Some more pictures

This morning my parents left by bus for Zagreb. It is a long trip, but they should be able to take the bus once they get back to Split, which will be nicer than the bus. Then tomorrow they take the train back to Ljubljana, and then Monday they fly back to Canada. Lots of travel for just a few days...

Meanwhile, Claire and I are getting some errands done this morning, doing some shopping and trip planning. We are taking the ferry to Italy (Dubrovnik to Bari) tomorrow just after lunch. We'll arrive in Italy at 8 pm and stay the night, and then get up early the next morning to take the train to Naples. From there we go to see Vesuvius and Pompeii.

Here are some more interesting pictures from the last few weeks...

The first is Claire and I at Ptuj castle with the town behind us. We biked around the lake in the distance with my parents the day after taking this picture. Ptij was very nice, not overrun with tourists!


The castle museum in Ptuj had a lot of interesting local artifacts. Perhaps the weirdest were this chair and table combination, made out of deer antlers. Rather like something from a nightmare, actually.

One of the most enjoyable things we did while in Ptuj is head out into the Haloze hills wine country. The tourist information there got us set up to visit with a local wine producer, 'Turcan'. They had some really excellent white wine, easily the best we've had anywhere on this trip so far. Also, they were very friendly and hospitable, showing us around their production facilities and cellar, providing a wonderful wine tasting and allowing us to use their patio for the picnic lunch we had brought with us.

Unfortunately you probably won't be able to buy their wines in North America. They do export a little to Germany and Austria, but they are not a large producer and most of it is sold within Slovenia. But look for it if you ever travel here! Here we are in the cellar and tasting room:

And here are some of their vines:

Dubrovnik

So once again apologies for the long delay between posts. Hopefully that will be better now that we are not traveling so quickly. We have so many pictures to go through that I will have to spend some time on the laptop sorting and organizing, rather than trying to do it here in the internet cafe where I pay by the minute.

However, here are at least a couple. Here we are in Ljubljana on the day we met up with my parents. We are standing at the end of the Dragon Bridge.

A few days later, here are my parents and Claire up at the top of the castle in Bled, with some of the lake in the background.

Now, Claire and I (and my parents) are in Dubrovnik, where it is raining for the first time here in 4 months. The hillsides are scarred with black marks from the fires they have been having. So we are taking the day to get caught up on trip planning and email, and updating this blog.

Since my last post when we were heading off to Zagreb, we've been through Zagreb (but didn't stay there) and then drove to Plitviče National Park. It's hard to describe it... a lot of small lakes connected by lots of waterfalls. That doesn't sound like much, but it is really amazing. Since the water is so loaded with calcium carbonate, the chemistry and physics of the water results in waterfalls which instead of carving deep channels and becoming a single channel, the waterfalls spread out and becomes wide collections of many waterfalls, running all over the landscape.

After Plitviče, we drove to Split (yes, that is the name of the city) and left the car, with a couple of nights there, followed by one night on the island of Hvar. We could have spent a lot longer on Hvar but had to leave the next day because that is when the twice weekly ferry runs. However in the short time there we managed to see the sights, have a good seafood meal, go swimming in the Adriatic, and catch a wonderful choir concert at the former Franciscan monestary that night.

And now we are in Dubrovnik. Sunday afternoon we will be taking the ferry back to Italy, landing in Bari. From there we head over towards Naples and the Almafi coast, Vesuvius and Pompeii, and then south towards Sicily.

A busy week

Sorry it has been so long since our last update. We have been travelling with my parents, driving a great little VW Golf Turbo Diesel all over the country. Since last Thursday, we have seen most of the top tourist attractions and "must see" sights in Slovenia. Some of the highlights:

- Ptuj, a wonderful, ancient city out in the eastern side of the country, where we stayed for two nights, toured the Haloze wine valley, biked around the lake, visited the castle, had some wonderful food, and more

- Bled, possibly the most beautiful town in the country, with a castle on the hill overlooking the lake, a church on a little island in the lake, some great hikes...

- Bohinj, (again - Claire and I were here for 4 days a couple weeks ago) where we saw the "Cows Ball", probably the most "Slovenian" festival in the country, ate sausage, goulash, sauerkraut, and beer, took the cable car up the mountain to get a view of Mount Triglav... lots of fun!

- Drove over the twisty, narrow Vrsic pass highway with its 49 switchbacks and spectacular views.

- Saw the Predjama castle, the Postonja caves, the Skocjan caves, the Vipava wine valley... The Skocjan caves in particular were one of the most amazing things I have ever seen anywhere. A HUGE underground cavern with a river roaring through the bottom of it, pathways winding along the cliffs over the river and a bridge hundreds of feet over the water. The best way to describe it is to compare it to the "Mines of Moria" scenes in the Lord of the Rings movie.

- Day tripped to Piran, a beautiful little town on the coast (seemed more Italian than Slovenian, not too surprising given its mostly Italian history)

And a lot more I can't even remember at the moment. I would love to put up pictures... we have taken several hundred pictures over the last week but unfortunately we are using the free internet service in the tourist information office and the computer here won't let me load pictures from our USB camera stick!

Anyway, we are heading off to Zagreb, Croatia in a couple of hours... maybe we will be able to put some pictures on the blog from there.

The

Pictures

After some difficulty with badly translated directions, I found the local man who sells trout last night... This led to new adventures in hotel cooking, as I got to gut and clean them myself in our tiny kitchen. Despite my inexpertise in filleting fish they were delicious.

Here are some of the local trout in the river:

A black & yellow spotted salamander Claire saw while we were hiking:


One of the local rivers, which has carved out an amazing gorge in the rocks:


And way up in the mountains (2500 metres, while the lake is about 800), some small buildings:

Now we are off to buy some lunch supplies and tackle a really long hike, limited only by our need to get back to catch the last bus back to this side of the lake. Hope the weather stays good!

From Tuscany to the Slovenian Alps

It has been too long since we've put an update here. Since leaving Tuscany, we've spent 24 hours in Bologna (where we had a wonderful, rich, expensive, decadent meal) and then continued on to Slovenia. We had two nights and the day between in Ljubljana, where did a bunch of organizing and planning for later in our trip. We also found time to bike around the city, which is beautiful, and sample some of the local specialties (horse burgers).

Then we took the bus up to Lake Bohinj, which is in the Alps again. We are staying at a nice little apartment with a kitchen, and enjoying cooking as usual.

Slovenia is much less expensive than Italy, and this area is very pretty. The hiking here is great - the first day we just walked around the lake (4 hours) and took lots of pictures, and yesterday we did a much longer, serious hike up into the mountains towards Mount Triglav, which is the largest mountain in Slovenia. We have decided to not summit Triglav as the weather is a bit chancy and it requires an overnight stay at a mountain hut.

Today we are resting up for another big hike tomorrow. We have found out from the (very helpful) tourist information office where to buy fresh local trout, which have a reputation for being delicious. (We have pictures of trout in the streams here which I'll put up later, when we get them off our camera.) So we'll be trying that for dinner, cooked with a seafood spice mix we are still carrying from Tuscany. Unfortunately we don't have a grill or oven, so it will need to be pan fried or possibly poached.

We are now off to see 'Slap Savica' which is Slovenian for the Savica river waterfall, one of the more famous sights in the area. The next posting will have pictures and less chatter!