B and I checked out of our hostel in Austria, headed to the Südbahnhof, and hopped on a train headed for Slovenia. This has to have been the best train ride of the trip - it was on a Wednesday morning, and the train was pretty well empty, so we had an entire compartment to ourselves for most of the trip. (Sweet!) And the trip itself was amazing, with great views of the Julian alps, and winding around and through mountains until we crossed the border into Slovenia. One train change in Maribor later, and we were on our way to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.
Ljubljana is really not a very big place, with a population of only about 270,000 people, so we felt like we got to see quite a bit of it in a rather short period of time. Our hostel was right next to the Dragon Bridge, which itself is a bit of a landmark. Unfortunately, it also rained both days we were there, which I think stopped us from exploring the city more. The first day, we went up to Ljubljana castle, which we thought would be a bit more interesting (of course, we're also spoiled here with Scotland's castles, so maybe our expectations were a bit high) but since there were only a few buildings we could get in to, we decided that maybe we would follow up on a suggestion my the hostel owner and take a bus to Bled.
Bled is a small pictureque tourist town in the Julian alps which oddly had much better weather than Ljubljana on the day we visited, and was definitely worth the trip! There is a small church on an island in the middle of Lake Bled, a castle on a hill, and many resort-looking places by the water. It was definitely not a very big place, but we spent most of the afternoon there, walking up to the castle for some cool views (like the one below) and wandering around the lake for the day.
The second day was pretty awesome too: we hopped on a train to the small town of Divača, which was a 3km walk away from the Škocjan Caves. The caves are a UNESCO heritage site, with over 5km of underground rooms and passages. You can only visit by doing a tour, which takes you through 3km of the caves, including some rooms so big that my mind just couldn't wrap around the hugeness of it. The one downside is that they don't permit any photos. I'm not completely sure why, but I think it might have had something to do with the tour which covers 3km in an hour and a half: if they allowed photos the tour would probably be more like three hours. Anyway, the photos you see here are borrowed from Wikipedia, and I did manage to find some other great photos here which at least gives an idea of how amazing the caves are (and yes, we did get to walk across the bridge in the photo below, which was amazing!)
Later, we hopped back on the train and headed back to Ljubljana for our final night in Slovenia, but not before getting some awesome night photos, like these gems I couldn't not post here.
The next (and final) stop: a little R&R in Zadar, Croatia!
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