Berlin Botanic Garden

Finally more pictures

I loaded up some more, not in the best order or anything but I did add a few comments. It was a great trip. Now, it's just a matter of planning the next one!

Cambridge

The hostel at Ljubljana used Linux and it didn't play well with blogger.com so, only the imprisoned part went through. The hostel was formerly a prison. It has been completely redone and is very beautiful, the nicest hostel I've stayed at. Part of the prison complex has been turned into a sort of commune, like Christiana in Copenhagen. It was a very interesting place and probably my favorite city of the entire trip.

I didn't want to spend the rest of my time in London, I'm tired of big cities, fortunately, there was a girl from Milton Keynes in Ljubljana and she said that Cambridge would be the place to go, so, here I came. It's really beautiful and it has the nicest botanical garden I've ever seen.

Tomorrow, I bus it to London and then Wednesday fly back home. It's been a great trip but as always the idea of sleeping in my own bed is more and more appealing so I'll be ready to get home.

Internet access here is $6 an hour so I'll wait until I get home to post the pics and give a summary of my trip.

Til then,

Lyle

The photos are of the Botanic Garden in Cambridge, the Hostel in Ljubljana and a cool sculpture in Ljubljana.

Imprisoned!

RAIN!

One thing I didn't mention about the trip from Zagreb to Sarajevo was the route. We started in a Serbian area, the only reason I know that is that all the signs were written with the Cyrillic Alpabet. It was pretty flat but then we went into a river valley and followed what must have been originally a goat track. It wasn't unlike Hwy 299 between Arcata and Redding, the only real difference was that 299 is 3 times as wide and has shoulders. Although it wasn't too bad staring straight down into nothing or looking up and seeing these huge boulders ready to spring on top of the bus and the daredevlin antics of Laurel & Hardy (the bus driver and his relief), it was absolutely terrifying when we passed someone walking along the road. One time a woman leaned so far back I thought for sure she was going to tumble down the cliff or the woman with her baby carriage I thought for sure was going to be sucked under the bus. It was a beautfiul trip thogh witht he Karst (limestone) mountains towering above and the river winding below.

There was one section though where about 50 houses had been totally destroyed, housing is in very short supply in Bosnia because the Yugoslav army did its best to eliminate as many houses as possible.

The morning I left Sarajevo, I had to leave about 6 am to get to the bus station in time. As I was leaving, the loudspeakers from the mosque below were alive with the call to morning prayers. It was Ramadan while I was there so that may account for the fact that so few people were out and about. Even the internet cafe I was at was playing muslim music.

There is an Apple Center in Sarajevo, in one of the University buildings, it looked a lot like the one in Budapest so I assume there must be some relationship there. I even saw a few white earbuds around town.

One of the oddest things about Sarajevo was the lack of tourists. Of course, it was off season but still. There were a few Northern European types but there was a definite lack of backpackers. The only foreigners I saw were those dressed in military uniforms, French, Italian, Finnish flags were very apparent on uniforms.

One thing I haven't mentioned is how impossibly clean the streets are. Sarajevo was absolutely spotless. It took me awhile to notice as there are so many destroyed buildings. The same with Croatia, the beaches don't have a single scrap of paper, the streets are spotless, there are little garbage cans everywhere and the water itself is the bluest, clearest looking stuff I've ever seen.

So, Dubrovnik is by far the most beautiful place I've ever been. The sun was shining all but the second to last day I was there and Except that day I spent a couple of hours every day on the beach. My accomodation was a room in the house of a 60ish woman. She lived in the ground floor of a 3 story stone house. The view was to the northwest and took in the ferry terminal and the sunsets were always incredible. She didn't speak much English, so most of our conversation was in French, although mine is so rusty that it was tough going at times.

I have a lot of pictures but this place doesn't have USB connections so, maybe from Ljubljana.

From Dubrovnik I headed north via bus to a little town called Orebic. It's on a little peninsula jutting up from Dubrovnik and isn't anything special but it has a southern exposure so is warmer than the more beautiful town of Korcula with its northern exposure.

Three days of beach and hiking up in the foothills, the forests are pretty dense and full of a few familiar plants but many I dont know. Lavender grows wild and the Italian Cypresses are huge. I'm sure it's considered rude but I've spent a lot of time peeking over walls into people's gardens. The pension I stayed at in Orebic had a beautiful garden and it was filled with hibiscus, gardenias and all sorts of exotics. It would be fun to come and pretend to do an article on Croatian gardens just to get inside of some of these beautiful places, maybe next time!

So, rain... Well, it's a good thing I decided to move on today as I woke up to cloudy and windy but warm skies and just as I got to the ferry terminal it started to pour down. I'm in beautiful Korcula now waiting for the bus to take me to the other end of the island so I can catch the ferry tomorrow am at 630 to Split. I'm hoping the rain stops so that I can enjoy Diocletian's Palace but I'm not holding my breath.

Only 9 days to go and only one more new country to see, Slovenia.

Lyle

the z's instead of y's and the lack of apostrophes is due to the strange keyboard layouts not my dyslexia!

Oops, meant to post the Sarajevo posts on the previous one. I don't know the name of the town, it was between Sarajevo and Dubrovnik. Typical Bosnian village.

The Church was up on the hillside on the mainland opposite Korcula. There was no road to it, just a few paths through the maquis. An old women who lived in the cottage behind the church was herding her two massive goats when I got there. I never saw her again. Maybe she didn't like company. The tower is in Korcula and supposedly the birthplace of Marco Polo. It's disputed of course and the current party line of the historians is that he was probably born in Split.

The house was on the waterfront in Orebic and was a captain's house because of the two windows in the attic where the captain's wife would keep a lookout for his ship. Similar to the widow's walk of houses in the coast NE of the US. Most of the doorframe had been replaced, all carved stone of course. It's amazing coming from the land of wood houses to see such intricate stone work.

Dubrovnik

Got here about 2 pm on Friday Ive dreamed of seeing the city for years and for once the photos dont do it justice. Its impossible beautiful. The difference between Sarajevo and Dubrovnik is like night and day. Sun, temps in the 70s and 80s, friendly people used to tourists, blinding white limestone buildings, crystal clear water just warm enough to swim in. The town is packed with Italians today so Im off to a little beach tucked into a southwest facing cove. There were only about a half dozen people there yesterday.

Im not sure that I want to leave here!

Lyle

The photo of the funky little half cave house is just outside of the walled part of Dubrovnik, it seems so timeless like so much of the city. The photograph of the city was from the island of Lokrum, which is about a 15 minute ferry ride from the city. There was a monastery, a small botanic garden, a ruined fortress, ruined by the Serbs by the way. It made for a great day trip. I found a southwest facing cove and spent a couple of hours taking the sun.

Dubrovnik was heavily shelled during the war and the old town received a lot of damage. It's almost impossible to tell now as most has been repaired. There are still bullet holes in a lot of the stone buildings and some of the stucco buildings, especially in the part of town that I stayed in haven't been repaired. It's hard to imagine that the Serbs could so willfully destroy such a thing of beauty, but then the Croats destroyed the 15th century arched bridge in Mostar so....

The people in Dubrovnik were truly some of the friendliest I'd met. It's definitely a place I'll back to.

The photo with the goal painted on the wall was a little soccer field within the walled city. I can't imagine what it must be to live in a place with a constant flow of tourists.

Somewhat surreal evening

So, Donna, the girl from Connecticut here at the hostel, had met this guy who played in Hungarian reggae/ska band and they were playing Saturday night not far from the hostel. Donna had a housewarming party to go to but said to meet her at the club around midnight.

So,,, Charlotte and Matt from New Zealand and I took off about midnight in search of the club. We get to where it should be and there's just offices and apartments and a Hotel. We ask at the hotel and the guy says it's just 3 houses down the street. We go further down, nothing, but we stop and ask a couple of people standing on the sidewalk, silently, they point at the door of the place they're standing in so in we go. We can hear music and we follow it up the stairs, which are crowded with people out for a smoke. A lot of them seem to be using sign language and as we got to the top and go in, it turns out that everyone is signing! There's a bar there so we go and order a beer and since this is obviously a deaf party there is no need whatsoever to worry about our lack of Hungarian so we point, guilt free at our preferred tipple and all is fine.

After a half hour or so, a guy next to me starts to sign, obviously he thinks because of my hearing aids I'm there like everyone else for a night out amongst the hearing impaired. Unfortunately, I can't sign and I have no way of telling him that so I pull out my passport and show him that I'm American and then he tries signing again (in International Sign Language maybe?) but it's no use. He gets a little agitated, leaves and comes back with a guy with a security badge around his neck. He signs at me, nothing of course, so we start heading to the door, finish our beers and leave after a few more minutes. It wasn't threatening or anything, just very awkward. On the way out, Charlotte spoke to someone who was Irish so I don't think it was my nationality that was the problem but the lack of sign language. It's too bad I don't sign, it could have been a very interesting evening.

After leaving, we found our way to the New Orleans club near the Oktogon, they were playing bad 80s dance music and there were some very drunken Hungarians speaking very bad english. On our way out we talked to a couple of American girls who were on their way to Romania to spend Halloween in Transylvania, that sounds sort of cool! We got back around 5:30 and I don't really think I'll see much outside of the hostel today!


Lyle