It happens every now and then that I wake up in the morning with no plans at all for the rest of the day. Actually, normally I wouldn't have stayed in Dubrovnik for 4 days, my original plan was to stay only 3 days, however that would have made me arrive at my next destination on a Sunday and Sundays in ex-Yugoslavia are really boring. Tourist information kiosks are not always opened, people are nowhere to be found... I didn't want to start my next destination on a Sunday, therefore I decided to stay an extra day in Dubrovnik.
The first thing I did today was to have breakfast at the hostel. They had the breakfast included all along but the first day I forgot to go and the second day I left for Kotor too early to eat with them. I had cereals for the first time since Belgrade, the milk was hot and the cereals were a bit boring but I miss cereals so much that they tasted like heaven :)
After breakfast I walked aimlessly in the streets of Dubrovnik. On my way to nowhere, I saw a guy with real life parrots, so cool!
My footsteps brought me outside of the old city walls where I saw a guy advertising for kayaking. I had seen that same guy many time but I wasn't extremely interested, but then I thought "hey since I have nothing better to do, that could be fun!" The price was kind of reasonable so I signed up!
Unfortunately I don't have that many pictures from kayaking, obviously water and cameras don't go extremely well together. But I will try to give you a good enough description so that you can imagine how it was.
First of all here are our mean of transportation:
On the water, the surroundings were approximately like this: Sun warming up my arms and shoulders (fortunately without burning them), drops of water flying around from the kayaking, refreshing my shoulders and arms so a perfect combination with the sun, big waves crashing on our kayak and on the rocks, the city walls of Dubrovnik over us, an island on our left hand side and the adriatic sea as far as the eyes can see on the right-hand side. It was just perfect!
I'm going to show you a picture that I took later in the day so that you have an idea of how far we went.
You see on the picture there is Dubrovnik and an island. On the right of the old town of Dubrovnik there is a little pebble beach from where we left. Then we went kayaking around the island that you see on the picture, and we went a bit further to the left where there was a cave (we stopped there for lunch and a swim), and we finally came back to Dubrovnik. It took us approximately 3 hours.
Here is a picture of when we stopped at the cave:
Coming back was very hard as my arms were quite tired but fortunately I was teamed up with a guy, so we made it back :) After this tiring activity, I could have kept walking but instead thought it was more appropriate to simply crash on a bench and do nothing for 30 minutes!
I don't think I had mentioned it to you but there is a fortress overlooking Dubrovnik located on a montain top, obviously too high for us to walk to it so I had given up on seeing it. I actually didn't bother taking pictures of it because it is so far away, it wasn't going to turn out very well anyways. but while I was walking aimlessly this morning, I realized that there are cable cars that climb all the way there! I didn't know that!!
So after the kayaking, that became my next expedition of the day. Here are a few more pictures from the cable car and from the top of the mountain
We were actually so high on that mountain that there were clouds around us:
I was gladly surprised to find out that the fortress has now been reconverted in a museum about what happened in Dubrovnik in the 1991 war. My blog sound very happy most of the time, because I'm a happy person in general but the exhibition was very sad. I saw pictures that were very disturbing. It started with a view of those nice middle-age narrow streets but with guns and destruction:
The exhibition made a very big impression on me because many of the pictures I saw were taken in places around Dubrovnik where I have been. It's so unbelievable to imagine that the beautiful marina where I walked yesterday looked like this 20 years ago:
The nice orange roofs that I love to admire looked like this in Dubrovnik 20 years ago
The walls on which I personally walked two days ago looked like this 20 years ago
It is very impressive that everything looks picture perfect today when there was so much suffering here not so long ago.
What I've seen today are actions that are absolutely horrible. I know that right now I only have the Croatian side of the story, but from what I have learnt today, it appears like Serbian-Montenegrin army attacked Dubrovnik in order to destroy the Croatians' desire for independance. I honestly do not see any other reasons why Dubrovnik should be attacked. Of course, after seeing this I cannot say "all Serbians and Montenegrins are bad" because I know for a fact that that's not the case. All the Serbian people I got to know personally are fantastic people! But I cannot comprehend how it was made possible that the Serbian-Montenegrin army could attack Croatia, kill so many people, destroy so many lives... I suppose I cannot judge because I'm not in their shoes but still, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
One of the description in the exhibition was the following and I thought it might be good to share it with you:
My personal opinion is that Serbians are awesome people, but a few bad ones had too much power and caused a lot of suffering. I will let you make your own opinion but please don't make a judgement based only from what I write because there are so many facts that I don't know. The reason why I'm sharing this with you today is to create a little curiosity in you, maybe you'll make some research, read more about what happened and decide for yourself. Based on what I read in that exhibition, Croatians feel like the rest of the world is not sufficiently informed about what happened. I'm trying to create the desire in you to be more informed. If we learn from the past, we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
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