Ancona & Split

The first line about Ancona in our lonely planet book is this...

"Unless you're taking a ferry to Greece, Croatia or Turkey, you won't want to hang around in Ancona"

This pretty much sums it up. We got in at 1pm and our hostel didn't open until 4.30pm so after some lunch and a quick walk around (there was nothing to see but guys loitering and closed shops) we headed to the train station and spent a few hours sitting in one of their waiting rooms reading until we could check into our hostel. We were supposed to be in separate rooms here (boys and girls dorms) but they must be quiet because they put us in the same room, a four bed dorm room that we had all to ourselves which was nice.
We didn't do much else in Ancona, went out for dinner where we both got the same thing... carbonara (it was the only thing on the menu we could understand) which was disgusting.
And that was it.

The streets of Ancona

I definitely don't recommend it, Ancona was king of like being back in Vietnam only this time the locals appeared to use the streets as their public toilets... doesn't make for the greatest smell!
We got the ferry to Split which turned out to be pretty nice. it was quite large and had a restaurant and duty free shop and a few other snack shops.

On the ferry

we got into Split at about 4.30pm i think and after checking into our hostel did a bit of sight seeing, got some dinner and stocked up on essentials for our cruise ie. board shorts and towels.