Ahoy Matey!

Arriving on Providinost, our boat for the week, was really exciting. We had to climb over a ton of boats to get to ours, but had some help from Max and Tony, the Croatian crew guys who work on our boat. We met our Irish tour guide Kathryn and a couple other passengers and then found our absolutely tiny room below deck next to the fuel tanks in what we lovingly referred to as the “dungeon” the place for everybody who was to cheap to upgrade to the deck. The dungeon was small but cute and something we came to love throughout the rest of the week. The basic set-up of the sail is that we leave the port early in the morning around 6, sail all day, stop for some random swims off the boat in the Adriatic and arrive at our island or coastal town around 4 everyday to explore the tiny towns, have dinner and drinks and fun. The places we went were a bit of a blur and we had some itinerary changes due to bad weather but being on the boat was the best bit. They rang a bell for breakfast and lunch. Lunch was always amazing and homemade with fresh soup, salad, bread, roasts(they gave us some extra veggie stuff) and if we were lucky, sometimes some cake. They had a bar on board and a couple of sundecks. The thing that made this trip for us though, other than the rugged mountain landscape floating by in contrast with the blue sea and quaint islands, were the people. The minute we met the people of this trip we knew we were going to have the best time. We instantly bonded with Emma, a girl from Glasgow(who would become our best friend on the boat), Joel and Amy(a couple) from Australia who were two years younger than us, Megan and Jeff(another Australian couple) who were 5 years older than us and Ang and Kelly(a pair of best friends from Australia, living in London). We all slept in, ate lunch together, egged each other on to get into the freezing Adriatic, got sun burns and had dinner and drinks together everyday. Ang, who is deaf also taught us a bit of naughty sign language and told us that she was the youngest person in Australia to ever wear hearing aids. It was her birthday on the boat so we had a huge party for her and the crew did a BBQ so that was also a lot of fun.

Our tour went to Makarska, Mijet, Korcula, Dubrovnik, Hvar and back to Split. Our two favorites, aside from Split were totally Hvar and Dubronik. Dubrovnik is really cool since it’s the only walled city in Croatia with walls still intact and you can hike around them with fabulous views and Hvar is really posh and slowly becoming jam packed with celebrities like Paris Hilton. Hvar is really cute though with the whole town centered around the marina. Below you can find a ton of photos from all the islands and I will let them convince you that Croatia is somewhere you have to visit, instead of writing about every single day in painstaking detail.


Providinost! Our home for a whole week...


Bridge to Dubrovnik


Dubrovnik from the tower on the city's walls


Kelly sticking her head out of one of the towers on the Dubrovnik city walls, with the sea crashing below.


Ellie recreating that moment


Since Dubrovnik is a walled city still, you walk by everyone's roofs and even pass a little nursery school on your way around the walls. Homes on one side and an amazing view on the other.


The sea view


Ellie, Emma and Kathryn, our tour guide hanging around on the walls waiting for the group.


Kelly and Ang in jail




Dubrovnik from the walls again


one big happy family, although there were a few exceptions to that rule.




You can drink directly from this fountain in the town because the water comes from some nice stream or something.


Concentrating very hard because if you can stand on this tiny little platform for ten seconds, you are guaranteed to come back to Croatia and get married or some other folklore. It is very very hard and we both failed miserably.


Kelly, Emma, Megan and Ellie enjoying a cocktail from a hip little bar inside the walls.



our first swim in the Adriatic and it was freezing. It is fair to say we could not feel our toes at this point.



Waiting for a towel.



Still smiling because I haven't jumped in yet.



The island of Makarska.


Entrance to Makarska's downtown


on the way to Mijet


Our first swim off the boat. The water is gorgeous.






Kelly and Emma, relaxing.


Amy, Emma, Megan and Ellie freaking out about a fish.


Drinking frozen drinks on top of this very cool tower where you have to climb a ladder to sit on top and the waiters bring the drinks up and down by a pulley system with their hands.


The bar.


The sunset from the roof terrace.


This may look like an ordinary hill but on the other side of this hill lies Bosnia, believe it or not and we were very excited about this for some reason.

All of the below pictures are from Ang's birthday on board.


Ang and Kelly


Amy, Ellie and Jeff


Megan, Kelly and Joel


The birthday girl at midnight with her straw necklace, loving handcrafted.


Public Transport, Croatia style.


Test tubes of beer, similar to Poland.


The Croatian Dalmatian Coast


Pizza Party on the Rocks in Hvar. One of the last nights of the cruise.


Later that night in Hvar at the Kiva bar, they do this thing called Tequila Boom Boom, involving shots of Tequila and wearing a big helmet and getting your head banged on by the bartender and surrounding patrons.

Emma hardly surviving a Boom Boom.


Amy in action.


Amy, Sally, Kelly and Joel


Back in Split, saying good-bye and eating our last lasagne together. Emma and Ellie.






At the end of trip, we all went out to lunch together even though the trip was over before crying like teenagers leaving summer camp and vowing to keep in touch. Amy and Joel actually ended up catching the train with us up to Zagreb before heading on to Budapest. Emma was heading for Hvar for a few more days and then to the states for a month with her Scottish friends, but is luckily moving to Melbourne, same as us, so we will live near her there hopefully. Kathryn offered us her mom’s B&B in Ireland for future visits and we left feeling so lucky that we signed up for round trip sail with these people.

After going to the beach for an hour with Joel and Amy and seeing some weird medical training class with this woman screaming on shore with “blood” on her arm that we totally thought was real, until she stood up wiped the blood off and laughed, we caught our train to Croatia’s capital Zagreb. On the train was unfortunately this stupid idiot Canadian guy who we met at a bar the night before in Split who asked us where we from and when I replied “America,” went on a diatribe asking “ Well are you Mexican, Peruvian, Canadian, from South America, Central America, North America? You have just confirmed my one big pet peeve about Americans, blah blah blah.” So rude and uncalled for that we responded curtly that we were AmericaN, therefore from America. He was just looking to pick a fight which could hardly be taken serious what with his striking resemblance to Gilbert Godfrey at the age of 20. Imagine my thrill when he gets the seat next to me on the train with his very 90’s Ray-Ban’s pulled down on his head. We suffered through it arriving in Zagreb before saying farewell to Amy and Joel, who were sleeping in the station to catch an early morning train to Hungary. We found our hostel in a quiet residential, slightly spooky neighborhood away from the city centre around 10 at night and decided that we were too tired to explore Zagreb’s nightlife, instead taking the hostel up on their free welcome beer and using their free internet before crawling in our room that strangely resembled Melissa’s room in Key West. The next morning, we headed to the train station from the hostel and caught a train to Ljublijana, the capital of Slovenia, leaving Croatia behind.