Croatia

Croatia has been our favourite country of the trip so far, and for one simple reason: the landscape. In Italy we were cycling between beautiful places - Padua, Treviso, Cremona - but the riding itself was mostly flat fields of rice and wheat through the Po valley. In Croatia, the landscape is the attraction. We've been riding through ancient forests, along breathtaking stretches of the Adriatic, and across idyllic islands. Pula's enormous Roman amphitheatre was a genuine jaw-dropper, and Split's old city inside Diocletian's palace is just incredible. The terrain has also been a step up from Italy - we've had several days with around 800m of climbing, which is a decent workout when you're carrying 13kg of luggage.

We took a few extra days off in Split: Mat had minor surgery to remove a cyst and needed a bit of recovery time. We hired a car from Split to Dubrovnik to give him some extra time, and then hopped back on the bikes for the last 40km to the border with Montenegro.

The drivers are generally very friendly and patient with cyclists, which is a nice change after Italy. The diet is mainly meat and fish, with fruit and veg very much as an afterthought, and the supermarkets all have a fairly basic range selling the same brand of yogurt, pasta sauce etc.

The Adriatic is beautifully clear! Our Scuba diving experience in Dubrovnik was on a different level to diving in Valencia. There is so much sea life visible even from the shore, and the clinic where Mat had surgery repeatedly told him the best treatment was swimming in sea water. The whole country is a geographical oddity being so long and thin, tapering to a very narrow stretch between the sea and mountains in the south. Until 2023 you could only reach the Dubrovnik region of Croatia by crossing through Bosnia and Herzegovina, when they built a bridge from the northern mainland to a peninsula further south.

The whole country is obsessed with the Split football team, Hajduk, with the possible exception of the supporters club Torcida which is even more obsessed with itself. The country is covered in graffiti and murals for both. There were also a number of Hajduk-themed murals memorialising people (supporters?) who died in the Homeland war; there was one near where we stayed in Dubrovnik which had the same name as our host, we assume it was their son.