From Slovenia to Austria

Our last day in Slovenia saw us heading through the Soca (So-cha) River Valley and over Vrsic (Vur-sheech) Pass. We got out of Bohinj via a car train which was really cool though a little freaky! You basically just drive your car onto the train open-air platform and sit in it while you are hurtled through the mountains in a tunnel, then down the valley. Quite a novel experience for sure!

Waiting for the train to leave the platform - not a big barrier between you and off the train!

Heading north through the Soca Valley we first stopped at the little town of Kobarid - front line during World War I - and visited Slap (waterfall) Kozjak, a neat waterfall amongst highly bedded limestone. The Soca Valley overall was a really lovely drive, with great views over the Vrsic Pass looking back into Triglav National Park and Triglav itself.

Slap Kozjak.

The Soca River Valley.

 Dave and Kate near Vrsic Pass.

The end of the day saw us arrive in Lienz, Austria, capitol of the East Tirol Region, where we found a beautiful campground by a lake nestled at the foot of the Lienz Dolomites.

Triglav National Park

Our next 2 days were spent exploring Triglav National Park and the Triglav 7 Lakes Valley hike. We got up early to a pretty awful rainy day and remembered we had forgotten to visit Vintgar (pronounced Veent-gar) Gorge, just out of Bled - something we had been planning to do and since it was rainy, seemed like the perfect thing to visit while we waited for the weather to clear. We'd been keeping an eye on the weather forecast and it was supposed to clear that night with good weather for the next couple of days.

Vintgar Gorge was beautiful - it's a really neat walk on a wooden boardwalk hugging the limestone gorge cliffs with some really amazing clear blue water and wonderful lush forest.

Beautiful Vintgar Gorge.

By the time we drove into Bohinj (Bo-heen) it was still raining quite a lot but after talking to the people in the tourist information we decided to book the hut for the night and head off on our hike with finger's crossed the weather would clear. As it was, the rain did stop it was just a bit damp and cloudy but not cold. It's supposed to take 3 hours 15 to reach the hut - we got there in about 2 hours 45 with a few stops for photographs and catching our breath. It's ridiculously steep! The first part takes you straight up the cliff-face about 700m of elevation climb - whew! Very cool forest though, especially with the swirling mist and we even saw 3 alpine ibex which we kept coming across at various stages up the valley.

The hut (Koca pri Triglavskih Jezerih) at Double Lake has double bed rooms and full board so we ate well even though it's really quite expensive! The next morning I got up early to take some photographs by the lakes - the clouds had all burnt off so it was a beautiful morning and we set of reasonably early to take advantage of that and get higher up the valley. We hiked all the way up to Prehodavci Hut at the very top of the valley, before turning round and walking all the way out back to the car - a good full days effort with amazing limestone alpine scenery and quite a bit of snow!

Dave in the mist.

Dinner in the hut - beer, macaroni, sauerkraut and kransky sausage!

A clear start to the day at Double Lake (Dvojno Jezero).

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Stunning views from Prehodavci Hut.

Dave crossing through some snow.

Logarska Dolina & Bled

Well am a bit behind on these - actually quite a lot behind as we are already back home again! Internet was not as easy to get on as we thought it would be over in Europe. Actually pretty expensive quite a lot of the time or just painfully slow and unreliable - it's really odd which places have good wireless or not!

Anyway, after our couple of nights in Ljubljana we headed north again to Bled via driving through the mountain-ringed valley of Logarska Dolina - a favourite nature getaway for the locals. Very pretty scenery and just nice to get into a different area not really on the tourist trails. We drove the Panoramic Road overlooking the valley, then headed up into the valley itself for a short walk up to the Rinka Waterfall and "Eagle's Nest" hut where we had a nice coffee enjoying the view of the mountains.

 Logarska Dolina from the Panoramic Road.

 The Eagle's Nest hut.

We next headed into the little mountain town of Bled where we would spend the next 2 nights. Bled was really pretty and very relaxing. We spent a whole day not doing much - just wandering around the whole edge of the lake, visiting the castle, eating "cream cake" (a Bled speciality), and reading books. We had 2 very loud thunderstorms also which were quite exciting in a tent! Bled has a world class rowing centre and will be the site for the latest World Rowing Champs held later this year - cool place to row, that's for sure!

Lake Bled from the castle.

Dave eating Bled cream cake - yum!

Ljubljana

Heading north again our next stop for 2 nights was the really beautiful capital city of Slovenia, Ljubljana (Li-oob-li-ana). We had a bit of trouble finding the campground as by this stage had run off our Croatian roadmap so had no idea where the roads were going or what names constituted suburbs of Ljubljana or actual towns! As a consequence, the Ljubljana ring road that we thought we were on turned out to be the expressway north to Munich and we ended up about 30 km north of Ljubljana just before Bled (a town we recognised as we’d planned on staying there in a couple of days time!)! Don’t ask me how we managed to drive 30 km thinking we were on a ring road for a city of just over 200,000....!!! There’s no odometer on the car, ok! :)


Ljubljana has been billed as the next next Prague (after Krakow, Poland) and it’s a statement that’s very appropriate. In fact, we would describe it as something like a mixture of what we imagine Prague and Vienna with a very young population, making for a very vibrant and energetic atmosphere. We spent most of the day wandering around the city, having breakfast by the river, visiting the castle on the hill and generally just watching the people. After a break for dinner back at the campground we headed in again on the local bus to downtown for the evening which was fantastic as a music festival was on, as well as a slalom kayaking competition on the river.

View overlooking Ljubljana from the Castle.

Breakfast along the river front.

The old town streets - Ljubjana has a wonderful network of old cobbled streets, all pedestrian only.

Back in the evening and a music festival, including a stage in the main square.

Slalom kayak competition.

Dusk near the Town Hall.

Crossing into Slovenia - Istria & The Karst

Our journey through Istria started with a side trip through the quaint inland hilltop villages of Hum (pronounced Hoom), Buzet (Boo-zet) and Motovun (Moe-toe-voon). Hum’s claim to fame is that it’s the smallest town in the world (16 people) that still has a church, town hall, and post office. They’re all very pretty but when you see so many little towns with churches everywhere it kinda loses its appeal after a while. Motovun and Buzet did look pretty cool though perched on tops of hills – Motovun in particular stands proud above the local vineyards and is quite striking coming in from a distance.

The little town of Hum.

The town of Motovun from across the vineyards.

Down to the coast again and we spent the night right near the very pretty Venice-inspired town of Rovinj (Ro-veen or Rovingno in Italian). We felt at this stage that we’d really seen the coast as much as we could and so we said goodbye to Croatia and headed north, looking forward to the next stage of our travels, heading into the mountains of Slovenia.

Rovinj from the waterfront.

The Karst region of Slovenia is where the word for eroded limestone landscapes “karst” originated from, obviously! It’s a fairly low hilly region covered with caves, huge sinkholes and dolines and underground rivers. We decided to visit the Skocjan (Skots-yan) Caves, a 2 hour explore through an incredible cave system and underground river. The caverns there were absolutely enormous!

Exiting out of Skocjan Caves - only allowed to take photographs at the end!

We finished off our trip through the Karst by visiting Predjama (Pred-yama) Grad (means Castle or fortified town) – a neat castle set into the limestone cliffs just inland from the very popular Postojna (Post-oi-na) Caves.

Predjama Grad.

Krka, Paklenica & Plitvice Lakes National Parks

The next section of our trip was visiting a bunch of Croatian National Parks. First stop was Krka (Kur-ka) NP, a park that covers the lower reaches of the Krka River. This river contains many travertine (a type of chemical limestone, precipitated out from water after having been dissolved from original biological limestone) formed waterfalls and lakes with the largest one, Skradinski Buk, a great place for swimming. We walked around the park, had lunch, then a swim before heading off north again towards Paklenica (Pak-len-eet-sa) NP.

Dave at Skradinski Buk, Krka NP.

We stayed the night on the coast just below Veliki Paklenica (the larger canyon) heading into the seriously impressive mountain range known as the Velebit. The next morning we headed up into the canyon and watched all the rock climbers scaling the very high limestone cliffs. It’s a really popular place for rock climbing and many international meets and competitions are held here every year. We drove over the Velebit via a gravel road through Mali Alan Pass. Amazing limestone mountain scenery and well worth the side trip!

View of Paklenica NP from behind the town of Vinjerac.

Rock climber in Veliki Paklenica.

Mali Alan through the Velebit.

We arrived at Plitvice Lakes NP (Plitvicka Jezera – Pleet-veech-ka) early afternoon and spent 4.5 hours wandering the whole trail section of the lakes (the lady at the info desk got rather grumpy when we said we wanted to see it all and that it would take us 6-8 hours and we should have been there early morning!). It was really cool – such amazing clear aquamarine water, lush vegetation and neat limestone and travertine formations. We’re a bit overdone on waterfalls now though – so many!

View over the lower section of the Plitvice Lakes.

Kate and waterfall.

Dave and Kate enjoying dinner at Korana Campground, Plitvice Lakes NP.

Leaving Plitvice we headed west towards the northern peninsula of Croatia – the heavily Italian influenced Istria. Our route took us through some funny back roads again. Warning – these are NOT shortcuts, even if they look shorter! Croatian roads are very irregular – on the maps they have them colour coded for how major they are. Typically, for the single lane each way road red is the biggest, orange next, then yellow, then white are the real local small roads. Unfortunately, while red is reliable, orange is a bit dodgy and yellow is downright misleading. We’ve had some yellow roads as good as a red road, then some orange roads that were worse than a local white road! The “orange” road we followed leading out of Plitvice wound its way through a lush pretty land-mined region of ruins and abandoned bullet-ridden Serbian villages (the region around the lakes was part of the front line during the war). Actually a really lovely drive but quite tiring when it goes down to one lane and lots of potholes!

The Adriatic - Peljesac Peninsula, Korcula & Split

Back in Croatia we headed out along the Peljesac (pronounced Pel-yeh-shats) Peninsula with the idea of catching the car ferry to the island of Korcula (Kor-chu-la) for a couple of nights. The Peljesac Peninsula and Korcula are locally famous for their vineyards and there are certainly a lot of them! We even got to try some – a white from Peljesac and a red from the town of Smokvica (Smok-veet-sa) on Korcula. The red was very nice but the white was a bit too sweet. Can’t remember the grape varieties but neither were ones we’d heard before! We first got on to the peninsula at the little walled town of Ston. The town was heavily fortified some time in the past to protect the salt mines when salt was worth more than gold or silver. The peninsula was a lot more mountainous than we’d thought so it was a slow, windy but pleasant drive through to Orebic (O-re-beech) then onto the ferry.

The town of Ston.

Leaving Orebic on the ferry.

We spent a night near Korcula town near the southern end of the island, then the second night near Vela Luka at the far northern end. That first night we headed in from thee camping ground to the old town (Stari Grad means old town) and had dinner and beer overlooking the water. Korcula is a quaint little town that was on a little island and is similar to Dubrovnik except it was built on a hill with a church at the top and all the streets are designed wonky and off-set to cut out the windy sea breezes that they get a lot of.

Korcula shore front at sunset.

The next full day was spent taking our time getting to Vela Luka. We spent a good 3 or 4 hours at a gorgeous beach on the south-western side of the island called Pupnatska Luka (Poop-nat-ska Loo-ka) just swimming, eating lunch and generally sitting on the beach reading.

Pupnatska Luka.

We had a bit of trouble trying to get to the campground in Vela Luka as they were doing road works and the roads we needed to go on were closed. They’re not good at all with signposts or helpful detours or anything like that over here – if you don’t already know where you are going, then tough! We did get there in the end though (it took us about 40 mins and the next morning going back once we knew where we were going only took 5-10 mins!) and the man who ran the campground was very kind. He had heard of all the earthquakes in Christchurch would you believe. Now’s the time to mention the ants – there were at least 5 species at that campground. This country is overrun with ants! I (Kate) think I’m getting use to them now but I’ve never been keen on ants at all – rather scared of them actually! I have to say though the really big black ones are quite cool – they cut up bits of straw and grass and put them in a pile for seemingly no real reason :) The locals seem to really like the ants – at least the man at our campground sounded very fond of them! “nature’s great filters” he said – he’s totally right but I’m not sure that makes them any more loveable!

We caught the ferry at 6.15 am the next morning for a 2.5 hour trip through to Split, passing close to the coast of the island of Hvar. We then spent a couple of hours exploring the Diocletians Palace on the waterfront before heading north again to Krka National Park.

The underground cellers of the palace.

Dave in front of the cathedral at the centre of the palace.

Bosnia & Herzegovina

We left Dubrovnik and Croatia relatively early in the morning and headed inland via a scenic back road into Herzegovina (the southern province of Bosnia & Herzegovina). We’re not entirely sure what the difference is between Croatia and Bosnia but it certainly did feel and look different. The best we can come up with is a feeling of “rustic” to describe the country and we mean that in the best possible way! It‘s is a truly fascinating country and one we both really loved. Lots of very green countryside (seems to be where smoke bushes come from!), amazingly friendly locals, little villages, lots of wonderful fruit and veges, stone roofs and walls and through it all the reminders of the recent wars with many abandoned villages and ruins, shrapnel and bullet holes and signs for land mines. This country and the inland parts of Croatia certainly leave a distinct impression – it’s an odd feeling – you can’t really imagine what it would have been like for the people here less than 20 years ago and yet it’s amazingly uplifting as to how they have recovered from tragedy. Mostar itself is the pinnacle of tribute to that and what we saw there gave us hope about what we may see in Christchurch in years to come. Ljubljana in Slovenia also suffered a devastating earthquake in the 1895 and again it was so very uplifting to see how beautiful it is today – but that’s for another blog entry!

Not long after the border we entered the town of Trebinje (pronounced Tre-been-yeh) with a lovely old walled town centre and church on a hill. Actually, lovely old towns with churches on hills are extremely common over in this part of the world but as this was our first one we very much enjoyed it! All the towns also seem to have really excellent produce markets which are great to wander in. 

Market in Trebinje.

Trebinje from across the local vineyards.

Leaving Trebinje we headed north towards Mostar through the very beautiful and wild countryside and some other very lovely towns – Ljubinje (Lyoo-bin-yeh) and Stolac (Sto-lats) – before we headed to Blagaj (Bla-gai) and the Buna resurgence and Monastery. This is all limestone country for miles around this part of Europe so there are many caves, sinkholes, rocky outcrops and underground rivers.

Turkish Monastery at the Buna resurgence, Blagaj.

We had booked in at a little B&B called Shangri La right near the famous Stari Most (Old Bridge) of Mostar. We would thoroughly recommend it- very good value (50 euro), perfect location, amazingly friendly hosts, clean rooms with a great view and all you can eat breakfast with personal service. Our accommodation was right next to an impressive old building that had been left as is after the war. Quite a number of buildings have been left in ruins following the war – in fact, many buildings have been redone but with parts left in ruins and with bullet holes all over them. We guess it’s part of the their way of remembering and it’s actually very striking and not depressing as you might think. The Stari Most is absolutely beautiful – so glad they restored it. We spent the evening wandering around the old town and along the river. The water is a stunning aquamarine. There are many mosques in Mostar as it is the cross-roads of many different cultures and religions (one of the main reasons the war was so violent here) but not many calls to prayer (not like we heard in Egypt and Jordan anyway!).

The next morning we headed off again back into Croatia and the coast.


View over Mostar from Stari Most.

The war scarred buidling just outside our accomodation.

The UNESCO heritage Stari Most.

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

Our following day was spent on a full day trip to Montenegro. We left Dubrovnik early (before 7 am) as had read that the border between Croatia and Montenegro can take quite some time as it’s a reasonably popular trip from Dubrovnik. Actually there was no one there both times we crossed so very easy! We made our way into the long Bay of Kotor and drove along the shore front the whole way, stopping quite a few times to admire the impressive views of the steep fiord mountains and clear water. We got about half way around the head of the bay and coming into the town of Perast when we spotted a bakery (called pekara over here – we’ve developed quite a fondness for their breads and pastries!). Jumped out of the car ready to head over, but...no euro! We had a whole roll of euros that had been in with our passports at the border crossing. Turns out Kate in the rush had stuffed them in her pocket and then forgot about it. Alas it was no longer in the pocket or anywhere in the car :( Dave decided it was worth driving back as it hadn’t taken us that long to drive around the coast as it was quite a lot of money. We drove right back to our first viewpoint stop outside the entrance to the fiord where the ferries cross. No money there. On to the next stop, then the 3rd stop, then the forth stop (did we really stop that much?!). Finally at the 5th stop Kate spotted the roll lying neatly on the ground undisturbed – amazing! Turns out that stop was quite near the bakery – we should have stopped there first!


After that little interlude the tour buses had started to catch up so we headed into the very quaint little seaside town of Perast with 5 tour buses. Fortunately the occupants all headed out to the little islands just offshore (the main attractions of this town) so we were able to wander along the town shore front relatively all to ourselves.

Dave in Perast.

Church in the town of Kotor.

Kotor itself is situated at the head of the fiord and has a magnificent walled fortress perched on the steep slopes behind a very pretty walled town. It was very busy by this stage so we wandered the town but then headed fairly quickly up the back and onto the walls and up to the fortress. It was the middle of the day by this point so got extremely hot – probably not the smartest thing to be doing in that heat but the breeze was cool up the top and the views were amazing. We had lunch under the shade of a tree just above the church then on to the very top where we got this view:

View from the fortress overlooking the town and Bay of Kotor.

To finish the day, we headed into the tunnel behind Kotor and through the other side back towards the main coast, then caught a car ferry back across to where we had first come in, then back through the border.

Dubrovnik

We spent a full day exploring the old town (Stari Grad) of Dubrovnik. We started early leaving before 7 am to beat the tour groups and cruise ships - was a really good idea as we pretty much had the walled town to ourselves for the first couple of hours. Walking the cobbled streets early morning was wonderful and then when the gates opened at 8 am we were straight up on the walls of the city do walk the full loop. This was another good idea - again beating the crowds but also beating the heat! Amazing views all the way around the walls over the sea and across the red tiled roofs.

 Walking the streets, early morning.

Views over the old city from the walls.

Midday saw us breaking for a swim from under the walls at the harbour front which was much needed in the heat. Such amazing clear water also. In the afternoon we headed up Mt Srd (pronounced sort of like Surdj) on the cable car to enjoy fine views of the coast and a welcome fresh breeze. Back down again we headed to the old fortress around one bay north of the city.

Dave on Mt Srd looking over Dubrovnik.