Sailing through Croatia!
So, sailing through Croatia was one of my favourite experiences of my Europe trip. I booked this tour before leaving for my trip. I decided to go with Topdeck travel but there are other companies that are available as well such as Sail Croatia and Contiki. Also if you want a bit more luxurious experience you can also look into Yacht Week. I booked through a travel agent but now that I am more experiences I would book directly from their website as you can sometimes get deals. I paid about $1500cad for an above deck suite for 8 days 7 nights. It also included 7 breakfasts and 7 lunches on the boats. There was a bar on the boat and they kept a tab of your drinks for the entire week (I think by the end of the week I maybe paid $100 for drinking everyday). The tour started and finished in Split, each day we starting sailing around 6am and arrived at our destination for the day around lunch time. The boat would often make stops for us to jump off the boat and swim, the water is so clear and beautiful but also the saltiest water I’ve ever experienced.
Jumping off our boat
With Topdeck we also had optional dinners each night with our group in the cities we visited which I ended up having some of the pizza I’ve ever had (I also tried gnocchi for the first time ever)! There was also so many fun events arranged each night, in the picture I am dressed as a banana pirate it was a sailor vs pirate themed party that we toured around to different bars then we ended up in a club in a cave!
We also had a bit of an adult scavenger hunt night that we ended up doing taking shots off the floor and one of our groups got kicked out of the club for maybe taking off too much clothing and pole dancing. Along with many other nights of fun planned events, our boat only had 18 people on it but there are so many boats docking at the same cities so you get to meet so many other travellers. Our stops for the trip included Milna, Hvar Korcula, Dubrovnik, Mljet, Makarska, then we stopped for some optional ziplining in Omis on our last day. I totally recommend the ziplining, it was so incredibly high up and overlooks this beautiful valley and the Cetina river.
All the towns we stopped in were beautiful, especially Mljet which is a national park.
Then we were back in Split to say goodbye. The only hiccup about the trip is that someone brought a stomach bug onto the boat and every single person got it at some point throughout the week but it came and went quickly and we all laughed it off! If you are thinking about booking a sailing trip in Croatia I say go for it, it may not be the best way to have a truly authentic experience in Croatia but we did meet many locals and you will get to see so much beautiful scenery that would be more difficult to plan on your own and you’ll make so many friends.