Day 2: Cavtat

We woke up early this morning with the aim of getting into Dubrovnik early enough to beat the hordes onto the town walls. We hadn't reckoned though with the fact that because some of the cruise ships were leaving Dubrovnik in the early afternoon, they would be making a correspondingly early start to their excursions. We were at the main Pile Gate into the old town around 9am, but numerous coaches had beaten us to it, and several tour groups were already following their leader towards the walls. The climb up the initial steps looked pretty busy already, so we decided that it might be better to give the walls a miss for today and escape the old town for another, quieter destination.

When we had been getting a lift from the owner of our apartment on Thursday evening, he had mentioned that Cavtat (pronounced "tsavtat") was a nice place for an excursion. I'd never been there before, although I was aware that it was a small seaside town not far from Dubrovnik airport. You can get to Cavtat on a public bus which departs from somewhere in the vicinity of the main Dubrovnik port, but we decided to go for the more exciting option of taking a boat.

When we were queuing up for the boat to Lokrum yesterday, we noticed that there were also smaller - and less busy - boats departing for Cavtat. When we arrived this morning there were a row of competing vendors selling Cavtat tickets at the entrance to the old town harbour. I opted for one which looked like it had a fairly frequent timetable, and we were able to buy return tickets for 100 kuna each. The guy who was selling the tickets gave us a timetable which helpfully had the names of the boats which belonged to this particularly company written on it for future reference. The next boat was at 09.45, so we had a bit of time to take a stroll around the harbour while we waited.

We walked right to the end of the harbour where there is a small pier jutting out into the sea. From here we had a good view out towards Lokrum.

There was a bench right at the very end of the pier...

...where we were able to sit and admire this view.

After a while we headed back to the harbour to wait for our boat to arrive. There were quite a few different boats coming and going so it took a while before we saw one of the boats named on our timetable approach. Our first thoughts were that it seemed a little small, but the good news was that there weren't many other people. Soon we were off, pulling away from the old town.

We sailed past Lokrum...

...and out into the open sea.

The journey seemed to take somewhere between half an hour and 40 minutes on the way there, and we had some beautiful views as we made our way down the Croatian coast towards Cavtat. We passed some unusual-looking islands, which seemed to be smaller and rockier versions of Lokrum.

Eventually we arrived in Cavtat, which seemed to be a pleasant seaside town, complete with a promenade lined with palm trees and cafes. We tried going inside the town's church, but didn't stay for long because they seemed to be preparing for some sort of ceremony; we couldn't work out whether or not it was going to be a wedding.

The town is also home to a monastery. We went inside the church here and found it had a rather disturbing pulpit, with a random hand clutching a cross protruding from the side of the railing.

A path lead past the monastery and around onto the wooded headline which Cavtat is situated next to. As we started to walk along this path, we had some views back towards the town.

The path was very shady and pleasant, and we had some great views of the sea as well. It was really cool to see the way cactuses were just growing in the wild by the edge of the water.

After we'd been walking around the coast for a while, we realised that we had a view back towards Lokrum and Dubrovnik.

It was so far away that zooming in with the camera didn't massively help, but it looked a bit clearer in real life. Lokrum is the green strip of an island towards the centre of the photo, and the walled city of Dubrovnik is the brown splodge to the right of it.

We thought we'd walked a really long way and would soon have to turn back and head back to Cavtat.

We rounded a corner though and found ourselves in a car park, which initially didn't look very promising, but once we had walked through it we found ourselves in almost the same spot where we had started our walk earlier in the morning. Without realising, we had managed to do a circular walk, along one side of the headland and then back round the other to the town.

It was about midday by this point and before we investigated options for lunch, we decided that it would be best to explore what is (apparently!) Cavtat's main attraction; the Račić family mausoleum. This was sign-posted from the main town, along a path which initially went a bit uphill and then degenerated into a succession of staircases up the side of a hill. It was quite tiring, but once you got most of the way up, you did have a nice view back towards the town.

It costs 20 kuna to go into the mausoleum itself, which is a strange white building right at the top of the hill. We decided to give it a miss. The mausoleum is situated in the middle of a graveyard, and it is true that there were some pretty spectacular views from there of the coast.

It felt a bit strange taking pictures from a graveyard though, even though it was a very attractive one.

We managed to take a different path down which avoided most of the steps, and found ourselves back at a point partway along the wooded headland. There was a really nice restaurant there where we were able to sit outside and have lunch, although quite a strong wind seemed to be blowing in our direction from out at sea, so by the end of the meal we were all probably looking a bit windswept. Disaster almost struck when Dad put our 300 kuna inside the wallet with the bill to hand back over to the waiter, and somehow the wind was so strong that it blew the wallet back open and our kuna went flying towards a neighbouring table. Luckily it didn't blow them too far and we were able to retrieve them!

We walked back to the centre of town, had a post-lunch ice-cream on a very sunny bench, and then started to follow a path which led around the other headland of the bay.

From this path we had a view towards the mausoleum that we had climbed to earlier (it's the white blob you can make out at the top of the hill!).

The views of Cavtat were particularly beautiful from here.

Unfortunately, after a while this path turned into a bit of a dead end, with the only way to progress further being to climb another rather steep looking set of stairs. It was time to retrace our steps and head back to town.

The timetable we'd been given said that there was one boat back to Dubrovnik from Cavtat at 15.00 and another at 16.00. We were just a couple of minutes too late to get on the 15.00 boat, although as we saw it pull away it looked far too busy for us to cram onto anyway. I assumed we would have to wait unil 16.00, but as we were strolling along the waterfront we saw another boat which was going to Cavtat at 15.30. The name matched one of those in the list we'd been given, so I figured it was just an extra service they were putting on at a busy time.

We went for a quick drink at a nearby cafe, returning with plenty of time to catch the boat. This one turned out to be nowhere near as busy as the preceding one, which was good news. We sat down and made ourselves comfortable as the boat pulled off.

We enjoyed the journey for a few minutes, and then we realised that the boat didn't seem to be going in the same direction that we had come from this morning.

First of all the boat pulled into a small settlement on the edge of a bay opposite Cavtat, where it picked up a couple of passengers, and then it preceded in the correct general direction of Dubrovnik, but very close to the coast.

We couldn't work out whether this was because it was a slow boat which was scheduled to stop in lots of places - hence not being on the official timetable we'd been given - or whether it was because the sea was actually getting quite choppy and it might be calmer nearer the shore.

It didn't stop anywhere else in the end, perhaps partly because the coast is so rocky that there wasn't really anywhere else you could stop even if you had wanted to. But it did take a much slower route, with the final journey time to Dubrovnik being nearer an hour.