Our only knowledge of Croatia before this trip was watching news reel highlights of their war in the 1990s. Today, Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, is buzzing with people, trams, and cranes. In the countryside, you still see some signs of the war with the occasional bullet-ravaged exterior and shells of houses that Serbians left behind. It’s easy to forget this awful period when you ride through the forested rolling hills of the Croatian countryside dotted with chickens and turkeys, kitchen gardens of cabbages and tomatoes, and fields of harvested corn.
Plitvice National Park is where the first shots of the war were fired, but now it’s back to being a popular a tourist destination even in the late October snow. At the park boardwalks lead over a series of turquoise lakes, so clear you can begin to count the hundreds of fish swimming beneath the surface.
The 16 lakes are all connected by waterfalls ranging in height from 2 feet to 240 feet each spanning the width of its lake. We’ve seen a lot of waterfalls in our travels, but at Plitvice we were still stopping constantly to take pictures of this beautiful landscape in spite of the misty 40 degree weather.
3 days ago, Croatia was pretty low on our list of “beautiful” places. But in one weekend, a lot of our misconceptions have been corrected.
Leave a Reply