Greg and Mandy's Travels

Spent the morning walking around the old city centre of Split, which is the Roman built palace of the Emperor, Diocletian. Usual layout for a Roman City, with two main thoroughfares, Cardo Maximus running north-south, and Decumanus running east-west, forming four quarters within a massive city wall.

Not an abandoned ruin like many ancient Roman cities, but a fully working, modern town where the locals still live and conduct their businesses. A fresh market and a fish market were just outside the walls.

Croatia has this funny rule that says you can’t run a free tour. In Zagreb, they charge you an optional dollar donation.…

After 4 weeks, flying 13,000 km, travelling 4000 km on trains and buses, and walking 290 km through 11 countries and 15 cities, we have hit the half way point, and suddenly morphed from travellers to holiday makers in just over two hours. We arrived in Split.

We are here for five nights, in holiday mode, and that pesky tour director who is always telling us to set the alarm at 6am to make that darn train in his oh-so chirpy voice is having a few days off. There is nothing (read – nothing) on our schedule until next Tuesday.

Maybe we’ll go to the beach.…

I’d assumed that Europe would be a very heavily populated part of the world, but I’ve been surprised just how green lots of Eastern European countries are. Slovenia, having a very small population, was largely green, and Croatia is showing the same characteristics. Some 34% of Croatia is forest, which is pretty darn good, and today we were in the oldest and largest national park in the country – the Plitvice Lakes National Park.

Almost 30,000 hectares, it was declared a National Park in 1949 after the second world war, and became very popular. The road was made in the 60s, and many of the hotels were built not long after.…

Pretty much the last of our trains today. Bid farewell to Ljubljana, which was pretty hard to do, and wandered down to the station to catch the train back where we’d come from – Zagreb. 

Ljubljana joins a very elite group of cities that I’d like to come back to in the future. Very clean, thoughtful, progressive and forward looking. And the scenery is stunning, though I guess it might not appear so attractive in the middle of Winter.

Only second class carriages on our train this time, but there was bundles of room – there was nobody at all in the front carriage.…

When I was just a lad, a depressingly large number of years ago, I discovered an ABC radio program for kids every afternoon at 4:30pm. At the time we were travelling around Australia, and fortunately you could pick up the ABC throughout a lot of the country. I was allowed to listen to it every afternoon, but there was a catch. I had to do my maths homework first. Easy peasy. So did my brother, and he had no interest in doing his homework so that I could listen to the radio. Situation normal.

Anyway, the program was called Jason And The Argonauts.…

Slovenia is a great, little country. Put it on your list. Very European. Clean and very enviro conscious.

Only 2 million people in the country, so it’s small, and has been at the mercy of nearby neighbours for most of it’s history, notably the Austro-Hungarian empire for hundreds of years. Only 200,000 live in the capital Ljubljana, and 40,000 of these are students. Hands up if you think this large proportion might have something to do with free education all the way to PhD level, and reduced tax rates for students?

Rained all morning, but we still joined the free walking tour of the city.…

Seems to be a common answer to get around here. ‘It depends on who you ask.’ There are so many conflicting thoughts, perspectives and experiences, muddied by changing allegiances, and lots of it has occurred within the lifetime of people around you, so that you get a different answer every time you ask a question.

Take, for example, an explanation from our Croatian guide, who was explaining three murals painted on the city wall. Famous Croatians we were told. The most famous – Nikola Tesla ‘who discovered electricity’. OK, so let’s agree that he developed a practical way to transmit and harness Alternating Current electricity, and changed the world.…

Quiet, cool, comfortable. Our apartment that is. So we might have had a bit of a sleep in, and a late start. Felt better for it.

Joined the free walking tour of Zagreb this morning. The first question Luka asked was whether there were any French amongst the tour group. No response. ‘Normal’, he said, ‘but we’re getting a lot of Belgians’, he joked. Luka then went on to describe the scene in the square we were standing in, on the day in July when the Croatian Football team returned from the World Cup final against France – disappointed but very proud.…

Sorry. No offence, Serbia, but as our train trundled across the border to Croatia, and a fast engine got hooked on with some additional carriages, we sped off towards Zagreb and I couldn’t help but feel that we were back in civilisation, or at least back in Europe.

Which is not to say that Belgrade was not nice. They are really trying to modernise the place, there is a lot of history and culture, and the place comes alive after dark, but still the inefficiency is palpable. We hoofed our bags up the hill to the main square, bought some lunch at a bakery, and hopped on a trolley bus in the general direction of the new main train station.…

From the useless list of ‘did you knows’ – Did you know that every girls name in Serbia ends with an ‘A’? What do you mean you’ve never thought about it. Ivana and Dragana were our two guides today. Then there’s Ana Ivanovic, Jelena Dokic, and Weird Al Jankovic (well, Weird Al maybe a guy I guess, it’s hard to tell).

Now our guide tells us that this is important in Slavic languages such as Serbian, as there are six different declensions that you have to apply to females, and you have to have a name that ends with ‘a’ to make it possible.…