Would you recommend hiking the Plitvice National Park in the AM or PM?
We have planned a half day and one night in Plitvice on Aug 30 and have the option of arriving by car from Zagreb around lunch and doing the hike in the afternoon OR arriving in the evening and doing the hike first thing in the morning before leaving Plitvice for Split after.
The best time to be there is when the fewest day-tripper tourists are there (most people come during the day). So the best time is to be there as early as possible. But that means you probably can't see the whole park before it fills up. Most smart visitors arrive mid-afternoon, check into the hotel in the park itself (it's imperfect, but its location makes up for its flaws), do part of the park late afternoon, as everyone is leaving, then sleep in the park hotel, get up early, go do the rest of the park as soon as it's open, then leave by late morning when the crowds show up.
Tip: The same technique works well at most other places in Europe that are so popular they are being loved-to-death (there are many of those).
Go as early as you can and wear good shoes. We saw tourists with fancy heeled sandals trying to navigate the paths and walkways and it was pouring rain. At one point we had to walk through a stream. LOL! I hope you have better weather than we did but be prepared.
It will not work well to arrive at lunchtime. I don't know what precise time to tell you to shoot for, but you want to be in the park after most of the daytrippers have left. Starting out at noon is not going to do that for you.
We were there last month and did the PM on arrival day and the AM the day after, staying onsite.
The PM was quieter than the AM, especially once it got to dinner time and later.
We arrived (in October 2017) around 11am and found few crowds at our starting point, as they were already much further into the park. We must have followed behind the crowds at a distance throughout our stay into the late afternoon, because only once did we bump into a minor pedestrian jam.
The same might not apply in August, with more people in the park.
I wouldn't count on having CWSocial's experience in the summer. I arrived at the park about 10 AM in June 2015 and was in the ticket line for about an hour. The park was a total madhouse, with people shuffling along like a slow-moving mob. I kept thinking, "If one person trips, six of us are going to end up in the lake."
We arrived in the early afternoon this past Thursday (June 16) and the park was warm and humid with light crowds. We then went in at the opening on Friday. It was quite crowded at the big waterfall by the time we got there (we took the boats and then hiked to it arriving around 10 AM).
I imagine if you enter at entrance 1 and start your hike at 8 AM you will probably have fewer people to deal with.
On a recent Rick Steves tour we started hiking at the upper lakes and worked our way downhill to the lower lakes. We finished closed to noon. By mid morning it began to get crowded and as our group of 16 were going downhill we were met by a constant stream of visitors going the other direction. With the narrow pathway and, in some areas, narrow wooden causeways it became necessary to focus on where you were walking as these large groups of people in general did not give way and you had to stand your ground.
I am hiking Plitvice mid September. If you are staying at a park hotel, book your ticket for the afternoon of your arrival and then your hotel can extend your one day ticket to the next morning as well at no extra charge.
I just booked my ticket in advance for the 2nd day and with my ticket was a newsletter telling me about this option. I fired off an email to them and they confirmed and changed my ticket to the arrival day. You don’t need to pay for more than one day as long as you book your arrival day!
We visited Plitvice in June. We had tickets for 7:00 AM. It was an early start, but it worked out great. It was a lovely, cool morning and there were hardly any people there. We left around noon and by that time it had warmed up a lot and there were definitely a lot more people.
