Top 5 most beautiful places in Europe

Dubrovnik. Renaissance city of Ragusa and major rival of the venerable Republic of Venice. Tremendously pretty, it is justifiably Croatia's most visited destination. The sun glints off the broad limestone paving stones of the Plaça, polished smooth by generations of footsteps. Narrow hillside alleys of vines and laundry lead up steep steps between Venetian balconies and shuttered windows to the famous medieval walls.

I am only passing through Dubrovnik, on my way to Sarajevo. I've been here twice now, and I think it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. Having travelled to many places I don't say that lightly. Silver-coloured cliffs surrounding Dubrovnik drop into opaline water. Tall spears of mediterranean cypress tower like shepherds above flocks of bony olive trees on the karst rock.

And somehow Croatia produces stunning women—blonde jaw-droppers who would take the catwalks of Milan by storm, and probably do.

So this inevitably leads me to the following entirely subjective list:

The Solonaut's
TOP FIVE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES IN EUROPE

(in no particular order)

Dubrovnik, Croatia
One of the best preserved walled cities in Europe. Maybe the best. Tourism has grown considerably in the last five years, but even amid the summer throngs it is easy to find a quiet bar in a lane, such as Caffe Soul, to drink local fruit brandy to the serenade of a live guitarist or watch an evening performance of a chamber orchestra in the chapel of Saint Saviour.

Oia, Santorini, Greece
Those famous photos of Santorini—white domed chapels with blue crosses and low, square houses barnacled above an azure sea—are taken from Oia. The island bakes in a delicious heat in summer. It is the only place I have ever been tempted to kick back with a beer and a book on a deck chair by the pool to overlook the caldera. I deliberately missed my departure ferry to stay. Pronounced ee-ah, Oia is probably my personal favourite in this list, above Dubrovnik.

Venice, Italy
Go back a thousand years in time. Tall fourteenth-century Gothic buildings usher you between piazze and you walk and walk and walk, down tall lanes, between palaces and churches, over bridges and under arched overhangs, and there isn't a hint of the modern world anywhere. You get a sense of how powerfully wealthy this state once was from the vast and sumptuous collection of paintings in the Doge's Palace—one after another gilt-framed Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese. It's like feasting on too much chocolate.

The Vézère and Dordogne valleys, France
Go in October, in wool coat and scarf weather. Leaves from woods of oak turn brilliant orange, yellow and brown in autumn and flock like starlings in the wind. Chateaux stud the hills and charming villages grace the valleys, such as the riverside La Roque-Gageac, the dramatic cliff-hugging town of Rocamadour, and the magnificent medieval Sarlat-la-Canéda, where I lodged for a week in a 16th-century tower.

Lucerne, Switzerland
In late spring, Lucerne is storybook. Yellow flowers whiffling in green meadows. Shaggy highland cattle clanking cowbells. Bright sun and blue sky. Tall evergreen trees. Snowy mountains. White swans on crystal waters. It's ridiculous.

Language

In major cities, it’s easy to get by with English.  Too easy.  Speaking foreign languages is one of the joys of travel.  Too many English-speaking tourists turn up in Venice or Paris and speak English.  You can't.  That's cheating.  Aussies are as guilty of this as Americans or the Brits.  You’ve got to make an effort.

But the effort does become draining, and the language barrier is isolating.  Spaniards are reticent to speak anything other than Spanish, and in provincial Andalucía you won’t get much else.  Luckily, my basis in French gets me by with Spanish, and it is probably my favourite language to try to speak.

In Bruges, English is so widely spoken it could be considered a second language after their Flemish Dutch (the national language of French is equally well-spoken, though pride is at stake due to wars with France).

Portugal and England share the oldest alliance in history, and English is widespread in urban areas of Portugal.  It is sporadic in rural areas.  The elderly, urban or rural, don't speak it at all.

My biggest surprise was Croatia, which easily has the most widespread English of all the countries I toured.  It is taught to children in school from young, and the standard is high.  This was a bit of a relief, because I have no knowledge of any Slavic language.  I was out of luck when I found that just over the border in Montenegro, English is not spoken at all, and I had to depend on my Croatian phrase book (for sensitive cultural and political reasons, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian are all officially different languages, but linguistically they are close dialects of the same language).

When I reached France, it was with a mixture of comfort and trepidation.  I actually speak a little bit of French, so I could have simple conversations.  But I also know enough grammar to know I’m getting my conjugation wrong or that I don’t know which participle to use.

Whew!

I caught the bus back from Montenegro to Dubrovnik, in the south of Croatia, then caught the ferry up the Adriatic Sea to Rijeka in the north, a 22-hour trip.  I booked a cabin for the night, a simple room with two bunks and a bathroom with sink and toilet; no window (an outside cabin costs more).  From Rijeka I had originally intended to stay a night in Rovinj or Poreč in Istria and catch a fast catamaran to Venice, but the service stopped running in early October.  Poreč has some remarkably well-preserved Byzantine mosaics which I was disappointed to miss.  So, instead, I had to kill seven hours in Rijeka, a pleasant-enough-but-not-terribly-interesting town, waiting for a bus to Trieste, from which I boarded a train to Venice.  Which is where I shall stay put for a while!

Border control

There were only a dozen or so souls on the 3PM bus from Dubrovnik to Podgorice, the capital of Montenegro. I was getting off at Budva, the centre of the action on the Montenegrin coast in peak season. In October, though, stripped of its tourist gloss under gray skies, it is somewhat bleak (as noted in my previous entry).

At the Croatian-Montenegrin border, a policeman boards the bus and collects passports from each of the passengers. He takes them into the border control office to stamp them and then gives them back to the bus driver, who returns them to the owners, a bit of a random process of sometimes checking photos and other times actually passing off the responsibility of distribution to another passenger. The bus travels two minutes up the road, stops at another border check, and we do the same routine all over again. Why? Old bureaucratic communist habit? And what is in between these two stops? No man’s land?

Chamber music

I won't bore you with the details of the makeshift raft, disappearing coastlines, and invoking Poseidon himself to escape the maelstrom, but there was afterwards a moment of peace when I was able to see the Sorkočević Quartet perform by candlelight in Dubrovnik's tiny Church of St Saviour (an odd name, as I thought there was only one saviour in Christianity, and that he hardly needed to be canonised).

The orchestra, comprised of flute, violin, piano and contrabass viola, performed:

• Handel's "Largo"
• Albinoni's Trio Sonata
• Sorkočević's Symphony No. 4
• Overture to Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro"
• Beethoven's "Coriolan Overture"
• Overture to Rossini's "Italian in Algiers"

They also performed an encore, which piece they announced but the name of which I didn't catch.

The atmosphere was intimate—there wouldn't have been more than fifty people in the audience, already more than half the little chapel's capacity—and the sound was warm and clear.  The small plan and high ceiling of the church are perfect for the acoustics of chamber music.  My favourite was the Cariolan Overture, which they performed with the dynamic sympathy required for Beethoven.  I thanked them afterwards for a wonderful concert.

Deluge in Dubrovnik

The storm front over Dubrovnik lasted for two days. The rain held off during daylight long enough for me to walk the stout 2km-long city walls, but that night after dinner I was trapped by the deluge.

I ventured out in the downpour that evening wearing only shorts, a T-shirt, and a light rain jacket because all my clothes were at the laundry.  I found a cozy little vegetarian restaurant in the old town called Nishta: wooden roof beams, gold script on purple walls, lounge music and candlelight.  The food—apart from being a simple relief from meat and potatoes—was delicious.  In Sydney, I eat much more vegetarian than I have been able to in Europe, so the ratatouille hommus wraps and tempeh burritos went down like a king's banquet.

The rain was so heavy that the restaurant had closed the outdoor tables in the little stone laneway.  When I got outside, torrents were cascading down the stairs of the perpendicular lanes and flooding the little street two inches deep.  I stood on a raised step with my back against the building, propped my umbrella up and waited in my bare legs for the rain to ease.  It got heavier.  I pressed myself into the building and waited some more, and after ten minutes, it got even heavier.  I couldn't believe it!  It was like the Adriatic was upturned.  I was reasonably safe on my raised step against the building, and all I could do was laugh.  I was stranded like Maitland livestock.

Summer is over

It's been an Indian summer in this part of the world.  The pleasant, sunny days I've had in Croatia are usually finished by September, apparently.  But there's now been an announcement that the fun is over.  Thunderstorms woke me in Dubrovnik at 7AM this morning.  The rain held off for most of the daylight hours as I walked the city walls, but now at 8PM as I write this it has returned, and it is pissing.  Notwithstanding the afternoon storm in Mértola, Portugal, I've had almost no rain at all on this trip (which was in karmic order after being practically rained out of Eastern Europe last year).

If this low pressure in the Adriatic keeps up by the time I reach Venice next week, I might just experience the notorious acqua alta, where the pedestrian areas of Venice are submerged.  I have an umbrella and a rain jacket, but I didn't bring any fishing waders with me, so I'd probably make the call to skip it and move on.  After running out of time in 2007, that would make it the second time I failed to reach Venice.

Long Island iced teas, filo pastry and women

When I got off the bus from Zadar to Split, I was mobbed by women wanting to take me home. I must have said no a dozen times. They only wanted me for my money.  In any case, I had already booked ahead for accommodation.

There must be many empty private rooms outside of peak season; wearing my backpack, I continued to be approached walking into town. “Excuse me, do you need a room? In the palace, very cheap.” They are civil, and a polite “no” resolves the matter; they are certainly nothing like Lisbon’s hash peddlers.

Lonely Planet says that Diocletian’s Palace is “one of the most imposing Roman ruins in existence.” It’s no overstatement. Built by the Roman emperor as a retirement villa, the intact, three-storey walls, roughly 200 metres on each side, encapsulate Romanesque and Gothic mansions built into tall Roman arches and Corinthian capped pillars by wealthy merchants in the Middle Ages, and today is a labyrinth of narrow stone lanes filled with jewellery stores, market stalls, museums, windows adorned with laundry, restaurants, and weed-strewn dead ends.

Split may be even more relaxed than Zadar. After a rather busy three weeks of driving through Portugal after scrambling to get to Andalucía on time, followed by a three-day Italian blitz, I decided to take advantage of the coastal Dalmatian atmosphere and spent three days in Split doing nothing much at all. The harbour is fronted by a long promenade knows as Riva, populated with open air cafes. It’s a beaut spot for people watching against the background of the Adriatic sipping a Long Island iced tea.

The weather in Croatia has been sunny and pleasant in the low to mid twenties. Despite having spent many hours in the sun without sunblock over many weeks, I haven’t yet been sunburnt, which is a bit of a mystery to me. My Irish skin is like filo pastry. I only once lathered up, when I sat in the baking Andalusian sun to watch the bullfight in Ronda, which I’m pretty sure would have otherwise done me in.

Sea Organ

Zadar’s Sea Organ is a unique and inspired installation. The swell of the sea pushes air through organ pipes built under the broad stone steps of the waterfront promenade. You can’t see the Sea Organ; you can only hear it. The sound is projected out the fluted risers of the steps, so the best way to enjoy the music is to lounge on the steps and watch the boats drift on the sea, especially as the sun goes down. The intensity and timbre of the notes surge with the waves, so a passing ferry sends a new song into the organ. It is peaceful, enjoyable and utterly brilliant, and the only one of its kind in the world. The designer deserves a special mention: local architect Nikola Brašić. It warrants stopping in Zadar just to see it

I’ve attached a 30-second recording of it here.

Croatia

The mood of the Dalmatian coast makes me think of it as an enormous Manly (a beach suburb of Sydney). Zadar has a calm, chilled vibe, quiet except that there is plenty of life. I always base myself in the old, historic centre of each place that I visit, but there are very few hotels in Zadar’s old town. My hotel was a half hour walk away. Most tourists here stay 3km away in the newer part of the city where there is plenty of accommodation. High season in Croatia is July and August, the northern summer, but October seems pretty low-key.

Zadar is a very youthful place; there is an abundance of people under 25. If this is representative of the Croation population, reflecting on the possible reason is disconcerting: the “ethnic cleansing” of the Homeland War, as the Croats call it, took place when they were all children. But there is a distinct feeling that that is history now, and the place feels ready to surge into the future with the youth at its helm.

The harbour is busy with ferries en route up and down the coast, and the marinas are filled with fishing trawlers, sailboats, and runabouts. The place is very genuine. Few of the yachts are as ostentatious as the showboats in Sydney’s Darling Harbour. I strolled along the peaceful waterfront at night back to my hotel, and quietly envied two skippers on cabin cruisers moored alongside each other, chatting over the gunwales and looking out to the moonlit Adriatic.

Adventure!

Constant travelling place to place is a continual cycle of anxiety, triumph and departure.  You venture into unknown territory, not uncommonly getting lost, and establish yourself in a strange place.  After orienting yourself, things become familiar and you’re comfortable enough to enjoy the novelty and newness of everything.  You even become a minor authority and pass on recommendations to fellow travellers.   Then you move on—sometimes it’s bittersweet when you leave a favourite place—and the anxiety begins anew.  It’s a slow-burn adrenaline rush.

I’ve stuck largely to my planned itinerary on this trip, adjusting it only slightly to stay a day longer in Mertola or Tomar, or dropping a destination like Elvas or Viseu because I try to do too much.  I think Croatia and Montenegro will be even more fluid, as it was planned with the least rigour and because my itinerary has now gained two days.  I had planned to raft Montenegro's Tara Canyon, but I have just learned that the rafting season is now over.  October is late, but some years the water is still strong enough for rapids.  It must have petered out.