Plitvice Lakes National Park is an absolute stunner, and a UNESCO world heritage site since 1979. Up in the mountains somewhere, 16 lakes are separated into an upper and lower cluster formed by runoff from the mountains, descending from an altitude of 636m to 503m over a distance of about 8kms. The lakes collectively cover an area of about two square kilometers, with the water exiting from the lowest lake to form a river.

The park was one of Yugoslavia's most popular tourist attractions until the wars of the early 90s that I mentioned earlier. In March 1991 it became the scene of the Plitvice Lakes incident - the first armed confrontation of the Croatian War of Independence that resulted in fatalities. It was retaken by the Croatian Army in August 1995 during Operation Storm, which ended the Croatian war. Although the park itself has been cleared of land mines, the surrounding Plitvice municipality outside the park boundary still has some problems with mine contamination to this day.

Several walking tracks run throughout the park and around the lakes which are renowned for their distinctive colours, ranging from azure to green, grey or blue. The colours change constantly depending on the quantity of minerals or organisms in the water and the angle of sunlight. Beautiful!

Aside from the lakes, there are heaps of these little streams of running water and waterfalls. Not quite deep enough to whip out the inflatable tube and go for a ride, but bloody nice!

There are many other larger waterfalls too of course, with the one on the left (known simply as Big Waterfall) being the biggest in Croatia at 78m in height. There wasn't a lot of water pissing down it on this day but heavy rains and melting snow in spring make it quite a spectacular sight apparently. You could take your inflatable tube down this one ;)

Despite all the beauty it does have one major drawback - tourists! We seemed to come on a day where half of America was here also.

"Hey man that's a great accent you got there! Where are y'll from?"
"New Zealand."
"Noo Zeeland? That's part of Australia, right?"
"Umm yeah, yes it is; just like America is part of Canada."