This is post nine of fourteen on our trip to Northern Ireland and Croatia, minus our mini Game of Thrones tour. Those posts can be found here.

• Intro to Northern Ireland & Croatia
• Recovering from Jetlag in Dublin: Dublin Castle and Trinity College
• Bubblin’ in Dublin: Dublin Eats
• Chasing Scully: Staying at the Hilton Belfast
• The Land of Giants and the Northernmost Point in Ireland
• Hiking Glenveagh National Park
• Singing the Blus in Dublin & Letterkenny
• Heating up in Zadar
• Azure Waters Await at Kornati National Park
• Falling for Picturesque Plitvice
• Let’s Never Split
• The Jewel of the Adriatic: Dubrovnik
• Walking the Wall in Dubrovnik
• A Brief Stop in Bosnia

When Mrs. Selfish and I originally planned our trip to Croatia we had looked into taking a ferry from Split to Dubrovnik in order to visit some of Croatia’s lovely island cities. This quickly nixed that plan, since we were already visiting 8 cities during this trip, which was already more fast travel than I would have liked.

The Adriatic Sea is known for its beautiful islands and azure waters, however, so we started looking into daytrips when we stumbled upon the Kornati National Park.

Only an hour and a half away from Zadar, the Kornati National Park is a chain of 140 beautiful islands. There are tons of tours leaving from Zadar each day for ~20 euros per person, but after reading online reviews we decided to do a private tour for 50 euros per person instead.

Our humble ship.

Cousin Selfish was along for the ride!

Our guide picked us up at 9 in the morning and an hour and a half later we arrived at the Kornati National Park (though we were told we had the “fast boat” which would only take an hour). Since the boat was slated to return at 5pm, that gave us only 5 hours in the park.

Fortunately Kornati National Park was beautiful. The islands had the barren shrubbery similar to some of the Greek islands we visited back in June and the water was a deep blue, different from anything Mrs. Selfish or I had seen before. There were also quite a lot of cliffs.

Since it was quite hot, we stopped to take a swim on one of the more private beaches.

While the water was lovely (and refreshing!) the beach was more of your European tiny-rock-style of beach. Pretty from afar, but not so nice on one’s feet.

After lounging on the pebbly beach for a little while we started to get hungry. Fortunately, our guide knew of a local restaurant.

Unfortunately, the restaurant was VERY expensive. 750 kuna (which trade at 6.5 per $USD) for a kg of lobster, which is over $50 a lb! Instead we opted for fresh clams, scallop pasta and polenta.

Happy and satiated we headed to our last island, which was known for its magnificent cliff views.

Overall an awesome day trip. Would I pay for a private boat again? Probably not. The private boat was only 30 minutes shorter per direction instead of the reputed hour, so we didn’t end up saving that much time over the group tour.

That being said, it was nice to be able to set our own pace – so if you’re considering visiting Kornati it might be worth the extra 30 euros per person just for that.

Join us tomorrow when we hop in a car and head for the beautiful Plitvice National Park.