Croatia - on Land

Travels with Chris and Joy.

So it's now the 14th September.  It's a beautiful sunny day and Chris, Joy and Jane and I are put ashore in Split, we are the shore party being left behind as the main event moves on.

Put ashore in Split! Bye bye boat.

We step ashore in time to see some gorgeous lady and her retinue also alight nearby from a chauffeured speedboat, and we followed her to the nearby grand hotel, where we happened to be collecting our hire car.  Her luggage however was whisked off in a van, as we struggled up the hill with our cases! Such is life for us ordinary mortals.  We still do wonder who she was though?

So, we load our cases into the car and off to the hills we go.  It's about 300km northwest by road, the first 200 being on a new 6 lane, mostly empty motorway, that goes up the coast before turning inland behind Zadar and crossing a major mountain range by cuttings, then a tunnel.  Most impressive. We wonder who paid for it, probably EU money!  The land being crossed was still very barren limestone plateaus and ranges; even the pine trees that spread across the ranges were struggling.

The mountain ranges behind Zadar, from a motorway cafe! 

Then we emerged onto a central plain that became much more lush and forested, with farms and cattle starting to appear, until we approached more hills that now form the border with neighbouring Boznia-Hertsogovina.  Here the sun disappeared, the clouds gathered and it started to rain.  We found our way to our hotel just north of  the Plitivice National Park, unpacked and huddled next to the radiators which were on.  It was cold, perhaps 8C outside. But the food was good in the restaurant, we were in pig and cow country here, so lots of hearty stews and steaks all round.

Next day we go to see the famous waterfalls in the Plitvice National Park.  Fantastic views and lots of water.  They had actually had too much rain the the previous month! The river levels and flows were so high that the boat trips on the lakes linking the waterfalls were closed, and so were many of the boardwalks.

Boardwalks behind the top lip of the waterfalls.

 There were still lots of visitors, long queues, and the limited areas that were accessible were heavily trafficked. But we had a great day walking through the quite unreal waterfalls that form naturally by travertine deposits on the water plants. Some grow to 20m high! The following pictures again hardly do it justice.  A quite wonderful place.

There were lots of tracks and trails through the two or three miles of the river valley, and as you can see some of the board walks should really have been closed off, but this was Croatia, so there was less than an Australian view of health and safety.  Which was probably a good thing or they would have closed the whole park, I expect.

Can you see the boardwalk on the far side? No, it's under water!

At one point we had to go across a flooded section.  If you had fallen off you would have been 3 miles downstream in about 5 minutes!

Jane, Joy and Chris leading the way. Huge drop on left hand side!

And the weather even cleared up towards the late afternoon, so we had bright sun as we walked out of the gorge and back to the hotel for another hearty meal and warm beds.

Waterfalls from side streams across the valley, in late afternoon sun.

Up early the next day we make tracks back to Split, but this time off the main roads. We took back roads over the ranges, initially because of a diversion for road works, then because the Tom Tom got lost/confused. It was a serindipitious problem as it took us through many villages that were battlefields in what in Croatia is called "the Homeland War" between 1992 and 1996.  This was a pretty brutal separation of the regions and States that had previously made up Yugoslavia, with pitched battles between Croatian forces and the Serbian and Bosnian armies.

We passed a few roadside memorials of tanks, helmets and guns, and deserted battle-scared villages - as a reminder of the catholic / orthodox "ethnic cleansing".  The wounds are still pretty raw out here in the countryside, each village graveyard has a few graves of local young men and women killed in the conflict. More later in the Dubrovnik post.

Jane, slightly compressed, in Krka.

And so on to a National Park at Krka, just off the motorway back to Split.  We only had an hour or two here. It was again a series of lakes and waterfalls similar to Plitivice, but this set had had a series of water powered mills and latterly hydroelectric generators installed over the years.

Is that enough water yet?

In fact it is famous for being the site of the first hydroelectric generator outside USA in about 1895, designed by Nic Tesla, the Serbian/American electrical engineering genius.

Water driven flour mill. You could buy the flour in the shop.

Plaque commemorating the early hydroelectric plant.

Again there was flooding and the water going down past the mill spillways was deafening, but there was a working flour mill - and lots of tourists and souvenir stalls!

But no time to stay, back in the car, for the drive  back into Split.

This time we are here for 2 days as real tourists to see all the sights.  And what sights there are!  It was the birthplace and retirement home of the last Emperor of the Roman Empire in about 300AD, just before it all fell apart! His retirement home - the Diocletian Palace is still, mostly, there - amazing.  Admittedly the Venetians took over in the middle ages when they built a larger port and walled city, and large bits of it have been used by canny Splitians for years to build there own houses, but the main layout and many original building are still there.  In fact the Palace basements are so well preserved that the "Game of Thrones" unit was there filming dungeon scenes in them for the next series!

Dome roof of Diocletian's tomb, 1,700 years old, using granite columns from Egypt, 3,000 years old! Wonderous stuff.

There is a plethora of high quality local marble from the nearby island of Brac so all these old buildings and pavements are faced in that stone. My highlight was the tomb Diocletian had built for himself in 300AD, which by 700AD was an early Christian cathedral, his bones having been thrown out!

Typical street inside the Palace walls.

In other parts of the city the film crew were disguising modern features in the narrow streets to use them for shooting more scenes of Game of Thrones.

Interesting to watch what has to be hidden and how they do it.

Comms box under plastic ferns!

So much to see.  But we cannot stop more than a few days.  We have to move on, we still have to investigate the jewel of the Adriatic coast that is DUBROVNIK and on the new country of Montenegro.

But that is another 300km to the south, so farewell sunny, hot even, SPLIT, we are on our way!