Plitvice Lakes
From Zagreb we rented a car to head to the Adriatic coast. While the prospect of sharing the road with Croatian drivers was frightening after walking around Zagreb, we needed to rent a car in order to reach Plitvice Lakes, a national park located in the middle of the country. We hadn’t expected to go there, but had heard so many good things about it from other travelers that we decided to change up our itinerary and head to the lakes. The short summary: beautiful, but nowhere near as pretty as the US national parks.
The driving was not as bad as expected; luckily there were signs most of the way, and freeway driving was freeway driving. The scariest parts were when drivers attempted to pass us on winding two lane roads – they really have no fear.
Plitvice Lakes is a series of lakes and waterfalls, surrounded by beautiful forest and with emerald green water. From what we could understand, a number of rivers converge into the lakes, and the result over the years was not a single river carved out into the rocks, but small lakes, each feeding into the next lower lake through wide “waterfalls”, which were so numerous and small that they appeared to be more marshes than waterfalls. The result was beautiful, even with overcast skies.
Unfortunately the green color of the water is hard to capture with a camera, but it is amazing – we were told that the spectacular color is due to the combination of very clear water and limestone at the bottom.
At the big waterfall
Our only hiccup was due to the park’s enormous footprint – in order to make sure visitors can see everything each ticket is a pass to a complicated combination of hiking trails, boat rides, and tram routes. Figuring it all out was hard enough, but the tram stops were barely marked, which caused us to wait with a nice Australian couple a few hundred feet away from the actual stop. When we flagged the tram down an unnecessarily angry driver wasn’t going to let us on, but I wore him down until he capitulated. Three years of law school, paying off!
Huh?