April Travels with Megan Part 2: Croatia
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| This fountain depicts an orgy |
There’s a lot you could say about Zagreb, Croatia… but what
I’ll say here is my impression: it’s apparent there was a war there about, oh 20 years
ago. They have a lot of growing still to do. The thing about Zagreb is that on a 10 minute bus ride throughout the city
we saw multiple people just peeing outside, kind of like everyone was camping…
but in the capitol. People speak English, but gruffly and with a lot of eye
rolling and shrugs. Based on my limited experiences, I’m not sure people smile
in Croatia. They use KUNA, instead of the euro, which involved far more math
than this linguistical mind could really handle… and there are about a million
Kuna involved in every transaction (when I exchanged 56kuna for euro in
Slovenia I received 6 euro). We went to the market because fresh food is neat
in any country and Rick Steve’s guidebook took us on a nice little walk through
a small part of town. We also saw this odd orgy fountain in front of the
National Theatre. Our one day was plenty in Zagreb, and I had no problem leaving
the nightlife there a mystery to instead venture to the entire reason we came
to Croatia, Plitvice Lakes National Park.
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| Well. Someone hearts Zagreb. It's just not us |
When it comes to transportation, here’s how things work in
Croatia… not very well. We had to get a bus from Zagreb to Plitvice, costing us
approximately 10 euro I believe, so like 85Kuna, add on the unforeseen 7Kuna
charge (like $1.20) for us to carry a big bag onto the bus. (3 currencies in
one sentence, is your head spinning yet? You can imagine trying to think in
Kuna, Dollars, and Euro for a few days. Yikes.) We told the driver's co-pilot
where we needed to go and he reassured us that he would tell us when it was time
for us to get off the bus. It conveniently started raining as we were dropped
off at a tiny hut in the middle of nowhere with the instructions “You go here”.
We braved the question “umm where is our campground” and were pointed in a
general direction after which we did indeed find a sign for Camp Korana.
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| You Go Here. |
One of our favorite
games throughout the entire trip was to stop and think, if our parents and our
significant others were watching this adventure as a film, what would they be
screaming at the tv right now?
Thankfully we had the foresight to purchase at least some
bread, cheese, and wine when we were in Zagreb.
After setting up camp in the pouring rain we enjoyed our meal and a game
of travel battleship before tying up our plastic food bag tightly and throwing
it as far as possible away from our tent into the “woods” because I was afraid
of bears (there is one depicted on the Plitvice Lakes National Park sign). A
bit of research from le boy assured us that while brown bears exist in Plitvice
Lakes National Park, they are rare and instead of dangerous are rather
interesting to see. In my opinion a bear is a bear, whether rare or not, and I
was not sleeping with any kind of food near me if there was the slight possibility
of one of those interesting beasts paying us a visit. (The only wildlife we saw
the entire time was some cats. Our food bag went untouched every night.)
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| It is possible this bottle instead says poison. We have no idea. |
The next morning proved to be yet another small
transportation struggle to get from our campground into the actual National
Park. We were told by the campground staff that a shuttle would arrive,
surprise surprise at the little hut out front on the road and that we were to
flag it down and it would stop and take us to the park. We accidently flagged
down a bus instead that was not the park shuttle, they told us they would drop
us off at the park, but then I got nervous and saw a sign for the parks and
after a 2 minute ride determined that we should get off the bus. There we
realized we were indeed not yet at the park and still had about 9km to go. We found
a dog and played for awhile just to regain some confidence and then decided
just to walk it until we saw the park shuttle. A small car with the national
parks logo drove past after about maybe ½ hour of walking, so we screamed
and jumped up and down and ran after it, they stopped, crammed us into the
front seat and laughed a lot at Megan who was wearing sandals, telling her with
pointing and gestures that she would only have 2 toes left after the end of the
day.
Here is why this entire saga was worthwhile. You walk for maybe about three minutes into the park and this is your view. Stunning. We
spent the day exploring about 7000 waterfalls and a small cave, hiking and generally
enjoying the unbelievable beauty we were surrounded by.
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| Photo Credit to Megan |
Only about 3 busses drove past us before one picked us up
that evening to drop us off at our campground. I’m fairly certain the man who
we paid for the tickets just made up a number for the cost of our journey,
which was like $2USD.
Now that we had seen Plitvice we were ready to peace out of
Croatia. Another dinner of bread, cheese and wine straight from the bottle and we
set an alarm to catch the bus from our hut at 6:40am (another wasn’t coming
until 10ish). These busses that we had to flag down from the side of the road
were all coming from Split, in the south of Croatia and traveling all the way
to Zagreb. I’m fairly certain this
is the only road in Croatia. If the bus is full it simply doesn’t stop. We finally got onto a bus at about 7:20am and
settled in for the winding ride back to Zagreb, where we made the short but
sketchy trek to the train station and treated ourselves to a beer at 11am
before getting onto a train to take us to Slovenia…
Wondering about the post title? Waterfall in Croatian = Slap
