On to Bosnia and Herzegovina Soon!

Hi from the lovely Croatian coast! Just briefly, we love this part of the world. Our luck hitchhiking has been amazing, and we have met so many great people! In Zagreb, we stayed with Julija who was an awesome girl working for a logo company who introduced us to so many Croatian specialties and history, Danica and Mia, dedicated university students who gave us a taste of Zagreb student culture (and super cheap student cafeteria food, like a 4 course meal for $1, yay!), Riba (it was worth it to visit Croatia just for his laugh)... how can we summarize this guy...: Mensa member, will be a father in 5 days, president of the Croatian curling club (?), Croatian Playboy Assistant Editor, hitchhiked on all continents except South America following the Croatian sports teams, can sing our national anthem thanks to his favourite band "No Means No", everyone knows him by Riba which means "fish", geography teacher, our friend recognized him from his feature on a Croatian TV interior design makeover show...I think there was more but it is all confused in my head). Crazy four days in Zagreb, but so fun. Thanks so much!

After we fianlly pulled ourselves away from the hospitality in Zagreb, we visited a National Park where the war first started. Most things have been rebuilt since, but if you look closely you can see the shell marks in the campground asphalt, and there are some houses that have dozens of bullet holes in them. That was the first time we have seen anything like that, and I don't think it will be the last. But that wasn't the highlight of the park...most of our attention was drawn to the dozen crystal clear lakes that all overflow into each other in the most amazing cascading waterfalls...it was gorgeous, and the park is well-designed (still a bit reminiscent of the communist era) with wooden paths that go over and around the lakes and up the high cliffs for the view.

We spent a couple of days relaxing at the seaside, and one night in Dubrovnik touring the magnificent fortified city walls and marble streets that have been almost completely restored after the intense destruction it suffered during the war. We stayed with a friend of Riba's, Igor, an IT manager at a "collection" of hotels. We took a photo of the Excelsior beach front hotel "where our backpacks stayed" for an afternoon in the luggage room. Now we are on the island of Korcula, in a tiny old walled town where they claim Marco Polo was born. We will be heading for Bosnia and Herzegovina in a couple of days, first to Mostar and then Sarajevo, where we have HC invitations.

We have been having a great time hitchhiking, every person we meet is very excited that we came all the way from Canada, and always is so hospitable, from coffee, or some sort of local specialty (we have a year's supply of Croatian soup stock in our packs...) or taking care of our ferry passages or giving us 2 day lifts (thanks Doreen and Hannah!). It has been very cheap camping when we don't have someone to stay with, and there are not too many tourists now that the season is ending, so we have beaches all to ourselves.

We had planned to just travel for a short time now and then work in Britain before Christmas when we go home to Canada, but we have been having so much fun and so many surprise invitations (like sailing) that we are going waaay slower than we expected. So we don't know if we will find work before Christmas, but we are just playing it by ear and seeing how it goes. We will let you all know!