If you're planning on following in my footsteps and taking a bus from Trogir, Dubrovnik or Zagreb, I thoroughly recommend buying your ticket from the ticket office before boarding the bus, preferably a couple of hours in advance, as you can then enquire as to which platform to go to - something which quickly drills itself into your subconscious once you've got your head around the concept of bus platforms. Otherwise, you may well end up wandering around the bus station for hours trying to read the small cardboard signs beneath the wipers of each bus in the hope that one of them might mention the place you're going to - and when there are only two buses a day to your destination and the next one is at midnight, you probably don't want to miss your bus. Plus, I've noticed a disquieting habit out here that drivers seem to have developed of sticking the sign in their window without looking and heading off to lunch leaving it upside down and facing inward, which really isn't a lot of help unless you're willing to climb up the side of the bus and peer in through the side window while hanging upside down from the roof just to see where it's going.

Another thing to be wary of at bus stations in Croatia - and I'm really not trying to make them sound like dens of iniquity here, because they certainly are not - are the really quite surprising number of men who suddenly seem to appear from nowhere like the shopkeeper in Mr Ben, offering to take you to your far off destination personally - presumably by car. Obviously, I don't need to tell you the stupidity of taking these people up on their offer - unless you've recently sent millions of pounds to a Nigerian prince, in which case I probably do need to tell you - but what really struck me as extraordinary is how pointless such an exercise would be anyway. The bus fare from Trogir to Plitvice - a journey of nearly 6 hours on a modern, air conditioned bus - came in at a little under £14, so anyone travelling on such a tight budget that even £14 seems too much should probably not have bothered leaving home in the first place because they certainly won't be able to afford to get home from the airport on their return. Not to mention that fact that, assuming you don't turn up in a ditch somewhere the next day sans wallet, you're basically turning down a luxury air conditioned coach for a sweaty 6 hour journey in a car with a stranger who doesn't speak English. I mean, why would you do that? One guy at the bus station in Trogir was so keen that even when I tried to get him to sod off by telling him that I had already purchased my ticket, he followed me around for quite some time insisting that I should immediately return it for a refund.

Whenever i travel on buses in foreign countries, especially where another language is involved, i always worry about what will happen if i miss the bus, how i will know which bus to get on, and most importantly of all, how will i know where to get off at the other end. When travelling long distances on intercity buses, i usually print out the schedule from the website of the bus company before i set out showing all the intermediate stops and at what time the bus arrives at each. This way, i can match the current time with the stop on the schedule as we travel and look for street signs to confirm where i am even in the most remote locations. After all, even if the bus is running ahead of schedule, its not going to leave a stop before the time on the schedule or people will miss it, so if my printed schedule says that I'll be passing through Vodice at 14:05, then i can be pretty certain that's the furthest I will have travelled at that point. Of course, in many cases this doesn't prove to be necessary and all my worries turn out to be unfounded as the driver of each bus will yell out the name of each major stop as you arrive. Don't count on this, though, as the UK certainly doesn't have a monopoly on grumpy drivers who want nothing more than to shoot past your stop in an effort to get home for tea and crumpet.

I'd just like to pause here for a moment to point out that the English language has not yet reached a point at which it contains enough superlatives to adequately describe Plitvice Jezera National Park. In fact, if you stopped whatever it is you're doing right now and decided to dedicate every hour of every day for the rest of your life to inventing new superlatives, you still wouldn't come close. The place is quite simply off the scale - and yet, I bet most of you have never heard of it. If I casually mentioned Niagara Falls, or the Victoria Falls, or any other randomly chosen location ending in the word "falls", you'd immediately nod your head and get all serious and tell me what a wonderful place you've heard it is or how many times you've already been - but bring up Plitvice and most people will start scratching their head and looking for an atlas. Which is odd. Of course, this isn't necessarily a bad thing - many of the world's most horrendously overcrowded tourist spots were once virtually unknown, and have made the switch overnight from delightful unknown beauty spot to somewhere on everyone's bucket list simply because a blogger wrote… In fact, forget everything I just said - leave Plitvice as it is, stay at home and watch Strictly. That way, I might be able to afford to go back again.

I have to be honest at this point, and confess that the only reason I ever got to discover Plitvice myself was because I have a friend who is half Croatian - and she has always taken great pleasure in extolling the virtues of the place at every opportunity and showing me photographs that required me to be rushed to hospital in order to have my jaw surgically reattached. If you don't appreciate the beauty of nature, haven't got a romantic bone in your body, or believe that waterfalls and lakes are for sissies, then I encourage you to stop reading now, because there's nothing here to interest you. Move along. For the rest of you, close your eyes for a minute and try to imagine 114 square miles of cascading lakes, spectacular waterfalls, dams and travertine terraces, connected by a well maintained network consisting of miles of boardwalks aimed at hikers of every level which skirt the lakes and weave their way around the falls so close that you can taste the spray. Imagine a road train that takes you from one end of the park to the other so that you can ride uphill and hike down, and then throw in a fleet of electric boats which traverse the park and paddle boat hire so you can go off exploring on your own, taking you up close to all the falls without even having to break out the walking cane. Got that? Now consider that you can actually stay in the park, in one of the two centrally located hotels, and have all this to yourself at night after they've closed the gates and everyone else has gone home. I can sense you booking your flight now.

My bus from Trogir was actually the long-haul service from Dubrovnik to Zagreb, the same one I had used on the previous leg of my journey. At first, I was a little nervous as I had absolutely no idea what to expect from Plitvice and had imagined everything from a towering DisneyWorld style entrance surrounded by hotels to a discrete gate into a field - so it seemed quite obvious to me that I may sail past the stop for Plitvice and end up in Zagreb wondering what I'd missed. I need not have worried. Yes, the road that runs through the park is fairly nondescript, and the entrance itself is nothing more than a driveway leading into the forest, but there were plenty of other people on the bus going to the same place and the driver knew perfectly well that sailing through Plitvice without announcing it loudly to all and sundry would be a bad idea. Opposite the entrance was a camping ground of some sort, which appeared to be holding a market when I arrived, but I was far too ready to settle into the hotel for a good night's rest after a long day on the road to worry about buying trinkets - an early night meant being able to get up first thing in the morning before all the day trippers arrived, and dawn is most definitely one of the best times to see Plitvice.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.