Travel question: Travelling from Ljubljana to Pula

Hi there, not sure if you’re able to help us at all but my friend and I are coming to Croatia this August for a festival in Pula. We are landing from London in Ljubljana, Slovenia at 19:00 on 27/08/13 and need to get to Pula to our apartment. We want to know if there is a relatively cheap/safe way of us travelling this distance at this time. The apartment owners are aware that we need a late check in but we want to arrive there at a reasonable time. Any information you have would be greatly appreciated. O. H-S

The Arena in Pula

Unfortunately, I have to say that you will find it difficult to travel from Ljubljana to Pula at that time of the day (well, evening). There is a direct daily bus from Ljubljana to Pula at that time of year, but it runs at 9.30am. (See the timetable on the FILS website - scroll down for the seasonal, summer line.) I believe a one-way ticket should be about 200 Kunas, or the equivalent in Euros.

The alternatives I would suggest also don’t really work at that time of the day. I would have suggested getting a train from Ljubljana to Rijeka, but the two a day are at 6.35am and 3.10pm. (From Rijeka to Pula there are several buses per day.)

Another possibility would be to take a train to Zagreb (if you did this, it would be best to take a taxi from Ljubljana Airport to Kranj, which is about 15 minutes away, rather than travel to downtown Ljubljana, about 30-45 mins away), and then a bus to Pula.. There are several trains per day from Kranj (or Ljubljana) to Zagreb but again, these all run before your 7pm arrival time.

(If you wanted to look up train timetables, the Die Bahn website is the best place to do this.)

These above options are all relatively cheap and safe (travelling in Croatia/Slovenia is very safe, just use your common sense with personal possessions, of course!) but, obviously, the most important issue is that they don’t get you to Pula the same day! Aside from renting a car (which isn’t an especially cheap option, and not everyone wants to drive) I’m afraid the best thing I would suggest would be to stay in Ljubljana one night and then get the bus direct to Pula the next morning. I’m assuming you’re attending Outlook so the bus will still get you there in time for the opening concert on the 28th. (Not sure if you’ll be able to amend your booking in Pula by a day.)

Save 15% on car hire in Croatia!

Holiday Autos are currently running a special Grand April sale for 10 days, offering 15% off car hire for a wide range of destinations, including Australia & New Zealand, Spain, France, Austria and Germany, and South Africa. On Sunday 14th April 2013, it’s your chance to take advantage of 15% off car hire in Croatia!

Use the booking form above to search for car hire in Croatia, and use the code APRILSALE14 on Sunday 14th April when booking to get your discount on selected rentals. (For car hire up to 30th June 2013.) This code will be valid for 24 hours.

Note – this particular code will only work on that day – but it will also give you an opportunity to make savings on car hire for Poland, Holland, the UAE and Iceland! Do check out the Holiday Autos website for additional codes for different countries, that will be valid on different days. The sale ends on Wednesday 17th April 2013.

If you’re after some advice on driving in Croatia, check out our Travelling Around by Car page for some useful tips.

Holiday Autos Sale – 25% off car hire in Croatia!

For all of this week (and up until 19th September), Holiday Autos have been running a great sale on car rental for a number of its destinations. Today, it’s Croatia’s turn – and it’s your chance to pick up a good deal on car hire in the country during the off-season.

Car hire locations include Dubrovnik Airport, Pula Airport, Rijeka Airport, Rijeka Downtown, Split Airport, Zadar Airport, Zagreb Airport and Zagreb Downtown.

To take advantage of this offer, you must book by 23:59 today for car rental from 14th September 2012 to 31st March 2013.

Alternatively, up until the sale ends next Wednesday, you can also take advantage of 25% off car hire in Australia & New Zealand (Friday 14th), the Canary Islands (Monday 17th), France (Tuesday 18th) and the UK and Iceland (Wednesday 19th).

Full terms and conditions can be found here; to book, either on the above banner or go direct to Holiday Autos

Travel question: from Zadar to the Plitvice Lakes National Park by public transport

We want to travel by bus or train from Zadar to Plitvice Lakes. We will arrive on in Zadar by plane – which bus should we have and where is the boarding point? Can we take the train? G.A.

Firstly, the easy answer, there is no train from Zadar to the Plitvice Lakes.

Plitvice Lakes National Park

To travel from Zadar Airport to Plitvice, first you need to transfer from the airport to the main bus station in Zadar. You can see a timetable for this journey on the Zadar Airport website.

From Zadar bus station, here is the timetable for buses to Plitvice Lakes (taken from the Zadar Bus Terminal website. (All routes run daily, although may be subject to change – at least, that’s the disclaimer on the bus station website!)

Dep. 8.30 Arr. 10.25
Company: Prijevoz Knezevic
Line: Zadar – Udbina – Plitvice Lakes

Dep. 9.00 Arr. 11.00
Company: Autotransport Sibenik
Line: Split – Zagreb

Dep. 12.00 Arr. 14.15
Company: Croatia Bus
Line: Split – Zagreb

Dep. 14.30 Arr. 16.45
Company: Croatia Bus
Line: Vir – Zagreb

Dep. 15.10 Arr. 17.50
Company: AP Varazdin
Line: Split – Varazdin

Dep. 6pm Arr. 19.55
Company: Prijevoz Knezevic
Line: Zadar – Udbina – Plitvice Lakes

Dep. 23.00 Arr. 01.50
Company: Imotski – Panturist
Line: Imotski – Osijek

You can also look up timetables on the websites of some of the bus companies that are listed on our Travelling Around – By Bus page.

Travel question: How to travel from Tisno to Split

I need information about hiring a car in Tisno, one way, and dropping off in Split? My boyfriend and I need to get to Split one way or another and i’ve heard the bus is a nightmare and takes 5 hours? Is this true? Please let me know if you have any ideas as to how we can do this. Many thanks. K.D.

I’m afraid it would be very unlikely that you would be able to rent a car in Tisno and drop it off in Split – Tisno is too small a place to have proper car rental companies, and any local agencies that would possibly provide car hire would only provide it for you to explore the local area (and bring the car back to them!), in the same way you could hire a bike or scooter for a few hours.

The scheduled bus from Tisno to Split should take around the two hour mark, not five. I’m not necessarily sure why the bus would be considered a nightmare – possible reasons might be that, as it’s the height of summer, traffic may be slow along the coastal road with lots of other holidaymakers who’ve come down to Croatia by car clogging things up. However, if you were to rent a car, you wouldn’t be able to escape this!

Even if the roads were slow, I would say that your bus shouldn’t be that delayed…possibly by one extra hour (so, a three hour journey in total). Obviously, things depend on the day of the week (weekends would be busier), time of day etc.

Other reasons might be that the bus might be very full, so there’s not enough seats and you have to stand. In some cases, the bus might be even so full that they wouldn’t let you on, and you might have to wait for the next one.

However, saying all this, there are a number of buses per day on this route. You can look up timetables at the Split Bus Terminal website. Select Tisno R as the starting point (not Tisno M).

When you’re actually in Tisno, I would confirm locally to make sure you know where the bus stop is. You could also enquire about purchasing your tickets, say, a day or two in advance, but as it’s a small place you might not be able to.

If you get stuck (for whatever reason – I don’t think you will, but good to keep these things in mind) I would consider taking a taxi (or local bus, if you can find the information when there) to another local town and get a bus from there. For example, Pirovac is close to Tisno (6 miles/15 mins) and there are more buses from there to Split.

Another alternative would be to take a local bus from Tisno to Sibenik (about half an hour away), which is the nearest large town. Then from here, there shouldn’t be any issues getting a bus to Split. Not only are there even more buses from here to Split (about 36 a day), but some routes start in Sibenik, so you wouldn’t have any issues about not being able to get on a bus because it’s too full.

Travel question: Train from Zagreb to Dubrovnik?

I want to know that if I come from Budapest to Zagreb by flight and want to catch a train to Dubrovnik the same day is it possible? My flight reaches at around 12 noon and there is a train at 2pm , how far is the airport from the station? Thanks. A.M.

I’m afraid that you’ve been wrongly informed – there are no trains from Zagreb to Dubrovnik as Dubrovnik has no train station. The closest to Dubrovnik that you could travel to is a town called Ploce, but this is still 2 hours north of Dubrovnik. If you did take a train here from Zagreb, you could change here for a bus to continue your journey; however, a train to here from Zagreb is still a long journey, 13 hours.

You could travel from Zagreb to Dubrovnik by bus. Firstly, take an airport bus (from outside the terminal building) to the main bus station in Zagreb. The journey time is approximately half an hour. Then, from here there are a number of buses per day to Dubrovnik (see timetables at www.akz.hr). Journey is long, however! (About 11-12 hours.)

If you need to reach Dubrovnik quickly, then flying is obviously the best method. There are several flights per day (in summer) with Croatia Airlines. Tickets aren’t always even that expensive, but it depends how far in advance you book.

Croatian transport figures for the first part of 2011

In an interview with Croatian newspaper Vjesnik, Danijel Mileta, the State Secretary for Railway Transport in the Ministry of Sea, Transport and Infrastructure, revealed some interesting statistics about the assorted types of transport used in Croatia for the first part of the year.

Of the different types of transport used, most saw an increase in passengers over the same period in 2010. Only rail transport decreased in 2011, with 32.1 million people using trains in the first half of the year; in the same period in 2010, 35.6 million travelled. By contrast, 3,149,071 people travelled by air within Croatia between January and July, up 11.77% on 2010.

Meanwhile, there was an increase in the number of people travelling on ferry and catamaran lines in the first sixth months of the year. 4,120,286 people travelled on the seas – a rise of 3.2% – and over 1 million cars where also transported during this period, also a rise of 8.6%. The main ferry company in Croatia, Jadrolinija, transported the most passengers – 3,507,321 – and vehicles – 875,208 – although these figures actually decreased on the year before by 2.9% and 4.5% respectively.

The ferry line that posted the best increase in passenger numbers was the Pula – Unije – Mali Losinj – Ilovik – Zadar route run by Linjska Nacionalna Plovidba; this particular line runs only during season, from the beginning of June to the end of October.

Mr Mileta believes that these healthy rises in sea transport numbers will continue for the rest of the year, so that overall statistics are sure to beat those of 2010, and may come close to the record figures from 2008.

Moving on to road transport statistics, 742,800,037 kilometres of travel were registered on Croatian roads between January and August this year, which is up 3% on both last year and the year before. 23,074,315 vehicles were recorded on the country’s motorways, 2.2% up on 2010.

Much of this interview with Mr Mileta focused on the expansion plans for Zagreb Airport. Bids are currently being submitted (up until the end of October) by companies for the building a new passenger terminal at the airport. The construction of a new passenger terminal should bring in new air routes with additional carriers, he says, and could see it become a hub for southeastern Europe.

Source: Vjesnik

Seaplanes could link Croatian mainland and its islands

A number of Croatian newspapers this week reported that a German company is to start operating seaplane flights on the Croatian coast, establishing regular lines between the mainland and several of the larger islands.

European Coastal Airlines (ECA) plan a first phase of flights later this year, linking Split and Dubrovnik with the islands of Korcula, Hvar, Vis and Lastovo, and also Zadar, Rijeka and Pula to the more northern islands of Mali Losinj, Rab, and other nearby islands. In total, 30 seaports would be used for flights between these places.

To give an example of how long some of these flights might take and the fares involved, ECA say that Dubrovnik would Korcula would take 20 minutes and cost €43; Split to Hvar would take 12 minutes and cost €25 and Split to Korcula would take 20 minutes and also cost €43; whilst Rijeka to Mali Losinj would take 22 minutes and cost €48. By comparison, to travel from Dubrovnik to Korcula takes 2 and a half hours by catamaran or just over 4 hours by ferry. (Both of these routes include stops along the way.)

ECA then plan to expand their services into a second phase, offering flights between a number of Italian ports on the Adriatic – such as Trieste, Venice, Ravenna, Rimimi, Brindisi, Ancona and  Bari – to the same Croatian islands mentioned above. Ancona to Mali Losinj would be a 32 minute flight, whilst Pescara to the island of Vis would take 42 minutes.

The planes that would be used are De Havilland Twin Otter DHC-6s which can carry 19 passengers, and are able to land on both terrain and on sea.

The fares mentioned above could also be lowered if tickets are booked enough in advance. Likewise, potential government subsidies could also see fares lowered substantially for locals – so a fare for Split to Hvar could be around 100 Kunas (€13.50). Clearly, these planes could benefit island inhabitants by enabling them to reach the mainland much more easily.

However, a quick search reveals that this company has been attempting to get such a project off the ground for a number of years – our forum even shows a discussion about it from 2005 (!) – and has never yet been successful. It’s certainly an interesting project and one that we think would be popular (with a certain type of tourist, at least!) but all we can really say is – watch this space…

Sources: Jutarnji, Vecernji, Slobodna Dalmacija