Key information,
Like destination and time,
But no more! No more!
We learned an interesting lesson today, one which I guess we've learned at several points along this trip, but which we hadn't taken the time to discuss together until now: too much information is bad. For instance, for the duration of our stay in Hrvatska, we have decided to purchase just one map which is a 1:500,000 scale. That's bigger than we generally like our maps to be, but we initially thought that we would just follow the 8 down the coast anyway. That turned out not to be the case after we spoke with Ivo; he recommended that we visit a couple of the parks further inland here, and we elected to take his advice for one. This park is situated in a river valley which is accessible only by climbing several hundred meters first. That's hard. We probably wouldn't have done that if we knew it was there, especially if we'd known that we had to cross a couple other river valleys along the way. But the park is beautiful, and we have no regrets for putting in the extra effort now.
But! We start at the beginning, as always: today we woke up at dawn in our sleeping bag, shivering a little bit because we couldn't set the tent here. At least it didn't rain, and with our clothes we were tolerably warm, although we woke up a few times to reposition ourselves for maximum heat exchange. In any case, the first thing that we saw as we awoke and packed our things (and ate our breakfasts) was a man herding his goats down from the mountain to the sea for a drink. It was really charming. We set off through town for coffee and dish-washing and all that nonsense, and we also stocked ourselves with food for the day; our plan to head into the mountains doesn't necessarily lend itself to easy food-finding, especially if the inland areas are as sparsely-populated as the coastal ones.
We reached the end of the bay, and looking back at the long stretches of island-facing coastline we had biked was magnificent. We took photos, of course. Then we cursed our lives as we turned away from the sea and realised that we were in for a lot of climbing today.
The first part of the climb wasn't so steep, but it was long and went directly into an enormous headwind that kept us busy with trying to balance and move forward at the same time. It's not so easy! But we finally made it around a bend to a little town called Obrovac, situated in a river valley. It was frustrating to climb back out, but the town was so cute that we didn't mind. We got some snack and more water and we were set to go.
From there, the climb got hard. Although it's October and chilly and windy, we had to remove our long underwear and long-sleeved shirts due to the immense power we were outputting from just going up. Up and up, up onto roads that we couldn't identify positively on our map but that we figured led the right way... we just wanted to make it to Krka, the park.
The mountain areas that we passed through were fantastic. Most of it was reminiscent of the Stony Field area in Diablo II (for those of you that know it), which is to say that the grass was a slightly grayish green colour and was punctuated regularly by lowish walls built of piled gray stones. Scrubby trees grew around, but again the wind around there had generally stunted everything. There were a few inhabited areas, and most of those had only one or two houses still containing people; the others had collapsed roofs and clearly hadn't been touched for some time. Ivo had told us that this area might be rife with land mines still, so we were careful to stick to the road, not even straying from it to pee.
Beyond that area, we emerged onto highlands covered in golden bushes. The leaves are beginning to change! To anyone who lives in an area where the leaves change: we are worried that we won't get to see the transition, since here it seems that leaves go from green to yellow to dead, and we would love to see photos of the rich reds and oranges if you could e-mail them to us (biketotheearth@gmail.com).
These highlands led slowly to a town perched at the edge of the Krka river park. Some young kids pointed us at the park nearby, and they were disappointed when we stopped at the supermarket to sicken ourselves with some midday beer and gingerbread cookies before heading on. It seemed that this town had access to just one road that went through, though, and that road led directly down into the valley to a monastery and immediately dead-ended. We decided that that was not a good strategy, so we followed a series of roads along the top of the valley, eventually coming down it to see a lake at the end of one branch of the Krka. Beautiful. Even better, though, was that beyond the valley that that lake was in lies a town called Skradin which is on the river itself. There is a large marina here, and they offer boat tours of the park. We arrived here around 17h, and the 20km or whatever to Šibenik seemed like a silly thing to bike, given that we have would then have to find a spot to camp there. This town has a beach which seems alright for camping, but we poked around a bit further and even found an unused forest area with soft ground and protection from the mountain wind. There are somewhat worn paths through it, so it's evident that it's not mined. Good news for our limbs. :)
Today is apparently a holiday in Hrvatska, or at least in this region, because all the grocery stores have handwritten signs in their windows saying that they are closed for some reason or another that we can't understand through the language barrier. We scrounged together a dinner of pasta with feta, corn, and lemon with a salad on the side, and we're happy. We also discovered that Ožujsko makes a wheat beer, and we tried Slivovica for the first time (officially). We actually discovered that it's the same stuff Nara gave us yesterday. :)
Now, to sleep! It will be peaceful here, away from the main road and things. Tomorrow, Šibenik and Split, and probably a shower!