We have moved from the coast up into the mountains near Plitvice National Park. I told Ton I was feeling lazy so I allowed Greta to use toll roads for the trip. The toll roads in Croatia are very nice, but quite expensive. We liked the mannequin flaggers they use here in construction zones if you are wondering about the picture today. I knew the last 60km’s or so were going to be on single lane roads, what I didn’t know was that Greta was going to use a short cut that sent us on a one and a half lane mountain road for 40 km’s. So much for our easy drive.
This area was extensively fought over during the break up of Yugoslavia. The mountains where we are at were a mixture of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. Over simplifying things terribly, they all speak the same language (Serbo-Croat), but are of different religions. This region was very heavily contested between the three different groups, and unfortunately a fair amount of ethnic cleansing took place. As we were driving on our unexpected back mountain road we saw plenty of evidence of the fighting from the 90’s, including one house pockmarked with small arms, and another house that had its roof caved in by an artillery round, as well as well maintained graves of soldiers who died fighting in the area. Many of the houses were abandoned on this road as a result of the cleansing. Also, on this road we saw for the first time soldiers from the Croatian army driving vehicles. When we arrived at the campground I realized that our route today had taken us within a couple of miles of the Bosnian border.
We arrived at our campground around 1:30 and decided to take the rest of the day off. We did polish off a very nice bottle of Croatian wine.