Day 15 – April 30 Saturday

A late start of 8.30 as our local guide Dmir took us on a tour of the ancient Roman ruins in Split.  Our first stop was Salona, the original settlement mentioned in Roman letters from 119 BC, that in 295 AD had 60,000 people living inside the walls of Salona.  These ruins are over 2,000 years old – its hard to fathom.  There has only been low key excavation of the ruins, with most of the site untouched & preserved in recent times, however, over the centuries the stone from the old buildings has been taken & used to build other buildings.  A priest was primarily responsible for the recent preservation of the complete site within the Salona city walls, where he conducted some excavations in the temple area & uncovered a lot of the ancient temple site & remains of large stone sarcophagus used to inter the wealthy.  Some of these are amazingly ornate & extremely well preserved, the carvings in marble are stunning.  The priest also built himself a house/chapel out of the bits & pieces he found & it is amazing the old elaborate carved stonework he has used in & around the house.

Next stop is Diocletian’s Palace, building commenced in 298AD & was completed in 308AD by the Roman Emperor Diocleses.  This palace is 1,700 years old & parts of it are still in use, there are more than 3,000 people living inside the old walls of the Palace, plus a mass of upmarket shops & cafes.  We drove past the ancient Roman aqueduct, built at the same time as the palace & still in use today to bring fresh water 15km from the spring in the mountains into Split.  Now that’s a return on investment.

Parts of the palace are built from columns stolen from Egyptian ruins in Aswan by the Romans & apparently took 8 months to transport them from Aswan to Split.  There is even an Egyptian sphinx outside Diocletian’s Mausoleum.  Over the centuries as different civilizations came & went, the palace was modified, added to & changed to suit the current rulers, so there is Venetian & medieval architecture, a church built in 5^th/6^th century, a magnificent clock from the 14^th century, still working, then some fairly recent buildings from the 16^th & 17^th century.  It is an amazing place, the streets are all paved with limestone blocks & the buildings are all large limestone blocks.  We were both very taken by Split & then there is the Riva, if you want to see some big expensive boats up close, this is the place. We had a wander through the markets to see what sort of fresh food they sold & that was very interesting as well.

Back in the bus & off on the scenic drive south along the coast towards Dubrovnik.  The landscape is different again, giant limestone mountains directly on the coast with a village squeezed between the ocean & the sea now & again wherever they can get a foothold. This part of the coast is very scenic & there is cultivation wherever people can find a piece of dirt that hasn’t got too many stones in it.  Grape vines & olives seem to predominate with vegetable plots around the river deltas.  We passed into Bosnia & stopped at the border post before stopping in a Bosnian town on the coast very briefly for a pit stop.  On again & out of Bosnia back into Croatia & Dubrovnik.  Our hotel is again very nice & right on the coast, our room has good ocean views & the buffet dinner was very good, a great selection of Croatian food.