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This isn’t a travel blog, despite how many times I’ve up and moved, just because very little of what I do feels like traveling. Or maybe it’s the usual ratio; at any rate, a lot of the places I have been are neither more nor less than places I have lived. There are a lot of things I’ve failed to do in Tromsø because I’ve figured I had all the time in the world. Most of them I have a vague notion of doing when I get back. Some of them I probably will do; some of them I’ve probably missed. I’ve still lived in Tromsø.

But now I am traveling in a proper way, so let’s talk about that. My first stop was Zagreb, and my tour of Croatia was nothing short of whirlwind: I hit everything I could possibly hit, and the things I missed I only missed because I ran out of time. Not my settled life in Norway, this.

There is more to see in Croatia than I could see in the time allotted, which was just a handful of days; the guy at the car rental agency told me that you probably needed months. The guy at the car rental agency also told me he’d never been to Plitvice Lakes National Park, the first stop on my tour, only drove past it on the way to go fishing. Which I guess speaks to the habits of people settled in their places. He also told me that when people asked him how Plitvice was, he always told them it was nice anyway.

Well let me be the one to tell you: Plitvice is beautiful.

It is also crawling with tourists, but it is beautiful.
The eponymous lakes are terraced and connected by waterfalls, and the water is aquamarine and perfectly clear; you can see sunken trees, canoes, hoards of fish with orange fins. There are boardwalks around the lakes and waterfalls, and standing on them and looking into through the lush greenery at the fish swimming below it sometimes felt as if I were in an aquarium, not a real place, but one that had been fashioned for display.

To Plitvice’s credit, it’s real; it is also, in a way, fashioned for display. The boardwalks are treated as a sort of walking tour, and there are ferries across one of the larger, lower lakes connecting one piece of scenery to another. But there are gaps in the tour: hiking paths that branch away from the boardwalks and up into the hills around Plitvice, which are thick with beech forest.
When I was about sixteen I saw a documentary on PBS’s Nature program about this place, mostly about the forests, and that was what put in my mind that I ought to go. Old growth forest is significant anywhere, but in Europe it is about as unheard of as root beer is in Norway (no one knows what it is. I'm bitter.), and Plitvice’s beech forests are unique, and connected to the very geography that makes the lakes and waterfalls possible. That’s part of the ecology of the park, in a way: protecting these lakes, like gems, protects the rough in which they are set. The tourist destination is an umbrella for a whole range of natural assets.

That’s not what I meant to say, though. Mostly I meant to tell you what I already did: that this place is beautiful.