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.