Monday, 21 November 2011

A day of two extremes Part 1 –the Plitvice Lakes




We kicked things off in Croatia by visiting the UNESCO protected Plitvice Lakes. There were no campsites open in the area so we booked a guesthouse. It was a good thing that we did because it was a particularly cold night.

We arrived at the Lakes at 9am and the car was telling us that it was 0.5 degrees, but we think it was exaggerating. It was proper cold. We employed our full warmth strategy of thermals, fleece, jackets, beanies, scarves and gloves and we were still freezing.

Not to be deterred, we set off to see the lakes. The best way of describing them is to imagine a massive champagne waterfall. Essentially, the area is a series of 16 lakes, each creating a plateau that creates a waterfall down to the next lake which then plateaus before creating a waterfall down to the next lake, and so on and so on. There were literally thousands of waterfalls ranging in size and intensity from small little trickles dropping over stones, to a raging 100-meter torrents. It was an amazing sensory experience with birds chirping, schools of fish swimming in the crystal clear water and the constant noise of the water skipping over rocks. The place felt alive.

It was one of the most incredible natural wonders that we have ever seen. It’s magnificence is hard to describe, and it’s scale hard to capture in photos.

Almost frozen, we finished up at about 1pm and began our drive south to our next stop, Split. We hadn’t gone far when we saw that the trees in the forest had started to freeze which created a beautiful white canopy over the forest.

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