Rock 'n' no Roll

Laden with enough fresh tuna for every meal for a week we continued north through the myriad islands off the Croatian coast. Our next stop was Zadar, a place with plenty of living history and an interesting modern twist! Zadar was another of the many towns first built by the Romans. What is surprising is just how much Roman stuff is still around, particularly town walls with impressive arched gates. Other bits have been put to good use over the ages. This Byzantine church, built in the 9th century, has used lots of Roman bits. Stones from an old Roman forum were used as its foundations and paving, if you look closely you can even see bits of old pillars in the base layers! There is also a big cathedral with a rather nice story behind it. Back in the day this whole area was run by the Venetians. Zadar was Roman Catholic which the Venetians didn't like. A gang of crusaders visited Venice and asked for the loan of some ships to go and  do their thing in the Holy Land. The Veneti...

After our scooter adventure we moved to the north coast of the island of Vis. Like much of the European coastline, Croatia has a lot of German concrete from WW2. On Viz we came across this spectacular rather spooky example. Submarines, the menace of the seas, were very vulnerable to air attack when resupplying, this was the German answer to the problem. Many of these submarine pens were built along the coast line, they now make useful docking places for visiting yachts! I reckon each pen would hold 4 submarines. Just opposite the pen was small concrete dock, ideal for setting up the barbeque, and after a barby, any good Aussie must swim - bottoms up! With the last of the meat cooked on the barby we needed to restock. Chris set to work (I don't have the patience) - he got a fish! Well sort of.... thank goodness for supermarkets! Our time was to come though.... We carry an inflatable canoe on board, its nice t...

The sun did come out for Dubrovnik, a beautiful medieval walled city but oh the people! 3 cruise ships were along side for the day - that's 12,000 people on top of those staying there - and its still low season! We did however manage to find a nice quiet and somewhat unusual anchorage for a sea going boat. A couple of miles up the river upon which Dubrovnik was built - we could have been on the Norfolk broads. With both bow and stern anchors out we snuggled up to to the reeds for the night. We are used to having dolphins playing under the bows but a duck is a first! From Dubrovnik we got into the first of hundreds of Croatian islands, the reason this area is such a popular cruising area for charter boats. Hilly, rocky and very green (yes we know why!) coming out of gin clear water. Our trusty steeds got the push this year. We hardly used the bikes last year because Italy was so hilly. As the Adriatic and Greece are very much the same we splashed out on a pair of e...