Sublime beauty in the shadows of war

A five-day trip is rewarded with the splendid view that the Lonely Planet travel guide promised, and a lot more

As I prepared to fly to central Europe recently there was a wonderful, vivid picture I could not expel from my mind. It was of a red pig flying a fighter aircraft, with the resplendent turquoise waters of the Adriatic below. Porco Rosso, a pilot cursed with the visage of a red pig, was the hero of a 1992 Japanese animated film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

By the time my friends and I had arrived in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, and boarded a bus for Plitvice Lakes National Park in the mountains, Porco Rosso had more or less taken a back seat in my mind.