Sometimes when your travelling its hard to avoid the major touristic areas and find small unique areas that aren’t typically visited; they’re difficult to get to or require a great deal of time investment. But we thought why not ! Off to plitvice national parks north of zadar.
We started by having a lazy morning, catching up on emails, booking accommodation for future adventures and finding some fruit and veg (pizza saturation point well past at this point). Emily had done a ton of research from this place as no single piece of information really explained the layout of surrounding private accommodation or if there was transport around once you were there. It seemed like it was put in the too hard basket, along with meals with no added salt and fresh milk (i miss you fontera). Most people, according to our future host, take private transport and only come for a day, since its 2.5 hrs from Zadar. We caught a bus, and got dropped off at a random piece of road in the forest after Emily dutifully constructed a sentence in Croatian for the jovial bus driver to make sure it was the correct random pace! in a private room in a house
Yay – it worked, perfectly placed in front of our house where we had a very nice private room. The area looked like something straight out of The Sound of Music, with rolling fields and snow topped mountains around. Absolutely beautiful !!
Off to dinner, which we were told could only be had at the one restaurant in the village; The après ski restaurant of the local ski lodge. The national park gets 6 feet of snow a year, so plenty for some skiing. They had a great pommer with a slope only 200m long by 60m; the entirety of Croatia’s ski industry.
Plitvice national park was named by UNESCO in 1979 as a world heritage site. It was the first area invaded by Serbian rebels on 31 March 1991, who used the national park offices as barracks and ransacked the infrastructure of the park. Given its value to the surrounding area, the facilities have undergone extensive investment. It lies in a dolomite valley, so the affect of limestone and ice cold water is amazing.
Taking the 6-8hr K route through the park, we thought we would smash out the whole route in one day (kinda like how DOC believes that all trampers are unfit and artificially increases the time). However my photography slowed us down as it was a great place to experiment with slow capture waterfall photos.
We set off down to the lower lakes, a series of smaller lakes separated by cascade waterfalls, at times emerging from springs in the limestone walls. It was amazing to see the myriad of fish in the crystal clear water. The board walks were amazing, literally 10 cm above the water line such that you felt as if you were walking on the waterfall edge.
As the afternoon continued we made our way up to the upper falls which were more of a continuous small cascade waterfall through bright forest. A few picture postcard moments!
By this stage our 6 hours was nearing so we caught a train/bus thingy down the hill to be meet by our host mum for a lift home.
Our house was great, A: The cheapest in Croatia so far, B: best nights sleep ever, C: Tv with Big Bang theory on repeat. Talking to the son was interesting. Originally from Serbia (400,000 serbs lived in the area which was ethnically serbian), they had a holiday house in Plitvice before the war. It was bombed and burnt out, hence the new place. He was studying political science in Belgrade so had some interesting takes on the area and the war.
We had an early morning the next day, to try to beat the crowds and also take some photos when the sun was in the right place (p.s. Emily is very very patient and loves me playing with ISO settings).
We returned to attempt to flag down the 1.30 pm bus to Zadar, a difficult proposition as they often zip past you and we couldn’t find an official timetable anywhere (not even on google)!
After a few random propositions from local ‘taxi’ people who seemed to have no faith in public transport, the bus finally came 30 min later.
On our way we found the bus headed to Sibenik; our next port of call. Good times all around.!