We started off our Croatia adventure with 2 days in Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik has gained a lot of popularity in recent years with tourists due to it being a primary filming location for Game of Thrones. If you’ve seen the show, the Old Town area was where they filmed the scenes for Kings Landing. We spent our first day there checking this out for ourselves. The entire Old Town area is surrounded by the old city walls, which you can walk around for amazing views of the town down below. From there, we spent the rest of the day walking around the Old City area and checking out other various museums and interesting old buildings. Our friend Shaina, who also attended Tulane with us also joined up with us at this point. Green wave rolling deep on this Eurotrip!
The other call out I need to make about Croatia relates to the food, which was mostly made up of incredible seafood. Our first meal there, I got one of the largest bowls of shellfish I’ve ever had, complete with mussels, long neck clams, and Noah’s Arks (which are basically these dinosaur clams that taste like a really meaty muscle, we had to get a lesson and a special tool from the waiter in order to open them up). Seafood was pretty much all I ate during our 9 days there, mainly shellfish, octopus, and squid. It was some of the best food I’ve had on the trip this far.
After Dubrovnik, we took a ferry to Hvar for a couple days. Hvar is an island off the coast of Croatia and is more of a beach town than Dubrovnik was. When I say beach, I want to clarify that most of Croatia is rock beaches, which allows for the gorgeous blue water you can see in the photographs below, however it is also more painful to walk on. In hindsight, I probably should have listened to the guides online that suggested buying a cheap pair of water shoes for Croatia. However, in keeping with my focus to not add additional things to my backpack, I decided it was unnecessary. Then my first time in the water in Hvar, karma caught up with me and I stepped on a sea urchin, which embedded several spines in my foot. Whoops 😂. Our first concern was whether sea urchins are poisonous, which the internet seemed to have mixed feelings on, however we confirmed with the woman at the concession stand that they were not. Additionally, she gave me some hot water to soak my foot in as well as a safety pin to serve as a surgical device in order to remove the spine. I got about half of them out and then decided I was doing more harm than good to my foot at that point and left the remaining ones in there to work their way out on their own. They didn’t really hurt unless I stepped on that foot in a very specific way. This also provided me with a souvenir from Croatia that I didn’t have to carry for the next several months in my backpack lol.
The following day we went on a daylong boat trip to check out some cool caves and beaches in the area. The main attraction was the blue cave, which has a massive underground opening that allows sunlight into the water and illuminates the water within the cave as bright blue, contrasting sharply with the pitch black cave. We also hung out at some nice beaches and met some cool people on our boat who were travelling from various countries in Europe.
After Hvar, we caught another ferry to Split. Split is another Croatian tourist hotspot, known for both it’s beaches as well as the historical Roman-era square located in the heart of the Old Town. While there, we spent some time touring the old palace and cathedral and also spent a couple days chilling on the beach, which was actually a sand beach. We also had some great meals and some fun nights in Split, including a sunset cruise with an open bar and live band one night, that we may have turned into our own personal karaoke party 😂.
After Split we rented a car in order to head inland to Plitvice Lakes, which are a network of sixteen lakes that sit at different heights and overflow into one another, resulting in hundreds of waterfalls you can see as you hike through the park. A significant portion of the trails are also built on wooden boardwalks over the lakes that allow for incredible views. This was probably the best hike I’ve ever been on in my life. Around every turn was more gorgeous scenary and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many waterfalls in my life. The plan was to do a 9 mile hike around most of the complex. However we misread (more like just didn’t read) the instructions and failed to get on a boat that would have significantly cut down on our hiking distance. This resulted in us doing about a 14 mile hike and basically hiking out of the park in the dark. Pretty sure we were the last ones out of there that day. Even the parking lot was closed when we got back, thankfully we were somehow able to get the car out and didn’t have to leave it overnight.
Next we moved on to our final stop in Croatia, Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Zagreb was a little anti-climactic after all the amazing places we had seen in the country. Mainly because almost every major attraction in the city was closed for renovation. Also it is a landlocked city, so no more beaches or swimming. It was still cool to walk around the city and see some of the famous buildings from the outside however, and we also still got some great seafood meals.
