Dubrovnik: Stunning, but too many fat people

All's well here on the Dalmatian Coast (as we now know it) - Simon and I arrived in Dubrovnik on Sunday and were slightly perturbed by the light smattering of rain that showered us as we walked from the plane to the terminal building. The weather since our arrival has been changeable but good for sightseeing - I don't miss the oh-so-sexy beads of sweat trickling down the back of my calves that were omnipresent in India.

Dubbers is architecturally stunning and has to be seen to be believed - the shining white marble streets look wet in the night-time lamplight and demand to be photographed. Yesterday we visited a Franciscan monastery complete with 1991 shell hole in its ancient exterior, and then took a walk around the city's 2km circumference walls, with the sea on one side and the gorgeous ramshackle rooves (is that the plural? Really? It looks seriously odd) on the other, satellite dishes pointing out to the horizon and the west coast of Italy. This morning we took a boat trip around the periphery, an overcast sky blighting my attempts at visual records on the Fuji Finepix although inevitably a frazzling sun broke through the clouds the instant we returned to the harbour - and now we're packing up and leaving this little walled miracle, finding our rented car and, all being well, crossing the border into Montenegro.

Despite its unquestionable beauty, two days here has been more than enough - the ratio of obese tourists to locals must be something like 47:1 and the food is not nearly as cheap nor as delicious as the guidebooks would have us believe. I'm looking forward to the next phase - nine days (count 'em) on a fjord, an optimistic number of books to get through - the iPod's fully charged, the sunhat's at the ready - let's just hope the Roger Farr who is renting us his Montenegrin apartment is not the Roger Farr that, according to www.timeshare.org.uk, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1998 for defrauding 467 timeshare owners out of £1.5M. Reassuring...