Nearly Dubrovnik - Again!

Saturday 24 August 2024. The ship is moored against the dockside in Gruz as we leap (slither slowly) out of bed. This is the port for Dubrovnik and almost every time we have been there so far, we have wandered down along the port to the far end of the basin rather than go into Dubrovnik itself.

There's a lot to be said for it. You get a nice peaceful walk down a long street lined with cafes, bars and grocery outlets on one side and ships, boats, yachts both large and small and a sailing ship on the other. In Dubrovnik itself you get a chaotic square-cum-bus station where buses, coaches and pedestrians all compete for the same bit of road and crowds of Game of Thrones fans all craning their necks to spot a recogniseable bit of King's Landing from the show.

Now I'm as enthusiastic about the show as the next person - actually considerably more so, as Miss Franny was the next person and she hated it... What I'm not enthusiastic about are massive crowds and people who seem to treat anyone walking with a stick as an opportunity to see how close they can get, dodging from one side to the other across your path after approaching silently from behind. So we walked down the length of the port again and very nice too. Buying drinks on the way back I learned my first word in Croatian - "vala" means "thank you" The conversation went like this:

"How do you say thank you in Croatian?" "Vala!" said with a smile of appreciation that I should take the trouble to learn. "Vala?" I said, trying it out. She nodded. "Oh thank you! Er... I mean vala!" I stuttered. Old habits die hard and all that...

We had a few other cruise ships travelling along pretty much the same route during the week. Sometimes there were four of us, sometimes three, occasionally five. A regular was Cunard's Queen Victoria. Actually owned by Carnival Corporation, she is operated by Cunard and was built 2006-2007 with delivery to Cunard in December 2007, when on the same day it was named by Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall. The champagne bottle did not break on hitting the side of the ship, a bad omen traditionally, but a second bottle duly smashed immediately. None-the-less much was made of the incident later that month when over 130 people contracted the winter vomiting disease norovirus aboard her. Moral of the tale is to never try to lick old champagne off the side of a ship...

Then the Franjo Tuđman bridge takes the road to and from Split over the River Dubrovnik. The brave - or foolhardy - can bungee jump from it... I was going to have a go - but the Norwegian Pearl was already sailing away. I settled for a jump down into the shower tray instead... It was perhaps just a little safer, there being a handle on the wall to hold onto. But - and readers might like to draw an admiring inward breath at this point - I did it without the aid of any harness or elastic band!

The Rose Garden Restaurant was a buffet style dining area and our usual go-to place to eat. The food was mostly ok, but Norwegian Cruise Lines, depite the name, are an American-based company and the food reflected North and South American tastes primarily. We did expect this and the majority of passengers were indeed from the countries of those continents. Some items were very sweet to our taste. Surprisingly, steaks which Americans are famous for were sometimes so fatty that we just left most of them on the plate. I've never experienced that in America.

Our main reason for choosing this cruise was the chance to see these two wonderful people again. Tomas and Maris, singing as "2 Intense". It was a joy for us to see them again and we had a meal together one night with a chance to sit and talk and catch up on all the things happening at home and with families etc. "He's itching to get up here!" grinned Tomas one night. Yes I was but I'm still not in any fit enough state to try it yet! Hopefully someday.

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An Afternoon in Sidmouth, Devon

This week we had a few days in Devon (with a foray into Dorset on Wednesday). We motored down on Monday morning, arriving in Sidmouth late lunchtime.

Sidmouth is a pleasant seaside town with sandstone cliffs at either end of a Promenade that edges onto a pebble beach. Many of the hotels along the seafront have balconies and hanging flower baskets for colour. A low stone wall separates the Promenade from the roadway and affords visitors a cheap and cheerful spot to sit if the benches are all taken up. Deck chairs are also available at a small half-day rate.

Solid-looking square wooden posts support huge lanterns, though the method of illumination is a bit more modern these days than that of the time the lanterns were first installed! Sidmouth is proud of its past. It was there at the time of Domesday, then being recorded as Sedemuda. George III's son, the Duke of Kent and his Duchess arrived with their infant, later Queen, Victoria on Christmas Day in 1819. Their visit was marred by tragedy as within a month the Duke had died of fever, not helped by the excessive bleeding by doctors trying to cure him. His Duchess was left penniless after his death, due to his debts. Left without any income and unable to flee home to Germany as her daughter was in line for the English throne, she begged the Prince Regent for help but he left her without a penny, doomed to watch all her furniture, horses and other possessions taken away by her creditors. Earlier during the visit, the window of the room in which the Duchess and baby Victoria were in was shattered by a bullet fired by a local boy at a bird. Whilst obviously anxious that the incident should not be repeated the Duke and Duchess asked that the boy not be punished.

At the eastern end of Sidmouth the river Sid flows out into the English Channel. Here is a small collection of moored boats, both fishing boats and more modest boats as seen here. The coast is pretty much a straight line here. It was not possible to build a harbour due to the lack of shelter. The pebbles of the beach have had to be replaced as the sea washed them away during storms in the 1990s.

Luckily whilst we were there the weather was a lot kinder. This small dog was enjoying the sea, going in several times, sometimes dodging, other times being swamped by waves, but always going back into the water for another go!

The cliff at the eastern end is that of Salcombe Hill. It forms part of Devon and Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The red-brown of the cliffs leaches into the sea at this point turning it a deep russet colour. Erosion is a constant threat.

The River Sid, looking inland from the river mouth. A short distance inland it passes through the village of Sidford, where the river can still be crossed by the old ford.

Devon & Dorset 2014 Index

Very Rainy Day in Flam

Tuesday 6 August 2013. Last night we were told that all planned excursions for today were cancelled. The reason was a fire in a road tunnel which was the way into Flam for not only the excursion coaches, but also the guides who provided the commentary on Flam's railway.

This is a famous scenic ride up the mountains and is listed as one of the 100 things to do before you die. Doing it after you die is theoretically possible but, even if they let you on the train, the overall experience is not as good...

So we decided that we would get up really early to make the most of our sailing into Flam, which is at the end of the Aurlandsfjord which a tributary of the Sognefjord, a 204 kilometres long and up to 1,308 metre deep fjord. We had therefore entered this fjord in the middle of the night.

The weather was extremely wet. We went for a coffee and by sitting close to the Lido restaurant, managed to sit outside without getting too wet and then decided to go down for our breakfast.

As we passed through the Lido Restaurant on our way down to the waiter service restaurant on Deck 4 I noticed this little house with a water wheel, made out of bread!

We made a leisurely breakfast in the Compass Rose restaurant and were interrupted briefly when a member of the ship's Destinations Team came down to tell us that the Cunard ship, Queen Victoria, was 20 minutes behind us and that anyone who was wanting to travel independently on the Flam Railway was advised to get off the ship immediately to secure tickets as these would be very limited.

A couple on the next table immediately started grumbling. "They could have told us that last night!" he stormed. Yes I can just imagine the skippers of rival companies having those conversations over ship to ship radio, can't you?
"What time will you get in, because we want to be first...?"

We finished our breakfast and then went up on deck to watch the Queen Victoria sail in. Given the weather I expect that the view from the train was going to be severely restricted anyway and without guides to tell you what you couldn't see, we weren't about to spend on tickets. If (Fran says "when") we go back we will pre-book the Flam train excursion and hope for better weather.

Later in the day we decided we would go ashore even in the pouring rain, just to stretch our legs and have a look at Flam itself. We got to the cabin to find someone else wearing my cap...

The Thomson Spirit was moored in the middle of the fjord and was using her tender boats to ferry passengers to and from the Flam landing stage. It was strange being on a tender boat that wasn't rocking about, all of our other experiences having been on the sea!

The train was loading up, ready for its trip up the mountain. There is a small museum in the nearby station building dedicated to the railway and other forms of transport, i.e. skis. The museum was free to enter and I had a quick look round it, conscious that I was dripping water all over the wooden floors. So was everyone else, but I still felt guilty and didn't stay long. We had a look in the souvenir shops (reindeer skins and trolls) and raised eyebrows to the ceiling at the screams from the American child who suddenly realised the skins came "from an animal, Mommy!!! It's from an animal!!!". Not that we're that much better - I used to work in an agricultural college and amongst the teenage newcomers there was a depressing number who could trace milk to a bottle and then further back to the supermarket, but had no idea where it came from any further back than that...

An hour was quite enough to soak us through. We got back to the landing stage to find a lady covered in mud, who had tried to climb up the waterfall and had come down the quicker way... We got back to the ship and changed clothes. Then we gave the Horizons Bar our custom and our books our attention until it came close to sailing time.

The last tender boat comes back from Flam to the ship. We wait whilst it is winched aboard and then the ship's company go about the business of preparing for departure. We find a spot on the Promenade Deck and watch for the first signs of movement.

There were quite a lot of people out on deck to watch us leave, but because of the rain those numbers dwindled quite quickly once we had been under way for quarter of an hour or so. Flam faded into the distance behind us and we sailed down the fjord, knowing that we would be in bed before we sailed out into the North Sea again.

The continual rain of the day had served a purpose in making the many waterfalls a bit more spectacular though!

Fjordland Wonders Cruise Index Page

The Excitement is In Tents...

Friday 6 August 1993. During the 1990s our usual type of holiday involved lots of canvas, lots of giggling and quite often lots of rain and squelching underfoot... We booked just such a trip with my parents, daughter Gill and one of her friends and headed south towards Sidmouth.

We had started gently for a change. Normally we would have just got up early and driven all the way down, but we must have been feeling a little wanton and giddy because we set off on the Friday, rather than Saturday and spent one night in a cheap B+B in Cheddar. Cheddar Gorge is a wonderful place but almost dead at night. Even at 5:00pm we were wandering around through deserted streets, looking at closed shops until I started to doodle the above sketch, upon which people started to materialise out of nowhere, looking over my shoulder and whispering excitedly amongst themselves...

"What is it?" "Do you think that bit could be a giraffe?" "Doesn't look much like those sewerage works to me"..."

An entire family of five people stayed watching every nervous quiver of my hand until I had finished half an hour later. Now, as mentioned previously, Cheddar doesn't offer much in the way of entertainment at night, but... By 1993 I was just about at the stage where my sketches could be identified as an approximation of the scene before me but I was still very nervous about it and dreading turning out a miserable mess of unrecogniseable cartoony images. Please folks, have a look, offer a word of encouragement and move on. Come back later if you want but please don't hang over my shoulder with your ice cream cornet wetting my ear!!!

Saturday 7 August 1993 finds us setting up our new (to us) 3-bedroom tent on a campsite close to Sidmouth in Devon. Both Dad and I had a Ford Fiesta at the time (we had only had ours three days before this trip!) and whilst you could just about get five people in one, taking six people, with a tent and luggage as well was not an option so we drove down in both cars and had to use them both to potter about Devon for the week. Camp sites tend not to be measured out to the exact inch and the woman from the tent on the next pitch has paced out both hers and our pitches and ordered hubby to complain because ours is bigger... Going to be a fun week for him then!

Sidmouth is a small town on the south Devon coast with a rather refined air about it. The infant Princess Victoria, well before she became Queen was sleeping in a bedroom facing the sea when her window was shattered by a shot that was aimed (so the culprit claimed) at a seagull. I'm not sure who the miscreant was except for the fact that he probably had a large white splodge on his jacket... Whilst it wasn't illegal for the general public to carry weapons at the time, quite what he thought he was doing wandering around Sidmouth beach with a gun anyway is not, as far as I know, recorded... "Fishing" would have seemed a lame excuse, even to the fledgling police force Sidmouth may have had at that time

Sidmouth centre hasn't changed a great deal over the years. It has old pubs, old-fashioned shop fronts and a church a short distance from the seafront. Queen Victoria has since moved on though so don't set your expectations too high.

All along the promenade runs a small wall, around 6-10" tall (I'm not there now so I can't measure it!) which separates the coast road from the Promenade walk. It normally has a row of people sitting on it, as to park your bum on a deckchair draws the immediate attention of an aging deck chair attendant in a once-white jacket and with a smoking ticket machine who will charge you for half a day minimum use but won't save your place if you get up after 5 minute's rest to cross the road to get an ice cream. It may have changed since 1993.

Sidmouth isn't a huge town, so we'll have a look at either end of it. A leisurely stroll from one to the other won't take much more than twenty minutes. At either side, the town is flanked by sandstone cliffs that either withstand the battering the sea gives them twice a day, or collapse suddenly with a cloud of red dust, fragments and dirty great chunks of rock that might put you off your dinner or even breathing if you find yourself under them.

These are the cliffs at the western end of the Promenade. If you approach via the beach or low Promenade wall it is a precarious thing to do at high tide. If you approach from the road, you arrive there on a level with the top of the cliff, through a small park and then descend down a series of wooden steps that, when climbing up, will make you question the wisdom of the attempt! We had a short sit on the benches on top of the cliff whilst on the next bench were a middle-aged couple still in the seaside uniform of the 1930s. He had on a suit and tie and she had a quite severe floral dress with a white wide-brimmed sun hat. He was reading The Times newspaper. "There's still no mention of them apprehending that villain who shot at and broke young Victoria's window..." he remarked. "Oh Herbert, don't be so ridiculous - go and get me some whelks..."

Twenty minutes later, here we are at the other end of Sidmouth. Approaching the eastern end of the town and Promenade we can see one of the original wooden lamp posts with the ornate lantern housings. Sidmouth was one of the first towns to install electric street lighting and they have preserved the original design of lamp post and deserve some credit for that.

At the eastern end is Salcombe Hill, where the sea has direct access to the cliffs and where the River Sid flows out into the sea. This access of water makes erosion perhaps a little quicker than at the western end, not that screams of anguish will occur every day, but just read any warning notices. Our campsite is on top of these cliffs a bit further west and inland - I don't want to drop in on anyone unexpected like...

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