For a very good reason, these lakes and waterfalls are on the World Heritage Register and I’ve put up on my facebook some photos that really don’t do the place justice.
Being the natural athlete that I am, I was keen to do the run on the boardwalks that take you around the lakes. But for the sake of Cro-man and his camera, I elected to walk.
What an adventure!
This is a hard slog at the best of times. In torrential rain, the effort required really steps up a gear (thank god I did my intense Everest Sherpa training before I left Perth). Do the European tourists dress for the occasion? Absolutely not – heaven forbid they are seen unfashionably dressed in a plastic cape. It is better for them to toss saturated fashionably cut and dyed hair than it is for them to cover this $500 investment in plastic, no matter that they were only going to be seen by a bunch of laminated, shivering camera carriers.
The mud of the Plitvice Lakes is unlike anything we have in Australia: not that it’s thick, but it is sticky. Once its splashed up your legs, the game is over. I had to soak in the bath for several hours before it had all thoroughly dislodged. Every hair follicle was plugged by this grey/browny gunk. I didn’t see Cro-man for 4 hours as his over-abundance of follicles meant he had to keep running clean water in the bath and re-soak (even then he was shedding dandruff-like dried mud for another 48 hours). For me there was the happy consequence that I ended up having a mud bath that cleansed and exfoliated my skin to a new baby glow.
Speaking of babies – they, and toddlers, get it easy by being in prams. Their hardy parents push them along the boardwalks the entire four hours around the top lakes. These are very uneven because they are made out of coppa’s logs (treated pine whatsits). So babies are toggled up and down to the point where the shit is shaken out of them. Mummies are stopping every few metres to change nappies. By the time they get back to the start, baby and pram are in a fog of stewing baby poo from all the stored nappies.
Mummy is cold, wet, smelly and covered in mud. Daddy wants to show her the “fantastic shots I got of the big waterfall and the little mossy log and the …..” Mummy will focus on getting her first gulp of wine before she begins to jackhammer the mud off the littles.
Then there are the tour groups – long lines of largely disinterested people who only get animated when they see a big waterfall. Then they pull out every form of camera ever invented over the last century and click frantically. The noise! Like crickets with emphysema.
The Japanese tourists pose so that the natural attraction is obliterated by their smiling faces. They make peace signs or fold their arms like ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ (oh for a bottle and a puff of smoke). The women wear vast sun visors and floral arm sun-protectors – their faces geisha-white with sunburn cream. By the end of their wet walking tour, the cream had washed down their clothes, gluing arms and legs to bodies so that they looked like little shuffling butterfly cocoons.
The Japanese man sinks at least a foot into the mud with the weight of his camera gear. These are magnificent hard plastic willies that swing about, pendulous and barely controlled. The number of people nearly knocked off pathways by these monsters is impossible for me to quantify.
But it wasn’t just the Japanese that made me giggle. I saw a 60+ man yesterday who was decked out in a safari suit, complete with hard plastic pith helmet (with painted on lines of sewing), desert boots and long alpine socks. Clearly a serious walker and nature-lover, he slip-slided his way around smoking an e-cigarette, before giving up with a blast of expletives and climbing onto the little ‘train’ to take him back to his tour hotel, where no doubt he over-indulged in the complementary Istrian cognac and talked about his adventures catching butterflies across the dangerous hedgerows of Cornwall.
This cognac is a feature of Istria. It was wonderful for dissolving the mud that had hardened into lava in our ears. It is also useful as a topical anaesthetic and could be used to knock some-one out in the event of an emergency appendectomy, lobotomy or other life-saving emergency. There were a number of folk at the Plitvice Lakes who were appropriated qualified for the latter.
Until next time…….
