Personal update – I’m tired. And I kind of want to go home. 😬 I’m about halfway through my trip and I’ve already done so much! I can’t believe I still have at least this much more time and activity before I go home. Strongly considering coming home early. 😅 Never thought I’d feel like this. I’m just not as spry as I used to be!! Six weeks is a long time!!

I believe these feelings have been brewing for a while, but the uncertainty and stress of the past few days hasn’t helped. Most of this unsettlement has been caused by the weather. My whole trip has been very touch-and-go weather-wise. The forecast keeps saying rain, rain, rain, and then usually there isn’t actually as much rain as predicted, but it makes it really hard to plan around. And then when the rain does come, it puts a (literal) damper on things.

In the past, I’ve mostly travelled to really big cities that are filled with museums and lots to do and see indoors, so the rain doesn’t get in the way too much. For this trip, though, I’m visiting mostly smaller cities and places where the outdoors are a big draw. Hence, the rain is a lot more disruptive.

The morning I left Split, I grabbed a tuna wrap (it was meh) and headed for the ferry. I was a little worried because when I woke up and stumbled out of my room at 10:30, the Canadian boy, Will, taking a ferry at the same time, was already locked and loaded, headed out the door. I later chatted with him about it and he said he was even “running behind” at that time! Jeez!

I high tailed it to the ferry, booked my ticket for cheaper than it would have been online (boo-yah!), and boarded the ferry. There were some really nice views, but I was pretty much smack in the middle of the boat, so not much window access.

When I arrived at the island of Hvar, the weather was overcast but not rainy, thank goodness. The water was this gorgeous, gorgeous turquoise-blue, so, so clear, and the view from my hostel balcony was delightful.

After checking in and settling down, thankful to have a bottom bunk that I could actually sit up in, I headed back to the port and the old town to explore.

I had some of the best ice cream of my life from a little stand on the port – “peanut” flavor, with a layer of the softest, creamiest peanut butter on top of the ice cream bin that got swirled in when it was scooped. SO yummy!

The old town was very cute and very small, with lots of restaurants but not a ton of shops.

I decided to walk up away from the city into the hills so that I could get a view from the fortress.

It was slow-going because it was hot! I took several breaks on these nice cozy lounge benches interspersed throughout the trail, and near the top, I sat for a while to enjoy a snack and listen to a guitar player who was busking nearby.

The fortress itself cost €10 to enter, and many people struggled to decide whether it was worth that price to access the toilets, myself included! As an English lady put it, “They aren’t daft, are they?”

I bit the bullet and paid the entrance fee in the hopes of another nice viewpoint. Mission accomplished!

I was also super fascinated by the prison. Not sure I’ve ever seen a medieval prison this in-tact, and you could even go inside the cells. Not a bad view, but what a horrible place to live, otherwise! So tiny.

Stalagmites were formed near the cell doors where there were holes in the ceiling. That part was pretty cool. I think there were six tiny cells in all. I wonder who had to spend time here and why.

After the fortress, I spent a lot of time debating hiking up to the second fortress, built by Napoleon. I was already so hot and tired! And I would get hungry soon. But I decided to do it in the end, and it was definitely worth it.

This trail really was a hike, albeit a short one. I had to walk along a road without sidewalks to access it, so that was the sketchiest part. It was also a little sketchy that I was in a dress with a long skirt, but I managed! I didn’t see a single soul on my way up.

When I got to the top, a van appeared and unloaded to people to take pictures. Lol. Didn’t realize you could just drive up there!

It was amazing to see the surrounding islands and the town down below. So beautiful! I rewarded myself with this tasty hazelnut chocolate milk I’d been saving. Basically Nutella milk! Yum.

I did see two pairs of people on my way down, probably heading up for sunset, but I didn’t want to wait around for that!

For dinner, I went to a place called Fig that was also in Split. I’d had some fully-loaded fruit pancakes there. This time, I had a fig and ricotta flatbread. Yum, yum, yum. I followed dinner with some golden-hour wanderings.

This really was one of my favorite days in a while! So fulfilling, adventurous, and unexpected. Very satisfying.

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The following day, I was supposed to do a full-day boat tour of some other islands and caves that people have been raving about. Unfortunately, due to the wind, that tour was cancelled. Whomp-whomp.

Faced with an unexpected day on this island, I decided to walk down to the beach. It was super pretty, though not warm or calm enough for swimming, and all of the cafes were mostly abandoned or closed entirely.

After reaching the first beach, I just kept on walking along the coastal trail. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I just checked AllTrails, and it looks like it was about 8 miles total! No wonder I was so tired. Unplanned hikes are always the most exhausting, because, yet again, I didn’t have proper snacks and got quite hungry toward the end. I’m still obsessed with the color of the water, though.

I was also really, really hoping to catch a bus back to Hvar town when I reached the town of Milna, but there didn’t seem to be one, and I couldn’t even figure out how to get to the town. With a big old sigh of resignation, I turned around and hightailed it back the way I’d come. I was a bit cranky, tired, and hungry by this time, haha. Also very hot!

I’ve been getting tired of eating the same food all the time. The places I’ve visited in Croatia are all known for their seafood, and every restaurant seems to offer the same five dishes. Yummy, but tiring. Then for breakfast and lunch, I’ve just been having pastries, and I’m so tired of bread!! I just wanted simple food today, so I went to the grocery store in the morning for cereal and milk, and for dinner, I got some pasta sauce and gnocchi.

The cereal was 10/10 what I wanted and needed. The pasta was 4/10. I should have gotten regular pasta instead of gnocchi, and I should have gotten my sauce at the bigger grocery store where they had more options. Instead, I was stuck with this roasted red pepper and eggplant sauce that was just not doing it for me, and the gnocchi was not as cozy as regular pasta.

I ended up giving up on the pasta and having another helping of cereal for dinner, haha. Don’t worry though! I pawned my leftover pasta onto so girls who were hungry and hanging out in the kitchen. They agreed it was weird.

The highlight of the meal was this ice cream bar. I thought it would be vanilla coated in chocolate, but it was actually both vanilla and chocolate ice cream coated by both white and milk chocolate. And the coating was soft, not hard. Very interesting and very tasty!

After dinner, I wandered down to the harbor, where I got rained on a bit, and then wandered back to my hostel to just have a super, super lazy evening planning out future days of my trip and catching up on the blog.

Most of the rest of the hostel attempted a sunset hike up to the Napoleon Fortress, but it was so cloudy that they didn’t get a real sunset. Also, they were not prepared for it to be a real hike, so many of them struggled on the way up. Also, it started POURING on them once they reached the top. Poor things. Then they had to walk down in the dark and the rain, slipping and falling all over the hillside. What a mess, haha. My roommates looked pretty miserable when they returned, but they admitted it was still nice and fun.

There were five girls in my room plus the Canadian boy from Split. So strange that people really seemed to follow the same itinerary on this trip. I kept having people follow me from city to city, or people were heading places I’d just come from. That’s what you get by travelling locally, I guess! In the past, I’ve mostly travelled by air, from one place to somewhere else far away.

The Canadian boy didn’t come back after the hike, and all of us girls were taking ferries off the island the next day, so we all just stayed in and chatted for several hours. It was so nice and cozy! There was an American girl (who did the same study abroad program I did in Copenhagen!), an Australian girl, and two British girls. Very cute.

What was not cute was being woken up in the morning by all the girls as they rummaged around the room for an hour and a half when I’d decided to sleep in and take a later ferry. Ugh.

What was even less fun was finally getting out of bed just to learn my ferry had been cancelled, and that the earlier one hadn’t been. CURSES!!

Seriously I was kicking myself for that one so much, especially since I didn’t even get to sleep in. Ughhhhh. Most of the girls had to panic themselves across the island to a different port with bigger ferries since their boats had also been cancelled. What a mess.

Faced with yet another day on Hvar that I wasn’t planning on, I joined a Dutchman for coffee who had been scheduled for my same cancelled ferry. He’d been there four nights already, so he wanted off the island even more than I did.

For lunch, I recommended we go back to Fig yet again so that I could try this “Mexican pulled pork” I’d been curious about but never hungry enough to try before. It was super tasty, but it was also super messy.

We even crashed the table of another hostel guest, a girl from Atlanta who had been travelling and working in hostels in Portugal and Switzerland for a few months. So neat! She said the snow was icy at her home mountain in Switzerland, though. Hmmmm.

After lunch, Maikel the Dutchman and I walked around the island in the opposite direction from where I’d gone the day before. Here’s the map:

Green was my 8 mile coast hike, and red was the paved trail we did on this day. Not too shabby.

There were also some park shenanigans.

We were thrilled to find that the five o’clock ferry was not cancelled, so we could leave the island after all. We went to our hostel to grab our bags and then back to the port to wait. Some of the hostel workers had eaten half my remaining bag of cereal, though! Lol. I’ll manage.

I wanted to hit up that awesome ice cream place to try a dark chocolate-lavender flavor they had, but they weren’t offering this flavor today! Dangit! I settled for pistachio and was quite pleased. Also, if I’d known the cone was free, I would have gotten one the other day, too. Oh, well.

The leftovers from my messy lunch made a huge, orange, greasy mess in my bag, and my white visor was the worst victim. Maikel insisted multiple times that I throw both it and the leftovers away. Not on my watch.

Because only one ferry per day travelled to Maikel’s intended island, he decided to follow me to Korčula.

I was bummed I didn’t get a full day here. We landed around 6:30 after a very bumpy ferry. Thank goodness I thought to take a nausea pill, but it was not very fun. That might be the first time I’ve ever felt seasickness. The boat was mostly locals, though, and they seemed entirely unphased.

Korčula is kind of like Rovinj in that the old town is on a tiny, adorable peninsula. I loved it right away! It was raining when we landed, but I had a great view from my hotel room. I was also so, so excited to have my own room, my own bathroom, my own wardrobe, my own mini fridge, a view, and no bunk bed. Like, seriously, so excited.

After some rest, we walked into the city and I was tickled to find a bunch of little art shops open late. I spent way too much money on trinkets and paintings. Not even sure where they will go!

For dinner, we found a super cozy spot and each had a risotto with wine. (He got truffle risotto and I had vegetable risotto.) This was maybe my most tasty meal of the whole trip so far. So creamy, with so much flavor. I can almost taste it now!

A little decaf coffee after dinner, and then it was time for bed.

I woke up at six in the morning without my alarm and strongly debated getting up for a walk, but then it started raining. Maikel and I met at the agreed upon 7am to walk around as much as we could before our 10am ferry.

We started our walk through town and then along the coast.

I still can’t get over how clear and green the water is here.

Our path then wound up into the hills for a great view of the town. Practically a post card!

It started raining on our way down, and Maikel and I were both cranky for different reasons. He had been hoping for (and expecting) sun and warmth on this trip, so he literally only packed t-shirts. He bought a linen pullover, but that didn’t help much with the rain. He went back to the hotel to dry off.

I went into town with the hopes of climbing the bell tower. I was told it would open at 9, but I stood around in the rain until I finally had to call it at 9:25. Not pleased!

I grabbed a really yummy chocolate croissant, which made me feel a tiny bit better.

I only packed tennis shoes on this trip, but I have these latex shoe covers that do wonders at keeping the water out. I just slip them on when it’s wet and take them off when it’s dry. SOMEHOW a bunch of water snuck into my left one and the whole ball of my foot and toes were soaked. Again, not pleased!

When I got back to my room, I took everything off and apart and attempted to blow dry my shoe and sock. Time went by fast, though, so I realized my ferry was coming in only fifteen minutes. In my rush to put everything back on, I ripped right through the left shoe cover, like a popped balloon. I was so unhappy!!!

I speed-walked to the ferry station, my left foot getting more and more wet, and stood crankily under cover as the ferry arrived.

Now let me tell you, this was a crazy ferry. Thank goodness we didn’t do the one at noon, because it would have probably been cancelled, as the wind was picking up throughout the day.

It became immediately clear that this ferry would be rocky like the first, so I took a nausea pill and had no issues this time. The other passengers (almost none of them locals) were not so lucky. That two hour ferry ride probably felt like an absolute eternity to them.

So much puking!!! Everywhere!!! Then poor souls! There was simply too much puking for too long to do it in the bathroom. Practically the entire center section of the boat was holding onto their little paper bags for dear life. A man walked around with a blue bucket periodically to collect the bags and hand out new ones, and let me tell you, his bucket filled up multiple times.

I put on my headphones super super loud, pressing them into my ears, and kept my eyes closed in an attempt not to see or hear any of the action. Goodness gracious. This ride was definitely more rocky than the first one, so it must have been some combination the nausea pill and luck that I felt totally fine the whole time. It was scary, though! Like an uncontrolled roller coaster. I almost grabbed the arm of the nice Singaporean boy in my row multiple times, lol.

I was so glad to be off that boat, but I’m sure not as glad as about eighty other people on that ship. Poor, poor things. I felt so guilty that I didn’t offer my nausea pulls to the ones nearby, but it just seemed sketchy because they were prescription pills in a Ziploc, lol. It didn’t seem right to share, but I really wish the boat sold Dramamine. I mean, come on!

Staying on land for the foreseeable future! More to come.

Najbolje želje,

-Lizzy-wa