Day 23 - Saturday 4th June

The hotel's WiFi reception worked OK for a while last night and then seemed to stop working about the time we went to bed. I'd no success connecting to the cable internet either. This morning it was still playing up and so I went down to the reception to ask about it. She said she was aware of the problem and was rebooting the router. To cut a long story short, by the time we had finished breakfast, both the WiFi and cable connection were working. However, although the hotel's website talks about fast broadband, it was still very slow.

Split is the second largest city in Croatia (after Zagreb) with a population of about 200,000. The ancient part of the city, where we are staying, is all protected by UNESCO. Of this area, the oldest part is the ancient Diocletian Palace area that dates back to about 300AD in Roman times.

Today our guide was Katja. She took us on an excellent 90-minute walking tour of the ancient palace region. Like other parts of Croatia, the buildings show the result of wars and invasions over many centuries. Parts of the palace complex have already been restored and more restoration work is in progress.

After the tour, Suzy went to look at the shops. Being a Saturday, many of them were due to close at 1pm. I went for a walk along the waterfront. The city was crowded with a large number of tourists. Part of the reason was that there are several huge liners in the port. In addition, there are giant ferries coming and going all the time carrying tourist buses and their passengers.

It was difficult to find a suitable cafe  for lunch. Some of them are really only bars that serve drinks and ice cream. Many of the others that serve food were full or didn't look inviting. Eventually we found one that was well protected from the heat of the afternoon by the tall stone walls of the palace complex.

People had given us various suggestions for dinner. In the end we asked the hotel to book at a restaurant called Konoba Varos that specialises in traditional Croation cooking. Clearly they are very popular because they were very busy. When we arrived, many of the tables were occupied by a Japanese tour group. The food was OK but if we come back to Split, I'd probably vote to try a different restaurant.

After dinner, we decided to look for somewhere to have coffee. We ended up in the same open-air cafe in a large plaza that we went to last night because they had live music tonight.