Dead man's town

May 29

When the boat dropped us off at 7am in Rijeka, there were no accommodation-offering old ladies to greet us. Rijeka was cold and grey and industrial. We took one look around and said fuck Rijeka and hopped the next bus to Italy. The next bus wasn't for seven hours, though, so we had some time to kill. We had coffee. Walked around a little. Had coffee again. Slooowly. Waited for it to be lunch time. Had lunch. Waited for the bus. Left. I admit we didn't exactly give Rijeka a fair shot. But after the paradise that was southern Croatia, this cold cloudy dirty port city just didn't measure up. Maybe nothing would have measured up. Sorry, Rijeka.

One good thing about my shitty geography is it makes for pleasant surprises every now and then. Like Slovenia. I didn't know Slovenia was between Croatia and Italy, but apparently it is so I went through Slovenia today. It looked pretty and green. Very exciting.

Anyway, stop number two on our tour of depressing port cities was Trieste, Italy. Or, as they say in Croatia, Trst. Who needs vowels? Trst is a little nicer than Rijeka, but not all that impressive so far. I wanna go back to Dubrovnik!

One thing about Croatia is it's not an easy country to get around. Maybe if that doesn't change it will keep it from becoming unbearably touristy, I dunno. You can't really go between coastal cities by train, because the trains pretty much only go to Zagreb, the capital, which is way over in the northeast part of the country. So to go 200km you'd have to take a train all the way across the country and back. There are buses, but they take a long time because the roads are two-lane and all twisty. Even driving like a maniac, it takes a while to cover any ground. And there are boats, but they're also very slow and never seem to drop you off in quite the right place. I'd be glad to deal with those complications, though, if they keep away masses of tourists.