Lake Bled, Slovenia

12 May - Day 58

Today we left Padova and Italy for Bled, in Slovenia. The drive took about 3 hours. The Slovenians use a toll system that my dad wants me to talk about called the Vignette, which is sticker you buy and stick on your windscreen instead of paying tolls on the highway, which means that we don't have to fumble around with coins and notes when we drive through the gates as they photograph your car as you pass.

We reached Bled around lunchtime and ate at a bar/cafe on the side of the hockey stadium. Afterwards we took a walk around the town. Bled has a huge lake so we strolled around that.

It's full of swans, geese and ducks, with boatmen offering boat rides on the water. The town is surrounded by pretty hills, some of which have pretty castles on them.

Having explored the town a bit, we decided to head to our hotel. I plugged the address into the GPS and it gave us a distance of about 60km. This was odd because Italy is closer than that. However, the GPS hadn't failed us too catastrophically yet so we went along with it. About ten minutes into the drive, we remembered we were almost out of fuel so we turned back to Bled which turned out to be extremely fortunate as we later found out.

All fueled up, we restarted the drive. We drove and drove for ages, leaving Bled, passing through several small villages, the Triglav national park, climbing up to over 1000m above sea level, coming back down again and eventually returning to Bled after over an hour of driving.

We found the area where our apartment and got really confused but managed to find it. After we parked, we put central Bled back into the GPS to see if there was a shorter route. There was. We were only 3 kilometers away.

Taking our newfound route back into town, we went to the 3glav outdoor adventure office to pick up our tickets for the Emerald River tour the next day. As we left the office, it started raining torrentially. We got really wet and then went home.

13 May - Day 59

Today was an early start for our emerald river tour. We got picked up at 8.15 by our guide, Marteus. There were two couples who were also on the trip: Gina and Frazier from Australia and Shannon and Todd from the States.

We drove through the Slovenian countryside to our first stop, a lake. Here, there was a statue of the golden horn which is a sort of deer with golden horns (we were told that they thought long and hard to come up with that name).

Afterwards, we drove up the mountain Vršič (don't ask me how to pronounce that) taking 24 hairpin turns and climbing up 1611m. We parked the van and went for a small hike through the mountains.

Next stop was a slightly treacherous climb along the rocky edge of a waterfall/river-type deal:

The drive was regularly punctuated by stops at really nice riversides and gorges.

After lunch, it was time for the rafting. We all squeezed into wetsuits and carried the boats down to the water. We learnt our commands of 'forward', 'backwards', 'balsa (rest) and 'high five' from our friendly rafting guide. This part of the day was very fun and there were great views of the country from the river. The route was 10km long and took an hour and a half, with a coupe of rest stops and some splash battles with a group of Italians when they paddled too close.

After drying off, we headed to another hillside where there was another waterfall, a bridge and more river as well as some of the remaining trenches from the first world war.

We also went to an impressive Italian war memorial which had an awesome view of the area.

 

Next, we drove down to the bridge jump. I was the only one willing to make the 10 metre jump into the river below, which turned out not to be the best decision I made that day because it was pretty freaky and the water was freeeeezing.

 

Then it was time for our van to catch the train. On the way, our guide played us some Slovenian country music through the stereo, so dad made what Gina declared to be the joke of the day by dubbing the song as 'country & eastern'. Ha.

 

The van got parked on a train carriage and we went for a 40 minute ride on a 100 year old train track, passing through tunnels as short as 50 metres and as long as 6120 metres and 40 centimeters.

We then visited one more lake before being dropped off back home, ending our 12 hour long day.