So as you can see, our New Years resolution of keeping better track on our Blog and making sure it is up to date was broken by Easter! Sorry! Over Easter we did a 10 day trip to the Western Balkans. We flew in to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, before heading straight to Croatia. We spent more time in Slovenia on the way back.
So, first off, Zagreb. We arrived on a beautiful Sunny afternoon that cast a warm glow over the beautiful Baroque buildings. It was lovely.
All round the city were super sized Easter Eggs that had been especially decorated and placed in anticipation of the coming Easter celebrations. Sadly we were only in Croatia's capital for one night before making our way down to Plitvice Lakes - one of the highlights of our trip. It was a bit of a close thing catching the bus but we made it. When we got there, we realised that a hire car is probably more practical for exploring this area (we had to walk about 6 km to get to our accommodation) but it was still a really enjoyable day. As we came right at the end of the low winter season, it was cheaper but with good reason - the upper lakes were still closed. We satisfied ourselves, however, with a lot of walking and exploring round the beautiful lower lakes and waterfalls. After one night at Guesthouse Frankjovic, the owner kindly checked the bus times for us and drove us back to the main entrance to the lakes to catch the bus on to Zadar, a lovely old Roman town on the Coast.
Zadar has a beautiful Old town and a lovely beachfront promenade - there is no sand here - only concrete pavilions and pebbles - but there were a lot of lovely open public spaces. The coolest by far was the "Sun Salutation" and the Sea Organ. The Sun Salutation is a circular installation of solar panels that collect sun light and then, at dusk, emits cool fluorescent colours when pressure is exerted. The energy also lights the whole promenade! The Sea Organ is a series of hole drilled in to the steps down to the sea so when the waves crash against it, different notes are "played" - quite cool. We were staying in a wee self catering apartment outside of Zadar but the transport was really good so it was no problem to come in to town each day. After 2.5 days, we caught the bus over to the Island of Pag, made famous by its cheese and its lace! The main township is small and only took us a couple of hours to look around but we had a couple of nice conversations with the locals before chilling out by the harbour. We then rode on to Novalja township where we spent the night before taking the ferry back to Rijeka in the North West and a train on to Ljubljana, back in Slovenia.
