Enchanted Waters: Plitvice National Park, Croatia

            Swimming has provided most of my most memorable water experiences, so I was dismayed to discover that swimming in the dozens of lakes in Plitvice National Park in Croatia was forbidden. Nonetheless, Plitvice, where Mike and I spent a couple of days last summer before our hike in the Dolomites, ranks high on my list of emchanted water experiences.

            Plitvice National Park is a landscape dominated by water. On the trail around the upper lakes, we walked on wooden walkways over water gushing more like waterfalls than like rivers and streams.

Farther up the trail we walked past thundering waterfalls that pounded the ears with unceasing percussion. At their feet water pooled in great large lakes, unbelievably serene. 

Water fell everywhere: from high cliffs a dozen at a time, out of densely vegetated hillsides, in huge gushes, in long streams, in joyously leaping bridal-veil falls, or in small cascades or in trickles and streams. For miles the gurgle, whisper, and chuckle of falling water dominated the sound of the landscape, while the color of still water – from dark turquoise to a darker green –  made me ache to swim. Between the lakes stretched little natural dams covered with bushes and riparian vegetation.

So much water!  – falling from one lake into another, falling from cliffs on all sides, falling down and down and down as we walked up and up and up to the top lake, and still I couldn't figure out where it all came from.

            The next day Mike and I took the trail around the lower lakes, up to the Big Waterfall, and back around the other side of the lakes. If I had thought the late afternoon walk around the upper lakes was through an enchanted landscape, this walk was even more so. These lakes were turquoise – deep turquoise – and spilled through vegetation and over tufa dams in hundreds of places, at all angles. 

The more I looked, the less I could comprehend it – the gorgeous color, the omnipresent water, seeping through and falling everywhere, the stairstep lakes, the tufa-built dams that were constantly building up and retreating down, changing the size and shape of the lakes decade after decade, century after century.

            At one point on the walk loomed a big sinkhole

with steps going deep into the earth, circling down and down through white and black rock. It was a vertical cave, suddenly ending not in the bowels of the earth but in daylight, at a waterfall on the path across the trail that we would take on the return. And then we made the return journey back through the sinkhole, round and round up the steps, leaving behind the sun and the blue and dashing water, up through hard rock and earth and black and white, through the hole in the earth back to the path in the woods we had left half an hour earlier to fall down the rabbit hole.

            At the culmination of the trail around the lower lakes was the Big Waterfall, which dwarfed all the others. 

It was unbelievably high – higher than Multnomah Falls with the volume of Niagara (or so it seemed). Its water fell not in one voluminous gush but in dozens of separate streams. And then where did all that water go? There should have been a big pool, but there was only a small one. The water seemingly ran under bushes everywhere to fall here and there in more gushing hidden falls and make its way downhill, from waterfall to lake to waterfall to lake: an expense of energy, a long rest, another expense of energy, another long rest, again and again.

             Plitvice is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I left dazed by what I had seen and experienced. Of course, it would have been even more thrilling to swim in any one of those beautiful lakes, but by the time I left, I understood why swimming is forbidden. Not only would it upset the balance between splashing water, calcium carbonate, and mosses and other vegetation that creates the tufa that builds up in dams, but also having people splashing and shouting in the water, children squealing, colorful plastic float devices dotting the water would be an outrage. It would ruin the experience, erase the contrast between gushing waterfalls and serene lakes, rob the landscape of its enchantment. Besides, just to be there, walking on the boardwalks beside and over the lakes, was to be immersed in a magical water experience equal to any swim I've ever had.