Selcouth Chronicles Week 14
Hello family and friends! Welcome to week 14 of the Selcouth Chronicles.
Week 14: April 7 - April 13
April 7 🛫 Istanbul -> 🛬 Zagreb
April 8 🚗 Zagreb -> Rastoke -> Plitvice Lakes
April 10 🚗Plitvice Lakes -> Zadar -> Split
CROATIA
Highlights: returning to clean drinking water, old town Zagreb, Museum of Broken Relationships, riding the shortest funicular in Europe, Plitvice Lakes National Park (and our Airbnb there), Zadar’s sea organ, staying within Diocletian’s Palace, walking the streets of Split, Split Ethnographic Museum, Museum of Illusions, old town of Trogir, Croatian gelato and chimney cones
Abby:
This week, we said farewell to Istanbul and a big hello to Zagreb, Croatia! Luckily, the plane ride was not very long since Istanbul and Croatia aren’t that far apart. (It was only about 2-3 hours.) Still, by the time we got our rental car and to our Airbnb, we were exhausted. We’d spent a good chunk of our day in either cars, airports, or planes, so we were definitely ready to get a good snooze. Our host had other ideas, but that really wasn’t a bad thing! She gave Mom & Dad a zillion helpful tips before she left. She recommended a place to have breakfast, a town to stop at on the drive to Plitvice National Parks, and much more. When she was out of the house, Mom remarked that she might’ve been the most helpful person she’d ever met! 😆 We got a good sleep that night, ready for our four hour drive to our 2 night stay at the beautiful Plitvice Lakes of Croatia.
We woke up early-ish and walked around town a bit. We had a nice breakfast at the cafe that our Airbnb host suggested, Broom44. Next we took a ride on Europe’s smallest funicular up the hill to the old town of Zagreb, then Dad had to go back to our Airbnb to work. 🙁 So it was just me, Mom, and James for a while. First, we went to the Museum of Broken Relationships, which is a museum where people send in stories of their “broken” relationships with partners or family, along with items that go with the story. Some of it was very. . . er. . . odd, as you’d probably guess, but lots of it was funny or heartfelt. After the museum, we wandered around more looking at the sites and shops.
We got home, packed our stuff into our rental car, said goodbye to our host, and stuffed ourselves into the car. The drive was very beautiful because it wasn’t going into another city, it was going to a National Park. It was mostly the countryside of Croatia, with lots of farms, but also many cliffs and tree-filled hills. Along the way, we stopped at Rastoke, which is a little town near Plitvice where the water from the lakes flows through. It was a very small town built around mini waterfalls. It was like a little version of the National Park! Afterwards, we got to our Airbnb, which was just a walk down the road from the entrance of the park. We were greeted by a playful, old-looking black dog named Arrow, who was closely followed by the host. We set our bags down and got settled in before coming back outside again. Arrow was waiting for us with a ball in his mouth, so while James & I played with him, Mom & Dad had a chat with our Airbnb host, Silvana. We had a good time playing with Arrow, running around the huge, tree-spotted lush green yard. There was also a pen full of chickens right next to the yard, and a tiny barn that the neighboring (adorable) sheep were housed in in the evenings. Silvana told us that a mama sheep had had two lambs but abandoned one, so they had to bottle feed it. She offered to let James and me help feed the lamb, and of course we said yes. A few minutes later, an adorable black little lamb came trotting from the mini barn. He baahed at us a lot until we shoved the little bottle of milk into his pleading mouth. The whole time, Arrow was jumping on everybody to try to get attention! After a long day, we were ready to have dinner. Silvana was suggesting some places to go out to eat when she told us that she had some beef stew left from when she made it for friends and if we wanted some we could have that. That obviously sounded very good to us and we ended up with a big tupperware of beef stew. Oh, and did I mention the HUGE PLATE OF FRESH EGGS FROM THE CHICKEN COOP that she just GAVE Mom for breakfast?? 😶 Stuffed, we made our way to bed so we would not get cramps when we walked around the parks on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, we woke up ready for a beautiful day at Plitvice National Park. It sort of gave me Milford Sound (see Selcouth Chronicles Week 5) vibes, with all the mist and big waterfall noises, but it was also very different. It had lots of beautiful lakes pooling at the bottom of the waterfalls, hence the name. Also there were a lot of clumps of super mini waterfalls in one ledge, and many lovely forests. We had such a wonderful time in the National Park. It was gorgeous, and I think it definitely shows the true beauty of Croatia. It’s really nice to be out in crisp nature after being in cities so much lately. We got back to the Airbnb very tired after a long day of uphill-downhill trekking. Except me. I had enough energy to play with Arrow for a little bit until dinnertime. 🥰
On Wednesday, we had to say a very sad goodbye to the lakes. James & I played with Arrow one last time while Mom & Dad talked to Silvana. I was so sad to leave Arrow and the lakes and everything that I cried in the car when we left. 😭 We drove 2 ½ hours for our stop, Zadar. There we took in the fresh breeze off the ocean and got some gelato, of course. We also went to the Sea Organ. This musical instrument looks like stairs going into the sea, but it isn’t. Sure, you walk and sit on it like a regular set of stairs, but these stairs have specially made holes in them so that when a wave comes, it makes a deep humming noise. This way there is music always playing in this city! (I can see it getting annoying if you lived there though.) We got back in the car and drove 1 ½ hours to Split, where we had a relaxing dinner. Since it was so late, I was the only one who went into the hot tub at our Airbnb. It wasn’t as fun as if everyone had come with me, but it was still relaxing. We all went to bed, exhausted from a long day of driving.
Thursday was a slow day. We ate a lot, including sausage sandwiches and chimney cones, which are freshly baked dough wrapped in a cone shape and stuffed with ice cream. It was so good!♥️ We strolled around town, too, just looking into shops and stretching our legs. Oh, a funny thing happened: we were waiting for Dad to finish a call so that we could go eat dinner at a restaurant, and a little band sat down and looked like they were about to play. We waited for a while and then they got up and packed their stuff away! Then, just as we were about to get up to leave, they came back up and started to play! Oh, what horrible timing. 🫣
We had a museum day on Friday. The first one was the Split Ethnographic Museum, which showed things like the clothing of the Croatian people from different regions over the years.. We wandered around this museum for a while, admiring the beautiful embroidery on the womens’ dresses or dramatic spikey balls and guns adorning the mens’ attire. After some history, we decided to have some fun at the Museum of Illusion, an interactive museum that, well, focuses on the subject of illusions. There were lots of mind-bending pictures and rooms that we explored. There was one exhibit that was just a door with a bridge to the other side suspended in a tunnel that’s supposed to look like space. When you walk across the bridge, the space “walls” spin really quickly, and even though the bridge isn’t moving, it is SO hard to walk across! We had lots of fun walking around there, and afterwards decided to refresh ourselves with some gelato, which was very delicious. We went back to the house to relax, and James had a video chat with a good friend from school. We had dinner at a delicious restaurant and we all chilled in the hot tub until it was time for bed.
We did a tour of Split and Trogir (a UNESCO World Heritage town neighboring Split) on Saturday. It was nice to learn about some of the things we’d been walking by every day, and to learn more about the things we already knew. We had a big group through the tour in Split, but Trogir was an add-on, so we only had one other person with us for that part. Trogir was very beautiful. We got some really good gelato there, and in our free time on the tour we sat by the shore. It was very green and peaceful. I think it would’ve been fun to stay in Trogir! After our tour, we got to the house, relaxed for a while, and then ate dinner. Afterwards, Mom and Dad went in the hot tub while James and I worked on this newsletter. It was a full week, and we are excited to be moving on to Dubrovnik and then Athens next week!
Caitlin:
Living in the US comes with a lot of advantages. Some of them are lifestyle choices that make us comfortable (I’m looking at you, detached house and full size washer and dryer!) and some of them are more fundamental privileges that feel so basic we don’t even think about them at home. One of those things is access to clean water. In California, we probably think about water more than other parts of our country; however, despite living in a perpetual state of drought, our family has always had access to as much water as we desire for personal use. We try hard to cut our water use with water-wise outdoor spaces and thoughtful use of drinking, cooking, and bathing water, but our basic needs are always met. Everything we need is one filtered faucet away.
That changed when we arrived in Cambodia, and continued through Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Istanbul. Until we arrived in Croatia this week, water has had to be a much higher priority in our daily planning. We had to think carefully about everything that we put in our mouths, and we made sure that we were well-stocked for our daily water needs. We needed water for drinking, of course (and in steamy SE Asia we needed lots more than usual), plus extra water for hygiene. We brushed our teeth and rinsed our mouths with bottled water, and things like retainers needed to be washed from bottles as well. We only ate fruit that could be peeled - think bananas, not grapes! No fresh veggies either, only things that had been cooked. A surprisingly frequent subject was whether it was okay to consume drinks that had been served with ice, and the answers varied depending on both the region where we were traveling and the restaurant where we were eating.
Some of this, of course, can be chalked up to being a tourist. If we lived in these areas our microbiomes would eventually adapt to local bacteria well enough that washed fruit, for example, would be fine to eat. But drinking water is a different story, when even locals defaulted to bottled water. Having to constantly plan for water needs makes life a little less comfortable. It means going out to buy large bottles and jugs of water, and figuring out how to transport them with us so that water was available when we needed it. Carrying the weight of extra water with you is not fun, but it’s a necessary burden. It means thinking carefully through your days to determine how much (or little) access you have to extra water if needed. If the kids finish their water early, will we be able to buy more or should we bring a backpack to carry extra bottles? I also felt acutely aware of our increased waste. Most of the places we visited didn’t have infrastructure for recycling, and we were constantly buying and throwing away plastic bottles.
Still, our trip is highly curated to ensure that we’re always staying in places that are safe and are easily accessible for travel. We’ve had to think more about our water consumption and change our eating and drinking habits, but at the end of the day water was always available to us, even if it wasn’t always as convenient as it is at home. One of the first things our Airbnb host told us when we arrived in Zagreb was, “You can drink the water here! It’s very clean.” Being back in places where we can easily use whatever we need straight from the tap is such a nice change of pace. It’s one thing to know intellectually that something is a privilege; it’s altogether different to feel it. We won’t be taking our clean water for granted again!
James:
Plitvice Lakes is a wonderful place that rivals even New Zealand’s scenery in beauty. It’s chock-full of roaring waterfalls that dramatically alter the soundscape and the surrounding tufa-limestone cliffs that seem to touch the sky, showing just how wonderful untouched nature can be. In fact, it made such an impression that it was made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979. Walking through the Lakes was fun for me mainly because of visibility. The water was so clear that I could look straight into it and see almost all the way to the bottom, and since there were practically no railings, nothing impaired my vision. I found an entire dead tree once, but what was mostly down there was sediment, rocks and sticks, with the very rare fish.
The lakes were awesome to look at, but what really caught my eye was the waterfalls. They would be strung together in wondrous harmony, all working to get the endless tons of water where it needed to go. Sometimes the walkways would go right over them, and if I looked between the slats in the wood I could see the white, foaming water just inches below my feet. My personal favorite was one I dubbed the Rollercoaster Waterfall, which seemed to zoom in every possible direction before shooting over a small lip of rock into the aqua lake below. If I stood at just the right angle, I could see the boiling cloud of white where the waterfall connected with the lake and went under. It’s a phenomenal example of opposites meeting - a tranquil lake and a raging waterfall. I could stare at it for hours.
As we progressed along the path, the waterfalls eventually became less and less frequent until we were walking through forest, with the glassy lake to our left and the soothing noise of gently running water in our ears. It’s incredibly relaxing and even made me a little sleepy😴. The other tourists also seemed to thin out around us until my family and I got to just have some wonderful alone time. I’ll remember that forever. The trees created just the right amount of shade so that we were warm but never hot, and it was so perfect it was like somebody had created them solely for just-right shade. The coolness factor proved to be very helpful when we started to hike up the limestone cliff. When we reached the top, there was a nice rest stop where we could have a snack before continuing on.
Going down was nice for two reasons:
1) Heading downhill was easier on our tired legs, and
2) We got to see everything we had just walked past in the first half from on high.
The waterfalls looked so small from up there! It was much faster getting back to the start, since there was a very helpful bus that took us most of the way there. When we got back to the beginning, I was happy and tired, and I knew that I would miss this park and all it had to offer.
Sean:
This week we enter the “European vacation” portion of our trip. Croatia already has rocketed up the list of our favorite places, thanks to the beautiful scenery, delicious food, and the incredibly kind people. The majority of the week has been spent in the coastal town of Split.
Split has been inhabited since at least the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, but began to build its historical significance thanks to the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian chose to build his retirement palace in Split, and that area is the majority of the Old Town that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. As was normal custom in those times, the palace had four walls, with a gate at each side, and two main roads that connected in the middle. Today, much of the Roman architecture is gone, replaced by a mishmash of houses that were built to accommodate the citizens of the city, but most of the walls and some of Diocletian’s mausoleum remain. There’s a satisfying irony to the fact that the mausoleum of one of history’s great persecutors of Christians is now the oldest building in the world that’s actively used as a church. Next to the church is a sphinx that is even older. The story behind this was that Diocletian was really interested in Egyptian culture, and so had various Egyptian artifacts and even structures brought from Egypt to Split to be used for his palace. The largest intact structure from the palace was the cellar, which runs from the east to the west wall. Oddly, as people tore down the palace to build their homes, they drilled holes in the ground to be used for toilets, which turned the cellars into a gigantic septic tank. This actually helped preserve the structure as the feces petrified and reinforced the walls, as otherwise the cellar most likely would have collapsed at some point.
Much of this history was learned during our walking tour of Split and Trogir (a town just north on the coast) on Saturday, but also observed as we strolled along the erratic paths that worm through the old town. After the Roman rule ended, and it transitioned to Venetian rule, the city expanded west and that is called the medieval section of the town. In one square, it’s possible to see different buildings with architectural stylings from three different centuries. Since it’s now a UNESCO site, there can be no changes, only restorations to the buildings. This leads to very interesting shops and restaurants that have to find ways to cram into whatever space they can.
The major allure of this place is the water, where it’s easy to suddenly go from walking down a narrow alley to strolling along the promenade with the sun glimmering off the Adriatic sea. With the numerous islands off the coast, it’s easy to see why this was such a sought after area, and why today it’s a major tourist attraction. Our family has found our time in Split, and Croatia in general, incredibly refreshing. Between the beautiful sites and amazing history all around you, it’s truly a gem.
See you next week!
Sean, Caitlin, James, and Abby
Catching up? Read week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, or 13.