On our way north it really felt like we left the Balkan peninsula. We drove along the coastline and its just like I said before completely different from how it look inland. The road is perfect, if you had a MC, it goes along the coast with a beautiful scenery, a bit winding and up and down over the hills. Not the same feeling with a car, especially not our car but it works fine and if you think of how many miles we been driving the car is really awesome, even if not has started to squeak every time we turn right. I really recommend the road from Split to Rijeka along the coast if you have plenty of time, I think our average speed was around 50km/h and one bike after another passed but who cares when you have the Adriatic sea to the left and high mountains to the right.
Our only goal for the day was to visit the national park Paklenica in a last attempt to see some wild animals. However its normally a good idea to do some research before except looking at the map and say, there is an nationalpark, lets go there and see some animals, we failed! Instead of founding animals we found Croatia and one of europes biggest climbing spots, in other words not a single bird, goat or any other animal but a mountain filled with people trying to climb it in all sorts of way. We may have seen a dolphin in the sea but more likely it was just an ordinary buoy. Even if the park wasn’t really what we looked for we took a small walk and I understand why people go here. While walking a small creek uphill you had plenty of different routes to take if you wanted to climb, from easy to diamond and it looked really neat!
We drove on an once the sun were about to set we decided to stop for the night. My idea that Croatia could be any western country were for sure found a big concrete building to hotel that couldn’t be more “eastern Europe”. This is true Tito spirit and I guess this is the exception that prove the rule, even here in Croatia we can find traces from the old Yugoslavian era. Its not really cheap either but compared to that newly built 5-star hotel next door, this one is cheaper!
