Back in Zagreb for Lunch, Then it's time to Split

Checked out and walking to the train station before 8am. It’s warm, but there’s cloud cover, so we don’t need to stick to the shady bits. 1.8 km feels a lot further when you’ve got 8 kg on your back and 4 kg on your front!

The train leaves right on time at 8:50am. It’s super modern with lovely, even air-conditioning and normal forward-facing seats. Our first stop is a town just inside the Slovenian border called Dobova. It’s about a 1.5-hour journey. We’re retracing our route from the other day, so the scenery is familiar.

The train stops and we get off. Around 12 others are also looking for the next train to Zagreb. There’s no other train at the station and no boards showing when it’s coming. Inside the station, there’s a small shop, and Sarah goes in to ask the lady about the train. She finds out it will arrive on platform 4, so we cross under the tracks to the second set of platforms.

A train turns up about 15 minutes later with "Zagreb" written on the doors, so we hop on. The first few carriages are all sleeper units with their blinds pulled. If the sign on the door is right, the train started in Zurich, Switzerland. Eventually, we find some 6-person compartment carriages and share one with one other person. It’s air-conditioned too—great!

We start reading our books again, and much earlier than expected, the train stops at a station and the woman in our carriage starts to leave. We have to get up to let her drag her suitcase past us. As she’s about to get off, she says, “This is the last stop. We’re in Zagreb.”

“This is Zagreb?” we reply.

“Yes!”

Oh shit—we’d better get off then. We’re getting really good at this train travel stuff! 😂

Sure enough, the station and surroundings are very familiar. We grab some lunch and head across to the park to find a seat in the shade. Sarah pops down the road to Spar to see if she can find something for dinner for the next train ride.

We have a two-hour gap between trains in Zagreb, but it goes quite quickly, and soon we’re looking for and boarding the next one. It turns out to be a ridiculously slow train that takes eight hours to get to Split. It can go faster—it does at times—but mostly crawls along. Weird.

About halfway through the trip, we get chatting with two young women sitting across from us. They’re about Emma and Kate’s age—early 20s. They’re on a three-month holiday that started in Scotland, then England, Italy, and now Croatia. Next, they’re off to Greece. We enjoy swapping travel stories, and they’re very impressed with our backpacks.

The scenery along the way is quite pretty—mainly rural landscapes, but we also pass through forests and climb over a large series of hills. They’re high enough to make our ears pop.

The train arrives into Split right on time at 10pm. It’s dark, so we didn’t see the coastline on the way in. We decided to get an Uber to the apartment since it’s about 5 km away—too far to walk this late. The host’s mum meets us to let us in. She only speaks Croatian and German, so that’s interesting!

More about the apartment tomorrow—it’s late, and it’s been a very tiring day. Time for sleep.