First days of the trip

2017. június 28. 15:50 - ladatour

Watch out, here is the Lada-diary!

As we already mentioned in our previous post, the departure was kinda smooth, and our ”Zsiga 1200” sitting on its ass because of our staff, hit the road towards the wild Balkans. After half a year of preparation and hard work the LadaTour has officially started! Our first stop was Plitvice, where we arrived also quite smoothly. In fact two times! As we arrived to the previously choosen camping, we had to realize, that there was another 50 km between us and our actual destination, considering this all of us agreed to keep on going. Finally, we eneded up paying 40 euros for our accomodation, tho true that, that camping was chosen to be the best camping in the country.

The next day departure was less organized, however we had no plans to be fair, and it felt like we left the place a bit late. We got to the lakes of Plitvice at 11, where – given being true hooligans – we both sneaked in and bought the tickets. There was a 100m long boat trip, which looked the most useless, tho it turned out, that actually it was the most important one, thus in a quick period of 6 hours we had the pleasure to hike around almost the whole park – except the highest waterfalls. The landscape was beautiful, the water cooled us down, and also kinda held out the carrot with us, because it was forbidden to swim over there.

After the satisfying excursion, there was an other 50 km waiting for us – which turned out to be roughly 80 km due to a small mistake. If I wanted to put it nicely: ”the engine was mooing, like a cow”, whimpering at 50 km/h while clambering up to an ascent – even by the solid white line we were overtaken abashedly, because we were so much fighting, then Sziszi being obsessed by fear turned us back towards the previous village, tho as it turned out, in the next curve we could have seen the right signpost we needed. The mistakenly taken extra ride was not boring at all by the way, we encountered loads of surprised and staring people. On the boarder, we were greeted and applaused by a whole bus full of turists, and in the town of Ripač while waiting for the traffic light to turn green, someone shouted out ”Nais kar!”. Finally after sauntering for quite a while, we ended up at a small house next to a dirt road, where – in the twilight - we were lead only by hope and some lights coming out from the house, but here we got a very pleasant experience: for in total of 10 euros, we were let to stay in a local’s yard, to cook our dinner on the fire and we could have a very lovely chit-chat with both the locals and some of the tourists staying there as well.

During the night, netiher a stray dog, nor a bear attacked us – and apart from Tomi, everybody slept well. He decided to try out how it feels to spend the night in the car if it comes to that, however he suffered from the experience, even tho he was alone – it won’t be easy peasy if there will be 3 of us for sure. At the moment we are having our breakfats, doing the dishes, charging out batteries and slowly we are heading towards our next destination, as in the „Una National park” and some famous waterfalls. If we will be lucky, we can raft as well, tho this will turn out only from our next post.