Kimberly's recommendations for a Croatia trip

I got back from Croatia last week. My friend Emily and I went to Croatia because we were already planning to be in Italy and, in looking at maps to explore where we could go after that, Croatia was right there. (I did not know this; this souvenir pictured here from the Zagreb airport would suggest that others also do not know this.) And, upon seeing it on the map, I jumped on this opportunity literally because of some Instagram pictures another friend had posted from July. Turns out Croatia is ridiculously beautiful, with tons of small and medium-sized cities along the coast and some very cool geography inland as well.

So, all this to say, Croatia's a great place to go if you're looking to extend a trip from Italy or somewhere else nearby. Or just go to Croatia on its own; we filled 7 days there and definitely felt like we had plenty more to do. Here's the TLDR:

• A ferry from Venice to Croatia takes a little over 4 hours and is quite pleasant.
• Rent a car for getting between cities; there are buses, but there's so much exploring to be done in tiny towns that you'll appreciate the freedom. It'll be expensive if you can't drive stick (I can't and had to use Enterprise).
• Plitvice Lakes is a must-see. It's unreal. Go Google Image Search it.
• Coastal towns are great; you kind of can't go wrong. We spent time in Rovinj, Pula, Poreč, Zadar, Split, and Stari Grad (with overnight stays in Pula & Split). Dubrovnik is also oft-mentioned. See what works for your itinerary and especially your arrival/departure options; they're all great but I wouldn't call any in particular can't-miss.

Here's our full itinerary, which overall I'm quite pleased with, in case it inspires you. It optimizes for seeing a lot of places; it certainly does not optimize for a relaxing vacation where you get to know one place really well. That's not my speed (and/or that's what I'm doing in Izmir, anyway). Read on...

Day 1: evening ferry from Venice to Rovinj.
There seems to be at least one daily ferry from Venice to somewhere on the Istrian peninsula in Croatia (aka northwestern Croatia); the exact day of week and times depend where you're going and what season. You can also take a ferry from Ancona farther south in Italy, but I don't know anything about that. The Venice --> Rovinj* ferry was a little over four hours long. They do immigration before you get on the boat and from there it's smooth sailing (no sails are actually involved). They played a Mr. Bean DVD the whole time, which I thought was well thought out given the international audience (all announcements were made in Italian, Croatian, and English).

We were intending to go to Pula, actually, on recommendation from a friend, and we'd already booked a non-refundable hotel there before we found out the ferry to Pula didn't run that day. Oh no! But it turned out to be quite easy to get a 1h bus from Rovinj to Pula. Lesson 1 should be to book transportation before booking hotels; lesson 2 is that error recovery was pretty easy since Croatia really isn't that big.

Alternate option, it's only a 3-ish hour drive up over the Adriatic from Venice to Pula, but you have to go through Slovenia, and the one-way rental car fees with international drop-off seemed daunting. Ferry was straightforward, though not particularly cheap (80 euros each).

*Pronunciation note: the 'j' in Croatian is just a 'y' sound, and I've seen 'nj' listed as a single character that sounds like the Spanish ñ, so I heard this city called essentially "Roviñ" or perhaps just "Rovin" to my untrained ear.

Day 2: full day in Pula, including Sunset Dolphin Cruise

You can do Pula in a day. There are some cool ruins like the the Pula Arena, which looks pretty similar to the Colosseum in Rome except that it's still fully standing all the way around. You can walk up a big hill in the center of town to the castle/fortress for a nice view of the city (pictured left behind me!). Other than that, we mostly spent the day walking around the old city and eating pastries.

Then in the evening we went on a sunset cruise that all-but-promised dolphins (I mean, you can't promise dolphins in the wild). Walking along the water, there are 6 or 7 companies looking for tourists to take on a daytime or sunset tour around the national park that covers the nearby islands; I didn't get a sense of needing to book in advance--not sure you even could. We just walked up to people, asked their rates, found they were all the same, and picked the one that seemed friendliest. This might have been one of the best things we did, because oh my gosh, we saw so many dolphins. My pictures won't do it justice, but we started getting excited seeing them jump a hundred feet away, and then the cruise captain would head over in that direction and we'd see them jumping up-close. At one point they were right next to the boat and we could see them swimming underwater. I'm not much into Sea World and the animals in captivity, but this was a pretty great way to spend an evening.

When we got back, there was this Festival of Light (not that Festival of Lights) happening all over Pula. No promises you'd find anything similar when you go, but do search for festivals if you have some flexibility in your route/timing - we found a number going on like a Street Food festival called Tunalicious about an hour north.

Day 3: Drive from Pula to Plitvice Lakes (and tips for renting a car!)
Croatia is small. Pula to to Plitvice Lakes is about 3 hours, so we took a leisurely journey inland and stopped in a bunch of little places to explore. We arrived around 4pm which gave us some time before dinner to go walk around, too.

The one-way car rental was pretty straightforward. I ended up renting from Enterprise, which turned out to be a 40 minute walk from the city center (not an issue since I like walking; I also assume a taxi would have been easy). We rented in Pula and dropped the car off 2.5 days later in Split, but I'll get to that. The lesson here is that road trips through random countries are amazing. I was so, so excited about the freedom it gave us -- we got to stop in a random costal city for lunch; when we saw a sign on the side of the road for all these families selling cheese and honey, we could just stop; we could get tea in a random town of population 150. Just so easy. I've decided this is my new favorite thing (sorry public transit) and aspire to take more one-way road trips through random countries.

I'd never rented a car internationally before and I was nervous. Here are some things I learned:

• You will pay quite a bit more if you need to rent an automatic (which I had to due to my embarrassing ability gap). Make sure you're clear in your reservation; I got an unwelcome surprise in Italy because some aggregator site sent me to rent an "automatic" which turned out to be a manual. I would have known this if I'd read the details on the company's site, but as it was I had to pay 3x+ for an automatic ($190 total for 3 days rather than $55; Croatian rates were similar).
• I got an international license from AAA before I left. I'm not a member, but I walked into one of their SF offices and got one for $20 plus $20 for the photo they took. I'd recommend getting passport photos from somewhere cheap beforehand because yikes.
• It is not altogether clear if I need that international license. Neither rental car agency (Maggiore in Italy or Enterprise in Croatia) wanted to see it; they just wanted to see my US license. Based on some brief internet research, apparently I'd need it if I were pulled over, but otherwise no one cares?
• Gas station procedures are different so you'll probably have an awkward interaction with an attendant who doesn't speak English, but so long as you get the right type of fuel (gasoline/petrol vs diesel), it's fine.

Oh, and Enterprise gave us a Range Rover. I did not want a Range Rover. Apparently it's all they had. So I was "that American" with a car literally twice the size of many others on the road driving through some curvy back roads of Croatia.

Which brings us to...

Day 4: Plitvice Lakes
Ok. Pause. Go Google Image Search [plitvice lakes]. Those pictures are better than mine, anyway. But that is what it looks like! Bright blue-green water, endless waterfalls, paths a few inches above the water. I'd put it on a "places to see before you die" list. It's a national park in Croatia, and it's so beautifully designed and maintained with many, many miles of walking paths that blend in unobtrusively with the nature. (There are also trams and ferries but we did not take those because #fitbitsteps.)

It's a set of 12 lakes and we walked around 11 of them (the highest one is very large and would have added 3ish hours to our hike). At the lowest one, there's a giant waterfall, which is amazing from all angles. We spent most of the day in the park, and I was glad we'd gotten up early; even in the slight-off-season (end of Sept was much less busy than July, I'm told) the crowds in the afternoon on some of the main paths near the trams were pretty terrible, but we also walked along paths mid-day that were completely deserted and just as beautiful. So: go in the off-season, get up early, don't follow the tram/ferry route if you can help it.

We stayed in the small town (if I can call it that - it seems to be literally just B&Bs and a few houses) of Plitvice Selo, which I'd recommend because then you don't need to drive into the park. We walked for half an hour or so along a quaint little road to get into the park (and if you're not up for 30 minutes of walking, this trip is not for you anyway). I have no idea how one would drive to the park. There were a dozen cars parked near the entrance we went in, which was fascinating to me thinking about all the parking infrastructure in US National Parks, but I guess the equivalent here is tour bus infrastructure from the bigger cities? No idea. Just rent a car and stay at a B&B because it's cheap and easy and you get an extra morning + afternoon there depending on when you arrive.


Specifically, we stayed at a wonderful little inn called Pansion Breza for about $100/night and had excellent food. They gave us a very large plate of meats, cheese, and bread for breakfast, in addition to fruit and eggs, and just as we were thinking "wow, I wish we could just take this with us", the woman in charge came by with picnic bags and napkins for exactly that purpose. So in addition to having a wonderful place to stay, we were all set with food for the day of hiking as well. Plus they sold us tickets to the park, which I think was good since we did not see another place to buy them, but the signage is pretty clear you have to have them, though no one stopped us. So I'm still unclear on what the official process there is.

One word of warning about Pansion Breza: they unexpectedly insisted on cash as we were leaving. I have literally never heard of a $100/night hotel asking for cash on check-out (random hostel, sure). 2 nights plus 2x2 dinners plus 1x2 breakfasts plus tickets -- we owed €330 and somehow managed to scrounge it together, digging through pockets etc for change. So, that was unexpected, but fine if you prepare for it, I guess (nearest ATM would have been 45 mins round-trip).

Day 5: Morning in the park; journey to Split by way of Zadar
Instead of going to the ATM that morning, though, we got to explore a bit. I found my favorite place in the whole park, which may not have technically been in the park - off the "main" road (which is barely 2 cars wide) there was a little hiking path that took me to  behind the big waterfall. I maybe saw 5 other people in the hour I spent there--not counting looking downwards, where I saw many hundreds of people (pictured below) taking the standard path. This is the location, assuming Google Maps works like I think it should, and there's a map from our B&B to the spot on the right. Below is the view; you can see the tiny, tiny people walking on some paths in the bottom-right, which is where you end up if you follow the signs to the big waterfall (which is to the right of this photo).

After that, again with the road-tripping! Plitvice Selo to Zadar is a 3-hour drive, but add a little less than an hour and you can swing by the city of Zadar and other tiny coastal towns (we called this the "scenic route" and just stayed along the water when we could; it lived up to its name). Zadar is the home of the sea organ, which is weird and fun. If we'd stayed till the evening we also would have seen what Hitchcock purportedly called "the most beautiful sunset in the world" and the Monument to the Sun, a solar-powered dance floor that lights up at nighttime. But we didn't, because we wanted to get to Split by the time the rental car return closed so we didn't have to figure out parking. And that worked out fine.

Day 6: Split

Split is pretty far south in Croatia, though not as far as Dubrovnik, which we didn't get to and is apparently overrun by Game of Thrones enthusiasts. They're both in the region of Dalmatia, which makes for menu items that sound funny to my English-native ear, like "traditional dalmatian meat" and "dalmatian cheese". Sorry, Pongo and Perdita. The Old Town of Split is by the water and has a very dense sort-of-grid of narrow streets packed with restaurants and shops. It's pretty fun to get lost in. To the west (and pictured right) is a large park with beautiful views; that's worth spending a couple hours doing.

To the east (and pictured left) are beaches, which I walked along on the way back from my walk through the non-touristy parts of the city, which I based on taking the uphill option at every juncture. That got me to what was presumably the highest point in the city. I'm not sure if I'm technically allowed to call it "anticlimactic", but it was just kind-of shabby apartment buildings and parking lots at the top, same as halfway up, same as the whole city as far as I saw. But down at the coast the water was bright blue and the beaches were deserted (it was probably around 70°F outside? Not cold but not hot) and it was really, really nice to walk along.

Day 7: Day trip to Stari Grad on Hvar
There are many, many ferries out of Split to various islands and down the Croatian coast. We'd heard about the island of Hvar so I picked the most convenient ferry, not really paying attention to which port I was going into. Our tickets were for Stari Grad, one of two options on Hvar, the other being Hvar Town. The latter's reputation seems to be around tourism and nightlife, so I think we ended up in the right place for us, but I can't be sure.

Stari Grad was very tiny and quaint; it seemed to be full of hippies from Croatia and other parts of the world. We saw a natural smoothie shop, a place that made its own soaps and lotions, and the word "artisanal" was thrown around by more than a few food shops. It was just really quiet and nice and a good place to spend half a day. We also went to the old church, now a museum, and walked along the harbor. We spent most of the afternoon reading by the water.

Both evenings in Split were spent wandering the narrow streets. By that time we'd eaten nearly 2 weeks straight of rich restaurant food and we just ended up cooking at our apartment, so I don't have much to say about the Split cuisine.

We got up super early the next morning to go to the airport. Not a ton of flights out of Split; to get back to Izmir I had to do Split -> Zagreb -> Istanbul -> Izmir; Emily had to do Split -> Milan -> Dublin -> Chicago. So that's what I meant above with picking your itinerary based on arrival/departure options; I think we would have been equally happy in Rovinj as Pula, or Split as Dubrovnik, so we just followed the cheap flights and convenient ferries.

All the details may fade from my brain in the coming months as I go on more adventures, but if you are planning a trip to Croatia and have specific questions, I would be happy to help you plan! Bon voyage.