My experience got topped off by unwillingly landing in a terrible Party-Hostel on a Saturday night, where the cool kids were getting wasted and ready to go out and get more wasted.
My only hope is that they won’t be back before I leave tomorrow early in the morning. I will be very glad to get out of here and hope Bosnia will make me happier than this.
Later at night I went out to pick up my ticket for tomorrow and strolled around the town for a bit, finally sitting down on a bench at the harbor under the full moon. While watching the boats rocking softly in the darkness I could feel that eternal loneliness that always overcomes me when I’m in a civilized world and situation I don’t fit in. It’s much easier to actually be alone. It’s not that I want to fit in (I don’t.), but rather the fact of not being able to escape it or share it with someone like-minded. I could have enjoyed this place much more in a different situation but with things as they are this is a clear low-point of my journey. I should probably just go live with the animals in the mountains…
Anyhow, some pictures of Dubrovnik, it’s very nice, just go there in february!:
