16 October 2026
Ryanair was three hours late, so we arrived just around sundown. I’m pretty sure I could see Mercury just above the horizon after the sun went down — a very rare sight.
Dubrovnik is more than just a walled city. We walked into the Old Town in the early evening and were greeted by a spectacular sound-and-light show, similar to what we’d seen in Zurich a few years ago on New Year’s Eve, but on a much larger scale. Virtually every building along the entire main street was covered in multicoloured projections and animations, accompanied by loud rock music. This year, the celebrations honoured Marin Getaldić, a Croatian mathematician who died 400 years ago and made important contributions to algebra, geometry, physics and optics.
We met Mark and Cindy, our cottage neighbours, at our hotel and went out for supper. Everything in Dubrovnik seems to be made of stone: the town walls, the buildings and the streets, which are paved in marble. There’s hardly any earth or greenery, apart from a few planters. Yet the town was alive with people, music, sound and light.
This was not what I was expecting. It was as if Disney had taken a few hundred years to build the original Disneyland, starting in the seventh century on the Adriatic coast. Every building seemed to be a shop, bar, restaurant or hotel room.
There was only one “Disney” ride, and it was somewhat more appropriate for the seventh century: cliff jumping. Buža Bar is essentially a beer bar reached through a doorway in the upper city wall. From there, you climb down a rocky staircase to a narrow but flat ledge on the cliffs outside the walls, where the bar is perched. People were jumping into the sea from heights of seven to twenty metres. I can’t imagine a bar perched on a cliff, where patrons jump that far into the sea, ever being allowed in Canada!
Of course, Dubrovnik’s Old Town was built as a fortified city, not a seventh-century amusement park. But standing there amid the lights, music, crowds and cliff-jumping, it was easy to forget its original purpose.
On Saturday, we took the ferry to Lokrum Island, which sits strategically just offshore from Dubrovnik and helps shelter the Dubrovnik harbour from ocean swells. Ladders are bolted to the rocky shoreline at various points around the island, providing easy access to the water for swimmers. There were a few people swimming, despite it being October. The water didn’t feel cold.
The abbreviated history of Lokrum goes something like this: the Benedictine monks who lived there were ordered to leave the island by Napoleon. On their final night, they lit candles upside down and walked around the island, cursing it as they went. Their curse was that anyone who owned the island and spent at least one night there would meet an untimely death — not necessarily on the island itself.
Three nobles, including five Habsburg nobles and Empress Sisi, whom we’d learned about in Vienna, supposedly fell victim to the curse, dying in various circumstances involving murder. (The details seem to get a little tangled in the telling of the story!)
After the Second World War, the island became a children’s hospital, treating asthma and other respiratory problems. The children would leave the island every night. Today, Lokrum is a nature reserve, but visitors must still leave every evening to avoid the curse. Some traditions, it seems, are best not tested!
This post is in progress. – we’re still in Dubrovnik but have now moved to the Lero hotel to join the OAT tour.
