The third part of my summary of our trip to Croatia... this time we went to the Plitvice Lakes National Park. it was a bit of a drive from Rovinji, something like 700km round trip - but not too early a start but quite late at getting back. It was worth every second of travelling though. To be honest I'd quite like to go back to the Plitvice Lakes and spend a bit longer. Looks like there would be lots of nice walks to have around the place.
The [Plitvice Lakes] are the largest national park in Croatia and contain something like 16 lakes but lots of little pools too. We didn't have chance to go around them all bit did quite a large area - there is a boat to get over one of them which helps quite a lot, otherwise well you'd be hiking for a solid day I reckon (possibly longer).
The water in the lakes was just crystal clear as can be seen by these fish:
as you can see the water has a bit of an emerald colouration and really reminded by of the colour of the lakes in [Banff national park]:
There are waterfalls everywhere! Including this huge 78m one (Veliki Slap):
but there are also a few prominent smaller ones:
The walk wasn't too bad but on occasion you do realise that what you are walking on looks a little unsteady. I'm sure its fine but I'm not convinced this is the place to go if you find walking difficult..
It was a great day out and a place I'm very pleased we went to see. On the way back we even stopped for some brandy (yes, I bought a bottle from the roadside too - it has the words medical on it but I didn't notice that until we were back on the road!) and saw some evidence of the Yugoslavian wars of not too long ago:
