At no point did I feel unsafe - and I drove at night, walked through cities at night, parked my shiny hire car wherever.

We did see plenty of depopulated rural towns and villages, but there seems to be a substantial push into ecotourism, and we met several young couples who had returned to renovate homes in their home villages. Got chatting to plenty of older locals, too - they speak German, the young folks English. Very warm, and welcoming, everywhere we met people.

We did find that almost every museum and historic site had to be unlocked for us, as we were usually the only people at any of them - all the tourists were at Sveti Blas, lying on the beach.

I don’t know - maybe it’s just a relative scale thing - I would count walking through Sao Paolo at night as somewhat sketchy, but not the instant death sentence that people seem to think it is, for instance.

Just because it’s covered heavily in the media doesn’t mean it’s commonplace.

I also think people in general tend to disproportionately exaggerate risks relative to the actual probabilities. Something exceptionally brazen and bad happens a few times making it into the news and now it's certain to happen to you should you go there.

Regardless though, if an alternative exists with 100% fewer reports of such problems, it's probably a safer choice relatively speaking.

But in my limited experience I have never found a "dangerous" place to be anywhere near as dangerous as its reputation described.