A Presto!

Ciao Roma!

Our last morning in Rome, and in Europe.

We rode to the airport in a taxi with the windows down, Italian pop blaring on the radio, threading through the heart of the city past the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Aurelian Walls and Circus Maximus. It was an entirely unplanned farewell tour, and it was perfect.

And just like that, the Festival of Fifty comes to a close.

Is it frivolous? Perhaps, on paper. But we are acutely aware that we live a privileged life, and we take none of it for granted. Firmly in the second half of our lives now, the sense that time is finite and genuinely precious is harder to ignore. We can't take anything material with us in the end — so we committed, instead, to memories and to the people we make them with. This trip delivered both in abundance.

Today we begin the long journey home. Barring disasters, we'll leave it right here.

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For the detail-oriented reader: a taxi from central Rome to Fiumicino is a flat €55 and runs 30 to 40 minutes. Airport security was swift — five minutes, with the new machines that mercifully allow everything to stay in your bag. The dreaded EES at Fiumicino on a Sunday morning, queue joined at 9:10am, took thirty minutes despite looking considerably worse. It kept moving. There is hope.

The gorgeous breakfast room

I've never had a fountain with my breakfast!

A few reminders that you are in Italy

Nutella

 

A Roman Sojourn

Is it a capuccino? No! It was a savoury dish made of pork, potato and cod! Yes it played with the time but tasted fantastic!

Happy to report that disembarking at Bari was a dream. Cabins were available until 10am, breakfast ran at the usual time, and suitcases only needed to be out 45 minutes before collection — after which they appeared, as if by magic, on the pier. No fuss, no overnight luggage anxiety, no queuing in corridors waiting. A model disembarkation.

What we didn't realise until too late was that we could have stayed for lunch, stowed our bags on board and explored Bari before returning to collect them. A genuinely fantastic service — and one that would have been considerably more useful had it been, at any point, communicated clearly. Finding information about anything on this cruise, it must be said, required more effort than it should have.

Walking off was exactly that, walking off. No checks, no queues, nothing. A taxi was called for us and we were at Bari Centrale by 9:45am, which was earlier than expected and left us sitting on a shaded platform bench in what was already, at that hour, a genuinely aggressive heat.

The train to Rome was, unfortunately, well populated with Australians. Travelling with children. In first class. The noise levels were considerable, the suitcases were enormous and strategically positioned to block carriage entry, and we had to walk around to the other side to board. We survived four hours. Barely.

What we almost didn't survive was the 300 metres from Roma Termini to our hotel. Thirty-four degrees, no shade, full sun. By the time we checked in, we were comprehensively drenched. Any plans involving shopping had melted, quite literally, somewhere on the cobblestones outside the station.

Our brief overnight in Rome was sponsored by Amex. We had travel and dining credits to fund our stay as well as an evening at All'Oro, a Michelin-starred restaurant a short taxi ride away from the hotel. The meal was a playful, elegant take on Italian classics — exactly the right way to mark the end of a very good trip.

Docked at Bari

Bari Centrale. So grateful for seats and shade

Hurray for freebies?!

Our very minimalist room in Hotel Palazzo Montemartini, funky interiors in an old building

Bathroom

Restaurant All'Oro

Kotor

 

Kotor, Montenegro

Today I was not the first one awake at 6am, and we have the Bay of Kotor to thank for that.

Club Med 2 entered the bay at 5:20am, threading through the Verige Strait — the narrowest point of the bay at just 340 metres wide — at 7am. The passage through is one of those moments that gets people out of bed. Even the French. The Bay of Kotor is essentially a drowned river canyon, often mistaken for a fjord, cutting deep into the Montenegrin (a new word I leant!) mountains and growing more dramatic the further in you go. 

We anchored three nautical miles from port, meaning a thirty-minute tender ride in, longer than we'd been used to. Kotor, it turned out, was worth every minute of it. Prettier than Dubrovnik, in our opinion . Though we appreciated we were comparing it on a cooler morning, which may have influenced the verdict.

We meandered the medieval old town, tried krempita — a custard cream slice that suspiciously tasted like an Australian vanilla slice — and then, in what can only be described as a failure to learn from experience, decided to walk the city walls again. And once again, it was enough to tip us decisively over the edge. Some lessons, it turns out, require multiple city walls to land.

Entering the Bay of Kotor. Yes sunrise is VERY early

Watching a cruise ship squeeze through the Verige Strait

Our turn. Through to the other side

The gorgeous Bay of Kotor

Another country under the belt! #76

The tender dropped us right outside the city wall

Did you say wall? 

City of cats. There was a cat museum but we refrained

Drago Palace

Yes that is street art

I don't know why a nun makes a place look older and more authentic...

Krempita

Remember this Belinda...remember this!

Um yeah, we were that dumb to walk the city walls...again

Although this was one was much shorter, had some shade and was free! How could we resist

View back towards the walled city

And just like that, our time aboard Club Med 2 was done.

It did take us a while to warm up to life onboard. The French reserve that greeted us on day one gradually gave way to genuine warmth. By the end, the crew and guests were greeting us by name: Bonjour, Bonsoir, Bonne nuit, delivered with real enthusiasm. One recurring conversation was with French passengers curious to know whether Europe had been good to us — there was something rather lovely about that.

The pace of this kind of sailing suits a particular mood, and we happened to be in exactly that mood. No shore excursions planned to the minute, no agenda beyond the rhythm of the day. The smaller ports — Cres, Krk, Vis, Mljet — were the highlight, genuinely untouched and unhurried in a way the bigger stops can't quite manage anymore.

Would I recommend Club Med 2? Yes, with caveats. It doesn't cater to early risers — breakfast at 7:30am is as early as it gets, and dinner runs late. There are noticeably more smokers than on other cruise lines, though they tend to claim the same corner of the ship consistently and are easy enough to avoid. Don't come expecting entertainment in the traditional cruise sense. There is none, at least nothing that we were still awake for in the evening. This is a read-a-book, nap-in-the-sun, try-the-watersports kind of ship. If that's what you're after, it delivers beautifully. The food, without exception, was excellent. I looked forward to every single meal, from breakfast through to the pre-dinner canapés, and not once was I disappointed. The coffee remained the sole dissenter throughout.

We were sad to leave. The rum-spiked iced tea situation alone was worth staying for. Tomorrow, Bari — and the end of our time in the Adriatic.

Lunch with a view

Ready for "white" evening

The French do know how to do farewells in style. The ship looked magnificent with guests in all white

All the seafood came out

Goodbye Club Med 2!

Mljet

Malo Jezero

Another day, another place we couldn't pronounce.

Fortunately, unlike Krk, this one contains actual vowels. For the record, it's "Mlyeht"...approximately. Unfortunately, by this stage we'd also become those precious Australians who apparently can't cope with a European summer.

Mljet is Croatia's southernmost and most densely forested island, much of its western end protected as a national park since 1960, one of the oldest in the country. The park's centrepiece is a pair of landlocked saltwater lakes, Veliko Jezero and Malo Jezero, connected to the Adriatic by a narrow channel. After handing over our €30 entrance fee, we set off with every intention of completing a 3.5-kilometre walk circumnavigating the smaller of the 2 lakes.

That plan lasted approximately as long as it took to start walking on the dirt trail in full sun. It was pretty, in fact the closest thing to an Australian bush walk we'd encountered all trip — but the objective quickly narrowed to a single, non-negotiable goal: reach the swimming point on Veliko Jezero and get in the water.

The water was a lovely temperature, impossibly clear and blissfully refreshing. We floated around for what must have been a record amount of time ashore, finally making our way back to the yacht at the positively respectable hour of 11 a.m.

By now, the crew knew us almost as well as we knew the cocktail menu. A margarita for Mal. A mocktail for me.

They had also taken on board one of Mal's suggestions. The daily afternoon poolside iced tea rounds now came with an optional side of rum.

I suspect he'll be expecting royalties.

I wish I could get a photo of her with her sails up off the ship! 

The seas have been like glass. No movement

Lots of small tour boats, each taking about 30 passengers for week long journeys up and down the coast

The National Park entrance ticket booth. There is also one right at the swimming point near the lake

Map of the island

First glimpse of the lake

Hey...are we on the Sam King Oval loop?!

Not too crowded

There was a channel that links the big and little lakes. It was fun swimming through it

You might think this is a table for 4. No...this is Malcolm not being to decide what he wants to eat for lunch

Dessert onboard are delish. Small portions make them easy to enjoy!

Finally we caught some entertainment! A dance performance by the GOs (Gentil Organisateur  or Gentle Organizer). Very Kitsch. Very Eurovision. Love it!

And of course with a setting sun as the backdrop

The burger had been calling us for a while. The problem was that there were too many other food option. We finally tried it. Damn it was good!

Some of the food offerings this evening

Never seen this before!