And so I arrive off the overnight ferry into Split, Croatia's Dalmatian gem off the Adriatic coastline. Fortunately, despite the Croatian war in the early nineties, Split managed to survive unscathed, militarily at least. The fighting mostly took place just north of Split between the Croatin army and the Serbian Krajina insurgent militants among others. Croatia's recovery into a prospeing tourist destination is remarkable and the whole town of Split is vey well geared towards mass tourism. Of course I have arrived in early March and while it is sunny outside it is far from warm yet! Fortunately this means that the city is peaceful even though it is the weekend. In fact the only place I can find any sort of hustle and bustle is in the morning market.

Day 3 was a fairly uneventful day as most of it was spent travelling to Ancona. I said goodbye to Venice with a final boat ride up the Grand Canal and then left at midday by train. Ancona held no special interest for me other that the fact that I could catch the Jadrolinija ferry to Split overnight. Being low season the ferry was barely occupied, I could count no more than 40 people in the Ferry Terminal and most of these were locals returning to Croatia. The only other foreigners were an American family wih a brat of a kid running around in a hyper-excited state and really getting on everyone's nerves, including the frontier police who were highly unamused, and there was an Australian couple who were travelling around Europe bemoaning the fact that it was so cold in comparison to home.

Due to the lack of people I managed to get a cabin all to myself at  the same price as a shared one and as it was late by the time we boarded. With nothing else to do onboard (the bar was closed) I settled down to start reading "Not without my Daughter" by Betty Mahmoody which is a portrait on life in Iran in the 1980s. I am not sure why I want to read the book as most of it describes how badly the Iranians treat their women and effectively kept them prisoner in their houses. While just reading his book doesn't fill me with that much joy about visiting Iran it will be interesting to see if times have changed when i do visit in May.

"The closer Croatia is to Europe the closer Serbia and Montenegro is, and both should hurry to Europe also in order to stop the negative forces from the past."

Svetozar Marovic