Plitvicka Jezera National Park, Croatia: Conga Line in the Garden of Eden

It is a mixed blessing to wake up to clouds in the morning. On the positive side, it means that when grinding up a long grade, at least the sweat doesn't wash all the sunscreen off your face and into your eyes.  But it also means, when you get to the top of whatever you invested all that energy into, the view might be less than spectacular.  So it was when we left our waterfall camp at Knin and continued our journey through the Croatia hinterlands.

A wide valley view north of Knin under a canopy of clouds.  We anticipated rain all day, but fortunately we found refuge when a few drops fell at lunchtime.  We ducked into an empty service building at a cemetery, which was fine.  But the groundskeeper decided to light all the piles of dry grass accumulated from the last weed-whacker session, and it smoked us back onto the road rather quickly.

We found the best stealth campsite yet on the trip in an abandoned pasture in an oak forest.  And the sun came out for a couple of hours before dropping below the horizon.  But morning was a different story.  We managed to eat breakfast and pack the tent, and were just about to get back on the road, and it started to rain.  See that tree next to my bike?  We stood underneath it for a good two hours waiting for the squall to pass.

Our destination this day was Plitvicka Jezera National Park, or "Plitvick Lakes".  John decided this was worth going to early on in his planning process, but I had not read the section in the guidebook about it yet and did not know what to expect.  After we left our oak forest, we cycled a bit and then merged onto the main highway leading to the park.  And what we noticed was camper van after camper van, heading south, with license plates primarily from Germany, some from The Netherlands, with an Austrian or Swiss to keep it interesting. Traffic going our way was busy, too.  By the time we got to the south entrance of the park, tour buses were passing us with barely enough room for comfort.  Maybe we weren't going to have this natural place to ourselves.

Fortunately, it was 25 kilometers of downhill to go through the park to the campground at the north end.  We passed hotels, chalets, inns, apartments for rent, and people moving between all of them.  Along one stretch we were moving along so fast it felt like we were flying through a deep green tunnel, and I wanted so much to stop and take a picture of the rainforest, but it was too dangerous with all the traffic. But we got through all of that, and just a couple of kilometers away from the campground the traffic subsided and a road gained a shoulder.  John came to an abrupt stop -- he had seen a glimpse of something across the road.  We parked the bikes, crossed quickly, and looked over the guardrail to see a deep, green river gorge and waterfalls and turquoise blue water.  It was a preview of what we would experience the next day, and only for us bike tourists who can stop anywhere on the side of a road with a sliver of enough room to park a bike.
 

Our roadside preview of what was to come.

We rented a sweet little cabin at the Camp Korana campground.  Not much more expensive that a tent site, it had twin beds, a little table and chairs, a wardrobe, and a porch with overhang to protect our bikes from the afternoon thunderstorms.  The campground was massive, with a capacity for 2000+ campers, as well as these cabins, a store, and restaurant.  It is operated by the national park, and a free bus picked up campers to take them into the park in the morning. 

It was a rare day off the bikes, and it was spent hiking a loop along the series of lakes strung along a gorge like gems on a necklace.  This is a karst landscape, with dolomite and limestone rocks and subterranean water sources to feed the lakes.  Travertine dams form between the lakes and control the flow and the beauty of the waterfalls.

Almost equally amazing is the wood path that is built that winds along the lake and over the dams and between cascades.  There were hundreds, maybe thousands of us walking the planks, like in a conga line. 

The water is so clear, and all different shades of green and blue.

There are 16 lakes total, and signs along each lake provide the vital statistics of elevation, area, depth, and height of the cascade to the next lake.

There are short and long loops, and electric-powered ferries transport hikers across a couple of the bigger lakes.

Travertine forms can be seen just below the surface through the clear water.

So I got to wondering about why so many Germans come to this place, and I went down an internet rabbit hole to find out.  My mother always talked about reading a series of books when she was a child growing up in Germany, written by the German author Karl May.  They were stories of cowboys and Indians, set in the American West.  The funny thing is that Herr May never even visited the United States. But his stories were captivating enough for my mother to dream of seeing those places.  Who would have imagined she would move to America and travel for decades with my father through those landscapes in a Jeep and tent trailer.  A set of those novels were given to her as a gift a few years ago, from my cousins who live in Radebeul, Karl May's hometown.  In the 1960's a total of eleven movies based on the novels were filmed in Croatia, and Plitvice Lakes was featured in several of them (look for a cameo of a waterfall in this trailer for "The Treasure of Silver Lake") And we will visit those cousins in Radebeul in just a few weeks, and see the Karl May birthplace.  And our house, back in California, is just a mile from Silver Lake.  Life is a circle game.

Ho, hum, another waterfall.

I got my rainforest shot!

At the end of the day the trails climbs out of the gorge for one last view of the conga line.