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After some shocking weather in Slovenia and some wild camping in the Forest we stayed in a Hotel for our second night in Slovenia.. The first for our trip so far.. How nice was it to have a real bed to sleep in finally.. We didn’t realise at the time though that our wild camping experience the previous night was actually in a bear area. oops.. maybe wild camping is not such a great idea in the mountains around the Balkans… after all heather thought she heard noises in the night.. maybe it was some bear trying to sniff around the tent.. Maybe it was the central heating system that kept it away after all.. Who will ever know.. one thing we do know for sure is that we are not going to be wild camping so much any more until we know there are no more bears.. ohh.. maybe the odd koala then.. After we camped  near the  Plitvice Lakes National Park. From there we went to see the baracs caves and the lakes. On the way to the National Park we came across a town called Slunj where we got our first glimps of what we should expect in the national park.

One of the many waterfalls in this village

Just before the town in the middle of the forest we saw this beautiful little setting.

Oasis in the Forests of Croatia

It was good to have a day off and relax while the really bad weather passed. Unfortunately our plan to let the weather pass was not so  great.. looking at the weather forecast its going to be crap weather for 5-7 days.. depending on who you believe (the bbc or weather.com). The caves looked pretty cool but they have nothing on many of the caves I’ve seen in Australia (Jenolan for example). It was still a nice suprise and the tour guide was excellent. I would recommend anyone going to the lakes to make the small detour (10km) to see the caves.

One of the cambers in Baracs caves croatia

One of the stark differences between Croatia has been the number of buildings in a terrible state. Many of them pitted with bullet holes, shell’s or with little memorials of families that have died there during the conflict. It was very depressing seeing all these comunities of just ruined buildings all over the area. There are so many ruined buildings they probably out number inhabited buildings 5 to 1.

One of the many buildings showing the signs of war in Croatia

Its crazy but its a real reminder of how shit war must really be. Now we have seen the lakes and the caves we had planned to go down to the coast and travel for a while. With the shit weather we are going to head north instead to Hungary and then east to Romania missing the Dalmatian Coast. Maybe next time if there is one we will make it down there.. or if the weather improves in the next 30 minutes our route will be back on track…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under croatia, London to Sydney, motorcycle touring, Plitvice Lakes, Slovenia, Wild Camping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.