On the train from Venice to Trieste, a shift in feeling and architecture is a matter of just a few hours. Venice is Italian, and its eastern influences are Byzantine in origin, ornate and wealthy. When I got off the train the sky was overcast for the first time since I left London, and the buildings, massive, Austrian, fit the atmosphere perfectly. This kind of architecture, with Italy’s signature red tiles, graffiti in various Slav languages, and a bus station advertising destinations everywhere from Venice to Vienna to Ljubljana and Belgrade, made this city seem like a meeting place for three different cultures–the western Mediterranean, personified by Italy, the north-central European, especially Austrian, and the eastern European.
I didn’t stay long, as I wanted to make it to Croatia before nightfall. I got to the bus station thirty seconds too late to catch the 4:30 bus to Pula, and so bought a ticket on the 6:00 instead. I can’t count how many times a thirty second difference like this has made a major difference in my trip, or led to completely unexpected encounters. In this case, it led to my meeting two other travelers from Britain, Kiril and Alex. They’d been traveling across Europe by Land Rover, but had broken down in northern Italy. Their friends were with the vehicle, waiting for parts, and these two had packed a couple of backpacks and headed out on foot.
Kiril was also Bulgarian by birth, and spoke the language fluently. While not the same as Croatian, it’s close enough that he could understand the locals and they could more or less understand him. Even I could pick up at least as much of the local conversation as I could in Paris, since many of the basics of these languages are tied with Russian.
The bus took us out of Italy, stopping briefly at the border for passport checks, and then we were on our way south into Croatia. With this, the shift was complete. The large, ornate buildings of Trieste were replaced with fading Soviet apartment blocks, and the first rolling hills of the Istrian peninsula rose around the bus.
Kiril and Alex were of my philosophy and were carrying a tent, so we camped out that night in some thick woods near Pula, and even built a fire, my first so far this trip. The next morning we explored the town. I was surprised to see quite a large Roman amphitheater, almost completely intact, which was being prepared for some kind of concert. There were quite a few here, from the posters–both Sinead O’Connor to Madonna were booked for the near future. Kiril informed me that this part of the world loves its rock festivals and big concerts.
I’d heard of a place called Plitvice Lakes, and was determined to visit, so Kiril and Alex decided to come along. We caught the bus to Rijeka, a bustling port city, and from there on to Karlovac. By now it was dark, so the three of us walked out of town, past row after row of tall Soviet apartment buildings. The walls facing the freeway were marked with scattered clusters of bullet holes, probably from the Croatian Homeland War in the early nineties. The next day we would see old tanks sitting in an empty lot just outside of town.
We found a good enough place to sleep, though–Croatia so far has provided good camping ground–and in the morning, with no real desire to see more of Karlovac, caught the first bus to Plitvice. From Karlovac, the road plunged into the Balkan mountain range, with rolling, heavily wooded hills raising on all sides. The Plitvice stop was unassuming enough, a wooden shack in front of a post office that stood alone in the woods, complete with stacks of firewood in the back.
The park itself was just a few dozen meters down the road. Apparently it’s quite a tourist attraction, and there were people there from all over western and eastern Europe, as well as a few people from Australia. There were three different hotels and a couple of restaurants situated just outside the entrance, but we weren’t interested in spending fifty Euro a night, and headed straight into the park.
At first, we walked a wooded trail that skirted the edges of still lakes with bright blue water. Pretty enough, but then the trail climbed up to the second tier of lakes. Here waterfalls cascaded down the rocks and wooden walking bridges wound across the shallows and around the edges. From here there were tier after tier of lakes and more waterfalls, everywhere, some of them carved into spouts and tunnels in the rock from millenia of running water. The lakes themselves were still and clear, fish swimming just beneath the surface. A beautiful place.
Heading out of the park, we met a couple of other English guys who had heard us asking about the nearest campground–a good eight kilometers away–and invited us to stay in the flat they’d rented for the night. One of them was studying to be a doctor, and was waiting for his graduation results, which would come out the next day, at which point he planned to throw a party either in celebration or drink anyway to drown his sorrows. Despite this offer of proper English drinking, we parted ways the next morning and tried to catch a bus from the park to either Zagreb, to the northeast, or Split, to the south. And tried. And tried. Everyone we asked had different answers, and timetables varied depending on where they were posted. Just when we were beginning to think we’d stumbled into the Hotel California, a bus rumbled up to the stop at the time posted, for once, and we headed south down the coast to Split.
It was a long but beautiful bus ride, down out of the mountains into the sparse scrubland along Croatia’s curving coastline and the clear blue Mediterranean. Here the cities were sundrenched, with palm trees and beaches, sailboats gleaming white out to sea, and the occasional coastal castle in ruins on high promontories.
We arrived in Split around 7:30 that evening, bought some groceries, and talked with one of the hordes of room owners trying to get us to stay with them. The price started at 450 kuna–at a conversion rate of about seven kuna to a euro–and dropped to 250 for the three of us when we played the poor young travelers card. At barely over ten euro for a decent nights sleep in an apartment with two beds, a kitchen, and our own bathroom, not too bad at all. We capped it all off with a bottle of Rakia before bed, a sort of local plum brandy. Quite good but, Kiril says, nowhere near as good as the homemade stuff. I’ll have to come back to eastern Europe again, I think, and explore a little more in depth.
Today it started sunny, but now it’s started raining. We’ll probably explore a bit anyway and see what happens. After that we finally part ways; I head down toward Athens, which I’ll hopefully reach in a couple of days, and Kiril and Alex head east to Bulgaria and Kiril’s father’s fiftieth birthday. What I see in between is still entirely up in the air; as usual, I’ll see what I see.
