Day 11 - Plitvice!

Today we got up early and made the sure walk to the bus terminal. While Ali went to a bakery to get some breakfast for everyone, Auke quickly went to the grocery store to buy some lunch for the day.

Once Auke was back, we found our bus and hopped on. We ate our breakfast, and before long we were heading to Plitvice! The bus trip took about 1 hour and 45 minutes and it was a pretty drive. Croatia is quite a rocky place it seems, but the mountains are beautiful. Titus fell asleep on the way.

Once we had arrived at Plitvice at around 10.00am at Entrance 1, we were roaring to get on our walk. We had purposely booked an early bus as we heard that the queues could get really big if you went too late. We had tried to pre-book tickets but all the websites said we had to buy them here on the actual day.

We sat down on the weirdest seat we had ever seen. They were all like that! Apparently people at Plitvice want to lie down rather than sit up!

We all started putting on our sunscreen and Auke went off to buy the tickets - only to be told that they don’t start selling tickets or letting anyone in until between 11.30am and 12.00pm. We couldn’t believe it! We hadn’t read about this anywhere online. As the queues were already getting long, Ali joined the queue while Auke finished putting on the kids sunscreens. We waiting in the queue to buy tickets for what seemed like forever until finally at 11.30am the they started selling them.

We were so excited to finally have our tickets in hand and we eagerly handed them to the man scanning the tickets - only to be told that our tickets had a time slot on them and we had to wait in another queue until it was our time. We looked down at our tickets and saw it allowed us entry between 12.00pm and 1.00pm. So off we went to go join another queue. Thankfully at 12.00pm they let us in.

Plitvice Lakes is beautiful - the water looks like the colour of a tropical island. The waterfalls themselves are everywhere. They run right next to the path as you are walking, and in some places they are underneath the path. Nearly the entire walk there is the most beautiful water sloshing just half a metre away, which is beautiful - but also very scary as it’s easy for kids to fall into the waterfalls or water. Sadly, it is banned to swim here - they say because of pollution from nearby hotels and a chemical imbalance in the water. This is like torture when you’re hot from walking all day!

The route we took was route A which would then turn into route B which meant not only could we see the waterfalls, but we could also take a boat ride. It was meant to take between 3-4 hours, so at this stage we were happy we booked our bus home for 5.00pm after we had already wasted so much time waiting in queues (originally we had booked a 3.00pm bus but we had changed in because we didn’t want to miss out on the boat ride etc).

After about an hour walk, we stopped on the side of the path to eat some lunch. We gave Titus a bottle, and then started walking again.

We were confused when just five minutes after walking, Route A was already finished. Route A was meant to take between 2-3 hours. We carried on towards Route B and after about 10 minutes we were at the boat. This was Titus’ first ever boat trip and he was excited!!

The boat took us back to Entrance 2 which meant our walk had finished! What was meant to take between 3-4 hours had only taken about 1.5 hours with a half an hour stop for lunch. We had finished at around 2.00pm. We must have missed something but we followed the signs the whole way and this was the way they had said to go! Of course there were other routes we could also do, but these were meant to take between 6-8 hours and the kids were tired! We figured our best option would be to try re-book our bus back to the 3.00pm bus.

Unfortunately, the bus was now booked out which meant we had to wait three hours for our 5.00pm bus! Titus had a short nap on the park bench, and we got icecreams and a drink while we waited.

Eventually we made the decision to go back to Entrance A because Ali thought it was safer to catch the bus back from where we had hopped off, rather than try to find a new bus stop. We caught the free bus between entrances, and then waited at the bus stop for our bus back to Zadar.

Eventually the bus came, and we all piled back in thankful to be finally going home after so much waiting! At home we had a quick dinner and then went to bed.