Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

We caught a mid-day flight from Belgrade to the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia. It went pretty smoothly, until I tried to change my Serbian Dinars to Croatian Kuna after buying some bottles of rakia at duty free. It seems that there's nowhere after security to do that. The Air Serbia information desk suggested going back out (past immigration, entering Serbia again) and changing the money in the other part of the terminal. It didn't seem worth the trouble. Of course, on landing in Dubrovnik, I discovered that the Croatian exchange desks wouldn't take Dinars, and the airport information desk didn't have any suggestions about where I might be able to do it.

The airport to city transfer in Dubrovnik was one of the easiest I've seen. There's a bus waiting at the airport to meet each incoming flight, and it goes exactly where a tourist would hope. We got some nice views of the Adriatic coast along the way.

Tinny booked us an apartment in the Old Town of Dubrovnik, and it turned out to be excellent. It's a narrow four-story building just far enough away from the main touristy street of Old Town, but still central to everything.

Mere steps away, I found a post office, where I was able to get a SIM card for my phone (frustratingly, T-Mobile USA's free international roaming doesn't work here, despite the dominant phone company being... T-Mobile), with a tourist-centric plan. It even came with a little dry bag for the phone. And around the corner, I found a currency exchange place that, despite not listing Dinars on their board, was willing to change mine. No repeat of the situation where we sent Moof home with a bunch of Moldovan money that he couldn't even change in London, the center of international commerce.

It was still well before sunset, so we took the Cable Car up to the top of Mt Srđ (pronounced like "surge"), which had a great view overlooking the old town. Dubrovnik is one of the best-preserved (or best-restored) medieval walled towns in the world, with a small center full of tiled houses and domed churches surrounded by a crenelated stone wall and tower fortresses. It fronts on the Adriatic, and in the evening lots of small boats were moving around the harbor, dodging tourists in kayaks. It's incredibly picturesque, and has starred in movies and television (it's regularly used for King's Landing in Game of Thrones).