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.

Swiss Alps Hiking: Brisen

To hike up the Brisen, we started in Wolfenschiessen, which is about a 10-minute drive from Engelberg (where we were staying). We first took a cable car up from Dallenwil to Niederrickenbach, then we walked a 30-minute more-or-less flat path to Alpboden where we took a chair lift up to Haldigrat. This is where we started hiking up to the Brisen summit.

This hike consists of walking along a long ridge (2km), up 500m of ascent, with a steep dropoff on both sides of the trail. The trail was narrow, most of the time only wide enough for a single person, and it was steep with loose rocks that made you have to watch every. single. step. that you took. After the first few ridges, we debated turning around but Martin soldiered on and summited while I only made it halfway up the last ridge before the summit. I was too nervous about going back down the trail to make it all the way up.

All that being said, the views from this hike were amazing. We had lake Lucerne and the Rigi on one side, Titlis on another, with panoramic views of all of the peaks in central Switzerland from the summit.

Here's a picture of the whole hike, taken from our walk from Niederrickenbach to Alpboden between the cable car and the chairlift we took to start the hike. We hiked over the three wavy ridges on the right side of the photo and summited the high peak towards the middle of the range.



A few pictures of the views we had on the way up:



And some pictures of how steep the trail and dropoffs were. In the first picture below the peak in the top left is the Brisen.



Some views from the top:



On the way back down ... the trail was even scarier when going downhill.



Taking a break from worrying about falling to my death! The rock face behind me actually had a chunk break off and fall while I was sitting here, which was pretty exciting.



Naturally, people come up here and basically run off the cliff to paraglide. Definitely not my cup of tea.



Martin enjoying some coffee schnapps from the Haldigrat restaurant after we had finished the hike. Note the chair lift operating behind him with the box in place of the usual chair. We rode down in that and it was a fun time. Mostly just sporty trying to get in and out of it.