I FEEL sLOVEnia

April travels with Megan Part 3: Slovenia 

We made a lot of jokes about Slovenia as the promised land… people will probably hug us as soon as we get off the train clucking “Oh I know where you’ve been”… we’ll cross the border and a Pegasus will fly across a rainbow in the sky etc etc. 

Triple Bridge, Ljubljana

But here’s the thing, it IS a wonderful magical land of happy friendly English speaking people, where you feel nothing but love and warm happy feelings about your life. Outside of my adopted “I wish” homeland of France, it may be my favorite country I have ever visited. In fact, Slovenia’s slogan is I FEEL sLOVEnia. How darling is that? It’s true! You DO feel love there! 

We had ½ day and 1 night in their capitol Ljubljana (pronounce the j’s like y’s and your life is a lot simpler). We walked through the old town and marveled at the pretty architecture. We were stopped outside an Argentinean restaurant where a young man attempted to persuade us to eat there. When we explained it was our first night and we wanted to eat traditional Slovenian he got his friend to translate “we are having a big party here later tonight, come back and you can eat and drink whatever you like!” Then, I kid you not, he gave us a hug and his friend gave us les bises, and they didn’t even try to steal anything from us during the whole exchange. Our joke “Slovenia is so lovely, people just hug strangers on the street to make them feel welcome” turned out to be reality. That evening we had our first hot meal in 3 days and a few glasses of wine. In the film version of our adventures, our mothers were cheering. 

Hungarian Goulash.

 Slovenia is a tiny little country, so if you situate yourself in Ljubljana (dead center) day trips are quite simple. The following morning we checked out of our campsite/hotel and when the man at the desk realized we would miss the complimentary breakfast, he pulled out two packed lunches and asked us if we wanted them. Uhm yes, kindest people on earth, we would love those lunches. Then his coworker, who had helped us out the night before when we had a bit of a problem, offered to take us into town to the train station. Uhm yes, kindest people on earth, thank you for the lift. 

Dragon Babies

We took a bus for about 1hour to Postojnska Jama and Predjama Castle. Postojnska Jama is a massive cave system, and while a bit touristy, thoroughly enjoyable. We felt it worth every penny of what we paid for the tour. You start out on this little train like you are entering Gringotts to get your wizard gold for Hogwarts. Then you have an hour walking tour of incredible awesome stalagmites and stalactites, ending with an exhibit of blind dragon spawn cave creatures, and a final train ride back to the surface. We then got a taxi the 11km to Predjama Castle (again, our mom’s were cheering for our decision not to hitchhike as is recommended by Rick Steves). 

Spaghetti Hall, because these baby stalactites look like pasta

 Predjama Castle makes my list of one of the Top 5 most Impressive Unbelievable Things I Have Ever Seen in the Entire World. It’s a castle built into a cliff with an extensive cave system underneath. The knight that once lived there was under siege for over a year… instead of dying from starvation as his castle was surrounded he simply used a route within the caves out to a neighboring town, and then returned. He was finally killed when a money-hungry servant signaled to the enemy as the knight went to an exterior portion of the castle to do his business. A cannon was fired into his bathroom and that was that. Now you can scramble all over the castle enjoying the juxtaposition of cliff/cave and living quarters. 

Photo Credit: Megan

 Back on a bus to Ljubljana, where we picked up our packs from the convenient and cheap luggage storage at the train station and hopped on a bus up to Lake Bled for two nights of blissful camping. 1½ hours later we are kindly dropped off at an Alpine Lake surrounded by snow capped mountains, swans, clear blue water, pletna boats… is this real life?

Photo Credit: Megan

 It started sprinkling when we arrived at our campsite and the ever so kind Slovenian working the front desk asked us if we needed a bigger umbrella to set up our site. At dinner that night, I not only got to eat trout with its head still on that I am almost certain came from the very lake I was currently looking at, but we were also treated to free blueberry mead “just to warm you girls up”. Slovenia is seriously home to the nicest people in the world. 

 

Our full day in Bled involved morning cappuccinos on the terrace near the lake, a leisurely stroll, a hike up to a viewpoint near the castle, traditional Slovenia desserts and savory lunchtime pastries, Cockta (the communist era version of Coca-Cola),a bottle of wine said to have healing properties, and a rowboat to an enchanted island where if you ring the church bell 3x it’s said that all your wishes will come true. Quite frankly I'm not sure the people of Slovenia even have any wishes, because they live in the greatest place in the world. We weren’t really ready to leave… ever. 

 

But back to Ljubljana we went for a day of exploration before catching an overnight train to Munich, Germany and then another train onto to Paris, where flights and trains back to the real world were awaiting us. We got rid of all our leftover Croatian Kuna coins making wishes in various fountains throughout the day. My favorite sites in Ljubljana were:

     1.       The Dragon Bridge (a dragon is said to have been slayed near the city so it’s the city mascot. I have no doubt that if magical creatures do/did exist, it was in Slovenia).

    2.       The Library, the only building damaged during WWII from a plane crash. The Slovenians didn’t want to lose their book collection and formed a human chain to save their precious books from the flames. The door handle to enter the library is shaped like a Pegasus head... to soar you into enlightenment. You enchanting little beautiful darling place Slovenia you.

Before our late night train we enjoyed a few communist-era Slovenian Beers and said Hvala for a truly wonderful end of our trip…

Which turned out wasn’t the end of our trip at all, since our overnight train didn’t arrive on time to Munich, making us miss our connection to Paris, making us miss our flights/trains home. It says a lot about a friendship when you can spend 2 straight weeks together, go through a mini transportation crisis, spend the night drinking beers from McDonalds in the Paris airport and pushing chairs together to make a “fort” to sleep in, but still be terribly sad to have to say goodbye the following morning. Nonstop adventures since the ages of Four and Five. 

The best part about Croatia was the Slaps

April Travels with Megan Part 2: Croatia

 

This fountain depicts an orgy

There’s a lot you could say about Zagreb, Croatia… but what I’ll say here is my impression: it’s apparent there was a war there about, oh 20 years ago. They have a lot of growing still to do. The thing about Zagreb is that on a 10 minute bus ride throughout the city we saw multiple people just peeing outside, kind of like everyone was camping… but in the capitol. People speak English, but gruffly and with a lot of eye rolling and shrugs. Based on my limited experiences, I’m not sure people smile in Croatia. They use KUNA, instead of the euro, which involved far more math than this linguistical mind could really handle… and there are about a million Kuna involved in every transaction (when I exchanged 56kuna for euro in Slovenia I received 6 euro). We went to the market because fresh food is neat in any country and Rick Steve’s guidebook took us on a nice little walk through a small part of town. We also saw this odd orgy fountain in front of the National Theatre. Our one day was plenty in Zagreb, and I had no problem leaving the nightlife there a mystery to instead venture to the entire reason we came to Croatia, Plitvice Lakes National Park. 

Well. Someone hearts Zagreb. It's just not us

When it comes to transportation, here’s how things work in Croatia… not very well. We had to get a bus from Zagreb to Plitvice, costing us approximately 10 euro I believe, so like 85Kuna, add on the unforeseen 7Kuna charge (like $1.20) for us to carry a big bag onto the bus. (3 currencies in one sentence, is your head spinning yet? You can imagine trying to think in Kuna, Dollars, and Euro for a few days. Yikes.) We told the driver's co-pilot where we needed to go and he reassured us that he would tell us when it was time for us to get off the bus. It conveniently started raining as we were dropped off at a tiny hut in the middle of nowhere with the instructions “You go here”. We braved the question “umm where is our campground” and were pointed in a general direction after which we did indeed find a sign for Camp Korana. 

You Go Here.

 One of our favorite games throughout the entire trip was to stop and think, if our parents and our significant others were watching this adventure as a film, what would they be screaming at the tv right now?

Thankfully we had the foresight to purchase at least some bread, cheese, and wine when we were in Zagreb.  After setting up camp in the pouring rain we enjoyed our meal and a game of travel battleship before tying up our plastic food bag tightly and throwing it as far as possible away from our tent into the “woods” because I was afraid of bears (there is one depicted on the Plitvice Lakes National Park sign). A bit of research from le boy assured us that while brown bears exist in Plitvice Lakes National Park, they are rare and instead of dangerous are rather interesting to see. In my opinion a bear is a bear, whether rare or not, and I was not sleeping with any kind of food near me if there was the slight possibility of one of those interesting beasts paying us a visit. (The only wildlife we saw the entire time was some cats. Our food bag went untouched every night.)

It is possible this bottle instead says poison. We have no idea.

 The next morning proved to be yet another small transportation struggle to get from our campground into the actual National Park. We were told by the campground staff that a shuttle would arrive, surprise surprise at the little hut out front on the road and that we were to flag it down and it would stop and take us to the park. We accidently flagged down a bus instead that was not the park shuttle, they told us they would drop us off at the park, but then I got nervous and saw a sign for the parks and after a 2 minute ride determined that we should get off the bus. There we realized we were indeed not yet at the park and still had about 9km to go. We found a dog and played for awhile just to regain some confidence and then decided just to walk it until we saw the park shuttle. A small car with the national parks logo drove past after about maybe ½ hour of walking, so we screamed and jumped up and down and ran after it, they stopped, crammed us into the front seat and laughed a lot at Megan who was wearing sandals, telling her with pointing and gestures that she would only have 2 toes left after the end of the day. 

Here is why this entire saga was worthwhile. You walk for maybe about three minutes into the park and this is your view. Stunning. We spent the day exploring about 7000 waterfalls and a small cave, hiking and generally enjoying the unbelievable beauty we were surrounded by. 

Photo Credit to Megan

 Only about 3 busses drove past us before one picked us up that evening to drop us off at our campground. I’m fairly certain the man who we paid for the tickets just made up a number for the cost of our journey, which was like $2USD. 

Now that we had seen Plitvice we were ready to peace out of Croatia. Another dinner of bread, cheese and wine straight from the bottle and we set an alarm to catch the bus from our hut at 6:40am (another wasn’t coming until 10ish). These busses that we had to flag down from the side of the road were all coming from Split, in the south of Croatia and traveling all the way to Zagreb. I’m fairly certain this is the only road in Croatia. If the bus is full it simply doesn’t stop. We finally got onto a bus at about 7:20am and settled in for the winding ride back to Zagreb, where we made the short but sketchy trek to the train station and treated ourselves to a beer at 11am before getting onto a train to take us to Slovenia… 

Wondering about the post title? Waterfall in Croatian = Slap