Croatia: Vukovar And The Kopacki Nature Park

I decided to skip our Brand G bus tour offered by the Amadeus Queen. Instead, I opted for "Vukovar On Your Own." I had a German-language map and walked to the City Museum in the former Archbishop's Palace. It had a collection of peasant-life implements, costumes, and old 18th and 19th century portraits. But it also highlighted the city's tragic destruction in the early 1990s during the civil wars after the collapse of Tito's "Yugoslavia," a country that no longer exists. One young journalist wrote about the suffering, but also hoped for the future - but his body was thrown in a mass grave, and his book only published posthumously. I walked around the town photographing the many buildings that remain shuttered before returning to the Amadeus Queen. - Dan
Jim opted to join the organized tour to the Kopacki Nature Park, a wetlands located about a half an hour drive from the ship. On the way the bus passed through Vukovar, and some of the remaining "shrapnel" houses damaged during the civil war. The government offered brick structures to replace destroyed homes, but the occupants had to re-furnish them. At the nature park the group boarded a covered boat for a slow trip through the marsh. The waters are teeming with fish which serve as an abundant food supply for thousands of cormorants, egrets, heron and huge white-tailed eagles. After our visit to the park we were treated to local brandy, wines and local snack specialties at the home of a colorful local fisherman and his family. - Jim