Cruising the Mediterrenean Part 5: Dubrovnik, Croatia

After leaving Greece, we sailed along the Albanian coast before reaching the final destination of our cruise, Dubrovnik, Croatia. When I first booked the cruise, I sort of shrugged off Dubrovnik as being just another location like Bari that we didn't particularly care to visit. After a little bit of research, we quickly changed our minds.

Coastline of Albania

Before getting too into our time in Dubrovnik, I have to mention the views of Albania from our ship. I figured most of our cruise would be on the open ocean with very little to see, but we were both shocked by the dramatic landscape of Albania. From the boat, it looked like huge mountains rose straight from the water and into the clouds. Tiny villages spotted the coast and the mountain tops. Huge cliffs were visible from miles away. We spent a good amount of time just sitting on our balcony drinking and watching the mountains passing by us. It may have been the most relaxing part of our whole trip.

Dubrovnik castle

Dubrovnik is credited as one of the most well preserved medieval cities in Europe. The city lays directly on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, but is surrounded by a heavily fortified wall. It so convincingly medieval, it's actually used as one of the main filming locations for Game of Thrones. Greg is a huge fan of Game of Thrones, both the show and the books, which he read on his last deployment. Once we read about the filming locations, it was certain that we had to visit as many as we could.

Before our cruise, I looked up if there was such a thing as a Game of Thrones tour. There are a few, but they are very expensive and took place at pretty inconvenient times for us. Most started too late for us to be able to join. Croatia is generally a pretty inexpensive country, especially since they still have not adapted the Euro, so paying the equivalent of $70 for a tour is a bit outrageous. Instead, we just researched all the main filming spots, put them on a map, and set out to see them for ourselves.

Fountain outside of Pile Gate

Our first stop was the castle just outside the wall of old town Dubrovnik. Unfortunately, we had read that the Euro had already been adopted in Croatia and we could use our euros everywhere. This wasn't the case. The man at the desk stared at us as we walked back down to exchange our Euros for Croatian Kaunas.

We passed the small dock a few times along the way back and forth to the castle, which plays a large roll in the TV show. It was hard to get a good picture with all of the tourists around. The water in the bay was beautiful, especially as it hit the rock formations.

Dock that plays a large part in GoT

Once we had the correct money, we were actually standing right near the Pile Gate, the gate to the city, where you can enter to walk along the city wall. The wall provides tons of awesome views of Dubrovnik, the castle and the bay. It's also home to a few important filming locations. As we walked, we would stumble upon familiar sites that we remembered from the TV show. I had to take a picture in the "House of the Undying" which is actually just a look-out tower  on the wall. Everyone else seemed to be overlooking this area.

It started raining just in time for us to exit the wall, which meant a steep, slippery walk down medieval staircases. I almost ruined a pair of TOMS. We took a break in the tourist center before walking back to the castle.

Dubrovnik from a window in the wall.

Where the "riot" scene was filmed in GoT

House of the Undying in GoT

Skyline of Dubrovnik

The castle is another great place to take beautiful pictures of Dubrovnik while also seeing some more filming locations for Game of Thrones. It appears that the whole castle has been used in some aspect for filming. It was also very empty because I don't think people want to climb the stairs to see it.

Inside the castle

Our last stop was to eat a snack and drink some beer before heading back to the ship. Like I said before, Croatia was extremely inexpensive. Beer was the equivalent of around 50 cents. The cheesecake I had was one the the best desserts I think I've ever tried.

This was a former prison under the castle where prisoners
would drown when the tide would rise, but it's also used in GoT.

Dubrovnik was beautiful and we enjoy taking pictures and seeing the Game of Thrones filming locations, but there didn't seem to be much else to do. It's kind of a location for tourists looking for good pictures before moving onto their next destination. I would love to go back to Croatia and seem some of their other beautiful sites, but I can't see any reason to spend more than a day in Dubrovnik. Although, it is a great starting point for visiting other locations like Bosnia or Montenegro.

The next day, we sadly arrived back in Venice to end our vacation. The time spent debarking the ship was even faster than the time spent boarding. Unfortunately for us, as first time cruise goers we weren't exactly sure how quickly we could get off the boat and to the airport. Our flight was booked at 5 pm from an airport only about 20 minutes from the dock. We got off between 9 and 10 and had nothing to do until our transfer at 1 pm. We walked around Venice for a little while but ultimately ended up waiting around the cruise terminal bored. Once we got to the airport, we found out that they don't let you check in until 2 hours before your flight. European airports do weird things like that. We waited around even more.

During this time, I was getting horrible sea sickness. Yes, seasickness from the land. I guess we spent so much time moving on the boat that sitting still suddenly became very difficult. Greg didn't seem as negatively affected.

Looking back, our first cruise experience was pretty ideal. Would we take another cruise? Possibly, if we found an itinerary that we liked. Would we cruise with MSC again? Yes, but not exclusively. Some of our Australian friends recommended a few other cruise companies as being better, but we had no complaints with MSC. We're open to all possibilities.

We would do a few things differently. First, we probably wouldn't do any excursions organized by the cruise company. It worked out well for us in Santorini, but other than that, they were overpriced and kind of pointless. We wouldn't waste so much time fighting crowds of rude Italians at buffet breakfasts. We also would have ate more while in the ship was in port and tried to skip the dinner each night. Dinners were fine, but the food on land in each place was better and definitely more of an experience. At least we got lucky on the ship and had a whole table to ourselves for dinner every night.

We didn't buy a drink package, which was actually a good idea because we didn't drink anywhere close to the cost of the package. Towards the end of the trip, we made friends with a few of the bartenders and they would let us order drinks on our Australian friend's drink package. Some bartenders would tell you it was against the rules for people with drink packages to "buy" drinks for others. I'm not really sure whether or not that was true.

Finally, we definitely would have been more knowledgeable about transportation to and from the ship on the embarkation and disembarkation days. We had a great time, but by the end of the vacation we were ready to be home and didn't want to spend any more time waiting on shuttles or flights.

Leaving Dubrovnik

Since the cruise, we've actually already taken another trip to Prague, Czech Republic, which I will be posting about very soon! (Actually, I typed that post before this one!)