Plitvice National Park, Croatia – Hundreds of waterfalls amongst miles of steps

The bus was packed on a Sunday for this national park, which is one of the most visited in this part of Europe. In order to ensure the beauty stays for this generation as well as the future, there is an incredibly strict policy that visitors are not to touch anything off the path, not the water nor the flowers or fauna, nothing. Everything taken into the park that is not directly consumed, has to come back out. To enforce this policy, dozens of park rangers are deployed throughout the park to make sure. The tour was a mix of bio-adventurers, like me, who just wanted a guaranteed round trip bus ride, and those that had paid for a more formal guided tour.

Once we got to the park, our tour guide announced that it was harder to keep track of everyone if the bio-adventurers were allowed to wander off so she HIGHLY encouraged all of us to join her 8 kilometer (5 mile) hike of the upper lakes, which would allow us to take both the boat and train and see the tallest waterfall in Croatia. She didn’t care that we hadn’t paid for the full tour, it was her experience that those that joined her vs toured on their own, helped keep the tour on schedule. Never one to miss a bargain, I agreed. What she forgot to mention during this little pep talk was how much of the 5 mile hike was NOT a path but various degrees of steps.

From the entrance, you could only see trees, so I didn’t realize what a steep journey we would have until we checked in with the rangers and started to descend to the boat area. One of the keys to keeping the beauty pristine is to let nature take its own course. This leads to the various steps we encountered being built over burrows, tree roots, water overflow etc. About 60 steps in, I realized this may be the norm and not just the start and had a quick rethink of the tour. A few of the participants had canes and one was wearing a leg brace, yet they all soldiered on, so I figured if I just went slow, all would be good.

As soon as we got to the first lake with the boats, I noticed the crowds visibly increased. Instead of the quiet cruise around the lake I had planned on, our boat “tour” was just a ferry to get us from one side of the lake to the other.

As we waited for the boat, we were able to sneak out to the edge of the lake and take our first waterfall pictures.

Our large group waited our turn and were quickly transported to the other shore.

There was a rather large crowd waiting for the boat once we unloaded, so we quickly went up the first series of slick wooden steps that would be the norm for the next 2.5 miles of the hike.

If you are a waterfall lover, this is the park for you. There was everything from the tiniest mini waterfall and rivulets to the impressive final, largest waterfall in all of Croatia.

All waterfalls were reachable by the varied height wooden steps that should allow 2-3 people to walk side by side.

A waterfall is called a “slap” in Croatian, so some waterfalls did have signs and were named.

There were also built out ledges where we could take pictures as a group. This shows the second – biggest waterfall in Croatia.

As we went through the winding path of steps, the width and passageway was interrupted or bottlenecked by a number of large families who wanted to pile up and take pictures at pretty much every waterfall, which caused our tour group to get dispersed over quite a distance. If I stopped too long or made eye contact, I was inadvertently asked to take the picture for them, making me fall farther and farther behind the group. At the third request, I had no other option but to stare down at the ground and forge ahead.

There was a rather interesting cave about halfway through the hike with eerie cobalt blue water if you stared straight down. Avoiding the family pictures allowed me to catch up with the last few stragglers of our tour so I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked.

The infrequent times we had an actual path, we were greeted by beautiful tree canopies.

About the time my knees were screaming, we made it to the top of the final crest and a rest area where the train would whisk us off to the highlight of the tour, the tallest waterfall in Croatia. Our options were, as a group, to climb down to the observation bridge and get surprisingly close to this waterfall, or stay at the rim of the canyon and walk another 25 minutes or so to the exit and our tour bus. I wished the group well and just took this picture from the rim. Many reported later that they got pretty wet from the spray, so it was even closer than I realized from where I stood.

I did manage to catch the series of waterfalls that fed in to the area as well as a final picture of the tallest slap before turning towards the exit.

The hype for this park was well-deserved and there are small hotels dotted at the very outskirts of the park that would make a lovely long weekend getaway.