One of our ongoing jokes throughout Croatia had to do with Irish pubs. We tripped over one in Dubrovnik. We laughed about it. Rachel said, “You know there’s an Irish pub in Diocletian’s Palace” somewhere. We kept our eyes peeled for the telltale shamrocks. No go. But then, we came back to our hotel one night and suddenly – at the front door of our hotel – Rachel stopped dead in her tracks and pointed across the street.

Is that the sketchiest place you’ve ever seen in your life? Every time we walked back into the hotel we glanced at it and started laughing. We never saw anyone go in. We never saw anyone come out. And we sure as hell weren’t going to venture over there to investigate.

The way our tour was designed, Ante was going to take us from Dubrovnik to Split. Split is where he lives, so that would be the end of the road for him. Davor would then pick us up and take us on to Zagreb. We would miss Ante. We had gotten very attached to him. We both hugged him when we said goodbye, and I think he was surprised. We discussed him afterwards: “Do you think he liked us?” “I hope he misses us.” “We love Ante.”

We had a long long day ahead of us: Davor was picking us up at 7:30. We had hours of driving ahead of us. In retrospect, I am so glad we got such an early jump on the day. Davor met us in the lobby. We liked him immediately. We’re friends with both Ante and Davor on Instagram and Facebook now. We piled into Davor’s car and off we went. Headed over the mountains again – actually, under at one point, into “continental Croatia” and finally to Zagreb. This would be our longest car ride. As we slipped away from the boundary of Split, the landscape got wilder, as we headed directly towards the wall of mountains.

Once we went through the lengthy tunnel under those mountains, the landscape changed instantly. We drove through a rolling verdant landscape of green fields, sheep, small farms.

Davor told us that this whole area had been really affected by the war in the 90s. We drove by a random cemetery in the middle of a field, guarded by a huge tank. Emptied out of people, Davor said that many never came back. Young people were now moving out of Croatia, in search of better jobs in other countries. Davor chose to stay. A young man in the 90s, who got his degree in political science, he clearly had the foresight to recognize that once the war was over, once the region was safe, tourists would want to come. He worked for a tour company, starting in the late 90s, before striking out on his own with Zagreb Tours. He was right. The tourists did come. We spoke about Bosnia, an inland country, without that coastline, without the possibility of hordes of tourists. A much poorer nation. Croatia’s only export is wine, and their real booming business is tourism. I stared out at those beautiful fields and tried to imagine them war-torn. They were very exposed. It’s just rolling plains, really.

Rachel and I snoozed off and on. But there was a lot to look at outside the windows. After so many days right along the shore, it was interesting to see the inland areas.

Before Zagreb, we were going to spend the morning/mid-afternoon at one of Croatia’s 8 national parks: Plitvice Lakes. Famous for its waterfalls, Plitvice is a series of lakes, at different heights, connected by waterfalls. There are 16 lakes in total, some of them perched high up in the hills, some down at the level of the river. Each of them are connected. It’s all one body of water.

This was such an interesting and fun experience, so different from what we had been doing up until then. We were going to hike along the lakes, and then start the climb, to see the waterfalls, to see the lakes higher up. It was a hell of a hike, people. The day was so chilly people were wearing parkas, and Rachel and I were wrapped up in sweatshirts. But about 20 minutes in, our blood was pumping, because this wasn’t just a small walk along a lakeside. It involved numerous climbs up and up and up. It was rigorous. We were warmed up almost instantly. And, of course, the higher up we went, the more the sun beat down on us. Davor told us that at the height of the tourist season, these wooden-planked pathways among the lakes are a traffic jam of people. It wasn’t like that when we were there, although there were tons of people there.

The paths wind you up and down and around these small lakes and bodies of water, all of which have the most extraordinary colors in them, bright greens, bright deep blues. Davor knows everything about the place and was telling us about how the minerals react with the water and the submerged vines and branches to create those colors. You can’t even believe it’s real, that these colors can be created naturally.

There’s Rachel and Davor. So you can see there are clearly other people there, but we always had space.

They’ve done a wonderful job of not interfering too much with nature. (This is a protected site.) The walkways are made up of planks, and many of the “steps” are just logs dug into the dirt. Eventually, after walking through these beautiful peaceful ponds, you start to hear the rushing of water. And then you get to the show-stopper of the “Big Sprinkler” as it’s called, a large mound of earth – with multiple cascades coming over it. Right around here is where you start to get the vistas around you, steep drop-offs into abysses on either side (once again, Rachel and I found ourselves having to navigate our height-phobias), and the sound of the waterfalls fill the air. There are times when the waterfalls rush underneath the walkways. It’s stunning.

One of the waterfalls had dried up, and Davor said he didn’t want to go past it since it “broke his heart” and this made me love him. He cares about this place. (Rachel also observed to me privately, “That hike didn’t tire him out at all, did you notice?” It really was like he was strolling from the kitchen to the living room. He probably does that hike 3 times a week.) Up and up we climbed. We started to get perspective on where we were. How the ground leveled out, with some blue-jewel-colored lake, or bright green lake, perched on a ledge of land, peaceful and serene, yet leading into yet another waterfall down.

There was also some humor, involving Ante telling us that we were visiting Croatia in what was known in Croatia as “grandmother summer.” We had incorporated “grandmother summer” into our vocabulary in a 2-day period. Ante explained it thus: “Grandmother is almost dead. So is summer.” Rachel and I accepted this without question. Early on in our drive, we somehow mentioned this to Davor and he was like, “What?” He had never heard of it. Which was funny in and of itself. Ante made it sound like it was a common saying. At one point, as we were walking through the lakes and waterfalls, I noticed Davor on his phone. He started to read out loud, “So … grandmother summer …” I immediately burst out laughing. He couldn’t let it stand, he had to KNOW. As we walked along, he read out loud to us. “Grandmother summer” goes by many different names, “Gypsy summer,” “Baba summer,” “Indian summer” – Davor was reading from this page to us – basically what the page was saying was that “Grandmother summer” meant “second youth” – like “Indian summer” – unseasonably warm into October/November. Davor said, “But it’s not like, ‘Granny’s almost dead.'” Hilarity. But maybe that’s how Ante learned it. “Grandmother summer” then took on a whole different aspect. I had told Ante I was going to spread word of the saying through America. Now I have. But now you have Davor’s perspective as well. The game of telephone continues. Oh, and humorously: He was reading it to me as we walked through these walkways, and he said, “Some people say that the saying comes from the mating ritual of the spider -” I exclaimed, “STOP.” At the same moment, he – having read further a little bit – said, “Okay, we don’t need to read that part.” Not because spiders are scary but because maybe he thought that reading out loud about sex – even among spiders – to his American clients – might not have been a good idea. Meanwhile, I just wanted no part of spiders having sex. The whole moment was so funny.

Eventually, we got to a certain height, and took this shuttle bus back down to the parking area. We then had another, like, 2-mile hike even to get to our car. Our legs were wobbly from having gone up, down, up down, for an hour and a half. Davor was going to drive us up to the highest point, so we could get a real perspective on the whole area. This is another great thing about Zagreb Tours. We did the tourist thing (and it was amazing) but then Davor knew a way up to a place not on the tourist track. He drove us up, up, up, and then basically pulled over to the side of the road. Nobody else was up there. We couldn’t see much, we were surrounded by trees. He took us down a path through the woods. You could get the sense of a gigantic DROP off to the right. Through the trees, which clung to an almost vertical wall of dirt. No guardrail, of course. Rachel and I tiptoed along. I couldn’t look to my right. It was too scary. Eventually, we emerged from the trees into a little clearing, that had a small ledge with a stone wall encompassing it.

And here is the view.

I mean …

It’s hard to really get the scale of things into a photo. If you look down around the bottom, you can see the pathway filled with people. The vista was so beautiful we all just fell into silence. And stood there for about 15 minutes, just staring. We also took a selfie with Davor, because come on, of course.

Waterfalls plunged off the cliffs every which way you looked. It made you dizzy just to look at them. On the wooded hillsides across the abyss, you could see the winding pathway we had taken. Like I said, the parks system has done a wonderful job of giving the public access to this beautiful area, without ruining things: the paths are woven into the woods, practically hidden.

Hanging out up there on that little ledge was a necessary breather. We had been hiking, uphill, for an hour. Then we walked around to the vista on the other side, so we could see where we had come from, and also get another perspective. Everywhere you looked was another waterfall.

See that little stone wall across the abyss? That’s where we had been originally.

Once we were up at this level, we were the only ones there.

I’m so glad we decided to fly out of Zagreb, and not backtrack to Dubrovnik (one of our initial plans). But I had wanted to see Zagreb, and so Davor had suggested we do this national park on the way. Zagreb was the real surprise of the trip for me – I’ll get to that in the next post – but seeing this national park, hiking among those blue-green lakes and waterfalls – was really important. It gave just a glimpse of the diversity Croatia has to offer, besides its coastline. I know we barely scratched the surface of things to see. But hiking for hours through that park was beautiful, refreshing, challenging, and the beauty was so extreme I had a hard time even letting it into my brain. (I felt the same way the first time I saw the Grand Canyon. I had to stare at it for like an hour before it even seeped into my head what I was seeing.) The photos I took do not do this place justice, and – like I said – they don’t really capture the heights, the scale of the views.

We hadn’t eaten a thing since our 6 a.m. breakfast. We were STARVING. Staggering back to the car, we were ready for lunch. Davor took us to a place he knew. We devoured it. Talking about our lives, his life. He went to America as a child to visit family, and doesn’t really remember much of it. But he went everywhere. From Toronto to Florida. He didn’t seem inclined to go back. He vacations in Slovenia, to go skiing. He has two kids, been married 12 years, something like that. He seems to really love what he does.

Rachel: “What do you think you need to have to be a good tour guide?”
Davor, after thinking a bit: “You have to like people. And you have to be a good psychologist.”

Fantastic answer.

After lunch?

We left Trogir and headed on to Šibenik. Clouds now filled the sky. We learned later from Davor that part of the road between Zagreb and Split had closed this particular day, because the wind was too ferocious. By the time we got to Šibenik, dark grey clouds churned through the sky, and the wind was enormous, flags standing straight out, laundry on the wine sticking out parallel to the ground … Rachel and I were like, “Where did this COME from? And WHY did we not bring our down parkas to Croatia in September?”

Šibenik is an historic city on a little hill, facing a small river, where the only access to the larger sea is via a narrow channel (pointed out to us by Ante). When we arrived it seemed nearly deserted, probably because rain was coming and everyone had gone inside, and tourists weren’t really traveling that day because of the weather. Whatever the reason, when we walked into the main square of the old town, there were only a couple of people wandering around.

There are many reasons to come to Šibenik. It’s one of those important cities/ports along the Dalmatian coast that was captured, re-captured, captured again, over the centuries, by the Byzantine, Venetian, Austro-Hungarian empire. It’s always been a crucial port city. The main attraction is St. James Cathedral, which is what we had come to see.

Ante gave us the bare bones details, and you could feel his enthusiasm: “It is a masterpiece.”

I haven’t really written about the limestone of Croatia. By the end of the week, Rachel and I felt like minor experts in limestone, its qualities and properties, its uses, its look and feel, why it is good, why it is problematic as a building block… It was limestone-limestone-limestone all the way through Croatia. If you feel like asking “Is that limestone?” maybe stop, because 99 times out of 100 the answer will be “Yes.” Limestone has almost a soft crumbly look, and it doesn’t just reflect the light – it seems to absorb it into its pores, emitting a glow from within. There was no glow on this day in Šibenik, since the storm clouds were gathering.

St. James is one of the most important sites for Croatian Catholics. And small wonder. Ante was right. This limestone cathedral is a masterpiece. Unlike the other buildings we had seen, the limestone of St. James had no mortar in between the stones, no connective tissue. “The blocks are like Legos,” Ante said, “So you can take the whole thing apart and re-build it somewhere else if you want.” Extraordinary!

It wasn’t open so we couldn’t go inside. I love the thought that regular masses are still held in these historic buildings. That THIS is where you go to church on Sundays.

Ante had said to us, before he dropped us off, “Along the left side of the building are 72 human heads.”
“Wait, what?”
“Look for the human heads. Nobody knows who they are. But they think maybe they were the patrons who helped pay for the building. They think a couple of them are Popes.”

We were very intrigued. After wandering around in front of the building, we moved off to the left hand side, and immediately saw the line of human heads. You can actually see them in two of the photos of the Cathedral above. Once we got close to them, we realized how unique they all were. These are not idealized portraits. They are practically photographic in their specificity. They look like regular people, like this must have been what they actually looked like. If you ran into them today, you’d recognize them. Just amazing. Who are they?

If they were patrons and popes, that’s all very nice … but the EFFECT is somewhat grisly. It LOOKS like they were enemies of the church, decapitated heads on display as warnings to those who would follow in their footsteps.

The entire place is so rich with history, much of it unknown. The place exists. But it’s so old – 13th century, 14th century – that much of its history is lost to us. But look at it. What an amazing accomplishment of architecture. I feel fortunate we saw it on a grey day, the wind whipping our hair around, with a couple of other quiet people wandering around. Šibenik is a city but we didn’t see much of it. We hung out in that square, and then down on the marina, watching as these bruised clouds massed up above us, the clanking of the boats and buoys filling the air. The water was dark. The whole place was so beautiful I’d love to go back.

We drove back to Split through a rainstorm. I don’t think we went back the way we came. My memory is that we were driving through these back areas, with crumbling small villages, not much else going on, the trees bending all the way over in the wind, parts of the roads flooded. We pulled into a small restaurant perched on the side of the road – in the middle of what felt like nowhere – because it was time for lunch, and Ante wanted us to have lamb. He had the whole thing planned out. “We do fish one day, we do sausages another day, and now you have to have lamb.” We did not question him or resist. Who could resist Ante? He wanted us to get the full spectrum of Croatian cuisine. We were the only ones in the restaurant. The rain battered the windows. The meal was delicious.