Plitvice: the good, the bad, and the ugly

We arrived in Split and spent our first day roaming around the city and going to the beach. It was a really great day. We visited the market, bought some peaches to eat, had a beautiful lunch at a restaurant specializing in Calamari and Squid Ink Risotto. After lunch, we walked home in the heat, packed our bags and went to the beach. We floated in the Adriatic for the afternoon and had a wonderfully relaxing time.

I didn't sleep very well our first night in Split, so I got out of bed early and spent the morning researching the places that we had wanted to visit. You know, the places that come up when you Google

"Things to see in Split Croatia"

Obviously, as a Unesco Heritage sight, Plitvice Lakes National Park falls very high on the Things-to-see-in-Croatia list. Looking at the map it was about a 2.5 - 3 hour drive from Split and opened at 7 am. It looked like there was an option to buy tickets online or purchase them at the gate, so I figured it would be a good use of our Croatian cash to just purchase them at the gate. We (I) decided that it would be best if we went to bed early and got up equally early to build a lunch and head out for the park in the early morning.

The morning came, and I awoke with excitement. I made some coffees, got the breakfast materials out, and started toasting the bread (in a pan with butter since there was no toaster) in order to make our sandwiches for lunch. I then woke up Holly (she really likes her sleep) so that she could get herself ready for this adventure. We got out of the house a little before 5 am and headed out for the lakes. We figured that the tour buses wouldn't possibly leave this early so at least we could beat some of the tourists and get a more serene experience.

One great podcast and its ensuing followup discussion later and we had arrived at the park entrance. It was 8:04 am and the parking lot was already teeming cars. The parking lot was less of a traditional structured parking lot and more of an abstract choose-your-own-adventure mosaic of tightly packed cars throughout several very wide dirt roads snaking through the forest. What made it less traditional wasn't the space itself, but the way that everyone used the space. Cars crammed their way into every nook and cranny possible, sideways, frontwards, backwards. The closer to the entrance the more it resembled a collection of puppies trying to get milk from their mom. Either way, it worked. I'll give it that. We got ourselves parked and walked to the entrance where I very soon realized that I had made a big mistake.

When I was "researching" this park the previous morning, I was also researching another park called Krka, which I seemed to have blended together in my mind. I seemed to have missed the section where it discussed the availability of tickets for time slots. Each ticket is allotted to a particular time slot to try to control the flow of people into the park. By not purchasing our tickets online, I hadn't secured a time slot and therefore we were now only able to buy tickets to enter the park at next available time slot, 12:00... leaving us with a four hour wait.

I know I don't have to describe the feeling. I think we've all been there. When you've made some mistake and have no-one else to blame but yourself. In this situation, I was feeling all of that and extra. That extra came from a conversation that Holly and I had the night before.

Holly expressed that by planning everything she feels that she is personally responsible for every detail and whether it succeeds or fails. She felt like she was on an island, responsible for contacting accommodations, managing travel itineraries, and planning excursions. For those of you who don't know, Holly is an ISTJ Personality. At any point in time, she is holding and managing many lists and tasks in her head and often has trouble delegating and trusting others with tasks, as she can't guarantee that they will be done to the degree in which she would do them. A lot of work for one person. I felt so sad that I had left her out on that island by herself. As a husband and partner, I take pride in supporting her and being a good teammate, and I had let her down. I needed to be better. Hence my "research" about the parks.

⏩ Fast forward to our current situation. Here we were, having to wait in the Plitvice Lake parking lot for four hours because my "research" that Holly had trusted had been wrong. I had, in one morning, validated her whole feeling about delegating tasks. So the feeling that I was having at this moment, was not only the disappointment in myself for being dumb but mostly the feeling of proving Holly's subconscious right, that she can't trust me to handle these tasks. I know. It's not that serious, but that's what was going on in my head. In hind sight, it was a honest mistake and I should have been more diligent. But in that moment, it felt terrible. It wasn't necessarily the waiting that felt shitty. It was that I couldn't replace the serene experience that we would no longer be able to have. We would be entering this park in the peak of its busyness on a day in high season. Buckle up 😬.

The Ugly

But now what? We had 3.5 hours to kill and my mind felt like it was melting from the frustration of my mistake. We got back to the car and ate one of our tasty sandwiches (Nutella and banana). When we had been looking at the maps after getting our tickets, I had noticed that there were some hiking trails that went off the back of the parking lot, so I decided to just go for a walk to try to clear my head. As I walked, I couldn't help but notice the litter on the side of the road/path. A pop bottle here, a wrapper there; it was so sad. In the back of the parking lot was a dirt road that quickly narrowed and exposed a sign for the trail head. At the base of the sign, some discarded garment and an old shoe. Sigh I continued to walk and found myself enveloped by this beautiful Croatian forest.

No sooner was my placid and serene walk shattered by a truly tragic sight. About 2 minutes past the trail sign, someone felt the need to dump garbage on the side of this hiking trail. Clothes, and shoes, and bottles and bags, strewn across the side of the hill next to the hiking trail. It was so disturbing that it shocked me out my own head and back into reality. All of a sudden, my frustration with myself had an outlet.

"If we were going to be stuck here waiting for 3.5 hours, I was going to try and clean up as much of this garbage as I could."

I quickly filled up three plastic bags with the garbage found around them and took them back up to the dumpster located just past where we had parked, about a 10 minute walk from my current location.

I took a garbage bag from one of the garbage cans by the entrance and headed back. I paused at the car to have a drink of water and to grab one of the used sandwich bags so that I could use it as a glove. As I was filling the garbage bag that I had taken, I located another garbage bag among the refuse. Suffice to say, this load was an ambitious one. I indiscriminately filled each bag with anything around me, clothes, shoes, flip flops, plastic bags and other random petroleum based packaging. You can imagine the weight of two garbage bags full of soggy clothes and plastic. The 10 minute walk back to the dumpster was a grind. My shoulders were on fire and beads of sweat were running down my face and arms. There's a masochistic sliver of me that loves this kind of physical exertion. In the past, it has pulled my mind away from over thinking and analyzing difficult aspects of my life. In this case, this physical challenge provided the refuge for my mind to escape thinking about my blunder with the park tickets.

I got to the dumpster and tossed in the weathered garbage bag as there was no way it wouldn make a second trip. I emptied my other garbage bag and turned around to head back out. I glanced at my watch. It was 10:30! I had time for one more load. I clearly wasn't going to be able to finish this task, so I had to get smarter.

On this trip, I found yet another old garbage bag among the trash and decided that I would use the garbage bags exclusively for all of the plastics that I could find. I would leave paper products behind as I feel they would have a better time decomposing. I would use all of the backpacks (and there were a lot) strewn about this dump site to stuff the clothes and shoes into. I figured, that by the time I had to return, I could at the very least put all of the backpacks full of clothes in a pile near the trail for whomever chose to continue this legacy when I left. The next 45 minutes were a blur of me scurrying up and down the hillside collecting plastic and stuffing nap sacks. In the end, I filled the two garbage bags and stuffed close to 15 packbacks full of soggy clothes and old shoes. I piled the backpacks near the trail and carried the garabage bags to the dumpster for the final time.

This whole scenario set my mind on fire with ideas. Nerdy, technology specific ones, but ideas none the less. I'll share it here for completeness but feel free to skip the following if you're not interested.

Idea

Hypothetically speaking, imagine that there is a digital currency that could accurately represent and reflect an individual's personal contribution to the environment and the planet. Now imagine that this digital currency could not be bought but only accumulated through real-life, personal actions. In this case, my 2.5 hours of cleaning garbage. Now imagine that this currency could be used for benefits that were exclusively available to those who had it. For instance, perhaps using my 2.5 hours of green currency, Holly and I could skip all the lines or go to some special area in Plitvice. It would put value on our environment that could not be bought or sold. Just an idea.

I went and washed up and returned back to the car. It was now 11:30 and I was soaked in sweat. Luckily I had brought a change of clothes in case we got wet on our Plitvice adventure. We ate our second sandwiches and a granola bar and headed towards the entrance of the park.

The Bad

I read an article recently, talking about how tourism is basically "eating" this increaslingly globally connected world. In the article they discussed how countries are imposing a congestion tax (i.e. on tourists) and how this may be an effective way to combat the sheer volume of people descending upon these locations. They discuss how it would unforuntately make everything even more expensive than it already is and likely only within reach of the elite and wealthy. I'm not sure how I feel about making things even more expensive; however, I can appreciate the thought process.

With selfie sticks and mobile phones in hand, children in tow watching movies on smartphones, we entered the park with hundreds of others. I'm cynical when describing this scenario, but in a lot of places that we have visited, it has been the akward reality. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you shouldn't take selfies or pictures when you're at these amazing places. But there has to be some balance between appreciating and capturing the moments. Holly and I often discuss being present in these places when we're waiting in line for something and watching all of the people roaming around recording videos of these places. Why videos? Well, my theory is that if a picture is good... a video is like 60 pictures per second... so that must be better right 🤪?

We both try to stay present and enjoy the spaces, while we're in them. I'm all too often overwhelmed by the beauty and want to capture these amazing sights with our camera. There's something so magical about taking a picture that somehow produces the feelings of being in that space all over again. And therein lies the challenge and tradeoff.

Lately I've been using an analogy for photography. Taking pictures is like fishing. In order to catch the beautiful fish, you need to know where to fish, what bait to use and depending on your skill you need to make a lot of casts. It also becomes very difficult when the spot your are fishing is overrun by other people who are also fishing. To extend the fishing analogy further, the internet has exposed all of the amazing fishing spots, so no matter which spot you choose, you're bound to be surrounded by others looking to snag that beautiful fish. In this case, the fish is obviously a beautiful picture.

In many of the places we have gone, we have found ourselves surrounded with the effects of peak season. In no place has this been more visceral than Plitvice. Granted, had I not screwed up the ticket purchase and we had entered the park when we arrived, it would not have been nearly as busy.

For reference, while waiting to buy our tickets earlier, I couldn't help but observe a screen showing the live count of available tickets for each time slot for the day. Obviously when we got there, each time slot up until 12:00 had a reading of 0. As I looked further down the board, the numbers got larger which makes sense. The last time slot appeared to have around ~550 tickets available. Given that there are 2 entrances to this park, each admitting 550 people every hour, with an average stay of ~4 hours, at 12 pm, a peak time during the day, there should be somewhere around 5000 people in this park? 😬 It's likely my math is wrong here, but the point is, it was busy.

We walked 15 minutes down to the entrance where we waited in line to get on a tram to drive us up to where we would begin our walk. Two trams left just as we got there and so we waited for the next one to arrive. We piled onto the tram with around ~100 others and set off for station ST3. Once we arrived, we started our walk down the wooden boardwalk through this serene landscape. Plitvice is a series of lakes that cascade into one another through successive drops in elevation. As such, boardwalks provide the means to walk through the park as the entire landscape is lakes and waterfalls. The boardwalks are wide enough for two people to pass each other comfortably, but this comfortable space quickly disappears as people would stop for selfies and pictures. At one point during our walk, we came upon a queued line on the boardwalk. Looking at the map, it looked as though we should be getting close to the dock where we were supposed to catch a ferry to the other side of the lake so we figured this could be the line for that. Turns out, this line was due to people taking selfies at the waterfall up ahead. Apparently in busy times, it's not unheard of that people end up in the water due to being edged off the boardwalk. Though this didn't happen, I didn't have to stretch my imagination too far to see it happening.

There were definitely times that really pushed the envelope of our polite Canadian demeanors. At one point, we were walking down a long series of steps in the boardwalk beside a lovely cascading waterfall. People were walking up the steps on the left and down on the right, when all of a sudden a woman rushes past me, strafing (walking sideways) down the stairs holding her phone in the air as she video tapes her "experience". I'm not totally sure if people end up in the water by accident or by the frustration of others, tough to say.

The Good

I feel somewhat bad that I started this article about Plitvice with so many negative things. I wrote it chronologically as I've found it's the easieast way for me to write these events in an understandable way. Even then I seem to take tangents back and forth in time to add in tidbits and context. Though our visit to Plitvice was not as serene and calming as one would hope it could be, the park itself, if you subtract the tour buses and car loads of people, is incredibly majestic. The boardwalk adds such a cool feeling to the walk through the forest as the boards creak and sway with your gait. At times, you are walking overtop of waterfalls that you can feel surging beneath each of the steps.

The waterfalls and lakes are an unbelievable mix of blue and green and as clear as glass. Like a pool of shimmering liquid sapphire flowing through the forest and under the walkway. The clarity of the lakes provided a skylight to view the fish with which the lakes were filled.

The lush green forest and the blue waters of the lake contrasted the white cascading water down the orangeish brown cliff sides. Stuborn shrubs and strange gransses cling to the cliffs as water rolls down their backs.

It was a place filled with truly magical vistas and walkways that gave one an intimate experience with nature. To summarize, I'm very glad that we went to Plitvice. It was an awe inspiring natural phenomenon that I will never forget. Unfortunately, many of the reasons I will remember it so well are not for its beauty and its majesty but for our races unscrupulous and self centered behaviors.

This world as a truly magnificient place. It lives and breathes and provides us with these awe inspiring gifts. I continue to hear that the point of no return is near, that if we are going to act we need to act now. I would love to think that this post might inspire someone else to show love for our beautiful planet, however, I know the possibility of this is small. There are already so many documentaries and news articles telling us this on a daily basis. All I can say, is that I want to do whatever I can to help out our beautiful planet. Let every day be Earth day. 🌍