Polarised in Plitvice

So the last couple of days have been quite something! We arrived in Zagreb on Sunday evening and went straight to our hostel, after successfully navigating the trams, dumped our stuff and headed out to a brewery for dinner. A litre of beer worked out to be about 3 euros which, when considering it's 10 at Oktoberfest, is pretty impressive. The food was also good and we went home with full tummies and excited for our Plitvice tour in the morning...

Tired but, beer!

Though when we got to the hostel, the man informed us that the trip wasn't happening because there weren't enough people going. Sia had booked that hostel specifically because it offered this tour, and she had even requested it when she booked, so we thought this was a bit off but we decided to get up early, skip breakfast and head straight to the bus station to see what we could get.

This actually worked out fine, and we got tickets for a return journey to the national park! We were quite proud of ourselves and were on our way at 8.15. We got off at Entrance 1, after being told that the bus would pick us up at 4.15 at Entrance 2.

We had to queue a while but we got in to the park, and the first thing we saw was the huge waterfall! We walked all around it, posed for pictures on rocks (obviously), climbed up into a cave, and followed the path around the incredible lakes, which were blue-green and crystal clear. It really was stunning scenery, but quite surreal!

Sia's photo: me and the big 'slap'

Is this real life or is this just fantasyyyyyy

We emerged onto the Great Lake (even though the last one had been pretty big) and stopped for lunch and souvenir shopping. We then decided to take the ferry across the lake to where we thought we could walk round to Entrance 2.

It wasn't until we'd walked up a hill bit and seen another little waterfall (that's the last photo above) that I realised we were going the wrong way so we walked back to the boat and walked up through a huge long queue and started walking again... but that was also the wrong way! I was now starting to panic, but Sia kept her head and rang the park reception. A really nice guy called Nicola (I don't know) told us to go back down to the smaller boat to where we could follow the signs to Parking 2 and get out. So we had to now walk back down the huge long queue... I was starting to panic again as I could hear people tutting and swearing and shouting 'Hey, they're pushing in!', I was doing my best to just keep walking and follow Sia, when a woman grabbed her! Sia shook her off, so then the woman grabbed hold of my arms instead. In any normal scenario, I would have reacted with anger, but this time I just broke into a panic attack and stood there with my hands over my face. I could hear that vile woman laughing.

We eventually got to the bottom of the queue where a really lovely man helped me up onto the deck, and the boat controller man got us onto the boat. On the other side, it was my turn to take the lead as Sia had begun to suffer from her poorly chest infection and was starting to lose her cool, so I marched onwards and I've never been so happy to see a bus stop (after about 100 stone steps and a bridge)... Nightmare.
But we made it back to Zagreb and were very happy to get back to the hostel. We ended up going to the same place for dinner because it was so good, cheap and we were very hungry. I can completely recommend Croatian pasta as I ate 2 nights in a row and loved it both times! It's called Trganci (I think).

Next post, our day in Zagreb
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