The alarm went off at 5:30am today so we could be at Plitvice Lakes National Park at 7am (when it opened) to beat the crowd....yeah, that didn't happen - there were TONS of people - bummer.
First, the good. WOW! It is an amazing park - basically 16 lakes that connect via multiple waterfalls - beautiful aqua blue lakes, some amazing waterfalls (even in mid-August), and some great flora - trees, grasses, etc. All of this is connected through over-water walkways, trails, boats, and a shuttle (called a tram in the park).
Next, the interesting. Plitvice Lakes National Park was established in 1949 and was Croatia's first national park. On Easter Sunday, 1991, the first shot in Croatia's war with Yugoslavia was fired at Plitvice Lakes National Park and the first casualty of the war was a park policeman.
Next, the bad. People, people everywhere! Loud, Screaming children. Unaware (or uninterested) parents. People walking (slowly) side-by-side on the narrow walkways without any sense of other people. Loud people. Usually when we hike, yeah, there are people, but about a mile or so into the trail, the crowd thins. Not here. We figure because the entire park is easily (fairly) accessible to pretty much anyone.
As we said yesterday, our Airbnb was a 10 minute walk to the park entrance, so we were at the park entrance about 7:10am. (The woman who runs the Airbnb let us leave our car at her place, saving us 17€, which was very nice.) Supposedly there are timed entries, and we purchased tickets online (40€ each) for a 7am - 8am entrance time. No way were there any limited on how many people could enter at any given time - not by the amount of people we saw.🤨
There are lots of different routes, called programs, throughout the park, that one can follow to see the lower area, upper area, or both. We did Program C - the entire park - which is 8,000 meters (about five miles) and estimated to take 4 - 6 hours.
It took us about 50 minutes to get to where one takes the boat across the lake. We had to wait for the boat for about 45 minutes, the ride was about 15 minutes long. (This is where people were at their worst, but no reason to linger on the negative.....) We continued our walk, enjoying the scenery and were pretty much done at 10:30. We did walk at a decen pace (when we weren't stuck behind people), but were still surprised at how quickly we "did" the park.
We took the shuttle (tram) back (close to) the entrance and walked out. Brad purchased a Plitvice Lakes National Park t-shirt, we had some lunch, and we got in the car for our drive (about 3 1/2 hours) to our next (and last) Croatia destination: Rovinj, in the Istria area.
The first part of our drive to Rovinj was on a (sort of) one-way road. Brad was driving; Suzanne navigating. Brad was convinced that we were heading to Bosnia (again). Apparently it takes only one time for Suzanne to navigate us onto a teeny-tiny road that goes to Croatia through Bosina - but only for locals so we have to turn around - and she is accused every time. 😂
Eventually the road turned into a "real" two-lane road, and then a highway - Brad was thrilled. The highway had tons of tunnels, which fascinated engineer Brad.
Around 5pm we arrive to our Airbnb, which is nice. The woman's name who owns it is Biserka - gotta love that name! 😀
No comments:
Post a Comment