Croatia Part II - Korčula

The next stop in our trip was the island of Korčula, about halfway between Split and Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian Coast.

We arrived in the evening and checked into our hotel, which was possibly the worst hotel we've stayed in in Europe. Apparently many of the hotels along the Croatian coast were built by the communist Yugoslavian government during the 1970s. This one probably hasn't been updated since then. The accommodations were pretty dingy and the staff was incredibly rude, but the hotel did boast a nice location right on the water, just a 5-10 minute walk from Korčula's beautiful old town.

The old town of Korčula is a walled city dating back to I think the 13th Century or so, and has a small population, only about 5,000 people. It is designed in an interesting way, with tall (for the time) buildings and narrow streets, and if you were to look at it from above, a map of the city streets would look kind of like a big fishbone. There is one main street down the middle, with side streets fanning out along from it. The sides streets were angled in a certain way so that cool summer winds would blow through the streets in the hot summers, but strong, cold winter winds (coming from the other direction) wouldn't penetrate the city. We went into the town, had some dinner, then went back to the hotel for some sleep.

In the morning, we decided to go to the beach right after breakfast. When we booked the hotel, we were under the impression it had its own beach. We wouldn't really call it a beach, it was more a bunch of rocks along the water, which wasn't what we had hope for, but was still alright. We walked along the rocks for a little while and found a quiet, semi-private spot where we could go swimming. The swimming, as in Split, was great. Perfect temperatures, nice and calm, all you could ask for.

For dinner that night, we followed a recommendation from our guide book and went to a really nice family-run seafood restaurant. We had some great fish, caught that very day, on a nice sidewalk patio along one of the narrow side streets looking down to the water. It was probably the nicest dinner we had on our trip.

When we got back to our hotel at about 11:00, we were not-so-pleasantly surprised to find out that there was an outdoor rock concert going on right next to our hotel. This was something our hotel neglected to tell us, both when we booked the hotel and at any other point during our stay. It kept us up until after 2 AM (and this was on a Tuesday night too), which made for a pretty miserable night. The hotel of course didn't care at all, and brushed of our complaints.

However, we didn't let it ruin our time in Korčula. The next morning we went for another swim off the rocks, and had a nice lunch at a pizza place along the water in the old town. Later in the afternoon, we had our next ferry trip, this time to Dubrovnik. Korčula was great, despite the awful hotel. It made us wish we had more time and were able to see more of the Croatian islands.