Europe

Plitvice Lakes

Posted by Jim St. George on July 14, 2022
Posted in: Croatia, Europe, UNESCO World Heritage Site. Leave a Comment

Here we are early in the hike around the lakes. Pretty nice water, huh?

We made a two-day stop in Plitvice Lakes National Park, what the guidebook calls Croatia’s “Adriatic hinterland,” about a hundred miles southeast of Opatija. We’d wanted to go there way back in 2013 when we first came here on our big adventure but it’s really hard to get here without a car. So part of the calculation in deciding to rent a car for this leg of our Slovenia/Croatia trip was to get to Plitvice.

The whole reason one comes to the area is this series of cascading lakes and waterfalls, surrounded by lush forests. It isn’t cheap – it’s about $40 per person, plus $10 for parking – but for a day-long outdoor experience it’s hard to beat. I mean, it’s been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since the 1970s. Oh, and one historic note worth mentioning. When Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, the Yugoslav (i.e., Serbian) army’s first point of attack was Plitvice. They held the park through the duration of the war and in fact it is thought that some remote parts of the park – not anywhere close to where tourists go – may still have Serbian landmines. Yuck.

As Lonely Planet puts it, “It’s as though Croatia decided to gather all its waterfalls in one place and charge admission to see them.”

So what’s going on here? The basic idea is that the geology of the area is loaded with limestone. As all the water flows along it picks up limestone and drops chalk sediment all over. That creates ideal growing conditions for moss and algae which constantly reroute the flow of water. The result is an ever-changing landscape of waterfalls cascading to lower lakes, over and over, all in stunning turquoise. And apparently it’s been going on for a long time, as in since the last great ice age.

And that was it. Though shorter routes are available, including lovely tour boats that glide across the biggest lakes as significant shortcuts, the full route around the major lakes in the park is about 12 miles. Which of course I had to do. Admittedly, I was sore the next days but the views were spectacular and definitely worth it.

Now it’s down to the ancient city of Split on the coast and off on a 14-day bike trip!

We were there quite early, before the crowds and when everything was very still

During the early part of the hike the boardwalk was often right over flowing water. We were amused by the lack of safety provisions; I can’t imagine you could have something like this without guard rails in the U.S.

More waterfalls

On the trail

While most of the trail was immediately next to the lakes, sometimes it went high up into the forest

From high up you would get views like this

And this

Opatija

Posted by Mark Sullivan on July 12, 2022
Posted in: Croatia, Europe. Leave a Comment

The Franz Joseph I Promenade runs 12 km along the sea, linking Opatija with neighboring towns Volosko to the north and Lovran to the south

Opatija is packed with grand old hotels in beautiful condition

I was intrigued by this Fixer Upper

Nothing says ‘Mediterranean’ like a plate of fresh anchovies

From Trieste, we cut back across a corner of Slovenia to get to our first stop in Croatia. Opatija sits on the Kvarner Gulf, the northern-most stretch of Croatia’s spectacular Adriatic coast.

Arriving here — and while planning this trip — I am struck by the sheer amount of tourism and related infrastructure that lines this coast. From the Kvarner Gulf in the north to the Dalmatian Coast in the south, I’m astounded by the number of resort towns that line Croatia’s coast and its many islands. And I’m pretty excited about seeing a lot more of these spots.

One of my favorite resources for travel planning is the UK newspaper The Guardian. They publish really good lists of “best hotels” in particular countries or regions. They list and describe hotels at various price levels that combine exceptional quality lodging, food, location, service, and value. For me it’s a great way to find places in a country that has plenty of good infrastructure, as well as to locate good value in each place. I couldn’t believe how many hotels in how many locations they listed for Croatia. It was hard to process it all.

This list helped me settle on Opatija as a good starting point for this trip. Now I had never even previously heard of Opatija, but once we arrived I just can’t believe how lovely it is — and how much tourism there is here alone. The town stretches along a pretty cobble-stone promenade running for miles along the coast. And many of the hotels occupy grand historic buildings that look like they have been lovingly renovated.

Though we’ve been to Croatia a couple times before, we’re excited to start a new journey down this beautiful coast. We feel like we’ve seen so little of what it has to offer. And since we’ll spend two weeks on a boat, biking in new destinations every day, we hope to get a good taste of a lot of new destinations. From what I’ve seen in just this first stop, it’s the Mediterranean we love — beautiful blue water, stunning landscapes, lovely architecture, good food. Why go anywhere else?

I never get tired of seats like this

A lively, rustic-yet-sleek dinner spot with great food. Earliest we could get a dinner reservation was 10 pm. It was worth the wait.

Our favorite lunch spot, seconds from our hotel

One of Jim’s favorite poses

Trieste

Posted by Jim St. George on July 9, 2022
Posted in: Europe, Italy. Leave a Comment

Trieste’s Unity of Italy Square after a summer storm has passed through. The other two sides of the square are at least as grand.

This trip is all about four weeks in southeast Europe – Slovenia and Croatia – and then four weeks in Scandinavia – Norway and Sweden – but we decided to elbow in a little corner of Italy while we were in the area. Trieste was once one of the great cities of the Austro-Hungarian empire: the fourth city, it turns out, after Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, and the most important seaport the entire empire. Since it was annexed by Italy after World War I, though, it’s become a bit forgotten. It is Italy, but it’s not really Italy, at least not the way Naples or Florence or Rome are really Italy. Still, as the capital of one of Italy’s 20 regions, Friuli Venezia Giulia, we wanted to give it a try.

And … meh. The food wasn’t as good as it is in the rest of Italy. Heck, it wasn’t even as good as the food in Slovenia. It didn’t have that same historic imperative you get in so much of Italy. And while it’s right on the Adriatic Sea, you got little sense of that from the city itself as it’s largely cut off as far as tourists and pedestrians are concerned by all the industry and port services. I felt like taking city officials on a trip to Barcelona and showing them what you could do with a great city if you opened up the sea.

Mark on our balcony one evening

There were a couple of noteworthy experiences. The Unity of Italy Square (formerly the Great Square) is said to be the largest sea-facing square in all of Europe. The three sides not facing the sea are built up with massive imperial Austrian buildings, truly awe inspiring. The problem was that it’s so big they really haven’t filled it up with cafés and restaurants and all that stuff that would make it appealing. In fact on a hot sunny day – pretty much the norm this time of year – you want to avoid the square because it’s so inhospitable. Still, it’s beautiful to look at.

And then there’s the Miramare Castle, some four miles up the coast from the city center. It was built by Archduke Maximillian of Austria, the younger brother of Franz Joseph, the guy who ruled the empire for 68 years. When you’re the Number 2 guy in that situation you don’t have so much to do. For a while he was commander-in-chief of the imperial Navy, and later viceroy of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, but his liberal politics angered his brother/emperor and he was dismissed from both jobs. So instead he built this really beautiful castle and park starting in the mid-1850s just north of Trieste.

Miramar Castle, home for a while at least for Archduke Maximillian and his wife Charlotte

Sadly for him, he didn’t really get to enjoy it that much. While the castle was still under construction in the early 1860s Emperor Napoleon of France offered him the title of Emperor of Mexico. He eventually took the job and moved to Mexico City but – once the U.S. Civil War was over – U.S. officials had the leeway to enforce the Monroe Doctrine blocking European powers from intervening in the Americas. By 1866, in the face of U.S. pressure, France withdrew its support for Maximillian. Ultimately he was captured by the Republican forces under Benito Juarez and executed. His wife Charlotte, who had gone back to Europe on her own to plead their case in both Paris and the Vatican, was considered mentally unstable and not told of her husband’s death. Instead she spent the next 60 years living in insane asylums.

OK, but back to the castle. Beautiful location, right on the coast and really wonderful restoration work with the wall paper and furnishings throughout much of the castle authentically Maximillian’s. One small section of the castle had been renovated in the 1930s by some Italian Duke who had been given the property and was somewhere between depressing and hideous. Fortunately the bulk of the property retains its historic presence. Oh, and the park surrounding the castle was huge, beautiful, and peaceful. All in all a worthy morning’s outing.

Otherwise there wasn’t a lot to do in Trieste. We tried to find good restaurants but the cuisine of the region just doesn’t match the rest of Italy. We did laundry – that’s always exciting – and did some shopping to prepare for the remaining seven weeks of the trip but all in all it was less exciting than we’d hoped our one stop in Italy for the year would be.

Next it’s on to Croatia: one stop on the beach and another in lake country before we start a two-week boat/bike trip in Split.

Very near the main square is this canal that runs from the sea to … nowhere as far as we could tell. Just a couple hundred meters before it just ended. Not sure what it was all about but it was at least pretty.

Nearly every item on every menu we saw was seafood. Most of it was beautifully prepared and presented but ultimately not that good. This was an exception, a great seafood mix.

Here I am at a sidewalk restaurant waiting for lunch


This was a classic Trieste restaurant. Had a good reputation, good reviews, nice setting … and bland food. Beautifully presented but kind of flavorless. There was a family of four sitting next to us, parents and two young adolescent kids. Those kids were not going to try a damned thing at the restaurant. They were, however, determined to show their parents and anyone around how completely bored they were with the whole thing. How fun!

OK, the food wasn’t great. But espresso in Italy is one of the great treats on earth.

A street scene on the way to dinner one evening


A lot of sailboats in the harbor


The view from our balcony our final morning. Neither ship was there the night before but when we saw these two tied up in the morning we realized the old town area would be swarmed with hordes in a couple hours. Seemed like a good time to get the heck out!