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“Should apply in person at the Bosnian embassy…”

After two days in Hvar, it was time to move on again. We’d booked our travel on to Dubrovnik on another tourist excursion, taking a bunch of foolish tourists on a day trip from Hvar (a journey of almost 6 hours each way, and affording them only something like 5 hours actually in Dubrovnik). As we only wanted to go the one way, however, it was perfect for us, because it would get us to Dubrovnik around lunchtime, a distinct improvement on the scheduled ferry/public bus alternative via Korcula that would have taken another 4 or 5 hours, and after the hassles of Hvar we wanted to be in Dubrovnik as early as possible.

After a short bus ride and a fast chartered ferry to the mainland (which somehow took us back to Bol first to collect more tourists), we connected with a comfortable and roomy bus to travel the rest of the way (we’d been divided onto three separate buses on a language basis for tourist-excursion commentary purposes, which partly felt like the basis for some interesting queueing strategy-based social experiment, but mainly meant that the predominantly French and Italian tour groups filled the other two buses and left us with plenty of room to spread out on the combined English-German bus). The commentary was an unexpected and interesting bonus. It explained, for example, why we had to pass through Bosnia before reaching Dubrovnik (not, as I’d expected, due to recent events, but in fact a result of the independent city state of Dubrovnik’s reluctance to share a border with their Venetian enemies when they acquired the rest of the Dalmatian coast in the 15th century, and the fact that they solved this problem by giving 9km of Adriatic coastline to the Turks occupying Bosnia at the time). Approaching Bosnia on a bus is perhaps not a great time to choose to read the following sentence in your guidebook: “EU, US and Canadian citizens do not require a visa to visit Bosnia. Australian citizens should apply in person at the Bosnian embassy in Canberra…” but luckily it turns out that the requirement is waived when in transit through the small section of coastline, and we made it to Dubrovnik with no problems.

And finding accommodation actually turned out to be as simple as wandering into the nearest travel agency, waiting for the woman behind the counter to flick through her book and make a phone call, and wandering into the old town to take the lovely appartment up in the top corner of the old town that would be our home for the rest of our holiday.