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| At the park |
According to most every travel account we've come across, one of the "absolute must-sees" in Croatia is Plitvice Lakes National Park in the center of Croatia, and it absolutely lived up to its hype. We've been saving this trip for my parents, who arrived on April 26. Knowing they'd want to get over their jetlag as quickly as possible, we thought some invigorating walks in the stunning, but cool and rainy UNESCO World Heritage site for the first 36 hours of their trip would be the most humane way to help them adjust to the new time zone. So after we picked them up from the airport in Zagreb, we headed to the park via Karlovac, where at lunch, my dad was introduced to his favorite Croatian beer, Karlovacko.
We got checked into the Hotel Plitvice, one of only a few hotels located immediately in the park, and headed out for a walk. Electric boat taxis take visitors across the bigger lakes in the park (it's commonly called a "necklace of lakes"), and that's how we started out. Immediately, you find yourself walking alongside dark turquoise to azure lakes with 18' trout swimming right at the surface. There are 16 large and small lakes at varying altitudes (hence, the cascades and waterfalls), all in a beautiful forest-setting. The paths, both paved and a wooden, meander right over the top of a lake and alongside waterfalls and cascades. Besides the trout, we saw 10" slugs and a cool black and gold striped lizard, but the park is famous for having a huge diversity of wildlife.
With my poor jetlagged parents who trekked for a couple hours in the park in the rain just hours after a transatlantic flight, we went out to dinner at a family-owned pension. I had some kind of spicy sausage that almost reminded me of kibbeh, but the wine was even better. We took my parents back to the hotel and they slept for 13 hours straight (medicated, of course), and they woke up without a lick of jetlag.
The next morning, we hiked in another area of the park up to the Veliki Slap (the big waterfall). Unfortunately, it was still raining, but this had the unintended consequence of keeping the masses of tourists at bay. In high season, when the weather is nice, the boardwalks and pathways can be jammed with tourists. You might proceed just inches at a time. There were certainly a fair share of tourists, but we were absolutely not stuck in a human traffic jam. At our first boat crossing of the second day, we met a lovely older man named Walter, from Canada, and his brother, from Slovenia. When we ran into them again at the end of our wet and chilly hike, they shared with us a nip of their homemade sljvovica (the ubiquitous plum brandy) which we drank straight out of the bottle. Walter told us the story of how he escaped Yugoslavia by traveling through the mountains to Austria during WWII, and eventually made his way to Toronto.
Incidentally, the first Croatian casualty of the civil war was a park ranger at Plitvice in 1991, just as Croatia was planning to declare its independence from Yugoslavia. He was killed by Serbians (who actually were an ethic majority in the Plitvice region until 1995), who seized the park, and then killed or evicted about 43,000 Croatians. The Serbs controlled the park until the Croatians overtook it in a successful military offensive in 1995. Payback was brutal. The Croatians killed about 14,000 Serbs and evicted between 150-300,000. There is still evidence of those forced evictions along the road to Plitvice, in the form of burned out houses, although far fewer than there were when our 1996 guidebook was published. There are no surviving Serbian Orthodox churches. After the war, one of Croatia's top priorities was to remove the landmines planted by the Serbs in the park so that tourism could recover.
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| Tom, Sue, Walter, Walter's brother, and the slivovica |
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| On the boardwalk |
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| Veliki Slap (the big waterfall) |
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| Scenery |
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| On the boardwalk |
