Thursday Split in Croatia

We arrive into the bay around 7am and today is a tender boat day which means that the mother ship mourns in the harbour and the life boats take you ashore for the day, it's good to know they work! Each tender fits 60ish people so the early people with organised tours get first picking, and that's just fine with us today. This morning it gave us a chance to sit out the back of the ship and have breakfast with a beautiful breeze and 23 deg with a view over the city of Split in the distance we lashed out and had a holiday breakfast today and I must say the turkey sausages were yum! 

We get off mid morning and after a 5min trip we have docked at the jetty. It was the only waves that we have experienced  in the last 5 days. The water's of the Mediterranean is so smooth and if you were to have a glass of wine sitting on a table you can't even see it move. We have had to test and retest this theory on many many occasion and nope not the slightest movement.

The ships report on our T V says 0 meters waves and 0 meters ripple, so off with the wrist ban and I can stop with the ginger tablets.

So back to Split a medieval town with a large palace called Diocletian's Palace which was the home to a royal back in the 293AD give or take a week.

This was his retirement home! Some 30,000 m/2 were within the walls that fronted the sea. A couple of 100 years ago the front was reclaimed from the sea and turned into a port and street scape. We entered through the middle of the front wall and wandered at ground level what was under the palace and was the food storage as well as the sewer system. A couple of girls in front of us and one was over the whole "old" thing tours and said to her girl friend 

"Great more petrified s....t".

I found the whole area fascinating as you were in the basements of a medieval palace and the internal town that it protected. The vaulted stone ceiling some 15 meters tall. The whole under palace basements were only rediscover in 1912 and to this day they are still digging out and finding more treasures. Over the centuries the people of the walled palace town used the basements as a rubbish tip, we could see about 80% and the rest is still being worked on. When you looked at the size of the brick and stone columns some 4m x 3m and in some of the store rooms there were 4 pairs it gives you an idea of the scale of the basements areas. The next floor up copied the layout of the basement level.

We spent a couple of hours in the basements and in the internal town, came back out to the "new city" 900 AD and wandered the streets. Everywhere you look is another 100 photo opportunities. 

Got to talking to some local fisherman down by the dock as they were preparing their lines to head out and try their luck again. The lines had some 200 hooks on each and they were threading on small headless fish. That would explain the massacre and discarded fish heads that we saw some distance down the docks. One of the guys could speak English and when he noticed my Crocodile Dundee hat he was excited, Australians are loved over here, or may be its just me! and everywhere we go, when they know your an Aussie they just want talk to you, and try out the english. One of the guys also wanted to try out his Aussie joke. Why did the aborigines invent the boomerang? ..... because they didn't have a dogs to fetch their sticks.  He ways beside himself with laughter and said the whole joke with what he thought us Aussie talked like. Whe had a fun time with these guys and when you stop and take the time it's surprising what you find out.

Well it is back to the tender boats, last people on again and we set sail at 6 pm.