I always get to bus stations early. This is partly because every bus station is soaked in local history and has to be savoured like an exotic fruit, but mostly because I am sort of dumb. It always seems certain that something weird will happen, and that that weird thing will take probably 40 minutes or so. Mostar was one of those rare times (actually, has it ever happened before?) when I am right: the bus to Split left twenty minutes early, which I still do not understand. Maybe they just looked at what they had and thought, yeah, this is enough?
We passed a watchtower on a cliff, pulled into another shabby bus station to collect two passengers, and headed for a border crossing, which was smaller and more casual than the one between Bulgaria and Serbia. The bus's Number Two man -- he loads luggage, opens skylights, checks tickets, closes skylights after people complain -- collects the passports, stacks them into a fat open book, and mooches off to a little booth across the parking lot. When he comes back, he reads out the names and hands out documents to those who claim them. He'd sorted mine to the bottom, having judged, very intelligently, that this would save a lot of irritating confusion.
On the Croatian side, the same thing, except our passports were collected by a border guard, and were just brought back to us stamped. They hauled one young couple off for a search, probably just to keep in practice. The same process with the passports, but this time mine was in the middle somewhere: "Canada?" Yo. A sign said Split 106km, but we weren't due to arrive for almost three hours. The bus, for whatever reason, avoids the highway in the interior and hugs the sea, tracing the whole crinkly Dalmatian coast, leaning left, right, left as it runs through endless S-curves on hillside roads.
Driving into Split, and wandering around it looking for a grocery store that's open on Sundays, you get an idea of how insignificant a piece of it the tourist section really is. Outside it is a city of 300,000 people. On Sunday nights, the men are gathered around bocce lanes, the children are running around wildly, and the women are -- I don't know what the women do, so I'm going to say "Go Karting". At the bus station in Split, old ladies mill about, offering rooms for anyone who thought "no need to book ahead, I'll just follow a mysterious crone off into the dark streets".
The old town of Split is beautiful and well-scrubbed. There is little graffiti, no begging, no litter, no dirt, no stray dogs, no cons, no buskers -- an eerie, Disney-fascist sort of feeling. Winding, narrow stone streets, a seafront stretch of white benches and cafes, and just enough historical attractions to feel vaguely enriching. Along the wharf, a line of huge Adriatic ferries and the booming nose-blow of cruise ships coming in to port. In the early morning -- by far the best time to wander around in Split -- tiny street-washers sweep the narrow alleys ahead of you, as for an emperor or a curling stone. Later, the town fills up with other tourists and with men dressed as Roman centurions of the wrong period.
The centre of the old town is Diocletian's palace. Diocletian, having stabilized the empire after decades of appalling chaos and established a radical new administration -- it failed immediately, but it was a good try -- retired here, having ordered construction to begin decades earlier (it reminds me that I need to give orders for my own fortified retirement palace). According to the wildly unreliable historians of the fourth century, he amused himself growing vegetables, tried to resolve some disputes, got annoyed, and died. Later peoples, fleeing from or intent on causing Dark Age mayhem, chose to settle around it ("hm, rocky coastline, dense forest, vacant palace...") and a medieval city grew over the ruins like a beautiful stone fungus.
They turned Diocletian's mausoleum into a tiny cathedral; hanging behind its altar is a huge crucifix of remarkable gruesomeness. Upstairs, a treasury: liturgical bric-a-brac and shelves of reliquaries. Finger bones, silver heads with small crystal windows to reveal pieces of skull inside, a glass casket of bones, all collected with the idea of benefiting from the holy radiation they would continue to kick out after death. It's quite a concentrated dose you get here, in this little enclosed space. Outside, a disproportionately large bell tower, probably added in embarrassment over having found a cathedral ready-made when so many towns were beginning multi-century efforts to build their own. Underneath it all, the crypt itself, cheekily rededicated to St. Lucy. The only possible remnant of Diocletian's own burial is a chunk of porphyry in the archaeological museum (which is so popular I get cobwebs on my arms poking around its outdoor collection).
I spent an afternoon walking around Marjan Park, an enormous, half-wild place rising to the west of the city. A gravel road leads along its edge, past hazy islands, to tiny churches set against a low cliff. The cliff holds built-over hermit caves and is also heavily bolted for sport climbing. It's a quiet walk, but here there's a tour group of five old women and one shirtless man in his 50s. (After I come back from looking around the cliff, the man is wearing a shirt but removing his pants; presumably a negotiated compromise.)
The guest room came with a grody jar of instant coffee, so I went out into Split very early the first morning and found an independent coffee shop -- exactly like every independent coffee shop anywhere -- and bought vinegary espresso from a friendly bearded man. I went back the next morning to show him how much I'd raised my game: I had small bills, knew what he sold, and knew he spoke English, so I didn't need to break out my apologetic grimace or either of my Croatian words. The third morning, he tried to give me a coffee for free. Deriding coffee-shop hipsters would be more fun if so many of them weren't so sincerely nice. Really, everyone is terribly nice to tourists now. Rating sites have changed the tourist from an oaf you'll never see again to the agent of a collective consciousness that will crush your business if offended, and this has led to a shaking-out of the colourful misanthropes you used to run across from time to time.
I also got a haircut in Split. Haircuts are one of those tricky things about long trips; you don't really anticipate it, and you don't know how to go about it in other countries. But I was developing a whoosh of Dracula hair that had to be dealt with (also decided to cut my fingernails, and maybe ease up on the thick, white 40SPF sunscreen). It's mostly a question of marching into a barbershop and seeing what happens. In Split, it all went well; a young barber with a sticker-covered mirror trimmed it all back for 70 kuna in 15 minutes, including lots of pauses to adjust the Youtube music stream.
Having dwelt so long on that haircut and on the coffee I bought, I suppose there's not really room to describe my BASE jumping adventure or the sword-fight I got into. From Split, I took a train to Zagreb, which I'll probably write five or six exciting paragraphs about in a couple of days.
We passed a watchtower on a cliff, pulled into another shabby bus station to collect two passengers, and headed for a border crossing, which was smaller and more casual than the one between Bulgaria and Serbia. The bus's Number Two man -- he loads luggage, opens skylights, checks tickets, closes skylights after people complain -- collects the passports, stacks them into a fat open book, and mooches off to a little booth across the parking lot. When he comes back, he reads out the names and hands out documents to those who claim them. He'd sorted mine to the bottom, having judged, very intelligently, that this would save a lot of irritating confusion.
On the Croatian side, the same thing, except our passports were collected by a border guard, and were just brought back to us stamped. They hauled one young couple off for a search, probably just to keep in practice. The same process with the passports, but this time mine was in the middle somewhere: "Canada?" Yo. A sign said Split 106km, but we weren't due to arrive for almost three hours. The bus, for whatever reason, avoids the highway in the interior and hugs the sea, tracing the whole crinkly Dalmatian coast, leaning left, right, left as it runs through endless S-curves on hillside roads.
Driving into Split, and wandering around it looking for a grocery store that's open on Sundays, you get an idea of how insignificant a piece of it the tourist section really is. Outside it is a city of 300,000 people. On Sunday nights, the men are gathered around bocce lanes, the children are running around wildly, and the women are -- I don't know what the women do, so I'm going to say "Go Karting". At the bus station in Split, old ladies mill about, offering rooms for anyone who thought "no need to book ahead, I'll just follow a mysterious crone off into the dark streets".
The old town of Split is beautiful and well-scrubbed. There is little graffiti, no begging, no litter, no dirt, no stray dogs, no cons, no buskers -- an eerie, Disney-fascist sort of feeling. Winding, narrow stone streets, a seafront stretch of white benches and cafes, and just enough historical attractions to feel vaguely enriching. Along the wharf, a line of huge Adriatic ferries and the booming nose-blow of cruise ships coming in to port. In the early morning -- by far the best time to wander around in Split -- tiny street-washers sweep the narrow alleys ahead of you, as for an emperor or a curling stone. Later, the town fills up with other tourists and with men dressed as Roman centurions of the wrong period.
The centre of the old town is Diocletian's palace. Diocletian, having stabilized the empire after decades of appalling chaos and established a radical new administration -- it failed immediately, but it was a good try -- retired here, having ordered construction to begin decades earlier (it reminds me that I need to give orders for my own fortified retirement palace). According to the wildly unreliable historians of the fourth century, he amused himself growing vegetables, tried to resolve some disputes, got annoyed, and died. Later peoples, fleeing from or intent on causing Dark Age mayhem, chose to settle around it ("hm, rocky coastline, dense forest, vacant palace...") and a medieval city grew over the ruins like a beautiful stone fungus.
They turned Diocletian's mausoleum into a tiny cathedral; hanging behind its altar is a huge crucifix of remarkable gruesomeness. Upstairs, a treasury: liturgical bric-a-brac and shelves of reliquaries. Finger bones, silver heads with small crystal windows to reveal pieces of skull inside, a glass casket of bones, all collected with the idea of benefiting from the holy radiation they would continue to kick out after death. It's quite a concentrated dose you get here, in this little enclosed space. Outside, a disproportionately large bell tower, probably added in embarrassment over having found a cathedral ready-made when so many towns were beginning multi-century efforts to build their own. Underneath it all, the crypt itself, cheekily rededicated to St. Lucy. The only possible remnant of Diocletian's own burial is a chunk of porphyry in the archaeological museum (which is so popular I get cobwebs on my arms poking around its outdoor collection).
I spent an afternoon walking around Marjan Park, an enormous, half-wild place rising to the west of the city. A gravel road leads along its edge, past hazy islands, to tiny churches set against a low cliff. The cliff holds built-over hermit caves and is also heavily bolted for sport climbing. It's a quiet walk, but here there's a tour group of five old women and one shirtless man in his 50s. (After I come back from looking around the cliff, the man is wearing a shirt but removing his pants; presumably a negotiated compromise.)
The guest room came with a grody jar of instant coffee, so I went out into Split very early the first morning and found an independent coffee shop -- exactly like every independent coffee shop anywhere -- and bought vinegary espresso from a friendly bearded man. I went back the next morning to show him how much I'd raised my game: I had small bills, knew what he sold, and knew he spoke English, so I didn't need to break out my apologetic grimace or either of my Croatian words. The third morning, he tried to give me a coffee for free. Deriding coffee-shop hipsters would be more fun if so many of them weren't so sincerely nice. Really, everyone is terribly nice to tourists now. Rating sites have changed the tourist from an oaf you'll never see again to the agent of a collective consciousness that will crush your business if offended, and this has led to a shaking-out of the colourful misanthropes you used to run across from time to time.
I also got a haircut in Split. Haircuts are one of those tricky things about long trips; you don't really anticipate it, and you don't know how to go about it in other countries. But I was developing a whoosh of Dracula hair that had to be dealt with (also decided to cut my fingernails, and maybe ease up on the thick, white 40SPF sunscreen). It's mostly a question of marching into a barbershop and seeing what happens. In Split, it all went well; a young barber with a sticker-covered mirror trimmed it all back for 70 kuna in 15 minutes, including lots of pauses to adjust the Youtube music stream.
Having dwelt so long on that haircut and on the coffee I bought, I suppose there's not really room to describe my BASE jumping adventure or the sword-fight I got into. From Split, I took a train to Zagreb, which I'll probably write five or six exciting paragraphs about in a couple of days.
