Croatia: Dubrovnik

We arrived in Dubrovnik on July 1st for our 2 day stay in this beautiful city. It took us most of the morning (from about 5am until 1pm) to sail there, so to break up the long boat ride we had some fun in the water during a swim break.

We also had a chance to admire some of the beautiful scenery and shoreline of Croatia.

Dubrovnik is not on an island, but is on the shore of the Adriatic Sea on the mainland. The city is famous for it’s association with the TV show Game of Thrones, where a number of scenes were filmed throughout Dubrovnik. The city, like other cities we’ve seen is surrounded by a high city wall.

The city has now grown outside the walls, and the total population of Dubrovnik is about 42,615, where only about 1000 of them live within the city walls. The city of Dubrovnik is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Because of this, the government has placed many restrictions on construction within the city walls, for example, you can not do renovations to the outside of your home within the walls because all homes must look alike on the outside, but you can do whatever you want inside. You are also only allowed 1 air conditioner per residence.

Since it was Canada day we wanted to show our support of our amazing country from the other side of the world.

Our first activity in Dubrovnik was to go Kayaking outside and around the city walls, and to a small island just off the shore.

We started our journey just outside the Dubrovnik city walls:

When we got to the island we ended up paddling right past a nudist beach! It was interesting to notice which beach users covered up when they saw our group of kayakers and which ones exposed more skin. Luckily the beach area is not extremely large and we paddled by pretty quickly!

We kayaked into a couple caves:

We made a little stop in the cave below to go swimming, eat some lunch, and admire the beautiful scenery.

I really enjoyed kayaking! It was pretty cool being able to kayak just outside the city walls, and view the city from the sea.

That evening we wanted to make sure we celebrated Canada day in style, so in preparation for our trip Paige and I bought a whole bunch of Canada temporary tattoos for the whole group. We made everyone an honorary Canadian and we spent the afternoon tattoo-ing everyone so that we could all celebrate Canada day together!

Our group showing off their new temporary tattoos:

The following morning we set out to explore within the city walls of Dubrovnik.  Below is a photo of the outer walls:

The entrance into the inner city:

The city is beautiful, and I loved walking through the streets and admiring the architecture and buildings.

The clock tower (in the photo below) is kind of interesting. It rings on the hour, but then it will also ring 3 minutes later. This is to remind people that 3 minutes have passed and if they were meeting someone on the hour then they would be late. They use 3 minutes because it takes 3 minutes to get from the city walls to the clock tower, and thus 3 minutes is the maximum acceptable amount of time to be late.

Within the city walls there are no cars allowed, and all the streets (apart from the main center street) are small and narrow, lined with shops and restaurants.

We decided to climb up the city walls, and walk around the whole city on top of the walls. It was pretty cool, and we got a great view of the city from up top!

At one side of the walls there is a tower on top of the wall, and once we climbed up the tower we had an even better view of the whole city:

After walking the walls we were exhausted from the sun! We had heard about a bar in the city, just outside the city walls, where you can have a beer and jump off cliffs into the water. A few of the guys in our group wanted to try cliff jumping, so we headed to the bar for some beers.

Since the idea of jumping off a cliff doesn’t exactly appeal to me, I decided to enjoy my beer while taking photos of the boys jumping.

Overall I really enjoyed my time in Dubrovnik. It is a beautiful city, with lots to see and do, and of course I will always remember it for the location where we all celebrated Canada Day in style.