And so at Marco Polo airport we wandered around looking lost having missed the LocAuto booth. Kathryn eventually spotted them and fairly soon after we arrived they said ‘is it just you two’, then offered us a free upgrade to a VW Golf Convertible.
I’ve never driven a convertible before, always imagined I’d not like having no roof. It turns out, I rather like it. I missed my hat (because I didn’t bring a hat), but I was stunned by how quiet it was, and how nice it was to be out in the open air. The sun poured over us as we headed into the Alps.
First though, came the border crossing. There is, obviously, no border crossing anymore. Well, there sort of is. There’s lots of weaving around the roads between the motorway through Italy and the one through Slovenia, and in Slovenia you need a Vignete to travel on the motorways. So we pulled into the first services after the border – which is clearly where there was once a border control and which has a lovely communist-grey motif, with empty what were once fountains (made from grey concrete). It also has ‘toilets’. I say ‘toilets’ because I’m fine with squat toilets. Well, notionally, in my head, I think ‘okay, I can deal with squat toilets’. But there being no toilet paper, and no soap, and no hand driers. That is something of which I’m less fond. Fortunately we had wipes and so on, being well prepared travellers, but still. It was not great.
Anyhow, we headed into Slovenia… and then… well.
See, we rapidly lost Google’s directions (largely, I suspect, because the roads all seem to have multiple numbers, and Google fails to do the ‘signposted to’ trick). Having declared lostness, we fired up Co-Pilot* which, like Google, said YOU MUST GO THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS!
We set off, and the roads fairly rapidly deteriorated into the kind of small roads that you see in Lake District, only this time we were driving a bigger (wider) car, I was on the wrong side, and there were INSANE SLOVENIAN DRIVERS EVERYWHERE. It was really rather ‘exciting’. It was also incredibly beautiful. Last time I was in the alps was back when I was still regularly holidaying with my parents, and I had forgotten what a gorgeous environment it is. As we weaved through many tiny roads, and darkness descended, the Australian Woman continued to suggest that we would be on the road for hours. The guesstimate wasn’t very accurate and we made it into Bohinj in time to buy some food for dinner (thankfully!).
We then nipped the few kms down the road to Savica, where we were staying, and were met by the lovely host who showed us an insanely nice apartment. Given the cost was less than half what we were paying in Venice (although that included breakfast, and this didn’t), the fact it was essentially a new apartment with a very nice shower seemed like a massive bargain.
Looking at the guide book informed us that you must see Lake Bled if you are in Slovenia (or goats will fall from the sky crushing each and every person, and darkness and pestilence will descend upon the Earth for thousands of years). So we decided it was best to go.
The morning mist slowly lifted revealing an incredible blue light. I’ve never seen anything like it before, the world tinted by (I guess) reflections from the water, or absorption from water in the air? We arrived in a small town which has an interesting convergence of traditional alpine architecture, late 70’s concrete and relatively modern arcades. The lake itself is indeed very beautiful, so long as you look at it from the side on which the town is located. We did more meandering, enjoying the scenery, and the outside air, and me dropping the lens cap from my nice new camera, thus entailing a long walk back along a not terribly pleasant main road, and incredibly finding it, undamaged in the middle of a side-turning. Then we set off on a quest, this being for lunch. Lunch, we decided would be at one of the fine eateries recommended in our guest book. The first, more pricy one, we located fairly quickly. We continued. The second, we thought, should be on this road betwixt castle and town. We meandered, then wandered, then starting looking with more definite ‘it should be here’, then eventually found ourselves half way up to the castle.
Having decided that it didn’t actually exist, but also by now being exceedingly hungry and at the top of a rocky outcrop with a castle (which, incidentally, contained a restaurant), we accepted our fate, paid our castle entrance fee (we’d been contemplating seeing the castle), and hunted out the restaurant. They, it turned out, did very nice food. Again, far too much of it, but it was very nice. I can’t instantly place what we ate, but the view was fantastic. Sat with a view into the Alps and across the rooftops of Bled, we had a delightful meal with a very nice waiter who encouraged us to try and speak Slovenian. And also explained that it was an incredibly difficult language. Fed and watered, we wandered around the castle museum. It’s interesting, but perhaps a touch overpriced. Sadly, the castle was well and truly looted during the second world war, so little exists to point to its heritage, but it’s a lovely building and they’ve done some clever bits of interior design to allow you to see that you’re in a castle whilst you wander round and discover general history of the region.
Surprisingly their restaurant isn’t overpriced, and their food is very nice. And that terrace, that is FTW.
After a fairly rapid descent (our parking was running out) we fled Bled and returned to Savica for a chilled out night munching fine home cooked foods.
The next day we headed to Lake Bohinj. This, being substantially closer and sporting a prohibition on building near the shore, had a couple of advantages and was more to our taste. At least as impressive as Lake Bled and waaaay less built up, the 12 or so mile treck around the lake and up to Slap Savica (a 78m waterfall) left us exhausted but happy. The sun shone, the waterfall was gorgeous** and our feet hurt like hell.
The next day we decided to try Ljubljana.
The outskirts of Ljubljana are depressing grey concrete, and drab wretched buildings. Much like any large European city. The centre, however, is delightful. Bright, beautiful buildings jostle the banks of the rivers, and an entertaining flea market in which we spent far too much time contains an assortment of ex-communist bits and bobs, rather nice furniture, and general flea market tat. I walked off with a record*** and Kathryn a book. I would have bought an Apollo / Something in Russian space probe pin, but couldn’t remember where I’d seen it, and we both wanted lunch and to head to…a museum.
Yes, indeed.
We had a pleasant picnic lunch lurking on the banks of the Ljubljanica river, on a strange benchy thing provided for the purpose, before doing some general meandering landing ourselves wandering up Jakopičevo Sprehajališče to the Museum of Graphic Arts, which, it turned out isn’t quite what we had in mind. So we wandered back down and headed instead to the Museum of Modern Art (mainly based on the fact it had some cool sculptures outside, and what sounded like an interesting display inside). A while later we emerged from the museum (we appeared to be the only visitors on a sunny Sunday afternoon) and wandered back to the park (back up Jakopičevo Sprehajališče) where Kathryn did some painting and I sat and read, enjoying the afternoon sun on my back.
As the sun faded, we headed into the city centre for Hot Chocolate from a place that looked like it did nice hot chocolate. It did. Unfortunately it did hot chocolates the size of Lake Bohinj topped with a mountain of whipped cream. We’d planned dinner as the step after hot chocolate. Indeed, the chocolate was merely a sunday time filler, because Slovenian’s apparently don’t eat dinner until at least 7pm. We wandered off, attempting to both walk off the hot chocolate and kill time. Then, taking our optimism in our hands we set off to find some of the recommended restaurants. The first, it appeared, was down a dark barely lit alley some way outside the city centre. We abandoned this, classifying the dark, barely lit alley as being ‘not a wise decision to walk down’. Kathryn’s optimism and determination managed to find restaurants despite the vagaries of the book which says chirpy things like “on the square” meaning ‘somewhere vaguely near the square’. We landed up having a delicious but again over filled dinner and some fabulous wine. Well, Kathryn had some fabulous wine.
We’d tried (at our apartment) Teran wine, which is a Slovenian speciality. It’s nice, but not I must have it nice. It has an aftertaste somewhat akin to taking a neat shot of lemon, so you drink it quickly. The fore-taste being yummy. And then you’ve drunk rather a lot of wine rather rapidly. :)
At the restaurant Kathryn got Traminec (aka Traminer) which is another Slovenian wine, described as semi-sweet, but essentially dangerously close to a desert wine. It is incredibly easy drinking (I had one sip) and, well. We want to get some here. It seems not to be easily available in the UK – apparently, the Slovenians cunningly drink all the wine they make themselves. Damn them! But we shall have it (oh yes).
Anyhow, we headed back to the apartment, packed up our stuff and made ready for the journey home the next morn’.
* Hereafter known as the ‘Australian Woman’, because I’ve set my Co-Pilot’s voice to Australian, she sounds so much more cheerful than the UK ones.
** Although, when the Slovenians say that they built a dam a distance from the waterfall to power a hydro plant, they mean 30m not 300m. It’s still gorgeous, but very pragmatic.
*** Two covers of 1960’s pop songs in Serbian. I wish I’d bought the other record by the same artist now, but at €1 each, it was marginally too pricey for me just to buy lots-of.
