About a year ago, I was Google Searching for “Waterfalls”
…when the image above came up. My first instinct was “that’s a really great computer generated image”. It wasn’t until I saw the same body of water from a different angle (below) that I thought – holy hell, this place is real.
My google fingers led me to the exotic Croatian national park – Plitvice Lakes (pronounced plit-vitz-er). GOOGLE IT. You will be amazed at the unreal nature.
Fast forward nearly 12 months later and we find ourselves in the vague vicinity of Croatia. I have one thing on my mind – I must see this park.
After a very interesting border crossing moment when we got theatrically escorted off the train by border control officers (I’d overstayed my Visa…it all worked out in the end), we found ourselves in the most beautiful area of Croatia, in the worst hotel we have ever been in.
Being non-car people, we only had one choice of hotel – Hotel Bellevue – which was right next to the bus stop and the entrance of the park. I’d seen the ratings on Trip Advisor, so I knew we were in for a rough ride – I just didn’t have the heart to tell Nemara until she found out for herself.
There was an interesting exchange of words had between us, which went something along the lines of “if it wasn’t for your stupid google image search we wouldn’t be here in this dump of a hotel looking at some stupid waterfalls”. Think school camp meets cabin in the woods with a hundred smoking Europeans. Capped off by a power outage, torrential rain and grapes and cheese for dinner, it wasn’t exactly the five-star treatment we had grown to be so familiar with.
But we made it through the night.
And boy, did Nemara change her tune when we set our eyes on our first bit of Plitvice lakes. You can’t even begin to explain the magical beauty that is this place.
How it works is that there is a massive lake at the top which is constantly full, and like some kind of perfect coincidence there are a series of pools below it at a few different elevations – so the water oozes out of the first pool, theatrically spills out into the next pool, and to the next, and so on…
The whole place feels like it is bleeding water. Simply Magic.