First stop, the Istrian Peninsula, which is the far western part of the country close to Italy. I booked a ticket to a cute little town called Rovinj, but just wanted to visit for the afternoon, en route to a larger port town called Pula. I read online that there’s lockers for storage at the bus station, which is why I made the pit stop, but then when I asked the lady at the counter about the lockers she waved me off saying “finished, finished”. Alrighty then!
I’ve definitely started to notice that people working in bus or train stations, or the bus drivers themselves, are not very customer service oriented haha. The older they are, the more likely they are to bark a few words at you and then shoo you away. So now I was in Rovinj, it’s very hot, and now I have to see the city lugging around my big backpack with nowhere to put it. It’s like 95 degrees and the old town is hilly. Great.
Rovinj old town looking on from the harbor
One of the side streets. Those stones are slippery!
First impressions of Rovinj was that it was definitely aesthetically pleasing, white brick buildings and cobblestone steps, lots of boutique shops and romantic looking cafes with outdoor seating wherever there was shade. And the coast was a shimmering deep blue color. Walking the streets felt a lot like Italy especially with all the Venetian architecture, but also kind of like a lower grade version of Italy. If anything the food prices on menus were just as high or higher than in Italy, which was surprising. Apparently inflation has been really bad in Croatia, and given what locals make per month, the food prices seemed pretty crazy in that context, I’m not sure how locals afford it, and it sounds like they mostly just don’t eat out that much, especially in coastal places in the summer, especially especially in tourist trap old towns! The Croatian coast is geared towards extracting as much money out of the summer tourists as possible, and given how popular Croatia is nowadays, business is gooood.
So upon getting there I hiked up the hill to church in the middle of town with all my stuff, dripping in sweat, and it sucked, so I decided that was enough walking for the time being! I did read on someone’s blog that they really liked a bar called Mediterraneo, and you could hop in the water right from their waterfront terrace, so that seemed like a good place to go. Once there I was able to thrown on my swimsuit, stash my bags in the corner, have a drink (for only $11) and go for a swim. This is the nice thing about Croatia, there’s always somewhere to swim, this specific part of the Mediterranean in the Adriatic Sea is just so calm (and blue) you can hop in wherever and not be worried about big waves or tides or ripcurrents, the temperature is perfect. The tricky part sometimes is navigating the slippery and possibly sharp rocks getting out. The whole coast is pretty rocky, and if there is a beach it’s more like gravel, not sand. But anyway it was much nicer scoping out the town from in the water than sweating like a pig on land.
That was a good way to kill a couple hours and then hopped back on the bus to my final destination, Pula, where I booked two nights. Pula was pretty similar to Rovinj, although a much bigger city. But if you stayed in the old town, which is where all the tourists stay, you wouldn’t really know it. The city is famous for it’s very well preserved Roman amphitheater. Of course just having been in Rome it wasn’t as exciting to me. I also found out that ferry across the sea to Zadar only runs 5 days a week, and one of the two days it didn’t go was on the day I was planning on going, so I just decided to book one more night, which kind of felt like a wasted travel day, because there’s just not that much stuff to do in Pula besides finding a spot on the coast to go swimming. That’s most of Croatia I guess, old towns and swimming! Don’t get me wrong, the old towns are top notch, the swimming spots are really really pretty, but as I will soon find out, it does start feeling a bit same-samey.
So Pula was kinda meh (and I only say meh being a total travel snob) I had two pretty chill days there, I hit the coastline both afternoons, and then eventually took the ferry to Zadar, and from there the bus to the famous Plitvice waterfalls. Someone recommended a good hostel in the nearby town, where they’re really good about organizing group activities for the people staying there, which is kinda nice. The first evening I was there some people were going on the kayaking tour, so I signed up for that one, and then there was an organized group dinner at the place down the street for traditional Croatian food, so sign me up. The group was a good mix of people, some Americans, some Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, one French, one Italian. They have these huge meat platters that are good for splitting among a few people, so we ordered a few of those, it’s tough to go wrong with a meat platter in the Balkans! Can’t go wrong with meat and bread :)
The next day most of the people at dinner were on the kayaking trip, so we had a pretty good group going. The rafting was done with inflatable tandem kayaks, and it was most flat water, but interspersed with small waterfalls and slides that kayaks handled really well. Also lots of good spots for jumping in. It was enjoyable, but really not the most exciting trip. Towards the end we passed though a weeklong hippie type electronic music festival where everyone was camping out and chilling out along the river, it looked like a great time. And let’s just say that clothing was very much optional. European attitudes about this sort of stuff are definitely a bit different than American ones!
That night was hostel run lasagna dinner + brownies and ice cream, which most people participated in. These group dinners are really good ways to get large chunks of the hostel sitting together and talking which is certainly becoming more difficult in the modern social media age. And the long picnic table seating helps too. And having board games and playing cards readily available. And a market a block away to buy drinks. But I had to be up early in the morning to get to Plitvice Falls before the big midday/afternoon crowds come. Being that Croatia has so many tourists nowadays they can basically charge what they want, Plitvice is 40 Euros, which feels kinda like a FU price, but is what it is. The entire park is pretty big, so there are about 15 miles of hiking trails going around all the various lakes, so you can spend the whole day there at least.
The lakes are basically terraced with rock formations called tufas, a
”Tufa is a hollow, porous rock created from the deposition of dissolved calcium carbonate in the water by plants, algae and mosses” so that’s what creates the terraced waterfalls. It’s pretty neat, although something quite common in Southeast Asia, and the color of the lakes is some really pretty shades of blue and turquoise from the mineral content, dissolved calcium carbonate or whatever. Although unfortunately summer season is the dry season, so the waterfalls are basically at their lowest flow, and it honestly wasn’t overly impressive. It felt more like a pleasant day hiking around some lakes as opposed to being one of the supposedly top waterfalls in the world kinda thing. But maybe I’ve seen enough of the best waterfalls traveling to make me a waterfall snob also….
In wet season these falls would expand into different streams all over the place
So Plitvice was fine. Checked off the list of must-do things in Croatia. The next day we had a bunch of people looking to do something, so the hostel organized a trip to see an abandoned airbase/hangar and then we’d go to some swimming hole. I was under the impression that this abandoned hangar was like something we’d stop by, see for 5-10 minutes, snap some photos, and move on. No, no, no, the place was huge! The entrance feels like something in a Bond movie, where the bad guy has his evil lair in some massive hidden compound in the jungle. And then once you’re inside the main tunnels fork off into different directions, and then from the main channels there’s a whole bunch of smaller tunnels to work your way through. The place is genuinely creepy, rubble, broken concrete, rebar, and graffiti everywhere, it seemed like it would be a great spot to have a crazy rave party.
This photo really does a terrible job at showing how absolutely massive this underground airbase was. We walked around for two hours and didn’t see everything.
Photo stolen from the internet. This place was soooo cool to explore
But some of the rooms in the smaller tunnels are actually somewhat decently preserved, you can find things that look like gear boxes, oil drums, huge silos, sleeping quarters and bathrooms, and just all sorts of industrial looking stuff that I have no clue what it is. And everything is pitch black, so we were just using our lights on cellphones for light, while the volunteer from the hostel had a small lantern. But we definitely could have used some stronger lights. We spent two hours in there in exploring and didn’t even see the whole thing. And we were the only ones there! I like how nothing was roped off or closed off by the government, and the whole place is just completely free to roam to whoever wants to do so. No way that happens with an abandoned military base in the US!
So that was really cool. That was my favorite thing in Croatia actually, certainly the most unique. Give me the abandoned cold war era underground bunker all day vs the cutesy, touristy old towns! I’m gonna have to go to Russia now and see more stuff like this, haha. So after that we loaded our shuttle bus and went to the swimming hole just outside Plitvice Park. There were already some people there, but we got some good local intel, and if you walked 20 minutes down a hidden path there was a small waterfall with a rope swing and swimming area, and we had that spot all to ourselves. It was perfect. A non-touristy day in Croatia! Felt good.
