One of the places that’s been on our travel priority list for several years has been the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. From photos we saw, it looked like a beautiful part of Europe. And, it seemed to have a rich history, stretching back to medieval times and continuing through the conflicts endured by recent generations.
This year, we found a Road Scholar program that was exactly suited to what we wanted to do: a seven-day small-vessel cruise along the Dalmatian coast between Split and Dubrovnik, with an additional two days of land-based touring at each end.
We didn’t want to go for the tour and return as soon as it was over. The investment of time and money in flying from California to Europe was too great for that. One nice add-on, we thought, would be to visit Marcia’s cousin and her family in Finland. We asked them if we could work in a side trip to Tallinn, Estonia (a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from Helsinki), and they said yes.
Tom’s travel priorities always seem to involve trains, and a country whose rail system was near the top of his to-do list was Austria. It didn’t take much effort for him to convince Marcia that five days in Vienna and two in Salzburg would be a good way to start our trip.
Soon we had a plan. Following a week in Austria, we would travel to Split to start our Road Scholar program. When it was over, we would fly from Dubrovnik to Helsinki. After five days in Finland (including a visit to Tallinn) we would return to the U.S. and spend a few days in Washington, D.C., visiting our son Ricky and our friends in the area, before flying back to California. We would leave on May 22 and return home on June 23.
Our overnight flight from San Francisco left at 8 P.M. By the time we arrived at our hotel in Vienna, it was 8 P.M. local time. Given the nine-hour time difference, we had been traveling for only 15 hours, but it certainly felt like 24.
Still, by the next morning, we were ready to start exploring the city. One of Ricky’s friends who had recently been in Vienna recommended Café Central, a traditional coffee house in the heart of the city, and that's where we had our first lunch of the trip.
We spent much of our time in Vienna simply walking around the city, or riding trams along the Ringstrasse (the grand boulevard that encircles the historic central district), admiring the city’s many beautiful and well-maintained buildings. They included the State Opera building, which opened in 1869…
The ornate decorative elements of the city’s buildings were striking, as was their cleanliness. Marcia had been here in 1970, and she said that her memory of the city’s physical condition at that time was that it was dismal. A friend who had been there in 1968 agreed. Vienna had definitely prospered in the intervening decades.
One of the tourist attractions found within the Hofburg complex is the Spanish Riding School, whose performances feature the famous Lipizzaner stallions. We learned after we arrived in Vienna that we could get tickets for a two-hour morning training session. While it did not feature the jumps and choreography of the formal performances, it still sounded interesting to us (and was available at a small fraction of the cost). About five horses at a time were trained for 25 minutes, and then another group came in. The youngest horses were last, and they showed more spirit and independence.
Before we left home, we had learned that the Vienna Boys Choir would be giving one of their monthly Friday afternoon performances at their home venue, the MuTh Theatre, while we were there. We immediately bought tickets for this. As was the case at the riding school, we were not allowed to take pictures once inside the venue, but we did get a photo of the boys arriving before the concert.
Their performance was wonderful, especially that of two young sopranos who appeared to be about six years old, both of whom were spectacular. The hall opened in 2012; it’s attractive and has very good acoustics.
The MuTh was just a few steps from one of the more interesting streets we found outside the regular tourist areas of Vienna: Taborstrasse. This street, whose existence is documented as far back as 1409, features two Catholic landmarks: the Carmelite Church, completed in 1639…
Another interesting building that was far from the tourist areas was the 1909 Palais des Beaux Arts, which was originally a fashion center and today serves as a residential and office building. Like the agricultural stock exchange, it had many decorative elements that are not relevant to the building's current use, but that provide a nice contrast with the simpler buildings nearby.
From Vienna, we took a train to Salzburg, where our hotel was a few steps from the city’s Hauptbahnhof, or main railway station. We were fortunate to have a room that provided a view not only of the station, but also of the city’s most prominent landmark, the Festung (Fortress) Hohensalzburg. Several kilometers beyond the fortress is the Untersberg massif, straddling the border with Germany.
Even Mozart’s birthplace has a Spar convenience store (a high-end 7-Eleven) in the ground level.
On the morning of our one full day in Salzburg, we headed for the Fortress, and were glad to arrive there ahead of the crowds. There’s a funicular that visitors use to reach the top of the hill (about 120 meters above the level of nearby city streets).
We did a self-guided tour, and had lunch at one of the restaurants within the Fortress walls. Before we left, Tom climbed to the top of one of the Fortress’s corner towers to get some views of the city, and the Salzach river that runs through it.
Within a few minutes, we were scheduled to enter the 8.4-km (5.2-mile) Tauern Tunnel, the summit of the rail line. But before we reached the tunnel, the train’s conductor announced that, because of a fire near the railway, the line to Villach was now closed. As soon as we emerged from the tunnel, at the Mallnitz-Obervellach station, we would be leaving the train and boarding a bus. Where would the bus take us? He didn’t know.
As we stood waiting to leave the train, we struck up a conversation with the two women in the compartment next to ours. We would later learn that they were Devora and Zoé, that they were from Munich, and like us they were en route to Zagreb and then on to Split. They both spoke excellent English, and they turned out to be our biggest allies in getting to Zagreb. We would have missed some key instructions without our new friends translating for us.
We hurried to get to the waiting buses, taking a last look at our now-empty train.
A half-hour after the first two buses departed, a third one arrived. We got seats, but it was very crowded, with luggage in the aisle along with several bikes and two large dogs. It was unclear what the plan was; it seemed that the ÖBB people didn’t really know how those of us destined to Zagreb were going to get there. As it turned out, the first bus would take us to Spittal-Millstättersee, 34 km (21 miles) from where we left our original train.
We arrived at Llubijana around 8:00 p.m., an hour-and-a-half later than our train from Salzburg should have gotten us there. We were told that our train for Zagreb would be leaving right away, even though it was at least 300 meters from where the bus dropped us (and our luggage). There was a mad dash to where our train awaited. It consisted of three well-worn cars that the Slovenian railway, Slovenske železnice, had apparently found sitting in the Ljubljana yard. It wasn’t fancy, but we did manage to get a six-passenger compartment to ourselves, and it was better than being on a bus.
Throughout this succession of transfers, as we scrambled to catch the next train or bus, very little information was provided by ÖBB or its bus drivers — without Devora and Zoé we would still be in Austria somewhere, instead of on this train to Zagreb.
At Dobova, the Croatian border patrol boarded the train. When the officer got to us, he quickly inspected and stamped Marcia’s passport, but there was something about Tom’s that puzzled him. He called one of his colleagues on the radio, and when she arrived the two of them had a brief conversation, while Tom started to wonder if he was going to be escorted off the train. No, the officer finally stamped the passport and returned it without comment. The whole exchange took less than two minutes, but after the stress of the past few hours, it was not what we needed!
We arrived at the Zagreb railway station around 10:30 P.M.
There, we caught a taxi for the short ride to our hotel, and checked in. The front desk gave us each a coupon for a free drink in the hotel bar, which we used promptly. This trip from Salzburg to Zagreb had been more of an adventure than we anticipated, but we were grateful to finally be at our destination.
The next day, we devoted the morning to doing laundry in our hotel room. We were traveling light, with four basic changes of clothes for each of us, plus a couple of extra shirts so that we could adjust for changes in the weather, and this meant that if we missed even one day of doing laundry, we would get behind. Fortunately our hotel bathroom had a heat lamp that helped get our clothes dry by that evening.
We hadn’t made sightseeing plans for Zagreb since it was just a stopover for us, but we used our free afternoon to see some of the city on foot. We started at the railway station (Glavni kolodvor), built in 1892...
and walked across King Tomislav Square, dedicated to the first king of Croatia, whose reign during the tenth century A.D. is considered to represent the founding of a unified Croatian state.
After winding our way through the trackage around the station, where many of the service buildings were heavily graffitied, we soon found ourselves rolling through the Croatian countryside. Once we left Zagreb, most of the houses we saw had small gardens. At one point we stopped for a freight train to pass, and we noticed these poppies growing along the right-of-way.
Our train had 15 scheduled stops between Zagreb and Split (a distance of roughly 400 km, or 250 miles, scheduled for six hours and 20 minutes), the first of which was Karlovac. Although our first sight of Karlovac included this attractive row of older homes along a river or canal…
As we got further from Zagreb, we began to notice a considerable number of buildings that had lost their roofs and suffered other damage. Here’s one such building at Lička Jesenica…
and another south of Gračac.
During the last 45 minutes of our trip, the train climbed the final mountain range separating us from the Adriatic, and as we began to descend toward Split, we got a dramatic view of the city (right center in the photo) and surrounding area.
In Split, we would begin our tour of Croatia's Dalmatian Coast.
This year, we found a Road Scholar program that was exactly suited to what we wanted to do: a seven-day small-vessel cruise along the Dalmatian coast between Split and Dubrovnik, with an additional two days of land-based touring at each end.
We didn’t want to go for the tour and return as soon as it was over. The investment of time and money in flying from California to Europe was too great for that. One nice add-on, we thought, would be to visit Marcia’s cousin and her family in Finland. We asked them if we could work in a side trip to Tallinn, Estonia (a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from Helsinki), and they said yes.
Tom’s travel priorities always seem to involve trains, and a country whose rail system was near the top of his to-do list was Austria. It didn’t take much effort for him to convince Marcia that five days in Vienna and two in Salzburg would be a good way to start our trip.
Soon we had a plan. Following a week in Austria, we would travel to Split to start our Road Scholar program. When it was over, we would fly from Dubrovnik to Helsinki. After five days in Finland (including a visit to Tallinn) we would return to the U.S. and spend a few days in Washington, D.C., visiting our son Ricky and our friends in the area, before flying back to California. We would leave on May 22 and return home on June 23.
Our overnight flight from San Francisco left at 8 P.M. By the time we arrived at our hotel in Vienna, it was 8 P.M. local time. Given the nine-hour time difference, we had been traveling for only 15 hours, but it certainly felt like 24.
Still, by the next morning, we were ready to start exploring the city. One of Ricky’s friends who had recently been in Vienna recommended Café Central, a traditional coffee house in the heart of the city, and that's where we had our first lunch of the trip.
Click on any photo to enlarge
All photos © 2017 Tom and Marcia Murray
The building seemed very formal, and the waiters were dressed as though they were ready to serve royalty, but the customers were mostly tourist-casual. We had very small lunches so we could sample the café’s pastries for dessert. It seems that every bakery and coffee shop uses only the finest ingredients – there were no disappointments here or at any other pastry shop during our time in Austria.
and the Hofburg palace complex, whose roots go back to the 13th century, but with sections that were not completed until the early 20th century. This is the St. Michael’s wing, which was finished in 1893.
One of the tourist attractions found within the Hofburg complex is the Spanish Riding School, whose performances feature the famous Lipizzaner stallions. We learned after we arrived in Vienna that we could get tickets for a two-hour morning training session. While it did not feature the jumps and choreography of the formal performances, it still sounded interesting to us (and was available at a small fraction of the cost). About five horses at a time were trained for 25 minutes, and then another group came in. The youngest horses were last, and they showed more spirit and independence.
Before we left home, we had learned that the Vienna Boys Choir would be giving one of their monthly Friday afternoon performances at their home venue, the MuTh Theatre, while we were there. We immediately bought tickets for this. As was the case at the riding school, we were not allowed to take pictures once inside the venue, but we did get a photo of the boys arriving before the concert.
The MuTh was just a few steps from one of the more interesting streets we found outside the regular tourist areas of Vienna: Taborstrasse. This street, whose existence is documented as far back as 1409, features two Catholic landmarks: the Carmelite Church, completed in 1639…
and the late-17th-century Monastery Church of the Merciful Brothers.
A block down the street from the Monastery Church is the former home of the stock exchange for agricultural products, completed in 1890, which today serves as the home of a theatre ensemble. Like many other buildings in Vienna, it looked as though it had just undergone a thorough cleaning.
Our Vienna hotel was only a 10-minute walk from the Danube River (in German, the Donau). One evening, Tom took a walk that brought him to an overlook by the river, where he happened to see the river boat Danubia passing the high-rise towers of Donau City (on the north side of the river)…
and the cable-stayed Donaustadt subway bridge.
This bridge serves a rapidly-developing area northeast of the city. As tourist-oriented as Vienna is, it seems to have a vibrant and diverse economy that presumably benefits from its proximity to the developing countries of eastern Europe.
From Vienna, we took a train to Salzburg, where our hotel was a few steps from the city’s Hauptbahnhof, or main railway station. We were fortunate to have a room that provided a view not only of the station, but also of the city’s most prominent landmark, the Festung (Fortress) Hohensalzburg. Several kilometers beyond the fortress is the Untersberg massif, straddling the border with Germany.
Arriving in mid-afternoon, we were struck by how crowded the city’s Old Town shopping area was. There are many historic buildings and museums in this part of Salzburg, but the area is very commercialized, with many shops appealing to tourists with disposable income.
On the morning of our one full day in Salzburg, we headed for the Fortress, and were glad to arrive there ahead of the crowds. There’s a funicular that visitors use to reach the top of the hill (about 120 meters above the level of nearby city streets).
It was a remarkable place – virtually a city on the hill, with a view extending many kilometers in every direction.
The next day, we spent the morning in Old Town (we had learned that mornings were less crowded than afternoons), and after lunch, we boarded our train to Zagreb. It had originated at Frankfurt and was en route to Klagenfurt, Austria. From Villach, just short of Klagenfurt, the three rear cars (including ours) would continue as a separate train to Zagreb, by way of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
A little over an hour after we left Salzburg, we were climbing through the High Tauern mountains, part of the Central Eastern Alps, past the town of Dorfgastein.
As we stood waiting to leave the train, we struck up a conversation with the two women in the compartment next to ours. We would later learn that they were Devora and Zoé, that they were from Munich, and like us they were en route to Zagreb and then on to Split. They both spoke excellent English, and they turned out to be our biggest allies in getting to Zagreb. We would have missed some key instructions without our new friends translating for us.
We hurried to get to the waiting buses, taking a last look at our now-empty train.
Unfortunately, there were only two buses, and they didn’t have capacity for all the people on our train. So the rest of us stood and waited while the people from ÖBB (the Austrian railway) tried to get more information.
There we boarded another train, which took us to Villach, another 38 km (24 miles) closer to Zagreb. At Villach, there were two buses waiting for those of us headed to points in Slovenia and Croatia.
We crossed the border into Slovenia without any request for passports. The driver got lost trying to drop off passengers at the town of Bled. He never did find the railway station, and instead deposited them at the bus depot. Still, it was a beautiful drive; we saw dramatic mountains and small villages with the ubiquitous church steeples.
At Dobova, the Croatian border patrol boarded the train. When the officer got to us, he quickly inspected and stamped Marcia’s passport, but there was something about Tom’s that puzzled him. He called one of his colleagues on the radio, and when she arrived the two of them had a brief conversation, while Tom started to wonder if he was going to be escorted off the train. No, the officer finally stamped the passport and returned it without comment. The whole exchange took less than two minutes, but after the stress of the past few hours, it was not what we needed!
We arrived at the Zagreb railway station around 10:30 P.M.
The next day, we devoted the morning to doing laundry in our hotel room. We were traveling light, with four basic changes of clothes for each of us, plus a couple of extra shirts so that we could adjust for changes in the weather, and this meant that if we missed even one day of doing laundry, we would get behind. Fortunately our hotel bathroom had a heat lamp that helped get our clothes dry by that evening.
We hadn’t made sightseeing plans for Zagreb since it was just a stopover for us, but we used our free afternoon to see some of the city on foot. We started at the railway station (Glavni kolodvor), built in 1892...
From the square, we walked several blocks north along a park-like swath that stretched for three blocks and included several public buildings including the 1898 Art Pavilion (Umjetnički Paviljon).
Our walk took us toward Ban Jelačić Square, named after a 19th-century Croatian army general, which was surrounded by banks, hotels and restaurants, and is a major transfer point for the city’s heavily-used tram system.
Here, we found an open-air restaurant where we could sit and watch the locals and tourists come and go. After lunch, we walked up a short hill to the city’s Old Town area. Its most prominent feature is the Zagreb Cathedral, whose lower sections date back to the 13th century, but has seen several reconstructions and additions over the past seven centuries.
By the time we left Old Town, the skies had turned threatening and, lacking any rain gear, we headed back to our hotel. That evening, our hotel room gave us a good viewpoint for a series of thunder storms that rolled through Zagreb. Our part of California rarely sees this type of storm, so we found them entertaining, but we were grateful that we didn’t have to be out in the elements.
Early the next morning, we were at the railway station for the 7:35 a.m. departure of our two-car train for Split.
Although they are a darker shade of orange than the California poppies we see at this time of year, they were just as ubiquitous, and we saw them at various points throughout out trip.
Our train had 15 scheduled stops between Zagreb and Split (a distance of roughly 400 km, or 250 miles, scheduled for six hours and 20 minutes), the first of which was Karlovac. Although our first sight of Karlovac included this attractive row of older homes along a river or canal…
we soon saw that a considerable portion of the city’s housing stock consisted of these concrete high-rises, which looked as though they had been built during the Tito era.
As we rolled along through central Croatia, we noticed that at every station there was a uniformed employee (the station master, perhaps?) who would emerge from his office dressed in white shirt, black pants and a red military-style hat who would give the train a proceed signal before it could depart. Here’s the scene as we passed the station at Rudopolje.
We don’t know for sure, but we suspect that much of the damage we saw occurred during the War of Independence of the early 1990s. This conflict followed constitutional changes by the Croatian Parliament in 1990, which effectively made Croatia a republic instead of a unit of Yugoslavia, and set off armed conflict with the Serb-led Yugoslav People’s Army and with forces representing the Serb population in Croatia. Formal resolution of the conflict came with the Erdut Agreement in November 1995.
During the last 45 minutes of our trip, the train climbed the final mountain range separating us from the Adriatic, and as we began to descend toward Split, we got a dramatic view of the city (right center in the photo) and surrounding area.
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Here are links to our other reports from this trip:
Thank you so much for this informative blog. When I retire from the railroad, I hope to enjoy some of these same excursions.
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