Lake Bled

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Elizabeth

(This is the ninth post of our Croatia-Budapest Trip, June-July 2014.)
Monday, June 23

We woke up in Buzet and saw this. . . . . . so thought we ought to again advance our plans by a day and head to Lake Bled that day, instead of exploring the southern part of Slovenia, like we’d wanted to.

After passing through passport control, we stopped at the very first gas station we saw to buy our Slovenian Freeway Pass, having been warned by several to do so. (scene is out the backside of the gas station.) In fact our innkeeper in Plitvice said that there would be two fines if we didn’t have it and got caught: one from the Slovenian authorities, of roughly 150 euros (like $225) and then the rental car company would charge us because of the hassle of finding us and get their money from someone in the States. I had also read about it in two guide books, so there was no question about whether or not we would have a pass on our window. Dave came out from the teensy place, affixed the sticker (15 euro, about 22 bucks) and we kept driving.

I loved the freestanding small buildings that were roadside shrines to Mary, to Jesus, and various saints.

About two exits after we got on the freeway with our spiffy new freeway pass, we left to go “wandering” our way through the countryside, on the way to Predjama Castle, andfound we were driving on the Mast Road, a farm-to-market road through the countryside with some historical significance. We know this because half the sign was in English!

We found the town “13” on the above map, V. Brda, with its interesting, but closed church.

And in Landol, this little chapel is dedicated to someone named “St. Jost,” but again, was closed.

But next door was this building, which apparently served as a toll house on the road.

Back on the road, we followed the signs to Predjama Castle, noting all the fallen trees from the ice storm as we drove.

Right around this corner was a small accident, a fender-bender, but the people involved had put out the glowing orange triangles signs on the road and they all had donned orange highway safety-type vests. That would explain the package I saw in the trunk of our rental car, of which the car agency said nothing. For the record, I had asked them about the Slovenian freeway sticker too, and again, the two twenty-somethings that ran the place kind of shrugged their shoulders: “eh?”

We parked and walked about ten paces and here it was–just like all the guidebooks said: an old castle tucked into a mountain. The guidebooks also said the inside was “forgettable” so we didn’t pay to go in. The outside is pretty striking, though.

A faded crest painted onto the side of the castle. I love the graphic punch of the black-and-white shutters.

We heard lots of chain saws going, and saw this at the bottom of the little lane.

We turned left at Jesus and headed toward the motorway/freeway.
We’ve got to get our money’s worth out of this pricey car sticker and were ready to get to Lake Bled, hoping to arrive before any storm.

We parked, found (a cheap) lunch, and then Dave decided he wanted to walk AROUND Lake Bled. So we did.

They do have some houses on the shore of Lake Bled. Here’s one, with a beautifully painted upper story.

And another, with sort of a hunting lodge flavor.

The hunting lodge house comes complete with a (cute) stuffed animal.

In the middle of Lake Bled is this small island. It seemed like we stopped to take a picture of this about every five feet. Soon it got to be a joke, trying to frame it with bits of trees and leaves, making a vignette. This is one of about 25 that we shot.

At the far end of the lake the pavement widened and we found the rowing club (with lots of sculling shells laying out on the lawn). There was also a place to go swimming, but you had to pay to get in. We kept walking.

After this boardwalk, we saw a few more casual beaches, and then found a small quiet place to strip off our shoes and put our feet in the water.

The lake is a clear beautiful aqua blue, and I’m told on many days the surface is as smooth as glass. A storm was coming in, so we had had a lot of breezes and a ruffled surface. We visited, relaxed and soon pulled our feet out of the water and put our shoes back on.

It must have been a good spot for wading (there were two other teens right near us) for we saw this sign just after we got back on the trail.

The island from the front. There’s a tale that if you can ring the bell three times, gold coins will fall out of your hair. No, that’s not quite right. If you can ring the bell, all your children will be rich. Hmmm. Maybe if you ring the bell you’ll have True Love? Good Fortune? That you are a gullible tourist? (Pick one.) So it would be quiet on the lake for a while, then a boat of tourists would arrive and we then hear the clanging of the church bell. You have to pay for the pleasure of getting your good fortune, so someone is doing okay, judging from the amount of bell-tolling we heard.

We’d heard that Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia (when there was a Yugoslavia) had a summer house on the lake which had been turned into a hotel and conference center. Our guidebook gave us the particulars and we walked up the grand set of stairs from the path to Villa Bled.

We found our way to this conference room (in panoramic view, here) with a mural from the Communist era, where all the workers looked happy (and like they worked out a lot at the local gym), and the peasants were singing songs along with the soldiers, who were also — in some places — holding hands with each other. Solidarity, indeed.

Okay, there was an occasional Bashing Their Heads In With Rifles scene, but don’t let that deter you from the specter of a victorious Yugoslavia.

View from Tito’s patio.

View across the lake.

You can’t go to Lake Bled without have a piece of their cream cake. Tired after three hours of walking (we were taking the scenic pace), we plopped down on the patio of a hotel, and ordered one piece and two forks.

“Everyone does that,” said the waiter. “And then they order another piece.”

We did too.

Next up: Arriving in Ljubljana

Beautiful (and Quiet) Buzet

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Elizabeth

(This is the eighth post of our Croatia-Budapest Trip, June-July 2014.)
Sunday June 22

We pulled away from House Tina, and took the country road north towards Karlovac, where our proprietor had been living in a camp during the war. Along the way we lots of houses with bullet holes and shrapnel damage, but there were equally as many all spiffed up with new plaster, paint and new roofs. Croatia seems to be putting the war behind them.

First, a stop at an Interspar store where we saw (from right to left) a clear plastic “can” with aluminum pop top full of clear lemon-water. I didn’t buy it and looked for one the rest of the time we were over there and never saw it again. It was very cool. We also saw a Jane Fondom workout video, right next to a Jane Fonda workout video. And then a very cute red-checked Croatian bag of KiKi candies, which I also purchased, along with supplies for our lunch. I wonder if foreigners come over here and go gaga at our packaging. Do we have any cool packaging?

It’s time to get on the road and get going. This section of freeway, which traverses from east to west across Croatia also has lots of tunnels, but their names are beside them on signs, not over them in fun writing. The terrain is hilly, wooded and in many section on the western side of the country we saw many fallen trees. Apparently there had been a big storm and the temperatures suddenly dropped, freezing all the rain/ice onto the trees, cracking them in half, toppling many. The damage was extensive.

Not too many freeway signs–mostly beautiful countryside. It reminded me of driving through Halifax Canada with long straight highways bordered by trees and fields. Croatia has a toll system for their roads. When you enter them, you draw a ticket from the automated machine and then drive. After a while you see the Autocesta gates and you stop to pay for what you just drove. This is more modern: no coins are thrown in a basket, instead you whip out the bankcard and they swipe it and present you with your card and your receipt. Drive on. At one Autocesta, we took in the scenery:

We drove from the blue dot (Plitvice Lakes National Park) up to Karlovac (red circle), then took the A1 West to Rijecka (green circle), where we promptly got sort of lost, but Dave kept driving and I kept flipping back and forth on my printed-out Google maps and frantically searched my map book, but somehow, someway, we made it through that spaghetti-ed freeway system interchange, heading into Istria. And then we paid a monster fee for traveling through a very very long tunnel.

From Rijecka (green circle), we finally made it to Buzet (violet rectangle). Istria was part of Italy until 1947, when it was scooped up into Yugoslavia, and there it stayed when Croatia split off and kept it. Besides being known as a place for truffle hunting, wine drinking and possible early birthplace of the Glagolitic alphabet (kind of like that old claim “George Washington Slept Here”), it resembles in many ways the hilltown areas of Italy. Some more deft driving and map-following and we glimpsed Buzet on top of a hill:

We drove up and looped around through this gate, the “Big” Gate:

On the right is what we saw coming up, and the view on the left is what we saw later, coming down. Yes, it was interesting. We found our hotel right away (after that hard hairpin turn to the left just inside the Big Gate), drove past it looking for parking, drove up and around the town, holding our breath on the narrow streets, then flipped around and came up again, through the gate and parked in front of Vela Vrata, our hotel.

We thought we were in Italy, really, except that everything was written in Croatian and they all spoke that as well. Whenever I’ve been in Italy, I’ve been able to pick up a word or two to add to my pathetically small working vocabulary. This time I didn’t pick up ANY words in Croatian, nor Slovenian, nor Hungarian.

Our room was sweet, the window shut against the day’s heat.

I’ve never been so excited to see shampoo, soap, and drinking glasses. And more than one washcloth and towel. We felt like we were in the Buzetian Waldorf Astoria.

View through the bathroom window.

And we opened up the bedroom window, to see the countryside. We retrieved our luggage from the car, then Dave had to go and repark it “down below,” in a special lot just for the hotel. We turned left onto a street that looked like it would work, except at the bottom there were stairs. Nope. Back up the car. Around that bend there was another street, but I urged Dave just to park the car in the little parking lot below and we would walk up. We did so, and found a little pocket park with a fountain, a family and some benches where we could eat our lunch, purchased in Karlovac.

What is it about European bakeries? The breads are fresh, delicious and available. We’d bought “picnic” supplies and enjoyed our lunch at this little place. Our unstated, but previously assumed goal was to drop our stuff in Buzet and take a driving tour of the Istrian Peninsula. This was rapidly being scaled down to drop our backpack in our room and take a walking tour of the small hilltown.

This is the view to the “front,” just below our little park, of a church and its cemetery.

The route back up to our hotel (really just a couple of long city blocks, but strung out into switchbacks and up a hill) passed by some gardens.

We walked to the right, up behind our hotel to explore. It’s not a large hilltown, and the Sunday afternoon was quiet.

Here’s a map we got AFTER our walk, when the tourist agency with erratic hours finally opened. Lots of things were noted here, but we used our guidebook to sort of guide us around this little town. Our hotel is just across from #6, the South Bulwark, and you can see where we parked our car (the large red P). While I do post this map, try to ignore it. Just go with us on a traipse around a little town where you don’t speak the language, are tired from driving across the country, are happy with having had such a good picnic, and have two cameras to record everything (one for this blog and one for Instagram, later on that night).

These cobblestones were slippery and uneven.

We saw two possible churches, but both were closed.

For some, it was laundry day. And everywhere were potted plants, lush and full.

I need this scissors sign to hang outside my sewing room.

My sister Christine was in China, and her Instagram feed was full of visits to museums. I joked that she goes to museums and we see the sign for one.

And around every lane you could see the edge of the hill drop off into the green valley below.

St. George’s Church (#21 on the map). Nothing was open. Nothing except our hotel and the bar next to it.

We walked up to the top of the town, the church abutting the old crenelated city wall. Buzet has credentials back to the 16th century, but I think the graffiti is newer.

The other side of the church, with a lone bell in the wall.

The view from atop the city wall.

The regular camera records the town’s Big Well (#17) in the center of the city, but the iPhone camera catches the light differently, giving a different look:

The views were expansive, but as Dave noted, “Italy seemed to have better land use management.” Yes, we’d look out over a sweeping valley and see a bunch of high rises, or a quarry, or a car factory. The old Yugoslavia, of which Croatia was a part, had its emphasis on industry and building mostly likely due to its roots in Communism, and the powers-that-be probably thought that a factory was a far better use of land than keeping a view or maintaining its agrarian heritage. It was kind of startling sometimes, as Italy’s hilltowns are surrounded by buccolic landscapes on all sides.

The backside of that gate we just came through. This was the “Little Gate,” (#15 on the left side of the town), whereas the Big Gate (#2) was on the lower right side.

We came back to the hotel. An afternoon nap seemed like a good idea in this equally sleepy hilltown. Forget getting in the car and driving around.

Soon it was dinner time. Really it went like this “It’s 8 o’clock already??!!” We walked back down to our car.

Pizzeria Jezic had about nine hundred options, but luckily a young couple helped us figure out what to get. We opted for a salad (our standard) and a pizza. We told the server we would split the pizza, so it arrived, neatly cut in half on two plates. The World Cup was on the television, but since Croatia wouldn’t be playing until the next night, Monday, June 23rd, the town was not as drawn in to what was being televised. The game was on in the bar as we walked up the hill after dinner, but the dining area in front of the hotel only had two guests. We remarked on how quiet the town was when we checked out the next morning, and the manager said, “Oh wait for tonight when Croatia plays.” We were glad to get a good night’s sleep in the beautiful Vela Vrata hotel in beautiful Buzet, Istria.

I woke up earlier than Dave the next morning, and recorded this from the bathroom window. You might have to turn up the volume to hear the singing birds. We showered, dressed, packed up and headed toward the breakfast room.

First stop: the swiming pool. I’d heard about it on the web and I wanted to see it. I kept thinking how much my sister Susan would like to do her laps in this place.

The breakfast buffet included hot and cold dishes, including some strange things that we passed right by. But it was a nice breakfast room:

The use of air conditioner was not apparent, a change from the guest rooms in the hotel, and finally the server/attendant opened up opposing windows to give us a breeze through the hot and stuffy room. We poked around places on the way back to our rooms, reluctant to leave such a nice place, but happy to go again.

We walked our luggage down to the car, remembering a large plaza we’d seen the day before (below).

Somehow Dave made his way there. We think it was a memorial to those who had died in the war.

At the center was this strange bowl-shaped object, with the signs of the zodiac on the top and bottom and faces all around the equator of the thing. We assumed, by the look of the light fixture on the inside, that it was some sort of beacon to memorialize the place. We never saw it lit the night before (the pizza place was sort of near this).

We felt like Croatia had been scrubbed of Communism and its relics, finding only this place with some obviously heroic logos from that time.

And then again, it could be about nothing, one of the drawbacks of using graphics instead of language to make your way through a town. We were headed for the Slovenia this morning, and to find a place to buy our “sticker.” Apparently it was a necessary item to drive on Slovenian highways, and we were warned in two guidebooks, as well as by our host at House Tina. He said we would get a fine of 150 euro (about $225) if we didn’t have it, and then the rental car company would fine us too, just for the hassle of having to track us down and bill us. We were on the lookout as we made our way north.

Next up: Slovenia and Ljubljana

House Tina (Plitvice Lakes, part II)

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Elizabeth

This is the seventh post of our Croatia-Budapest Trip, June-July 2014.)
Saturday, June 21

At the end of our Plitvice hike, we made our way to the car and headed north on the highway towards House Tina, a small hostel recommended by travel guru Rick Steves. It looked new on Trip Advisor (an online source we use for finding hotels; I write under the name Letterpress) and we found it without too much trouble, using the map printouts from Google Maps that I’d printed out at home.

It reminded us of homes we’d stayed in on our honeymoon in Austria.

The hostel designation is an interesting one, for the standards they have to meet are different than those of a hotel. For example, there is no soap in the shower, nor cups in the bathroom. We’d brought along a travel bar of soap from Hotel Vrlic in Split so were good there, and used our water bottles for cups. I was happy they had towels, after learning about this, but extra amenities are not required.

Milan, the “owner-manager” with Dave. He lives there with his girlfriend and together they run the place, but her family owns it. They employ local girls to come in and clean and do laundry, which was in the garage area. When we walked by one time, the doors were open and it was quite a set-up with several washers and dryers, folding tables, iron and cleaning supplies all arranged on shelves.

Upstairs we had a “double,” which was two twin beds pushed together. We were used to this from our travels so were not surprised, but the construction of the beds (by a local carpenter–very nicely done) had a piece of trim which kept the beds about 4 inches apart, even when pushed together. There was a fan in the room, but no air conditioning.

The house was fully booked and we were the last to check in. Our room was in the front, overlooking the front car park area and the fields beyond. This is the view from the bedroom window.

To the side of the car park area were two family-style cabins.

Of course, the first thing we do is check to the internet, getting the code from the hotel owner and syncing up all our devices. We liked the news from home and had fun uploading to Instagram every day, seeing people’s comments. I realize that the advent of electronics and access to the World Wide Web has severely curtailed my journal-writing from these trips. I rue this development, but sometimes I’m just too tired to do anything else. When Dave and I first started traveling, there was no way to book hotel rooms on the Web (it didn’t really exist) so we’d travel around all day, stopping about 4 p.m. to find our hotel and dinner. The evenings were relaxing as we hadn’t “touristed” ourselves to exhaustion, which I think we do too much of now. Of course there is always this desire that runs strong in my husband’s DNA to see one more sight, knock off one more attraction, drive a few more kilometers. The old system was a nice counterbalance to those urges.

One lovely surprise about House Tina was the chance to eat dinner on site. Tired from walking, I thought this was bliss, so after we got settled, we went downstairs.

Around the side of the house was an outdoor patio and across the lawn was a massive outdoor barbeque set-up. It was obvious that this place, of recent construction, was built solely for accomodating tourists. Sorry about the photo above. We were so hungry that we dived right in before remembering to take a photograph.

We could have grilled meats or grilled fish. I chose one and Dave chose the other and we shared. Both were excellent.

Thankfully Milan boned the trout for us. He later sat down and told us that all their food was locally sourced.

He called this risotto, but we called it rice with gravy. After he cleared away the diners’ plates and got things down to a dull roar (there were about 5 rooms full that night), Milan joined us and we were able to get some more of his story. As a child, he moved to Karlovac with his parents to wait out the war, staying in a refugee camp there. “That’s where I learned all my languages,” he told us, as he learned to converse with all the different nationalities of soldiers stationed there. The family lost their home to the war, but later in the conversation we found out that they had re-established themselves, also running a tourist guesthouse a few miles away.

The guesthouses generally open up around Easter and stay open throughout the summer and some stay open into fall. At Christmastime, sometimes they re-open, but then are closed during the winter months because of snowfall, as “it’s hard to get food up here when there is all the snow” he said. When Easter coincides with the school holidays, everyone is happy, but when Easter is early, then they have to hire “the girls” early only to have nothing for them to do until school gets out. (I’m thinking this must have happened this year, otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned it.)

Milan had mixed praise and scorn for those run guesthouses, as “it’s an easy way to make money, and no one has cows or farms any more.” He alluded more than once to the easy-money making thing, and sometimes it was wistful, as if he were witnessing a sea change in the life of his fellow countrymen and wasn’t entirely happy about it. But he himself eschewed farming for this “easy money.”

We talked about Bosnia-Herzogovina and I found the distinction between those who had government jobs (“mostly relatives of the men who already have government jobs”) versus the rest of the population generated some harsher judgement about those who were the government fat cats. We’d read about this before coming — the clearly feudal system of regional governments taking up most of the country’s cash flow. “But the floods will bring us together again,” Milan insisted. “We donate clothing, money, our time to help our brothers.” Clearly there was some desire to put the divisions of the war behind him, and he felt that working together to fix the effects of the massive floods would be a tool to equalize them and bring them together. We don’t often get the chance to talk to those who live in these countries, these towns, making assumptions as we go. I don’t believe that one dinner table conversation will give us an accurate depiction of life there, but his willingness to talk to us about his life was helpful in understanding this country in which we were spending time.

We joined an Australian couple at their table for more visiting, finding out that they were taking three months to travel around and see the sights. And here we were trying to cram it all in to two-plus weeks. No wonder we were exhausted every night.

The next morning we went down to the breakfast room, where Milan served us “happy eggs” from local chickens, the scrambled eggs a rich buttery yellow.

We could also make our own toast in this fabulous machine. Jams and Nutella plate (above-above) were available, as well as juices.

And of course, Croatia memorabilia everywhere in honor of World Cup Soccer.

We paid and turned in our key.

And saw Milan’s car, all decked out, as we pulled out. We were our way to the Istrian Peninsula.

Next up: Buzet, a hilltown on the Istrian Peninsula

Plitvice Lakes National Park

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Elizabeth

(This is the sixth post of our Croatia-Budapest Trip, June-July 2014.)
Saturday, June 21

In the morning we showered en suite in the tiny, but immaculate shower, packed up (easy to do with half my clothes gone) and thought we’d go up the street to get some baked goods at the bakery the landlady mentioned. And on our way we would take half the luggage. This prompted an outcry in Croatian from the “mother” to the English-speaking daughter. We kept saying “one minute. . . one minute” like she could understand our English. Somehow she and I both thought if we spoke more emphatically in our native language that the other one would understand. This never works, but goes on all the time.

I stood at the front door, checking out the laundry hanging over our heads until the daughter dressed and peered down from her second floor stair landing, where we explained that we’d be right back in a minute and were just going to get some breakfast up the street and drop our luggage at the car. “Okay!” she said, then explained this all to her mother, who then made the universal symbol of “carry on,” a hand gesturing towards the front door. We were free to go.

Luggage stowed, we entered the bakery, the only ones in there, and started looking around. I immediately bought a bunch of the cookies (above) which tasted like those round nutty cookies at Christmastime, but without the annoying powdered sugar all over them. We bought some breakfast-looking breads, then Dave, seeing a loaf with a chunk cut out, wanted some bread. He pointed and asked with his fingers indicating a small bit. By this time, she was tired of us. She took a knife and whacked off a piece, rolling her eyes as she held them out and said “This one or this one?” He chose the small one and we skedaddled. Split is a working town, with little patience for American tourists, we decided. We paid our bill, stowed the rest of our luggage and left town, heading for the A1 going north.

Heading up the A1, we saw this interesting formation: Sveti Rok.

As we got closer, it morphed into this. We continued on, through tunnels and open road until we could stop for gas.

These freeways stops (this one at Gornja Ploca) had all sorts of interesting things to snack on:

I bought this one for my granddaughter because her nickname is KeKe (pronounced like this candy).

Paprika is the national flavor, we decided. We shared a bag once at some random lunch and it tasted like barbeque-flavored chips.

“Taccos.” I love how we come off as Americans.

I finally did buy this one, as I couldn’t resist the title “Big Pep.” (I could use some of these every afternoon about 3 p.m.) After a while, we turned off the A1 onto Highway 52, heading towards the interior, leaving the coast behind.

The landscape in this area is less Mediteranean, more rolling meadows with rivers and lakes.

It was lunchtime, so we stopped at the roadside restaurant/hotel.

Nobody was home, it seemed, but we needed to stretch our legs and after all, all the doors were open. Eventually we were served and after a few more minutes, they brought us these:

We sat outside in the car and enjoyed our lunch (we left the plates there, of course) and then continued on towards Plitvice Lakes National Park.

We decided to begin at the lower section of the park and walk our way to the upper section, following the well-traveled trail, as shown by the map, above. The lower box also shows the changes in elevation, but even after driving all morning after a pitiful night’s sleep, we didn’t find the hours we spent in the park to be strenuous.

We walked in from paying for the tickets (not cheap) and to the overlook, where we saw this sight: Veliki Slap, or Big Waterfall. It’s the tallest in the park. See that line of tourists about halfway up on the left side, all lined up to see this? That’s where we are headed.

The descent is via a sloping, switch-backed path, down through the forested slope.

We have now joined the line up of tourists as only a few can pass around the corner at a time, but we endure.

Okay! We made and got our picture besides, thanks to a skilled visiting tourist who knew how to meter a photo for proper exposure. I hope I did theirs okay, too (a time-honored tradition: trading cameras to take shots of strangers). We headed back up the boardwalk, following the hordes, but thankfully so far, no tour guides carrying flags leading a pack.

The colors are amazing, changing from a jade green to a teal to deep blues. We are happy to be here on a not-rainy day, as we’ve been following the weather forecasts ardently, moving the trip to Plitvice up a day, just in case. We had gorgeous weather on this day.

The park is a series of lakes and waterfalls in between each lake, and near each is a sign like this showing where you are (a little arrow on the right, which is hard to see) and the elevation.

Looking up the canyon.

This is a still shot of the place where I shot the video (below).

The boardwalk crosses over one of the lakes, and there was a pathway to head up to the top of the canyon walls, passing by this cave. We decided to head on up the lakes (bypassing this gaggle of tourists). We realize that by arriving at 2 p.m, we were going to hit crowds, but the park is so huge it wasn’t a big problem. But Dave is a blue-sky kind of guy and will press on ahead just so his view is not the backside of multiple tourists, but a more open landscape. By bypassing some groups, he was able to see the natural surroundings that were quite frankly, phenomenal.

We stood here and took about five shots each of this, tilting our cameras this way and that for the exposure in order to get the blue below and the jade above.

Seeing Dave’s backpack was often my view as he kept pressing on. . . and I kept stopping. (However, the photographs on this blog were taken by both of us.) I did catch him once and got him to pause enough for the next two photos.

At one point the trail led up into the forested landscape, where I found some dainty wildflowers. We were headed to Jezero Kozjak, a big lake central to the park, where we would catch a boat ride to the next part of the trail.

View from the front of the boat, where we sat.

Another boat passed us going the other direction. Our tickets could only be used for one boat ride, otherwise I might have been tempted to get on another going the other way, and then another taking us to where we were now headed: towards those little set of falls, straight ahead of us (below).

A panoramic photo of the lake. The lake was serene, the day was not hot, but warm, the crowd on the boat was relaxed and soon scattered as we reached the dock. Most of the time I felt like Dave and I were in our own little world, being English speakers in a foreign country. We could sit at tables close by our neighbors at dinner but since we couldn’t understand them (and we assumed that they couldn’t understand us), a cushion enveloped us as we traveled where we didn’t speak the language. And it had the added benefit of creating a deeper bond between Dave and I.

The first few days in Croatia, we would walk side by side and not speak to each other. It wasn’t because we were angry or anything, it was that we were just out of practice.

At home we would spent most of our days in our own “caves:” he doing his work and me doing mine, and then after dinner I’d head up to my study to grade or even get a few minutes of quilting in, and he’d stay downstairs and read, grade or watch TV. Parallel lives that were now blending into one life: that of a middle-aged couple on the road together, creating memories and sharing experiences.

The ferry landed on the left side of an inlet, and we stayed on, as it crossed over and dropped us off on what looked to be an island, although we knew it just the other side of the lakes. As it turned out, we went backwards from everyone else. Fine by us.

As we walked along this path, a large group, complete with parents pushing baby strollers, came walking towards us. One older man detached himself from the group and went ambling off to my right, in between the trees. Usually good tourists keep to the trail, so I realized he was after something else. Sure enough, he stopped, looked at his group, unzipped his trousers and took Nature’s call. Unfortunately, he didn’t look DOWN the trail, so Dave and I caught the full visual image. We focused our gaze back to the left to see others in the group looking over at him, shaking their heads, smirking. We were smirking, too. Some things cross all language barriers.

The group passed us by and the trail changed to boardwalk, as it was headed over marshy land at the edge of the next little series of lakes. There are twelve in this upper section, but by taking the path we did, we would only see about half of them.

More falls:

Because we live in a dry, quasi-desert country, all this water is amazing. Gallons and gallons and gallons falling over moss-covered embankments. We loved the sound and so took more videos here than any other place on our trip.

After a while the water splashing on this rock began to remind me of hail, the fat drops of water scattering and chattering over the surface of the water. I could hardly tear myself away, but we still had much to go and the light was changing, indicating late afternoon sun.

Dave snapped this blue little insect in mid-flight. Still can’t tell if it is a flying buzzing thing, or a tiny butterfly. I think the former.

Even the lichen on the bark is beautiful here. We won’t see such things in our neck of the woods.

This path leads back to the boat dock, where we will take a short ferry across and then up to the trams to carry us back to the beginning.

It’s hard to leave such a gorgeous place. I’ve seen pictures of this in winter and the frozen landscape is also beautiful. (I just wouldn’t want to be here when it rains.)

We board the ferry to cross over to the other side of this narrow part of the lake.

And head up the path to the trams, which we think will carry us back to the beginning. We start chatting with a couple next to us, waiting on the bench. They are from Russia and he is a photographer, carrying a tripod and bag of gear. Their English is pretty good (our Russian is non-existent) and we chat to each other. Of course, we are dying to get their views on the Russian takeover of Crimea–a real first-hand viewpoint, but I don’t think it’s polite to grill your benchmates on politics, so we talk about places they’ve been, places they liked a lot (many in the US). The tram comes and they board the first car and we board the second.

The tram takes us about halfway down the canyon, near the hotels onsite, and drops us off. We have a bit of a walk, and it’s late afternoon and we’re a bit tired. So we are passed a lot by faster-moving younger people, but we still manage to stop at most of the viewpoints, to look down on where we’ve been.

I wonder if the larger lake at the top of this photo is where the boat crosses.

The boardwalk that crosses the lower lakes, just above the Big Waterall. There are steps from this vantage point down to the hidden cave. No way I’m doing that, and I think Dave feels the same. We still have to find our hotel, find dinner, and get settled before we can call it a day.

Our final view of the canyon. The Russian couple kept our pace, and we saw them again at the big sign at the entrance, where he took our photo (below).

Next up: House Tina and a real, home-grilled dinner

Split — in Croatia

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Elizabeth

(This is the fifth post of our Croatia-Budapest Trip, June-July 2014.)
Friday, June 20

Today started out with getting our car rental, finding our way out of town, then “Where’s the map?”
“I don’t have the map.”
“Yes, you do. It was on your nightstand at home. You were supposed to bring the Budapest book and the map.”
“Well, I don’t have the map.”
Silence.
“Then we’ll just have to buy one.”

At the next travel stop, we purchased a nice spiral-bound book of Croatia/Slovenia. Not as cheap as the one off of Amazon purchased before the trip, but that was home on a nightstand in a whole other life. And here’s where the tourists start to make a shift. Although certainly still bleary-eyed from the regimen of no sleep (World Cup Soccer issues) the jet-lag is receding and we no longer have the urge to find a place to lie down in the middle of the day. Good thing, for today we are driving up the Croatian coast to Split.

We pass over the Tudman Bridge on the outskirts of town, and wind our way up to the coastal road. We go through Border Patrol twice — once for Croatia into Bosnia, and then from Bosnia back into Croatia. We passed.

Here is a picture of the Tudman Bridge from the air, as we were flying into Dubrovnik a few days ago. You can see the cruise ship parked there (one of their “parking spots.”) Which reminds me to tell you that one of the best things we had to eat for an airplane snack was on Air Dolomiti, where they served us chocolate pudding that was out of this world. And gave us cute little aqua spoons, which I lost in Zagreb. Bummer.

After traveling a few whiles on the coastal road, we said “forget this,” and turned inland to travel on Croatia’s nice new superhighway, complete with tunnels.

And more tunnels.

Last shot of a tunnel, but I like how most all of them have names.

After about three to three-and-one-half hours we got off the expressway, turning eastward, heading toward the coast and to Split, where this interesting landmass caught our eye. We felt like much of the landscape was very much like home: a Mediterranean mix of hills, rocks, some trees. I’d printed out directions off of Google Maps at home, and with those and the cool map we’d bought, I managed to get us to the front door of our hotel, but there was no parking. Did I mention that the driver likes to park only in legitimate parking places (and that we’ve had some discussions in our prior travel about parking preferences)? I suggested that we double park, briefly, while he went and checked with the hotel where to park, but instead we took an interesting detour up and around in the hills of Split and I swear drove on a one-way street but that could be under some discussion but I digress, until we finally looped our way back around to that same place where the navigator had suggested we double-park and check in with the hotel. We did just that this time.

I sat in the car, and Dave rang the bell. Soon he was followed by a woman in harem-style pants, pointing and yelling at her father who had walked quickly up the street to move his car, placed there in reserve for our car. Just as he was pulling out, another car about eight spots away from our intended parking place started to pull out, and she asked them to hold on while he drove around and got that one (“another guest is coming”) she said. She then jumped in front of our car, her back to the city wall along the street and motioned us forward, forward, more, forward. Dave gunned it and we were both thinking that we were going to chop off her legs with the front of the car, but then she suddenly threw up her hands, and Dave slammed on the brakes. (That’s why he’s the driver–good job, Dave.) She grabbed my suitcases and strode down to the other parking place, releasing that car to pull out, then standing in the spot (with my suitcases) while her father looped around. Once this was completed, she smiled and welcomed us to Hotel Vrlic, which of course I can’t pronounce.

The gate opened onto this short course of steps.

And we headed toward the front door. Our room was at the end of a hallway, and she unlocked the glass door. Inside there was a bathroom on the right, with sink, toilet and shower, and on the left was our bedroom. We checked in, got the map from her and headed out to see the ancient part of Split.

We made a stop first to pick up some supplies at the drugstore, and finally found our way to here: The Golden Gate of Diocletian’s Palace. Diocletian was a Roman Emporer who decided to retire here at Split at the end of his life. Not a great guy in terms of humanitarian standards (killing and torturing Christians for a start; read all about it in Wikipedia) he build this jumbo palace right here on the edge of the coast, which over time was taken over and integrated into the city of Split.

We entered into the palace through this gate and walked through narrow passageways (below) until we arrived at the main square.

We’d arrived at this main square, called the Peristyle, just at the time that a bridal couple were greeting their guests, who were serenading the couple with a lovely, throaty version of “You are the Best Couple Ever in Croatia and Thank You for Not Scheduling Your Wedding During One of Croatia’s World Cup Soccer Matches,” or something like that. I love the dude dressed up as a Roman Soldier, over on the left. For a few kuna, you, too, can pose with him.

A little flag waving made it all seem much more spirited. This is the “centerpiece of Diocletian’s Palace,” says my guidebook. The Entry Vestibule is just behind the bridal couple, and to the left of this photo is the Cathedral. Underneath the balcony are some stairs down to the cellars, which is where we started our walking tour.

First though, some more shots of the wedding. She was lovely and the Peristyle was rocking with good times. They left and the crowd emptied out so the serious tourist business could proceed apace.

Sweet little building on the Peristyle.

The cellars (or the Podromi) were built to level out the palace floors above, and originally were filled with water to supply to palace’s needs. In medieval times, the residents cut holes in their floors (the ceilings of the cellar) and used the area as a refuse dump. Since the last century, they’ve been cleaned out and now for a ~~small~~ medium fee, you can come in to see them.

Some parts of the cellar (the daylight to the right, in the above photo) were open to the walkways above, and several Walking Tours of Split brought their people to this spot to talk about the ~~overpriced basements~~ cellars to discuss the history of Split. Finishing with the cellars, we walked back up the stairs, passing the myriads of souvenir stands. We climbed the few steps back up to the balcony where the bridal couple had stood, and then walked into the Entry Vestibule, where supposedly Diocletian received his visitors.

Apparently it used to have a dome (which collapsed) but now makes this a very cool place with a sort of oculus, and a phenomenal place in which to stand and sing your klapa music for Japanese tourists:

The Entry Vestibule also has four large niches where once stood statues of the “four tetrarchs who ruled the unwieldy empire after Diocletian retired” (Rick Steves Guidebook).

Back out to the Peristyle. The stone steps flanked by Lions, with Santa Claus (!) at their base, is where you normally could enter the chapel, but during high season they route you around to the right so you can stand there and choose from five different options, with five different payments of what you want to see. We chose one and climbed the steps up to the Cathedral, which is tiny tiny and ornately decorated. It once was Diocletian’s mausoleum, but it became a cathedral in the 7th century, which is when they started decorating it. According to Rick Steves, “When Diocletian died, there were riots of happiness” among the Christians. We concentrated on what was here during the Roman times.

The surviving pieces from that time are the granite columns and the relief circling the base of the dome. The red marble pillars you see were scavenged from Diocletian’s sarcophagus.

The dome has half-moon etchings layered one upon the other. Dave excels at getting these symmetrical ceiling shots. We left the cathedral, passed by Santa Claus and headed directly across the palace to the Baptistry.

Ivan Mestrovic’s magnificent statue of St. John stands there in the baptistry, which in Diocletian’s time was once a Temple to Jupiter.

On the front of the deep 12th-century font is a carving of a bishop (left), the king on his throne (right) with the submissive commoner at their feet. This Baptistry isn’t huge at all, maybe as big as my living room at home. I was surprised by its small size to hold all this. That explains why the statue feels kind of wedged in here, but don’t worry, St. John holds his own.

This vaulted half-barrel ceiling is “considered the best-preserved” of its type anywhere. Each little face and box are different.

Split1

We walk around the ancient place a little more, the limestone pavers polished to a shine over the centuries.

In some places we can see the mosaics from ancient times; this is roped off so people don’t walk on it.

The bougainvillia was beautiful on this residence. I’d like to have dinner up on their terrace on top of the house.

A view to The Riva, the town’s pedestrian promenade, from the “rooms” above the cellar. After leaving Dubrovnik, with all the driving and walking, we decide we need a break and head to the Riva to watch people and the boats.

Or should I say, mammouth gargantuan cruise ships being ushered out to the Adriatic by tugs. Because of the rain, we had cooler weather initially, but today is a bit hotter, and we keep moving from bench to bench, trying to find some shade. We watch this tug-ship entertainment for a while, then decide we ought to start on the March to Find Dinner, so we head back into the Palace area.

The sun is beginning to set, casting a golden glow on the different towers.

And it’s always the last place you look where you’ll have dinner. We ended up at Bistro Appetit, and yes, the World Cup Games were on their flat screen.

Salad first.

Dave had pasta. I can’t remember everything that was in it, but I do remember that it was flavored with truffles, a rather strong taste. He liked it.

I had vegetables and a flattened, grilled chicken breast dredged in sesame seeds.

My friend Judy had traveled here last year and I so wanted to see this sculpture, right outside the Golden Gate of the palace, Alas, it was under renovation, but I laughed when I saw that they’d left the toe exposed so people could rub it for good luck. On my wrist you see my Croatia Solidarity Bracelet, which I wore until Croatia was eliminated from the World Cup a few days later. We brought one home for the granddaughters, which are all probably lost and gone now, as souvenirs are.

We stopped at a market and bought some peach juice for breakfast, as the owner told us that there was a bakery up the street where we could buy some baked goods in the morning. Then home to our little home-away-from home.

I mean little, literally. The bed was about a foot shorter than Dave. Couple that with the sudden and awful realization that I’d left half of my clothes in the little closet in Dubrovnik, made for an interesting evening. Dave wrote to the sobe in Dubrovnik, asking if they could sent the clothes on to Zagreb to our hotel. No answer. By the end of the night, I’d pretty well resigned myself to the loss of the clothes. I still had enough to get me through the trip (with a laundry stop somewhere), and realized by the silence that shipping some dumb tourist’s clothes to a far away city was not what a sobe owner wanted to do. Dave wrote him back suggesting that he instead donate the clothes to someone who needed them, and we went to bed. A response came in to the second email, that yes, he would do that (completely ignoring the first email). I figured his mother-in-law to be the likely recipient. I also learned that even if you think you are paring down your wardrobe to nothing, it can be pared down even further.

Next up: Plitvice Lakes National Park

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Tag Archives: Croatia

Lake Bled

Beautiful (and Quiet) Buzet

House Tina (Plitvice Lakes, part II)

Plitvice Lakes National Park

Split — in Croatia