Slovenia Round 1

Slovenia

We drove on the motorway at rush hour to hopefully make the border crossing easier and we bought a vignette to allow us on all the motorways within Slovenia (we thought we would try and make it easy on ourselves and avoid the risk of a fine). As we approached the border we saw it was a manned gate which made us a little nervous (we knew they could turn us away and make us get new emergency passports to allow us to cross on the correct date, we were crossing this border late and wanted to cross the Croatian border early).  However as we got closer we saw that the people in front just showed their photos and didn’t even hand over the passports so I made sure I had them on the right page and did the same and we were waved into the country. 

Having made it into the country we had to quicky decide what to do so we decided to do the most touristy thing in the whole country Postojna cave. We drove there and then had to find some parking as the car park there wanted us to pay over £10 for 1.5 hours parking (because we were a motorhome and not a car). We parked in the town and walked to the cave and got on the next tour. For the tour a large group is split into different languages and then each group has their own guide who leads them to a little train which travels down into the cave through some impressive caves. The train takes about 5-10 minutes and travels at a couple of km an hour and you do get rather close to the cave walls, lets just say Rich even went to duck a couple of times! We then walked within the cave for about an hour while the guide told us a couple of facts about the cave before we got back on the train and headed back out. Having looked at the potential camper stops and not wanting to drive too far we found that there was a wild camping place not far away but the reviews described it as spooky. Not fully believing that we headed there and soon understood the spooky aspect, it was behind an old hotel which backed onto the woods. To begin with we were the only ones there but after an hour we were joined by another van and soon after that a car arrived as well. Feeling better that we weren’t alone we were able to settle in for the night and plan the next couple of days. 

The following morning we headed to Postjana castle which is essentially a castle in a cave and was stunning to view. There were several birds flying around the entrance and we even saw a large bird of prey flying around the hillside. Next we hoped into the car and headed to a coastal town called Koper where we parked up next to the sea and walked into the town. We stumbled upon a little vegan café for some lunch before exploring the town. While there we spotted signs of a festival for that evening so we headed back to the van to freshen up before cycling back into the town for the evening.

The following morning we decided to do a supposedly easy cycle from Koper to Piran (which is supposed to be the Slovenian version of Venice). We knew it would be about 15km each way and were prepared for that but what we weren’t prepared for were the very large hills we had to traverse. They were killer but we made it into the town, however it was rather small and after about 20 minutes we had walked around the entire town. Dreading the ride back we decided to stop and have a cup of tea to psych ourselves up. Once we made it back to the van we decided to jump into the sea for a quick cool off before driving south to Croatia.