I guess good morning and welcome to day two. An early-ish start, not as early as first hoped due to the insane heat in the room and difficulties with sleeping. First port of call is to get down into Old Town and grab a couple of necessities for the days activities. Basically I need a hat, some sunglasses (what sort of ‘etard goes away without theirs?) and a towel for beaching. I’d say this was a successful hunt but that would be being nice, yes I got all I needed but it took a lot longer than it should have and I had to pay a lot more than I would have liked. However, mission accomplished and we could move onto the harbour and finding the ferry that would take us to Lokrum

And what do you do there? You basically have an island to explorer, numerous beaches, an almost infinite number of places to get into the sea, a botanical garden, a fort and lots of rich looking people with their boats. We started off with walking, and checked out the botanical gardens before becoming convinced we had earned ourselves a swim in the ocean. I had been getting warnings from some people who had been before about how you need rubber shoes to go in the sea due to the sharpness of the rocks and these famously tricky black sea urchins which can get proper nasty, we’re talking spikes, infections and death. Fun fun, so in we plod, no shoes, the rocks are sharp getting into the sea but no problems other than the underwater slipperiness of the algae. I was also a little concerned I had burnt my feet, they had been looking very red for a while now and was excited by the prospect of them being in cool water. So you can imagine my lack of surprise at how they felt slightly sore after a bit of swimming. We played around, I drowned a little trying to snorkel and drank some water, usual stuff really then headed back to shore. Where I looked at my, embarrassingly, sunburnt foot, however it was only my little toe that was hurting and on closer inspection it became rather apparent rather quickly that this wasn’t sunburn. The ominous black spikes were well and truly wedged in my toe, nicely under the skin. Enter very small levels of alarm, not from the pain, but from the guidebook which explained the nastiness of these said black sea urchins. I managed to rip the first one out myself, the outcome was a little blood and a black spike, about half a cm long and 3 mm wide, doesn’t sound huge but when its under the skin it stings a little. At this point I had to hand over to Surgeon Barbie, we spent the next 10 mins with her nails cutting my toe to get the remaining spikes out, fun times, you will be happy to hear I have survived and haven’t yet had to have my foot amputated.

This is what the little buggers look like, courtesy of Wikipedia:

We went and grabbed a pint, which I felt I had thoroughly earned, and ate our picnic. That’s when the real walking started, we managed to find a route to get to the opposite end of the island, via a majorly high fort, steep to say the least. On the other side we walked on and found another beach to swim from. This time there were more black sea urchins, but Snorkel Barbie found they were deeper out and found none in the shallow. Easy pickings to get to a depth I couldn’t touch the bottom at. So no bites/pricks/spikes and I didn’t drown snorkelling this time, I’m getting better. I also climbed the rocks to snap this picture, using continuous image capture and Windows Live Photo Gallery, it really is a little gem!

Bigger Size

After the walk back to the conventional end of the island we went to check out the dead sea, a salt water lake on the island, the image below doesn’t do it justice! The cave was cool and NO deadly creatures, just a retired rope swing.

Moving on we grabbed a beer whilst waiting for the ferry to come pick us up so we could go get Mexican for dinner! Much excitement ensued, until the near hour wait for the food to come. And the food wasn’t great, don’t get me wrong it was nice, but not worth the wait, or money. But the beer was nice!

More beer before starting the daunting walk back up to the apartment complex we are staying in, nice early night, big plans for tomorrow, really hoping they come off!

You can check out all the pictures of Lokrum here, or all the ones I have taken here.
[Disclaimer – this post was written on Tuesday 28th July]