Plitvice National Park

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We spent our last day in Croatia in the Plitvice National Park. It was a 1h30 drive from Zadar, so we got up at 5:15 AM and were on our way at 6 AM. When we arrived to the park at 7:30 AM, we were surprised how many people were already there! I’m sure it was a few hundred people! We had taken entrance n°2, because entrance n°1 was indicated badly and we had missed it. We got our tickets and looked for some information on the trails, but it was a bit difficult because the info point was still closed. It turned out there were 3 options for us from this entrance and we chose the one of 4-6 hours. We had to take a shuttle to one point in the park (apparently the highest one) and then we started our trip with about 300 other people. Still, it was quite ok because we were pretty much at the beginning of the group and so there weren’t too many people. It was only when we got to the boats that it started getting a bit more crowded. The free boat ride across the lake was nice, but there were some people on the lake who had rented a small wooden boat to paddle around and we thought they were crazy, it was just too hot to be out on the lake without any shadow and row a boat! °_°

When arrived at the other side of the lake, there were many more people waiting to get to the side of the lake we just had come from and until the end of the trail we would encounter masses of people. That’s when we realized how lucky we had been to a) be there very early in the morning, b) start from entrance 2, because if you start from entrance 1, you do the trail the other way round, starting on the flat part and in the end going up the (small) mountain whereas we went down the mountain. With the heat that day, we wouldn’t have wanted to do this… :S So, we were lucky and happy, until Anne got bitten by a wasp and she was in quite some pain. We slowly walked back to the entrance and we were wondering about all the crazy people who arrived to the park after 2 PM, in this heat (surely 38-40°C) and most of them without any water! Crazy people, no wonder emergency units were walking around the park all the time…

Plitvice is a very beautiful place, lots of waterfalls, stunning blue-turquoise water, green trees and plants everywhere, colours you can’t describe and couldn’t imagine! We enjoyed it very much and if you are in Croatia you should definitely go there, but go early! :-)

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