The Rest of My Holiday

I am sitting in Dubhai airport on the way back home to New Zealand. We have a 4 hour wait here, then a 15 hour flight to Sydney, then 3 hours back to New Zealand. It takes about 30 hours in total!

From Montenegro, we went to Croatia. Mostly we travelled along the beautiful coastline - the water is the most amazing blue colour, and very very clear. I even had a swim (but it was FREEZING). We visited lots of medieval walled towns, which were fascinating. The biggest was Dubrovnik. Here is a picture of it:

There are lots of shops and restaurants and houses now inside the walls, so it is a living place. We walked right round the walls (about 2 km). They are very thick and very high, with hundreds of stairs, and many towers. Interestingly, Dubrovnik was attacked in the 1990's by the Yugoslav Army, and much damage was done to the walls, but the people have fixed them all up again and they have done a great job. You can see how much protection these medieval walls give to the people inside.

From Croatia, we spent one day driving to Mostar in Bosnia. Another country which has suffered wars quite recently, and you could see damage in the walls of buildings from all the shelling. Mostar has a very beautiful bridge, which got bombed, and has also been fixed up now.

The most incredibly beautiful place I have seen on the whole trip has to be Plitvice Lakes in Croatia. It was a long drive to get there, but it was amazing! We walked for about 5 hours, along tracks and boardwalks which went over and around waterfalls, for about 6 lakes and maybe 100 waterfalls! Bears and wolves live in this area too, but we didnt see any, though we saw some caves that looked like a good place for a bear to live. Look:

This is a map of the area, showing the lakes and where the falls are (called SLAP in Croatian).

Most of the boardwalks had no handrails. Luckily this one did, as we had to walk OVER this waterfall!

Can you see the people walking on the boadwalk in the far distance of this cave?

It is impossible to show you just how beautiful this place was, but it was incredible!

From Croatia we went to Slovenia (another of the old Yugoslavian countries). We did two very different things in Slovenia. Firstly we went in the MOST SCARY but amazing cave I have ever seen! It was enormous, and we had to go on a guided tour. We walked down and down and down to the cave entrance, then walked through the cave, sometimes on narrow little pathways on the sides of cliffs (with good fences thank goodness), and had to cross a little bridge 45 m (measure it - it was HIGH) across a raging underground river and waterfall. After all that downhill, I was very pleased to discover there was a lift to take us back up again!

The second thing we did was visit Lipica - the town where the Lippizaner horse breed was developed over 4 hundred years ago! These horses are nearly all grey (white), and are very good at performing difficult movements above the ground that used to be used in battle when battles were fought on horseback.

On our way back to Germany, we went to a salt mine in Austria. Again we went deep underground to see how salt was mined. We had to wear white suits like the Oompaloompas in the Willy Wonka movie, and travelled on little trains, and slides, and walked, and went on a boat on an underground lake! We even crossed the border underground into Germany and back again.

Once we were back in Germany, the weather got very very cold, but we didnt mind. Now we are on our way back to New Zealand, and on Tuesday I will be back in class with all of you again!