The two most popular national parks in Croatia are Krka and Plitvice Lakes. While both of these are beautiful, Plitvice is difficult to get to, and therefore has fewer tourists (still a lot of tourists). This is how we backpacked to Plitvice.
Getting to the Park From Rijeka, we took a train to Vrhovine. This was a tiny farm village in rural Croatia, but Dragan’s Den hostel caters to backpackers hoping to see the national park.
For a reasonable price, the hostel offers a shuttle to and from the park every day. As a team of three girls, we reserved a one way shuttle seat to the park, and planned to find a bus somewhere (we literally did not know where) once we arrived in the park.
We brought our large backpacks to the park, and a ranger gave us a key to store the bags for free in a (semi-secure) shed for the day.
Immediately upon arrival, we went to buy bus tickets. You must buy them right away because they do sell out - you’re not the only person flying by the seat of their pants for this backpacking trip. In fact, almost every traveler I met had a relatively fluid plan. We purchased 4:30pm tickets to Split, which is the earliest you would want to leave the park. It’s a big park. What to Expect Plitvice Lakes National Park is a series of 16 terraced lakes connected by waterfalls.
For most of the park you walk on trails and bridges around and over the lake, but there are also a couple of boats that ferry you across the larger lakes. The ferries are included in the entrance ticket.
What Route to Take The park is split into two parts: the upper lakes and the lower lakes. The lower lakes are the more popular, but all are beautiful and different. Many tour groups that arrive only have time for one part, so they all herd in an impossibly long line to see only the lower lakes before leaving.
I recommend making sure you have enough time to do both - probably 8 hours if you walk quickly and stop for pictures.
Get to the park as early as possible, and start with the upper lakes. There are virtually no tourists, and the views are incredible. Including a stop for lunch, the upper lakes took us 3-4 hours. Then we took a ferry to the lower lakes. We were running out of time, but it was completely worth it to see the lower lakes as well. The lines had died down because tourists had already finished this area, but it was still busy.
We did not wait in the insanely long line to see the “big waterfall,” but we had a good view of it when we climbed the mountain to hop on the shuttle to the bus station.
We missed the big waterfall and the two southernmost lakes because of a time crunch, but everything we saw was absolutely breathtaking. It is absolutely worth it to add Plitvice to any Croatian travel plans!
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