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I took a whole roll in beautiful Dubrovnik and made the effort to walk all around it on the ramparts to get good pictures. I took me a difficult three hours to cover the two km distance on my bad ankle. I only got a few barely presentable pictures out of it so I think that I have earned the right to solicit your sympathy and complain about my infernal luck...
This is the Pile Gate at the west end of Placa which is the Old City's main avenue whose east end opens onto the old harbour.
Here is Placa looking east from above the Pile Gate with the Franciscan Monastery in the right foreground and the Clock Tower next to the Harbour Gate at the other end.
Here is part of Dubrovnik's fortifications, from the Pile Gate next to the Franciscan Monastery up to the northeast bastion called Minceta Tower and then eastward towards the harbour.
The roofs of the old city the were all covered with unique honey coloured tiles like those of the Franciscan Monastery before being bombarded by the Serb controlled federal army during en eight months siege from October 'is 91 to May '92. The common red tiles that had to be used for the reconstruction show the extent of the damage suffered during that siege.
Fort Lovrjenac and the Pile district seen from the eastern ramparts.
In Dubrovnik I stayed with a lady who had met me at the bus station. She spoke only Serbo-Croat and German and lived close to the ferry harbour, about three kms from here. It was not very convenient but it was cheap at only 10 $ a night.
Placa looking west towards Pila Gate. It was sad to see so few tourists in this beautiful city. I generally do not like to see crowds of milling tourists because I travel to meet the local people and not other visitors like myself. In this case however, their absence made the place look empty. The civil war was over but the tourist attendance had not returned to its prewar levels. There had been very few tourists in Sarajevo and Mostar as well...
The Balkan end of this year's trip turned out to be a mess but there were some good moments like having a super seafood dinner and meeting the friendly owner Andrija Marinovic who sat down to share vast quantities of his homemade wine with me an Italian customer, Flavio Cardone, who was driving to Albania that night. Had it not been for my ankle I would have asked him to take me with him and taken a chance of getting a transit visa to cross Montenegro at the Yugoslav border. It was very tempting but I really did not feel up to it and prudently resigned myself to get home as quickly as possible via Bari, Rome and Madrid.
