Slovenia: Bled and the Vintgar Gorge

On our final day in Slovenia, we joined up with our tour guide, George, to visit Lake Bled, Bled Castle, and the Vintgar Gorge. Unfortunately, the weather was not very nice throughout the entire weekend and this day started out no different. It was incredibly foggy, as you can see in the picture below. Here dad is sitting up at the castle and he should have a view of the lake - but all you see is white.



Slowly, the fog began to lift. First, we could see the hills on the other side of the lake and, almost an hour later, the little island in the middle of the lake (Slovenia's only island!) started to come out of the fog:



Meanwhile, on the other side of the castle, there was almost no fog (it was just hanging out over the lake) so we got a nice shot of the Alps.



To allow the fog to fully clear before returning to Lake Bled, we passed a few hours at Vintgar Gorge, which is a 50-100m deep, 1-mile long gorge near Lake Bled. It has wooden walkways lining most of it (a well-kept trail after the wooden walkway ends), and has been open to the public since 1893. It's a really beautiful walk down (and back) the gorge to the final waterfall where the gorge ends. Below are some pictures from our walk. We hit the fall colors just right, which made it extra special.



After walking through the gorge, we ate lunch at the restaurant at the top of the gorge. I'm not sure what its name was, but the food was good. Nothing spectacular, but a good place to eat if you're hungry after the walk. Their potato salad is delicious.

After lunch, we drove back to Bled and stopped at a few places around the lake to take a few scenic pictures of the lake, surrounding mountains, Bled castle high on the hills, and the island in the middle of the lake. You can either hire a boat to take you out to the island (14 euros per person, so quite steep), or you can rent a boat and row yourself out to it. We did neither of these, as we didn't feel the view from the island would be any more spectacular than the view from shore. Plus we didn't want to spend the money to take the boat, and our guide was insisting on rowing us there himself if we hired a rowboat, which we weren't excited about.

Anyway, here are some of the views of the island in the lake. The first one also has the castle in it, up on the hill just to the right of the church on the island in the picture.



And views of Bled Castle up on the hill from various angles:



After taking some pictures, we stopped at a restaurant where they serve the famous Bled Cream Cake. It was delicious! The service at the restaurant left a lot to be desired, but the cake was worth it. The picture below doesn't show the cake very well, but it's the only picture we took. The castle is in the background!



After eating all that cream and sugar, we then went for a walk around the lake. We didn't go all the way around because by then it was getting quite late and the sun was setting, but it would be easy to walk all the way around. The entire way is a paved trail that is wide and nearly flat and it's only about 4 miles around the entire lake. With the fall colors, it was one of the best parts of the day! I would imagine walking around the lake is quite crowded in the summer though, as when we did it there were quite a few people but I wouldn't say it was crowded. In the summer, however, it may be unbearably crowded on a nice afternoon.

Slovenia: Ljubljana

I have to start by saying that I loved Ljubljana. I'm seriously looking into the possibility of getting Martin transferred there so we can move there! It was somewhat reminiscent of Zürich with the Alps visible in the distance, a river bisecting the city, and tons of cute streets lined with restaurants and shops. Oh, and the fog.

Ljubljana was named as Europe's greenest city in 2016 and it's easy to see why. Almost the entire city is pedestrian-only. It was really nice to walk everywhere and almost never see a car or have to wait for traffic before crossing a street.

We wandered around the city a bit the first day we arrived but we saved the main touring events for the full day we planned to spend in Ljubljana. On this single day we went for an early morning walk around town and through the Tivoli Park, we did some shopping, we partook in the free city walking tour, we wandered up to the castle, and of course we found some good restaurants for lunch and dinner. It was a busy day but we definitely saw most of what Ljubljana has to offer throughout the day.

We started out with a wander through Tivoli Park, where I only took a single picture (below). Part of the park contains wide trails surrounded by manicured lawns and the rest of it consists of trails in the forest to the northwest of the park, including a good-sized hill you can hike up. This is a solid amount of green space to find in a city and I could have spent a lot more time walking there.



During our walk, we were distracted by an event occurring in Congress Square. There were a bunch of people on horseback in red coats followed by a carriage containing some important-looking men, plus a marching band and several hundred men in tuxes with white gloves standing by. There was almost nobody watching this event though so it couldn't have been anything too important. I'm still not sure what this ceremony was all about. We asked our walking tour guide what it was and she had no idea but she said anything that happens in Ljubljana happens on this square - including things like beach volleyball tournaments where they fill the entire square with sand. Congress square is enormous, all paved and pedestrian-only. Here's a picture of the square (with the castle in the background!):



And some pictures of the ceremony:



The white building in the background of the picture above right is part of the university of Ljubljana. It used to be an important government building but now it's just the university.

Next up was our walking tour. This tour is daily @11am, free (but they ask for tips on the end based on how much you feel like giving), takes 2-2.5 hours, and is very informative. Below are some pictures from around Ljubljana. I'm not going to go into all the history we learned on the tour because I'll ramble on for paragraphs. I'll instead focus on how beautiful the city is!

Side note, the dragon is a symbol of Ljubljana. There are several conflicting stories of how the dragon relates to Ljubljana. One belief is that Jason and the Argonauts traveled through Slovenia while fleeing with the stolen golden fleece. While near the location of present-day Ljubljana, they encountered a great marsh dragon (that had been terrorizing local citizens for years) that Jason killed. Then some of Jason's friends started a settlement that eventually became Ljubljana many years later.



Here are some more pictures from around town, including a few of the river Ljubljanica that runs through the city.



After the tour we had lunch at Paninoteka, which is a small place, perfect for lunch, and it had great pasta dishes and soup (just what we needed after being outdoors in the cold all morning). Dad and Martin had some irish coffee that was more of a dessert than a drink it seemed:



And, finally, we walked up to the castle. It's a very short - but steep - walk. Here I am, taking a break:



There isn't much to see within the castle itself. There are a few restaurants and a museum (that tells about Slovenian history, not the castle's history). There isn't really an "inside" to the castle that you can tour through. Below are some fall colors on the castle:



We really just walked to the castle to get a good view. In order to get good views, you have to pay to climb to the top of the bell tower. They kind of rip you off for this, but I wanted to get the view of the city and see some Alps! You can just barely see a few snowy peaks breaking through the line of clouds in the distance in the pictures below.



In this view, you can see Congress Square (the enormous stone rectangle towards the left of the picture where the city holds all of its events), and you can also see the big hill that is part of Tivoli Park, which includes the entire first hill seen in the picture:



In celebration of being named Europe's Greenest City 2016, all the bridges and the castle are lit up in green at night. The picture below is blurry, but you get the idea:



And here is a view from our hotel room at sunset. We stayed at the Lesar Hotel Angel, which is a very nice hotel. Our rooms were big and clean, breakfast was good, staff were friendly and helpful, and there was a nice cozy fireplace where we warmed up in the late afternoons after a long day of touring around. We had a few small complaints, mainly my shower didn't always work properly and my dad's toiletries and coffee weren't replenished when he ran out but they were minor things and I really liked this hotel overall.



Just putting this here, one of the wines we had that we enjoyed! We had this at "As Aperitivo", where we ate on our final night. The food (and obviously drinks) were all fantastic. Try the vegetarian pad thai there, and go for cocktails too! They have a big cocktail menu.

Slovenia: Skocjan Cave, Predjama Castle, and the Coast

It just so happened that the day we flew into Slovenia it poured rain all day ... and all night that night. We did, however, manage to have two great meals in Ljubljana on this first day. Really, the restaurant scene in Ljubljana is impressive. There were so many places to choose from, and so many seemed popular. We have to go back just to hit all the restaurants we didn't get to. Anyway, for lunch, we wandered into Julija where we had fresh handmade pasta dishes and really fresh salads and soups for lunch. All the food was excellent, the service was attentive and helpful, and the atmosphere was cozy. Highly recommend. For dinner, I had made reservations at Manna just based on tripadvisor recs. Here we're pretty sure the owner himself waited on us for most of our meal and he was very friendly and informative. The food was all excellent - dad got the pig cheeks! Mostly traditional Slovenian food here, with almost no veggie options though I think you could request something veggie and they'd make something for you. Dessert was also excellent. :)

The next morning we woke up to a cloudy day and so we decided to visit caves and castles that day (Skocjan caves and Predjama castle). The rain also made it perfect to visit the Skocjan caves the following day because the river that flows through the caves was at an impressive height from all the rain.

We hired a private tour guide, George, via www.slovenia-private-tours.com, and that's how we saw most of the sites in Slovenia. He drove us wherever we wanted to go, plus he suggested other places we might enjoy that were nearby to the sites we requested.

Our first stop of the day, the Skocjan caves, are a UNESCO World Heritage site. They contain one of the largest underground canyons in the world and you get to walk far above the Reka River as it flows through the cave. It was atmospheric with only a few lights outlining the walkway and the river raging far below. At one point you walk over a narrow bridge where the river is raging 45 meters below your feet. Unfortunately, pictures are not allowed anywhere in the caves. :( So I don't have anything to show you. But, TRUST ME, this is worthy of a stop if you're ever in Slovenia!

These first few pictures are from a lookout point above Skocjan caves, where the Reka River exits.



Some trees on our walk down to the entrance of the caves:



The two blurry pictures I took at the exit of the cave tour. These caves are enormous.



Dad and I standing outside of the exit of the caves.



After leaving Skocjan, we drove out towards the coast because it looked like the sun was coming out! And we wanted to enjoy some sunshine after having only clouds and rain for the first 24 hours we'd been in the country. First, George drove us to an overlook point where we could view more or less the entire Slovenian coast (all 47km of it), plus some of the Italian coast (the town of Trieste is on the right in the photo, I believe).



We then drove down into the town of Koper, where we had lunch at a winery, Vinakoper (I wanted to taste some Slovenian wines, are you surprised?). Below on the left are two of the wines we tried, both were okay but not spectacular. We then tried two more that we liked better, shown on the right.



The food here was amazing. The menu consisted of maybe 6 different dishes that you could order as starters or main course - they were what had been prepared that day. It was like stopping by a friend's house for a meal with just a few options. I enjoyed some broccoli soup followed by this delicious pasta with shrimp and artichokes with a creamy red sauce. Martin also had some pasta in a cream sauce with truffles and seriously it was one of the best things I've ever eaten. And the portions were huge. The pic below is what dad had - a plate of pork, more or less. Sorry I was so busy eating and enjoying my dishes that I forgot to take pictures... definitely stop here for lunch if you can!



After finishing our big lunch, we wandered around Koper for a bit. This is a picture of one of the narrow streets there, lined with shops. It was really cute.



Next we drove to Predjama castle, which is the castle built into a cave. We grabbed some audio guides and did the tour inside the castle. It was originally built in the 13th century and its famous storyline is that a knight named Erazem lived there in the 15th century. He got into trouble with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and had to hole up in the castle for over a year. During this year, he used a passageway through the caves behind the castle to visit a neighboring town to get supplies. The story goes he grabbed a lot of cherries and brought them back to the castle and threw them at the soldiers outside the castle attempting to kill him. Eventually they succeeded in killing him by shooting a cannonball into the toilet when he was in there, which was perched on an outside corner of the castle.

You can see the tunnel that Erazem used through the caves and it is steep and dangerous and requires rock climbing in spots. Impressive that he used it often.

Anyway, here are some pictures of us from outside the castle - the lighting was perfect for photos there.



Here is Martin going down some very steep, very slippery stairs in the castle.



Looking out through the small opening in the top of the cave that's behind the castle. The inhabitants of the castle could live in the caves if they had to, and pull up a drawbridge inside the castle so that nobody could reach the caves, should the castle have been broken into.



After the castle we headed back to our base in Ljubljana. We didn't have any dinner reservations, tried the tapas bar (TaBar) to no avail, and eventually found seats at Zlata Ribica, which was a really good find. Dad had some tuna, I had a caprese salad, and Martin got some salad that only had iceberg lettuce in it - so don't get a salad there! But everything else was really good. The table behind us all ordered huge steaks and they seemed really happy with those too.