Plitvice, Croatia

Plitvice, Croatia

Plitvice is Eden. This alluring sequence of sixteen lakes, set within a basin of limestone, is a piece of heaven hidden amongst rolling green hills halfway between Zagreb and the coastal city of Zadar. Descending from the forests that surround this protected site, one emerges onto a lakefront where dazzling turquoise waters lap gently at a tree-filled shore. Transparent waters teem with fish that bask in their aquatic sanctuaries, gazing beyond the sheen of the glassy surface towards the daytrippers that idle along on wooden walkways, admiring this pristine paradise. Away from the cafés and ice cream stands by the banks of the largest lake, the tourists thin out and the paths become pleasant trails, each twist and turn revealing yet another sublime landscape. It is the jewel of the Croatian interior, most of the country’s other prime beauty spots being situated on the coast.

That was where, after six days of being inland in the former Yugoslav states, I was heading. The Central European city of Zagreb was to be left behind in favour of the more Italianate towns that line the Adriatic. Seven years previously, I had spent a happy family holiday in the top half of the country, spending most time at the Istrian town of Poreč, and later close to Zadar, at the northern end of Dalmatia. I was itching to get further south. My travelling companion Andrew, on the other hand, expressed a burning desire to visit Plitvice, a destination I had visited as a teenager. To factor this into the itinerary, we agreed to head there and then stay in Zadar before migrating down the tapering tail of Croatia towards Dubrovnik later on.

After an early start, we boarded a bus at Zagreb’s main station that stopped at the park; there are a number of services that deviate from the motorway and go to Plitvice on the way towards Zadar or Split. The day promised to be sunny and warm and we had a swift cruise down the motorway to Karlovac. Here, as I had grown used to seeing in neighbouring Bosnia, a number of buildings exhibited signs of having been damaged during the Yugoslav Wars. This seemed rather strange. In Western minds, Bosnia is synonymous with war. Croatia, on the other hand, is known as a tourist destination. The same size (127^th and 126^th in the world respectively), and with similar populations, Croatia receives 15-30 times as many tourists, and its nominal GDP is four times Bosnia’s. Why then, in this EU and NATO member state, in a city barely ten miles from the border with prosperous Slovenia, were there so many bullet holes in buildings?

I had promised not to be a lecturer, but with this source of intrigue prompting questions, I began to give Andrew a short history lesson. As the internal divisions of Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s prompted Slovenia and Croatia, and later Bosnia, to break away from the central government in Belgrade and declare independence, various minorities began to grow concerned about their rights. Ethnic Serbs in particular began to form their own states outside the motherland, determined to be governed by Belgrade or themselves, but not by anyone else. The result in Bosnia was the Republika Srpska, formed in 1992 and now one of the two constituent entities of that nation. In Croatia, the equivalent was the Republic of Serbian Krajina, made up of two non-contiguous areas, one along today’s Serbian border, and another a wide crescent protruding from Bosnia around the apex of Croatia’s upside down L shape. The biggest concern for Serbs in Croatia was the lasting memory of what had happened to their people the last time Croatia was independent. During the Second World War, it had been a puppet state of the Nazis, and its fascist Ustaše leaders had overseen a systematic slaughter of Croatian and Bosnian Serbs in their quest for a Greater Croatia. There are reports of the Ustaše using the sign of the cross as a shibboleth to distinguish members of each group; the Catholic Croats, who make the horizontal bar of the cross left to right, were spared, and the Orthodox Serbs, who sign right to left, would be killed. Serbs were often executed with manual tools like hammers and saws, and in some cases were incinerated alive. Decades of mutual multi-ethnic tolerance had kept the disparate nation of Yugoslavia united under Tito’s leadership, but after his death in 1980, the country had started to fragment again. The start of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991, with both Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and new Croatian president Franco Tuđman propagating dangerously divisive natioanlist rhetoric, left Croatian Serbs feeling that their very existence had been compromised.

Their ultimate aim, a little ironically considering their inability to accept a Greater Croatia, was to create a Greater Serbia. Alongside the army of what remained of Yugoslavia (i.e. Serbia) and forces from the Republika Srpska, Serbian Krajina waged a four year war with the Croatian military, culminating in 1995 when Operation Storm saw the Croatians overrun Krajina’s provisional capital of Knin. Karlovac, despite its relatively northerly location within the country, lay almost on the frontier of Serbian Krajina and was thus badly shelled during the Serbs’ attempts to resist the independence of the new state of Croatia. It was just another victim of this chaotic fallout.

Serbian Krajina (red) shown on a map of Croatia

Plitvice Lakes National Park (Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera) has a recent history that neatly bookends the Croatian War of Independence. A small clash between the Croatian police and Serb armed forces from Krajina on 31 March 1991, killing one person on either side, was a precursor to the conflict. The park is in the heart of Serbian Krajina and was used as barracks by Serb soldiers until its recapture by the Croatian army in August 1995. It was cleared of mines shortly after the conflict, leading to its removal from UNESCO’s list of endangered world heritage sites, to which it had been added at the start of the war. (There are still an estimated 50,000 mines that have not been cleared in Croatia, but they are outside tourist areas. By comparison, Bosnia has about a million, and tourists are advised not to stray from paved roads or marked footpaths).

These events are an important reminder of the fragile recent past of the region, and it is worth considering that it was not long ago that this tourist hub of the Balkans was shattered by ethnic conflict. The beauty of Plitvice today stands in stark contrast to its dereliction in the early 1990s. It was this beauty that we were really after, and further thoughts of the Croatian war were cast aside as the bus neared our stop and we snatched our first glimpses of a lake and a waterfall through the trees to our right.

Looking down into the park at its bottom end

A short crossing of this lake took us to the start of the park's trails

The wooden walkways climb natural living dams past iridescent pools...

...leading to shallow ponds...

...surrounded by marshy plants...

...where fish teem in the waters...

...and sunken trees create underwater landscapes.

The path winds higher still...

...to reveal sweeping vistas...

...but also points right by the water's surface...

...enabling one to admire the fauna...

...and mirror-like reflections.

The park is sublime. Every few metres, the vistas changed, constantly being reformed in myriad ways. Each azure lake, each gush of flowing water, each dam and outcrop of living limestone, each submerged tree, provided more splendid beauty, more natural glory, to stop us in our tracks. Determined to see everything, we had to rather hurry towards the end to ensure we made our bus. Nevertheless, we managed several hours of invigorating walking and pausing to take it all in, interspersed with brief respites away from the tranquility as we joined legions of tourists to be transported by land train from one end of the park to the other, or to cram ourselves into a boat full of a United Nations of languages before once more finding peace a short walk beyond the cafés.

Plitvice is home to a diverse ecosystem including bears, wolves and lynx, as well as smaller or less glamorous animals. On my previous visit, I had spotted a crayfish. This time, even that was asking too much and the closest we got to emulating David Attenborough was finding a nest of lively chicks in a small crevice of rock. The park receives around a million tourists each year, so it is surely no surprise that all but the lakes’ fish choose to give the walking trails a wide berth. Having said that, if I were a large carnivore, the opportunity to come out of the wilderness areas and drag off an American tourist with an ice cream in each hand would offer a low risk and a high return. The bears evidently hadn’t clocked onto the abundance of unhealthy, slow-moving meals at the lakes’ main access points, nor of the isolated, defenceless ones far from the info points and park rangers.

Boats enable tourists to cross Kozjak lake, the park's largest (81ha) and deepest (47m)

Some pools are fed by spectacular waterfalls...

...like this one.

Other waterfalls are smaller...

...and some are just gushes of white water.

At the lower end of the park, the lakes are larger and the cliffs more imposing...

...and smaller cascades connect the lakes together.

At the bottom of Plitvice there are staggering waterfalls like this one.

All too soon, it was time to leave, and we managed to climb out of the valley at the lowest end of the park, catch a land train, retrieve our bags from the luggage storage and find our bus stop with precision timings. After a ten minute wait, a bus from somewhere north of us, perhaps Zagreb, pulled in. Several others also boarded and before long, we were on our way again, now destined for the sea.

The contrast between the vegetation-filled karst landscapes of Plitvice and the dry, scrubby country beside the Croatian littoral was immeasurable. We cruised through rolling hills and a wide flat plain, before joining the motorway and cutting through the Sveti Rok tunnel beneath the craggy grey Velebit mountain range. Awaiting us on the other side were sweeping views of the Adriatic, preceded by an arid belt of pale grey, littered with stumpy plants. It is a far less scenic land than the small hills and mountains that abut the Bosnian border. The smaller highway leading into the city of Zadar was lined with the pine trees that are so ubiquitous along the shores of Dalmatia. It was also scattered with tatty advertising hoardings marketing an array of holiday homes, resorts, swimming pools and restaurants, in addition to the usual range of products. Sadly, the land immediately beside the road is also off-limits, still being dangerous because of mines placed during Croatia’s war. Zadar was also close to the heavily mined border of Serbian Krajina and it was besieged for a year, during which time Zadar was cut off from the rest of the country except via the long island of Pag. Serb troops committed massacres at the nearby inland villages of Škabrnja and Bruška in November and December 1991, killing 67 and 10 people respectively. Most Serbs fled Croatia after the war, so there isn't a significantly divided community here, though on an international level, the wounds between the two nations are still slowly healing. For Zadar in particular, it is striking that this popular destination, Croatia's fifth largest city, is still accessed by a road through what is quite literally a minefield.

The Velebit mountains meet the sea close to Jasenice

At Zadar’s bus terminal, we stepped off into a noticeably warmer day. The heat was close and the smell in the air indicated that the sea wasn’t much further beyond. We walked for about half an hour to the guest house that was ours for the next two nights. (I had made a mistake in the booking, intending to take a bus to the bottom of Croatia overnight the following evening, but the place was so comfortable that we chose to remain there for the second night and spend less time in Dubrovnik. Zadar was, after all, the best of the three coastal cities we visited. It is a lively and charming place, more understated and less bustling than Split or Dubrovnik, but somehow emerging as altogether more elegant and refined. They can keep their world heritage sites – Split’s Diocletian’s Palace and Dubrovnik’s Old City. Zadar has its cultural history too. Croatia’s oldest city, Zadar was besieged by the maritime Republic of Venice at the beginning of the Fourth Crusade in 1202, falling under its control for six hundred years before being absorbed into Austria-Hungary. Its architecture reflects this lengthy influence, and much of the city’s older areas resemble that great Italian city. On top of that, Zadar features a 12^th century cathedral, the 9^th century Church of St Donatus and a Roman forum that sits right on the seafront. Moreover, its historic heart, situated on a finger of land bounded on two sides by the Adriatic and on the third by the city’s harbour, is small and easily manageable on foot.

Andrew and I intended that this part of the holiday would be geared towards relaxing so it was ideal that a brisk walk from our inland accommodation would bring us into the city and we would not need to do much more than saunter about. For this evening, the main task was finding food. In Zagreb, this had been a small mission. In Zadar, there was an abundance of enticing restaurants, mostly serving seafood dishes or pizza; the Italian influence was very clear. The latter option having taken our fancy, we filled up and enjoyed the city’s ambience, its polished stone streets reflecting the lights that shone from busy eateries, clusters of people ambling lazily along, relishing the pleasant evening. Having slated the custom of Croatian waiters abruptly presenting their customers with a receipt at the time of service in Zagreb, and being once more faced with this peculiar habit, this time, we began to notice another trend that remained apparent throughout our time in Croatia.

The stone streets of Zadar shine in the evening with the lights of nearby buildings

It is a 21^st century basic need to have wifi, and this addiction makes it all too easy to join the swarms of screen-taping zombies, who slouch along without ever abandoning their precious devices and looking up to enjoy their vacation. We absolutely determined not to degenerate to this stage, but getting hold of the internet to research information about our trips, assure family members that we were still alive, and check the football scores was fairly vital. It is commonplace that restaurants and bars have free networks, often coded with some variant of the venue’s name and the current year, a pithy one-liner or in a more small-town place, the name of the owner’s cat perhaps. In the worst cases, there is a hideous string of 24 abstract letters, numbers and punctuation. Here, it quickly became apparent that all the food and drink establishments up and down the Dalmatian coast avoided the labour of selecting a suitable password, and opted for something like 12341234, 11223344, 87654321 or other eight-character combinations of the basic numbers. Such was the regularity of these sequences, we were soon able to dispense with the need to actually visit such places, effectively possessing a skeleton key to every network in town. Maybe I lack a little imagination, or have just not noticed this habit in other countries, but it struck me that the Croatians were much more blasé about securing their internet than everyone else.

Not all Croatians use predictable wifi passwords

With a little space left after the pizza, we idled along Široka ulica, the central thoroughfare, to an ice cream shop I had seen recommended on TripAdvisor. Situated in a prime spot on a small square next to the Cathedral of St Anastasia, Slastičarnica Donat should be a tourist attraction in its own right. There is nothing overly special or ostentatious about the shop itself, and we didn't even linger because the café seating outside was full. The ice cream, however, was marvellous; affordable, generously sized, smooth, deliciously flavoured, and topped off by being slathered with melted chocolate. It was to die for. The one downside was that the evening was so warm that even wolfing down this delicacy wasn't enough to prevent the ice cream running down the cone and dribbling onto the flagstone streets, leaving sticky streaks upon one's hands as it went.

The end of the evening was peaceful as we strolled to the promenade in the northwest corner of Zadar's historic centre, where there are two noteworthy sculptures, the Sea Organ and the Greeting to the Sun, more on which in due course. Tomorrow promised a lazy day of strolling around this seaside city, Mediterranean sea swimming, more sumptuous ice cream, and England’s tense Euro 2016 showdown with Wales. For now, we enjoyed sitting and chatting, like many others around us, as a balmy summer’s evening faded to night.

The Adriatic seen from the promenade at Zadar; the island of Ugljan lies over the channel