I said in my last post that I got an interesting and unique perspective on Dubrovnik’s Old Town and here we go. I did a night cruise on a pirate ship!
Ok, technically the Karaka is a reproduction of the 14th century merchant ship of the same name. Dubrovnik has a proud history as a naval city and a city-state and they did a lot of trading all over the world. Karaka, one of the most important merchant vessels of the years of the Dubrovnik Republic, sailed not only all over the Mediterranean, laden with goods, but went as far as India. It’s a three-masted sailing ship of the kind called a carrack in English (karaka in Croatian, which is now making me doubt whether there was ever a ship actually named Karaka), large enough to handle heavy seas, spacious enough for a large amount of cargo, usually square-rigged and the predecessor of the better-known class of galleons. Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria was a carrack, as was Vasco da Gama’s São Gabriel and Magellan’s Victoria.
This one is a reproduction and when you see it sail (read: motor) around St John’s Fortress and into Dubrovnik’s old port, it looks.. well, it looks marginally less convincing as a ship than the one that takes you around Big Thunder Mountain in Disneyland Paris. It’s too high, too rounded, far too shiny and it sails without having any sails visible, because it’s powered by a diesel engine hidden under the deck somewhere. I went out for its night cruise. It does a sunset cruise, taking you out around the walls of the city to watch the skies change colour while drinking champagne and then it has to go back to Gruž where it’s moored until the next time it’s required to go out. I was staying in Gruž. It seemed an appealing idea to take the bus to the Old Town in broad daylight, jump on the boat, have a nice cruise as the light faded from the sky, see the city from the water and be delivered back almost to my door when it got dark, rather than having to find a bus and figure out where my stop was when I couldn’t see it. Now, the cynical part of me says that, knowing the ship has to go back to Gruž, someone went “Well, we might as well get tourists to pay to go on it while we’re putting it away at night as well as during the day” but it was such a convenient and interesting way to do a boat trip that I didn’t care.
So, yes, it’s getting dark as you embark. There’s plenty of covered deck but I don’t think anyone went inside. There are four decks. At the front is the forecastle deck, which you think is going to be the best place to see where you’re going. You board at the main deck, which definitely isn’t – it’s the lowest of them all which means all you can see is out the sides. No one hung around on the quarterdeck, for some reason, and the best one of all – although the one with the steepest stairs – was the poop deck, the high and steeply-angled one at the back, where you can see everything. I mostly stayed on the poop deck but I did venture forward to the forecastle deck for a little while, until I discovered that the bowsprit pretty much stopped you getting to the actual front and blocked most of your view forwards.
But I get ahead of myself. This ship ties up at the jetty and they put out… well, a piece of cardboard for a ramp. The fact that it’s a red carpet ramp in no way makes it more comfortable to scurry up and board. I believe if you go inside you can claim your free glass of fizz but no one bothered, we all made for the deck of our choice. You’re here to see the views, not to drink or sit inside.
The first night view is of the old port, obviously. While you’re waiting for the ship to come in, the lights of the port come on and the sky is turning royal blue by the time you’re departing. Then you sail alongside the city walls. I knew those city walls were huge and virtually impenetrable but on a ship four storeys high, you find yourself sailing almost alongside the top of the walls and you really start to get the scale of them – how high they are, how thick and solid they are, how fortress-like they are.
Once you get round the other side of the Old Town, you start to see town lights again. The walls do prevent you from seeing the lights of the Old Town but that’s ok, because the walls are part of the joy of the Old Town. But it’s still fun to get back to the unwalled parts of Dubrovnik and see the lights twinkling in the dark. I think it was somewhere around here when I decided to go and investigate the forecastle deck. I definitely take ships’ ladders backwards. When we docked, I thought I could be brave enough to depart by climbing down forwards. Nope! While we were at sea, I definitely took them backwards. It wasn’t rough but you could feel that you were moving and I wasn’t going to risk falling off the ladders.
Anyway, once you’re out of the shadow of the city walls, the sea and the Elafiti Islands begin to open up and the remains of the sunset. This is the night cruise, not the sunset one, this is the repositioning trip, but there’s still plenty of orange and white and pink on the horizon and the colour silhouettes some of the islands which you might not see. I especially enjoyed taking photos from the poop deck, with the masts and rigging in front of the bright colours.
You round the Lapad peninsula, which sticks out between the Old Town and the port and now you get all the colours of the port. There’s a big bridge with a tower over the mouth of… well, I’m not sure if it’s a wide river or a short fjord, but there’s an inlet here where a bridge carries the road away from Dubrovnik and into the mountain villages to the north. That tower, which I could see from my terrace, was mostly lit in white but was blue one night. The cruise ships also dock at this end of the port and even if they’re staying overnight and not doing much, they still have a lot of lights on. Then there’s Gruž itself. What you don’t realise from looking on Google Maps is that the settlement around the port is basically built on the side of a mountain. It’s almost vertical and it stops very suddenly. It’s like sailing into a huge wide theatre, all these lights on the hill looking down at you along the full length of the port and marina. I love lights in the dark and you get an abundance of them here.
You also discover that it’s all a bit Below Decks at the port. I was about halfway along the port and up about four levels and I had no idea that there are people partying on megayachts down at water level. Yachts as in five-storey powered boats with hot tubs and staff, not yachts as in tall sailing ships. These things have never seen a sail. They had flashing lights and mirrorballs and girls in bikinis shrieking with cocktails in hand and I’m sure they were having a great time but I was also very glad I was staying a bit further away where I couldn’t hear them. I’d be really interested to stay in one of the coastal cities in the north of Croatia. I know Dubrovnik is the tourist capital and I’d be really interested to see whether colossal party boats are a thing elsewhere.
Anyway, we eventually came alongside the port, used our sideways engines to push ourselves into place – try doing that in a sailing vessel – and the cardboard ramp came out again. That’s my one criticism. The gangplank just feels too wobbly. Three steps and a hop and I was safely back on dry land, looking up at the ship I’d just spent an hour on. It’s tall when you’re standing next to it but I think it’s taller when it’s sailing past city walls.
I was exactly right that it was really convenient to go out for an adventure and be delivered home as part of that adventure – so much easier than walking back through town and waiting for the bus – but it does mean you go straight from the magic and romance of sailing the Adriatic under the sunset and the twinkle of the city to sweating while climbing 101 steps back up the side of the mountain to your apartment.
