“You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. This is not logical, but it is often true.”
-Mr. Spock, “Amok Time”
Sites covered in this post:
• Krka National Park
• Cinco de Mayo – Rainy Day at Starigrad Fortress
Go-Date: Day 102 & 103, Saturday/Sunday, May 4-5
Lesson Learned: If you are going to be hiking and getting off the city streets for rural archaeological sites, national parks, nature trails or gorges in Crete you probably ought to pick up a Trekking Pole (or two if that is your style). We already had one at home (that we found in Bryce Canyon National Park if you happen to have dropped yours over a cliff) but we left it behind. That was a mistake.
Trekking poles provide stability while hauling heavy loads or moving over technical terrain, and they provide comfort and rhythm when walking on every type of surface. They’re great for setting a rhythm when covering long distances and significantly reduce load and impact on hips, knees, and ankles when going downhill. As with most hiking and backpacking gear, balancing weight and durability is the most common consideration.
Well, that’s what the pros say, but how much can these poles actually weigh? Less than a pair of shoes, for sure. Right, not much. Packability is of the utmost importance to me, and of course durability. You don’t want to hand carry the poles around and they need to fit into your suitcases, whether you check your bags or carry-on. Weight, well it’s light, like around 12 to 20 ounces. If you are really battling weight for carry-on bags (12 kilos on international flights) you may need to find the lighter ones. Most collapse to 26 inches, but that is slightly longer than overhead bags can handle, but you might be able to lay them diagonally inside the bag. We found one that breaks down into three sections, and I got Ellen one that we can unscrew and reassemble and it fits in her roller bag (carefully). I highly recommend picking one up.
Prices? How much do you want to spend? I’ve seen them on Amazon from $21 to over $200. I picked ours up in Greece and paid $20 for one and $35 for the other. You can find them made of carbon fiber, aluminum, or a combination of the two. High-end trekking poles are often made from carbon fiber, which is lighter and stiffer but also more expensive and brittle (and when carbon fiber breaks, it breaks; aluminum may just dent or bend and still be usable). Being highly economical (Ellen says cheap) ours are aluminum (Al-ee-min-i-num as the Brits say) though I do really enjoy my carbon fiber bike, so I may try one my next pole.
Trekking pole grips are another thing you need to consider. Most come in three main types: cork, foam, and rubber. We got foam, though I thought the cork looked good, but it wasn’t great cork. A quality cork handle has an exceptionally comfortable feel in the hand and wicks sweat very well. It also will conform nicely to your hand over time, making it great for long-distance treks and multi-season use. One other factor is whether there is spring recoil in the pole. Mine doesn’t, but Ellen’s does. This is when you press down on the pole it retracts a bit and then springs back into place. I’m not sure that it puts any more spring into your step, but it does have a nice feel to it.
Well, that’s my two cents. We like ours and find they help on the trails, and we do enjoy hiking.
Lesson Learned 2: When hiking you need to keep your visual references on multiple levels. Look at your feet (of course), eyes low to look for trail markers and not trip, higher up, on trees or posts for signs and other markers, and 360 degree sweeps when you come to a fork in the trail which is not clearly marked. Make it a habit, maybe you won’t get lost. Its amazing how you can walk right by a marker that shows a change in direction or the “right” trail when it just doesn’t look like it should be. Don’t figure this out the hard way.
Regrets: Well, we screwed up our car rental and received notice yesterday that we were overdue returning the rental. (I think Ellen got a text “Where the hell is our car?” or something like that). I’m not sure how we did it, but we only rented the car through May 3, when we needed it through May 23. What’s one little zero. We fixed it, and we still have wheels, but it’s one of those things. Attention to details. It won’t happen again.
Krka Park, Beautiful Waterfalls
The Krka National Park encompasses an area of 109 square kilometers along the Krka River. It’s a beautiful place that reminded us a lot of the Plitvice Lakes. The park is an undeveloped, beautiful, natural, layered ecosystem of fall after fall. On a quirky note, the Krka Waterfalls area has the second highest density of lavender in Europe, hence the high frequency of wasps and bees in the area. The lavender wasn’t in bloom when we were there, so I can’t vouch for this claim. But I will say that we see evidence of bee-keeping in Greece, Croatia and even Egypt far more than we ever do in the U.S.
We arrived at about 11 AM on a Saturday and the park was mostly empty. Not completely, but not crowded, which we thought was unusual. Granted, part of that may be due to the weather, which was cloudy, very windy, and rain was inevitable. We parked at a lesser-used entrance, and walked 3 km to the falls. It was a beautiful walk and we completely enjoyed the morning. The falls are incredible, we had easy access, the trails are very manageable, and the crush of humanity I expected never appeared.
We cut short our visit as rain clouds were rolling in. I mean serious Mordor-looking storm-front moving over the park. As we hiked back out we met a nice British couple on their last day in Croatia. They were anti-Brexit millennials. Nice kids, reminded me of my own daughters. It really is refreshing meeting people from other countries and having a chance to talk. I won’t say we get to know them, because we didn’t spend that much time together, but you do connect on some level and come to realize that everyone is pretty much the same. I find that rewarding, even if we were sprinting out of the park as the rain began to fall.
Croatia is very green this time of the year. We know why….it rains a lot. It did today, but thankfully we had made it to the car before the downpour.
If you don’t want to hike into the park like we did, you can always go into the little town of Skradin and catch the hourly boat to the falls entrance. It looks like a lovely ride, but we decided to pass on the boat ride since we wanted the walk.
In the summer you can swim in the lake near the big waterfall Skradinski Buk. There’s a lot of vendors around in the common area, so you don’t have to pack a lunch unless you want to. The bench area is a nice place to just sit and watch the falls admire the diversity of wildlife (lions and tigers and bears…. well, or ducks, swans, fish, squirrels and lizards) and listen to the sound of tumbling water. Nobody was swimming in the lake the day we were there.
This park proves there is more to Croatia than strolling down old town in Dubrovnik, Split or Zadar. Not that those are not nice as well, but these parks are killer pretty.
Hiking drama – Fortress Starigrad
Technical – a sports term meaning challenging, difficult, or requiring special skills or courage. In hiking it may mean a trail that includes sections with rugged terrain where the use of your hands is necessary. Well, we found a trail that had sections you would call technical. There were spots that you used your hands due to extreme terrain, such as large rocks (smaller ones , too), steep slopes, or a combination of both. Though I wouldn’t call this trail dangerous, a fall could result in serious injury.
Fortress Starigrad, is a 15th century fortress situated on a hilltop above the little Dalmatian coastal town of Omis. Like all castles, its old. This particular one is from the time when the Venetian empire ruled in the area, the fortress, together with the other Omis fortress Mirabela, was an important protection from the Ottomans who were pressing to occupy all of the Croatian coast (the Venetians and Turks really didn’t like each other). In addition to being a great look out post, the fortress was also the place for the citizens of Omis to retreat in case the attackers came too close, from the fortress they would then be able to bombard the attackers in the city with stones.
Starigrad is located about 2 kms from the center of Omis (pretty much straight up). There are multiple ways up to the top, and we selected one of the less challenging routes. Everything has a cost to it, and this route’s fee was a confusing drive up to the starting point. To get to the trail head you drove through the pretty little town of Omis and up through a narrow, winding one-lane road, past the fire house up to a hillside neighborhood to the trailhead. Like I’ve said before there are a lot of castles here in Croatia, and the Starigrad Fortress is one of the many Croatia landmarks along the Adriatic Sea – and I thought a hike up the mountain to the fortress would be fun. The web reports say this hike is steep and vigorous, but well-rewarded with sweeping views over the town and sea and not incredibly difficult. Well, that might be true if you are 35, but we found it a bit more challenging. For 10 minutes everything was fine, until I turned left when we should have turned right. Backtrack and we are ok again. The trail was ok for another 10 minutes until it turned left up an old rock slide. We should have stopped and turned around then. Ellen balked and decided to wait for me to hike to the top, take my pictures and return.
I followed the trail up steps and over rocks, always at an incline, until at the top of the slue I came to a sign post that pointed to the fortress. It was mostly flat, wide and easy going, but took another 20 minutes to reach the fort. The views were amazing and the castle interesting. Who would build such a thing in such a treacherous place, and who the hell would chase you up to the top? I spent a few minutes snapping away, talking to the curator (he made sure to collect the 20 kuna entrance fee and ensured nobody did anything stupid enough to kill themselves). Nice guy.
On the way down things went south. First, it took longer to reach the top than I expected. After that, the trail was a bit slower heading down than it was going up. So by now I’d been gone from where I left Ellen for about 40 minutes. Even so, I had to snap a few pictures down the trail, which was fine until my camera popped out of the front pocket of my pants, bounced on a couple of boulders, tumbled down the hillside to finally rest on an outcropping over a 30-foot drop. I mean, it was 2 feet from disaster. Well, it didn’t look like it bounced too hard, so it was still probably OK. I had to fetch it, after all it cost me around $300 (ten years ago).
Thirty feet (vertically), 500 feet (horizontally), and 30 minutes later, I had my camera and was trekking back up the slope, onto the trail, and down to meet up with Ellen. Total time lost on this little adventure was about 45 minutes. The only thing was, once I got back to the starting point from where we split up, she was nowhere to be found. Even worse, when I tried to call her a bush nearby started ringing and a German lady hiker pulls Ellen’s phone out of the weeds. OK, this sucks. You should have seen me trying to convince this lady (who didn’t speak English) to give me the phone she had just found. I finally succeeded and I hope they don’t find her body until after we get out of town.
An hour of searching, calling out loud, asking hikers if they had seen her, and backtracking, I was about to call for search and rescue. Finally, another couple said that she had climbed up the trail she didn’t want to scale, walked up to the fortress and then made her way back down. From now on, we won’s split up.
It was a long, stressful day. We won’t do that again.