Rowkin Rovings Blog

Very nice digs we are holed up in for three nights. We especially like it because of this absolutely Di and Fras friendly remote control – the KISS Version 101 – Keep it Simple, Stupid.

So, we have set up camp in the Plitvice National Park which is one of the oldest and largest national parks in Croatia. In 1979, Plitvice Lake National Park was inscribed on the UNESCO World heritage list, due to its outstanding and picturesque series of tufa (variety of limestone) lakes, caves, connected by waterfalls.

We have two days to discover this amazing national park so have split it up into the upper falls and lower falls. Today we tackled the upper falls but not before paying the exorbitant park fee of $40Cdn per person for each day – wow – this has to be the most expensive national park we have ever been to. On top of that we had to pay 10 Euro for parking for the day.

The national park is world-famous for its lakes arranged in cascades.

There are sixteen lakes in total.

These lakes are a result of the confluence of several small rivers and subterranean rivers.

The lakes are all interconnected and follow the water flow.

Most of the water flows down from one lake to the other by the way of waterfalls but there is a lot of water that goes down through these tomas which create caves over time.

The network of paths and elevated walkways were very well maintained and are about 22 miles in length altogether.

We could imagine that on a hot day it would be so hard not to jump into the crystal clear cool water. The scenery did remind us a lot of scenes in New Zealand especially with colours of water ranging from azure to green, grey or blue. In this case though, the colours change depending on the quantity of minerals or organisms in the water and the angle of sunlight.

We are guessing that with increased rainfall that the waterfalls would increase in volume.

We discovered that the Croatian word for Waterfall is slap – hence, we saw heaps of slappers today – ha ha!!

We walked for about three hours doing the top section of the lakes. The remainder we will do tomorrow. We made our way back to the lodge where we are staying but did not dip into the pool as just a little cool.

We have a two bedroom suite as outlined in red on the above photo. It is a perfectly satisfactory abode.

There are very few choices where to find food in the park but we managed to squirrell our way into a pizza place where we shared a table with two young girls from France. Between their broken English and our total lack of any other language besides Australian English, we had a fun evening losing a lot in translation. It was a pretty fun evening.