Plitviče National Park

I had to abandon my plans to ride the Vršič Pass in northern Slovenia due to an unscheduled apocalypse; head-height fork lightning, pea-soup and rain drops the size of hazelnuts bouncing two feet off the ground aren’t the safest conditions for riding a twisty mountain pass.

So I turned south instead, chasing the sun over the border to Croatia, where I found it burning a pleasant 26°c not far short a Zagreb and barely a cloud in the sky. But it wasn’t all plain sailing.

The 2.5 hour journey to Plitviče National Park turned out to be 5.5 hours thanks to 3-mile queue at the border. Unfortunately, the border between Croatia and Slovenia is ruthlessly protected at both sides.

Plitviče is essentially a collection of over a dozen aquamarine pools and waterfalls, which under any other circumstances would be absolutely stunning, but after the enormity of what I’d seen in the last ten days travelling through Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, it seemed a bit... meh.

Really, you need to spend all day there to get most out of it, and it’d be a lot more fun hiring a rowing boat and going off-piste on the lake, but I didn’t have time; I had to get back across the border to Mordor.

These photographs were taken with my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV and the extraordinary Canon 35 mm f/1.4 L II USM .