Croatia to Italy

There is no easy way to make this journey, or should I say fast way. The overland roads across Montenegro and Albania are small and windy. This is complicated by the fact that Albania is the wild west of the European continent. Bad roads, even worse drivers, no signs and no services. Not one person recommended we drive there. So we gave up the idea and decided to travel by ferry. Of course there is no direct ferry, even though Greece is just down the coast from Dubrovnik. One must cross the Adriatic to Italy and then catch a second ferry back to Greece. And to make it more complicated there is no conversation between the different ferry lines. Information was only available on the internet and even that was somewhat sketchy and hard to interpret. Sozon reassured us that there would no problems in the off season which was quite true. .There was almost no one on the ferry...and hardly any trucks.

First we took the Croatian ferry leaving in the afternoon from Dubrovnik, a journey of 7 hours. Even though it was an international ferry, they barely accepted Euros. We had diligently spent all our Kuna's and had only euros. Luckily the dinner in the restaurant was enough that we could use big euro bills. But there would be no after dinner coffee in the bar...bartender only took small euros or kunas. Croatian nationalism! Silly... Maybe when the autobahn is finished to Dubrovnik, there will be more trucks and maybe even that ferry directly to Greece!

We arrived in Bari after a calm easy trip and headed for our pre booked hotel. There was no tourist info at this international ferry dock... the only indication of info were few signs at the entrance pointing to 5 hotels in the city centre. But, we had booked the Best Western outside the centre. So we fired up the GPS..not listed. Best Western was a newly converted hotel. We had an address on a numbered highway and the name of the suburb so we tried that. In the dark, it was very difficult and we were in an industrial area with no one to ask. Finally an hour later we arrived. The next day when we travelled back to the dock to book our ferry to Igoumenitsa, it took us about 15 minutes to drive.