Adventure holiday in Croatia

16.04.06 - The latest article in the travel supplement of Saturday's The Guardian, titled "Croat of many colours" is about the adventure holiday around Plitvice Lakes. Subtitled " Who needs the beach when you can have this unspoilt adventure playground of lagoons and waterfalls to yourself?" , the article covers a week long light adventure holiday organised by Hidden Croatia, the first UK tour operator to run adventure holidays in this part of Croatia . Here is an extract from the article:

Croatia has probably the bluest sea in Europe, so you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the last-minute holiday I'd booked myself on to wouldn't take me anywhere near the country's sparkling cobalt coast. I needn't have worried. The colour of the waterfalls, lakes and rivers at the heart of Croatia are even more mesmerising than its coast.

In the Plitvice Lakes national park, between Zagreb and the Adriatic, the water is every shade of blue and green imaginable, from crystal-clear azure and emerald to opaque jade, changing hue depending upon the minerals and organisms in the water and the angle of the sunlight. In places, the colour of the water was so vivid it looked as if vats of turquoise dye had been thrown into the river upstream.

This area of stunning natural beauty, declared a Unesco world heritage site in 1979, was the base for my "light adventure" holiday - a mixture of kayaking, mountain biking, walking and white-water rafting - with UK operator Hidden Croatia.

The highlight of the national park is an 8km string of 16 lakes, falling one to the next via a series of waterfalls and cascades and turning a different shade of bluey-green at each stage, a unique landscape formed by calcium-rich material being picked up by the river and deposited downstream. Bears, wolves, wild boar and deer roam the surrounding forest ......to read the rest of the article visit this link . ...