Journey: Zadar to Plitvice Lakes, Croatia
Distance: 135 km
Campsite for the night: Borje Camp
YouTube link: Day 17

Today we headed away from the coast and wiggled up through the mountains to the Plitvice Lakes national park. Apparently everyone has heard of them before except me. However, once I’d found out about them, I really wanted to go.

Before we booked tickets, we had to work out which entrance we wanted to use. There are also a variety of different programs you can choose, and it is all very confusing. Each program consists of a ride on the panoramic train (bus), a walk of different lengths and a ride on the electric boat across the lake. I found a blog that broke it all down and made it much simpler to understand. Essentially, there is one big route that takes in both the upper and lower Plitvice lakes and many waterfalls. Depending on the entrance you use, you start at one end or the other. These are programs C (entrance 1) and H (entrance 2). The other routes are shorter subsets of the big route, starting at either entrance 1 or 2 and only seeing either the lower or upper lakes. We opted to do program H so that we saw all of it and chose entrance 2 purely because it was the first one we came to.

After a long walk from the van to the entrance of the park, we got on the bus to take us to the top of the upper lakes and then started walking. Unfortunately, we got snarled up in a couple of tour parties, which was really frustrating. They were all walking really slowly, not really paying attention to much and spoilt it for everyone else. So we didn’t get to appreciate the waterfalls or stunning lakes as much as we’d have liked and instead focused on getting through all the groups — which on boardwalks is quite challenging. Amazingly, neither of us ended up in the lake. There was also a French woman doing the same thing, so we wordlessly took it in turns to battle through.

Once we got to the first boat station, we started to relax however, as we’d left the tour groups behind and got a chance to sit and eat lunch finally. The boat trip across the lake was good but really cold. I don’t know if the lake radiated cold or something but the temperature difference was even noticeable once we had docked and simply stepped off the boat back on to land.

The walk around the lower lakes was much better. We had time to enjoy it properly, stop when we wanted and not feel harassed. At this point, I agreed with the blogs suggestion of starting at entrance 1 of the Plitvice Lakes — because you walk towards more waterfalls, but after seeing the final waterfall, I think you’d peak too soon and actually think entrance 2 gives a better build up the finale.

Overall, it is an amazing place, just try and avoid the busy season. We thought we’d be ok in mid-May — and the carpark was only half full — but it still felt too busy.

After we’d left the lakes, we drove down the road to the campsite (which was one in the Plitvice Lakes national park) and both felt shattered. However, we had just enough energy to pop across the road to the supermarket. I can’t even remember what was so critical that meant we had to go, but I found a vegan instant oatmeal that I thought would be just the ticket after a cold night, and we also found the world’s biggest wafer biscuit (possibly).

Due to our tiredness and the fact we had to get up early the next day, we didn’t bother putting up the garage tent for the bikes, and just left them outside in their transporter bags (chained together of course, we weren’t that tired) and we didn’t put the awning out.

We then spent a very quiet night reading, with the heating on at points. It dropped down to 4 degrees overnight - our coldest night of the trip so far was in Croatia. We both got woken up in the night by the sound of rain, which got progressively heavier, so all our stuff got absolutely soaked!