Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia

Three countries in six hours - not bad going.  The strange thing about the trip was that we'd said to ourselves that we didn't expect there to be much difference between north-eastern Italy, western Slovenia, and north-western Croatia.  But it was remarkable just how different they all are.  Italy was rusty brown hills topped with terracotta-roofed villas and castle.  Very Italian-looking actually. 

Slovenia was white domed rocky hills with plains covered with light scrub and sparsely populated with tiny towns.  North-western Croatia was extremely hilly, bordering on mountainous, covered with Alpine trees and even more sparsely populated by tiny villages.

The area that we are in is called Plitvicka and this area was at the center of the conflict several years ago.  We'd heard that there were some remnants of the war, but didn't really expect to see anything.  So we were surprised to see many of the villages close to Plitvicka showing very real signs of fierce fighting.

Many destroyed houses, some razed,  some with caved in roofs in every village.  Many of the houses had dozens of bullet-holes in them.  We drove past an old church that must have been the center of some close combat as it was peppered with bullet holes.  It was very interesting to see, but extremely disturbing at the same time, to see the bullet holes riddled around windows and doors.  Makes you wonder who won these fire fights, and, in these now sleepy villages, how war could have ever broken out in the first place.

Every village showed signs of war.  This was one destroyed house close to the National Park.  The villagers in these places are clearly poor.  Very few cars and very little going on.  Was it really necessary for the various armies involved to smash these places to bits?  More evidence that war is utterly pointless.  This war was many years ago but the scars are still very evident.

Another bullet-hole-ridden house.  At least this one was being repaired.  But there are many many more that i suspect won't be set in order for many years to come.

It's also interesting, now that we're in "Eastern" Europe, how much cheaper things are.  An hour's motorway driving in France is about E20.  In Italy it goes down to E15, and here in Croatia only E5.  We were charged E0.70 at one toll, and the man behind the counter, seeing the GB plated car, gave us English money in change for the 1 Euro we gave him.  This was a nice gesture, except he only gave us 10 pence, which is equivalent to only 13 Euro cents, not 30 cents.  Whether he was genuinely ripping us off, or trying to be helpful, i don't know, but we only figured this out once we were out the other side of the toll. 

Regardless, it's still a lot cheaper here, we just paid E35 for a two-course meal at the hotel restaurant, that would easily have been E60 in France.

We've only seen the waterfalls  from the balcony of our room so far as we got here too late to explore the park, so tomorrow morning we'll be out to go and play with the Tv setting on Natalie's camera and try and get some good photos.  We might take the time to enjoy the scenery too.