Slovenia

We stayed two night in Ljubljana. That is one of the hardest words to type that I’ve ever come across. It takes far too much concentration. Anyhoo, the first afternoon we had a couple of hours to organise ourselves and find some lunch, and then we took a walking tour around Ljubljana with a local guide. Ljubljana’s rather small, and the tour was meant to go for two hours, and I think that the guide felt like she needed to fill the entire two hours. She was very knowledgeable, but she had a tendency to spend ages at every stop, telling us every bit of information she had, rather than giving us the basics and then moving on. It got quite entertaining, because she’d stop speaking, and we’d all go mmm lovely how interesting, and go to walk away, and then she’d start again – and the door handles are significant because…

It would’ve been better to keep it brief and finish early, in my humble opinion.

The market; Lover's Bridge with padlocks; a random composer next to a very random tree.

Ljubljana is adorable, and has a small old town that’s built down both sides of a river, with lots of bridges that cross between. The walking tour took us to a few of the most interesting bridges, the town hall, the local cathedral, and the markets. One of the bridges has become the local Lover’s Bridge, and it’s where you go to lock a padlock to the fencing to symbolise how you’re going to be together forever. It’s a shame I’m so cynical really. It was very pretty though. After the walking tour, most of the group went up to the castle (which is really a fort, apparently, it’s just become known as the castle). You can either walk or take a cable car up for a few euro. I took the cable car. To be really honest, the castle was a bit of a letdown. You have to pay to get into most individual parts of it, and it’s not all on one ticket, you have to pay separately for each area. There are only a couple of things you can visit for free – the wall, which has a great view out over the city, and a small chapel which has some decoration on the walls. Some, not a lot.

For dinner that night, Kim directed me to a kebab shop, which did really good kebabs (for those who are going there in a week or so, go to the main square, look for McDonalds, the kebab shop’s right before it…. I noticed there were 8 views from Montenegro on my last two posts within a few hours of me putting them up, that can only be Sara’s new group!). Their vege option is just salad, there’s no falafel, but Kim reckons it was really nice. And not only were they good, they were about 3 euro. Laura and Kim like this.

The next day we had an included excursion to Lake Bled, which Tucan organised for us. We went by local bus, and it was only an hour or so away, so we were there reasonably early. Marsha and Cam, Sue and Vince and I all decided to hire bikes and pedal our way around town. We picked them up from the tourist info at the bus stop, and the girl who was working spoke excellent English and was really nice. She let us take the bikes and pay when we got back, so we didn’t have to worry about how long we were gone for, and she talked us through how to get to where we wanted to go and what was good to see, and gave us a map. We decided to all ride out to Vintger Gorge, which was a few kms away, and then do the lake.

So we headed for the gorge. We went along the back roads, but they were still reasonably busy. She’d also told us it was mostly quite flat and easy riding, but we must not be as fit as she is! We had to get off our bikes and walk them on several occasions. On one of those particular occasions, I was behind everyone else, and as I was walking up to them I went to climb on my bike, only to discover one of the pedals was missing. Like, the whole pedal and piece of metal that attached it to the bike had just fallen off as I was walking the bike. Just as I got within shouting distance, the rest of the group all rode off. So I carried on pushing my bike, and a couple of minutes later they realised I wasn’t with them, and all stopped. When I caught them up, Vince went back on his bike and found my pedal, then whipped a roll of duct tape out of his bag (yes, really), and tried to reattach it. He strapped it up pretty good, but it was very oily and I didn’t get very far before it fell off again, even though I wasn’t putting any weight on that leg. So the rest of the way to the gorge, I pushed my bike along the flat and up the hills, and rode it down the hills. Thank god we were almost there anyway.

The gorge was lovely, but again so many tourists. Even though it was the end of the season, there were still just enough people to make it slightly uncomfortable. Just so that you get stuck behind slow people and can’t quite get past until they decide to notice you. However, it was beautiful and the water was just as absolutely clear as what we saw in Croatia. The walk from one end of the gorge to the other took maybe half an hour or so, and then you walk back. At the end there’s a big waterfall, which is worth seeing but because of the angle of the sun I couldn’t get a good photo of it.

There were buses running from the gorge back into Bled, so I jumped on one of those and the driver (who thought the whole thing was hilarious) shoved my bike into the storage compartment. I took it back to the hire place and swapped it for another one. The girl was a bit shocked, she said they’d only had the bike for a couple of weeks, but she was really nice about it and didn’t try to blame me or inflict a surcharge on me or anything. From there I went and rode around the lake, which was gorgeous. If you’ve ever seen a photo of this lake, you’d remember it. There’s an island in the middle with a church on it, and a castle on a hill on the edge of the lake. There’s also the Bled International Rowing Centre, where they held the third part of the World Rowing Cup four weeks before I got there. There were people I met at the start of the tour who told me about sitting on the grass watching it. I saw a couple of guys head out for a training session. I’m so hanging out for a row.

By the time I rode around the lake, stopped a few times, took some photos, and found Marsha and Cameron, we figured it was time to eat again. It was about 330pm, and we’d taken lunch with us to the gorge, but we were starved again. So we returned our bikes (when we eventually managed to find our way back to the right place), went and ate, then got the bus back to Ljubljana. What an awesome day, and what a beautiful and peaceful place.

The following day, we were on our way back to Budapest, to the final leg of our tour.