13. Serene Slovenia

Day 73, June 25th.  Treviso – nr Brestovica, Slovenia, Veneto, 23-30C, thunderstorms, rain, sunny

We cross the border to Slovenia in late afternoon.  Until 1991, this border was heavily guarded, with razor wire and watchtowers; now it’s a signpost and a dilapidated customs building – redundant since Slovenia became a member of the Schengen Area in 2007.

It’s a short drive along winding, unfenced country lanes to the village of Brestovica, through rocky, scrubby forest land which is evidently recovering from a recent wildfire.

We met Ales (pronounced “Alesh”, rather like Sean Connery saying “Alice”) at a petrol station in the village. He’s our host for tonight, and we’re staying on his little patch of land, up in the hills.  We follow his little Skoda as he bombs up a rocky, rutted track, for three kilometres.  Either we’re more precious with our suspension or his Skoda has magical powers of invincibility; we’re not sure either way.

His house sits on top of a heavily wooded hill.  It’s just 70 metres from the Italian border – unreachable due to the impenetrable forest, which was apparently planted after WW2, as a means of making illicit border crossings more difficult.  Ales’s house is a former military look-out post from the Cold War era, and still has its watchtower poking out of the roof.  Ales and his family have owned it for a decade and have been slowly refurbishing it; it’s a difficult task, being so remote – half of it is still derelict.

“I recommend you park over there, it’s less windy and if it’s stormy, trees won’t fall on you” Ales informs us phlegmatically.  He points to a particularly rocky piece of ground, with yellow and white flowers and sharp grasses stubbornly growing through the gaps in the pale stone.  We walk over and inspect; a swarm of grasshoppers, crickets and praying mantises leap out of our way, in all directions. The ground is flat enough for us to park on, albeit we’re glad to be in the roof tent – it would be an uncomfortable night’s sleep on the ground.

We set up camp and cook supper (the last of our Italian prosciutto and melon, then pasta with cauliflower, beans and fried salami); after supper Ales comes over and joins us for a beer.  He’s smart but cynical – he’s considering moving to the Philippines to find a cheaper, better quality of life with less rules.  Initially this strikes us as ironic as we assume, wrongly, that Slovenia represents a cheaper, better quality of life with less rules than the UK.  As we spend more time here, we realise it’s definitely not cheaper.

He talks to us about the horrendous cost of living crisis in Slovenia and how locals need to be ‘smart’ to get by – everyone needs a side hustle.  He’s vehemently anti-EU and anti-NATO, but acknowledges that Slovenia is “a long way from the front line” with Russia, with much geographic protection offered by its neighbours to the east.  He tells us that most Slovenians think the same; we’re not quite so sure – we’ll reserve judgement on that until we’ve met a few more people.

As we’re going to bed, he says we should expect (a) to hear the wolves howling nearby (we knew this, it’s one of the reasons we came here) and (b) a thunderstorm arriving at some point during the night, so “tie everything down properly”.  This is less welcome news – sleeping in a roof tent (or any tent) during a thunderstorm isn’t generally considered to be a smart idea.

In the end, there’s some wind and rain, no storm, and no wolves.  Quite undramatic.

Day 74, June 26th.  nr Brestovica – Lake Bled, Slovenia, 24-38C, rain, sunny

It’s raining heavily when we wake up, but by eight o’clock it eases off and we can leave the shelter of our (beautifully waterproof) roof tent and get some breakfast on the go.

Tent packed up and the morning’s home schooling completed, we wend our way back down the track and make our way towards the Soča Valley in northwest Slovenia.  Quickest route?  Back into Italy.  We weave across the border several more times before reaching the Soča river, marvelling at the magnificent Alpine landscape which the Italians can call their own, in addition to all their other treasures we’ve enjoyed in the past month.  At one border point, Italian border guards are actually checking papers for some reason, leaving to a hurried, slightly embarrassing search for our passports, buried and unused under a seat somewhere in the truck.

The Soča Valley is as beautiful as we’d been led to believe – a steep sided, deeply forested valley with a turquoise, clear, icy-looking glacial river crashing through its base.

We stop for a coffee in the pleasant little town of Kanal ob Soči, just after 11am.  Our previous attempt to buy coffee at an earlier village had been met with an officious rebuff that they couldn’t serve coffee until after 11 o’clock… Ales had mentioned something about rules…

At lunchtime we stop in the pretty valley town of Kobarid to buy some provisions for a picnic lunch and for camping.  Peaceful and attractively nestled in the Slovenian Alps; it belies its history.  Much of the town was destroyed between 1915 and 1917 in WW1, before the area was annexed by Italy and subsequently subjected to Fascist Italianisation, before once again finding itself on the front line during the early part of WW2, before the Italian surrender in 1943. 

We find a suitable picnic spot not much further upstream, on the banks of the Soča.  It’s a perfect spot for cheese and salami sandwiches, cherries and flat peaches, and a fleeting dip in its glacial waters.

By mid-afternoon we’re nearly at Lake Bled and take a short detour to the Pokljuka Gorge.  Slovenia is a beautifully tiny country, meaning all its treasures are packed closely together.  Nothing seems to be more than a 45-minute drive away, despite its slow and winding roads.  The days of driving for entire days across some empty fraction of Algeria to get to our next destination feel very distant here.

Pokljuka is certainly worth more than a ‘quick detour’.  Parking the car in the bottom of yet another quiet, unspoilt Alpine valley, we begin a rather sweaty trek up through the gorge, following a mountain stream surrounded by ferns, mosses, beeches and elders, and other shade-resistant plants.  The sheer sides of the gorge mean the moisture rising up from the stream has nowhere to go.  By the time we’ve climbed the hundred metres or so up and out of the gorge, we’re all sodden.

On the way down, Laurie finds a little spring by the side of the path – very cold, clear and refreshing.  He’s insistent we return to the spot to fill up our water bottles, so on returning to the car, Laurie and I turn round, clutching empty bottles.  As is often the case, he’s right.  The water is delicious – perhaps the best we’ve had anywhere on the trip. 

It’s a reminder of one of our mottos from this trip – we need to listen to our children more.  They think logically and don’t overcomplicated things.  These sorts of instances happen on a regular basis, and despite our occasional reluctance, following their ideas and opinions usually leads to happy outcomes.  

We drive on to Bled to the little farm we’re camping at, a few kilometres from the lake.  Manca (pr. Mansa), our host, couldn’t be more different to Ales: cheerful, wholesome and positive.  Her family have farmed here for 60 years; like most Slovenian farmers, they have a little of everything: chickens, goats, sheep, some donkeys, a bit of arable. 

It’s been raining heavily here recently; she tells summer hasn’t really begun.  She continues by saying they didn’t really get a winter either – just two days of snow – and that the weather is completely upside down.

Anyway, the rain holds off tonight, and we sleep soundly in rather less wild surroundings than last night, with just the village church bell to interrupt the peace.

Day 75, June 27th.  Lake Bled – Zgornje Jezersko, Slovenia, 24-33C, cloud, sunny

We start the day with a protein-filled breakfast of fried eggs, toast, fruit, granola and yoghurt, in expectation of an activity-filled morning at Lake Bled.

It’s rather more relaxed than that.  That’s just how it is in Slovenia.  We reach this picture postcard lake early, but it’s not as heaving with tourists as we’d feared.  It’s busy-ish but super-chilled out – it’s hard not to be, at when gazing across the mirror-like waters of Lake Bled, surrounded by lush, forested Alpine mountains, with its impossibly picturesque wooded island, complete with pointy Slovenian church protruding above the trees.

Despite the cloud cover, it’s still a fairy-tale scene.  We hire some bikes and commence a very easy six-kilometre circumnavigation, broken up by a very expensive coffee break and a swim in the lake.  By no ordinary measure could our morning’s exertions be considered ‘exercise’; our substantial breakfast was completely unwarranted.

Finishing up, we buy a few provisions for a light picnic lunch – judging by our 25-euro coffee and orange juice stop, lunch would set us back the equivalent of three nights’ worth of camping accommodation here.

Next stop is Ljubljana, where we’re in search of a garage for a routine service, plus – hopefully – a solution to our increasingly stinky and smoky exhaust.  Whilst the car is running fine, it’s just plain embarrassing when we start the car in the morning and smother any neighbouring campers in great clouds of black smoke.

We find a good-looking and highly rated garage in the suburbs – less than an hour from Lake Bled – and book in for Monday, their next available slot.  This gives us four days to kill – not really a hardship in Slovenia – and after some excellent under-pressure research by Nina, we elect to drive north again, back into the mountains.

Only in Slovenia could you leave the capital and in 20 minutes be on a country road, winding one’s way up through pretty, Alpine valleys, following a crystal-clear glacial river.  Within very little time we’re at another farm, in the village (more of a hamlet) of Zgornye Jezersko, nestled idyllically in a widening in the valley.

Zgornye Jezersko is perhaps a microcosm of rural Slovenia.  It’s like a cross between a Roger Hargreaves drawing of a mountain village, and The Sound of Music.  Both are lovely, in many ways:

1.        People really care about their environment and take great pride in their homes and gardens.  If Algeria was at one end of the scale on this measure, Slovenia is very firmly at the other.

2.        There is no sprawl; the villages are tiny.  The countryside is pristine and unspoilt.  Each village consists of a handful of houses and a single, pointy church; each with immaculately tended garden, window boxes, veg patch and fields.

3.        There are no fences, except the odd bit of neat electric fencing or post and rail to keep livestock in, giving the place a homely, trusting feel.

4.        Outside the capital, everything appears to be frozen in the 1930’s.  We watch farmers fork hay into piles and stack it on drying ladders under ancient wooden shelters to air; people taking their cows, sheep and goats out to their pastures in the morning and returning them to shelters in the evenings.

5.        Everything happens at a very slow pace.  And when we turn the engine of our stinky truck off, more often than not, there is silence.

We check into a farm-cum-campsite, the first time in Slovenia we’ve lodged somewhere with other campers.  Our cheerful host (with an utterly unpronounceable name) shows us to a spot where we can park up and set the roof tent, walking past impeccably tended polytunnels, charming, rustic barns with ancient wooden rooves (some with moss and baby Christmas trees growing out of), and a posse of chickens scratching about in the yard.

He explains that – like most Slovenians – everything they grow on the farm is used on the farm. These days, he says, the farm draws the tourists – and that’s where they make the money.  It sounds a little like the UK.  We had wondered how rural Slovenians managed to keep all their homes in such good condition, given their subsistence style farming and the challenging cost of living.

We cook and eat our supper – chicken curry with Moroccan spice mix – and wonder how we could justify relocating to Slovenia.  We also congratulate ourselves on adding in a summer Alpine leg to this trip, something which wasn’t initially planned but which we’ve always wanted to do.  With the forests, the rivers and lakes, the wild flowers, the pretty villages and the generally unspoilt landscape, it hasn’t disappointed.   

Day 75, June 27th.  Zgornje Jezersko, Slovenia, 24-33C, cloud, sunny

Today is an action-filled day.  After breakfast, we hire bikes from our friendly farmers and set off up a series of hairpin bends behind the farm, towards the Vellach pass – and the Austrian border – at the top.  We start at around 900 metres’ altitude; the pass is at 1215 metres. 

We take it steadily, Laurie leading the way, pausing at each of the hairpins.  We’re overtaken by a steady stream of Austrian and Italian motorbikers, a few e-bikers, and a handful of lycra-clad ‘proper’ cyclists on carbon fibre contraptions that weight about five ounces.  We take great satisfaction in the fact that we’re the hard-core ones doing it on conventional hireling bikes – whilst wearing shorts and T-shirts.  Ralph and Laurie – the really hard-core ones, being the youngest people on the worst bikes – get lots of thumbs-up from passing cyclists, most helpful encouragement, as we near the top.

At the top of the pass, we cross the Austrian border – but only for about 10 metres. It’s the first time we’ve ever crossed a border without a passport: the Schengen era has ushered in a new culture of openness and trust.  It’s hard to think that this border, like the others we’ve criss-crossed in the past few days, was until 1991 sealed shut with razor wire, monitored by watchtowers and patrolled by Soviet soldiers.

We celebrate with a picnic lunch of fresh bread, cheese and salami, whilst admiring the view.

After lunch, there’s more uphill, on a gravel track now, as we start the second leg of our circular trip.  After another 50 metres’ climbing, Ralph decides the combination of gravel and altitude are a step too far, so he and Nina retrace their steps back to the campsite – which takes about ten minutes; literally downhill all the way.

Laurie and I plough on, climbing to 1350 metres, crossing the border several more times, on old logging roads.  We stop at a long-abandoned watchtower on the Slovenian side; despite being semi-derelict we can just wander in.  Ancient plug sockets, electronics for radio sets and worn-out vinyl floors give an indication of what the place must have been like when it was in use.  It’s got a slightly spooky feel to it – not a building filled with happy memories. 

As we leave, we notice the windows of the watchtower jutting out from the roof all face one way: towards Slovenia.  This Soviet watchtower – presumably like many others -wasn’t concerned with stopping people entering the country.  It was only interested in stopping people leave.

We cycle on, passing a few ancient metal signs shouting “Achtung! Staatsgrenze!” (Warning! Frontier!”) reminding us where we are.  There are no other signs on the logging tracks and they’re deserted; we take great care to begin our descent heading down on the Slovenian side.

It takes us an hour and a half; it’s an arduous, gravelly descent requiring multiple stops to let Laurie’s hands rest (the brakes on his handlebars being set too far away for his hands to reach comfortably).  It’s hot too; we stop halfway to refill our water bottles at a mountain stream.  Finally, we reach the valley, and can cycle the last kilometre or so back to the campsite in relative comfort, ready for a very well-earned lemonade and ice cream. 

For supper, we treat ourselves to a traditional Slovenian meal cooked by our hosts. We dine on the large terrace of their farmhouse / guesthouse, overlooking the gentle, green valley below and the dramatic, sheer grey ridge of rock that forms the Kamnick Alps, their various snow-capped peaks rising about 2,500 metres, flanked by forested Alpine foothills. 

The fully homegrown supper – with homemade bread and cottage cheese, followed by beef and roast potatoes accompanied by some sort of tomato / goulash sauce – whilst wholesome, is not as good as the view.  But we’re too tired, and taken in by our surroundings, to care.

Day 76, June 28th.  Zgornje Jezersk – Ljubno, Slovenia, 22 - 30C, sunny

Laurie is indefatigable, so he and I are up early to try a spot of fishing in the crystal-clear waters of the glacier-fed lake that also adorns this valley.  We trundle down the hill at 7.30am, clutching our rod, tackle bag and a cup of coffee for me, and set up.  Despite the beautiful setting, we’re unsuccessful, notwithstanding numerous sightings of trout that have no interest in anything we fling at them.

But we’ve seen enough fish to persuade ourselves that we should try again: after breakfast and a quick pack-up of the tent and car, we all drive down together, enabling Ralph to do some painting, Nina to enjoy sufficient space and peace for some Alpine Qi Gong, and Laurie and I to try different lures. 

The painting and Qi Gong are successful; yet again, the fishing is not.  We lose a lure in the water; I break a flip-flop in the muddy bed of the lake trying to rescue it; and still we catch nothing.  Bloody fish.  We give up, commiserate ourselves with an espresso, but even that’s the worst coffee we’ve had on the European leg of this trip.

On the plus side, Nina finds a local selling organic whole foods from a stall by the lake – probably the healthiest foods we’ve seen on this trip – so we stock up with an array of ginger, turmeric and other goodies to improve the quality of our camping diets.  Laurie and I rather grumpily pack our stuff up, before we all head back to the car and leave, smoking out the car park (now full of bikers also drinking terrible coffee at the café) in the process. 

We’re driving along Slovenia’s Alpine ‘panoramic route’ today, which takes us back into Austria for another 20km via dozens of precipitous hairpins, and then on to a single tracked, gravelly, contour-following road that skirts the upper reaches of the Lagorska Valley – Slovenia’s prettiest Alpine valley by all accounts, but who knows?  They all seem idyllic and unspoilt. 

We stop for lunch at a farm somewhere along the way, and ‘enjoy’ more Slovenian mountain delicacies – cheesy pastry / roulade concoctions (workable), boiled smoked sausages (emergencies only) and slices of blueberry strudel (highlight).  We’re still less than 30 miles from the Italian border, yet from a culinary perspective and despite a similarly sunny and fertile landscape, we might as well be across an ocean.

Later, we descend to the bottom of the valley, passing numerous ancient, larch-rooved farms, which seemingly have been farming the same land in the same way since the dawn of time.  Ancient tractors hug the sides of impossibly steep slopes, cutting grass for hay.  The whole landscape has an aura of simple, bucolic authenticity about it.  We couldn’t live here though.  What on earth would we do? And as for the language…  At least we can get our heads round Italian!

Reaching the base of the valley, we follow the Savinja River downstream and find a tiny campsite on its banks, run by Sebastian and his wife, Sabina.  We can park up between the river and an old millstream, which contains a pear wood raft for children to play on, which is immediately monopolised by our feral youngsters.

Sebastian is chatty and generous with his time – he’s not in a hurry.  Whilst checking in, we talk at length about his country, and the floods which ravaged the Savinja valley last summer.  He shows us pictures of his campsite – underwater last August and now fully recovered.  In the same breath he tells us the Savinja River is – day-to-day – just a shadow of its former self; being fed by glaciers which have been receding for the past hundred years.

He enlightens us on how the country is run, too.  “Terribly!” he jokes, before explaining that Slovenia is divided up into about 200 village municipalities, each with their own mayor, with powers for running their patch.  This works well at a local level; he goes on to explain that Slovenians can be pretty physical with their local politicians: if they don’t deliver what they’ve promised, they get beaten up, quite regularly. 

He's particularly animated on the subject of immigration, as was Ales previously, and blames immigrants in Ljubljana for a rise in crime in the past ten years, from a city where “you could walk through drunk and stark naked and nothing would happen to you” to a place where “some really bad things happen now”.  He tells us an anecdote about an immigrant who was spotted, here, in this village, last year – driving up and down the main street over a few days.  The individual was stopped, questioned and threatened by the local community, and never returned.

The sun comes out and bakes us as we’re setting up camp.  Helpfully, we need look no further than the Savinja River on our doorstep, for a refreshing family ice-bath.

It's Sunday and we’re short on supplies, so on Sebastian’s advice, in the evening we walk upriver to the local trout farm, which apparently serves excellent fish and chips.  They do.  Even better, we secure a fishing licence for their lakes, for tomorrow morning – and a quick glance at the lakes as we walk home suggests they are teeming…

Day 77, June 29th.  Ljubno, Slovenia, 24 - 31C, sunny, cloudy

Melissa at the trout farm informed us that 7am is the perfect time to catch a fish here, so Laurie and I need to set an alarm for an early start. We’re back at the lakes, with our fly rod and some local flies purchased from Melissa last night, by 7am.  Laurie goes first, and with his first cast, gets a bite, and lands his rainbow trout, with me holding the net.  Cue a huge moment of celebration: Laurie’s first entirely self-caught fish, his first international fish, and the first fish of our trip. 

We carry on and within an hour he’s caught two more – taking us to the catch limit on our license.  We return, jubilant, with our three fish, gut them in the river, and put them in the campsite’s fridge for our lunch.  Laurie is overjoyed and rightly very proud of his efforts.

We’re only an hour from Ljubljana; despite our 8am rendez-vous with the garage tomorrow, we decide to stay on another night here and leave early in the morning.  We don’t fancy staying in a Ljubljana campsite, or in an expensive hotel in the city, and this place is idyllic – much like everywhere else we’ve stayed in this delightful little country. 

We grill Laurie’s largest trout for lunch; unsurprisingly it’s delicious.  We decide – unanimously – to return to the lakes this evening.  Ralph is keen to have a go, as is Nina, and it’s the perfect spot for everyone to practice their casting.

The evening session is a little trickier thanks to the breeze, but nonetheless Nina catches her first fish of the trip, Ralph perseveres through the conditions to get his first bite on a trout, and I land a couple more.  We head back to the campsite, with five fish to cook for supper now – a veritable feast.  

Day 78, June 30th.  Ljubno – nr. Bzuljack, Slovenia, 18 - 22C, cloudy, thunderstorms, heavy rain

Monday morning, and a 6.30 alarm.  Our second alarm in a row, after not having had one for months – albeit not such an appealing reason this morning.  The school run in September is going to be tough for all of us!

We pack up as silently as we can, start the car and leave as swiftly as possible, to avoid waking up our German and Dutch neighbours – the only other sets of residents here for the past few days.

Heading into Ljubljana, once again we find ourselves still driving through farmland when we’re just 10km from the city centre.  But the population is only around 200,000 – about the size of Oxford – so we shouldn’t be surprised. 

We reach Tomas’s garage in good order and talk through the issues again. Helpfully, he’s a Land Cruiser and overlanding expert, and is supremely unconcerned about the black smoke. “It’ll be the fuel injectors, but don’t worry.  On these old cars they can run fine with these things, and we can’t get the replacements easily in Slovenia.  But we’ll take a look.” 

He promises the car will be ready later in the day. The garage owner drives us into the centre of town in our own car, deposits us and takes the truck away again for the service.  We’ve got the best part of a day to explore this tiny city, but before we do anything, we need breakfast. 

Ljubljana doesn’t really need a day to explore – both Tomas and Sebastian had been spot-on about this.  After refuelling on poached eggs, bacon, avocado, plus the ubiquitous yoghurt and granola, we wander along the river, admiring its elegant bridges and aesthetically pleasing town planning, then walk up to the castle. 

By lunchtime the skies are looking ominous and we duck into a restaurant on Mestni Trg, Ljubljana’s main, pedestrianised street, searching more for shelter than for sustenance.  Whilst it chucks it down outside, we take as long as possible over our single course lunch, before deciding we’ll have to move on or get thrown out. 

We repeat this exercise several times over the ensuring hour on Mestni Trg, in the process buying (a) new raincoats for Nina and I, (b) umbrellas for the boys (with automatic opening mechanisms – they’re so easily pleased), (c) some more rocks for Ralph’s rock collection and (d) a hot chocolate in a fancy café. 

We’re running out of money and things to do when Nina has the excellent idea that we should walk to ‘Slovenia Fly Fishing’, on the northerly outskirts and in the general direction of the garage, to buy some more fishing line – stocks are running low.  Unfortunately, when we reach ‘Slovenia Fly Fishing’ we discover it’s a travel agency – but no matter.  Before we’ve lingered aimlessly in the suburbs for even a minute, Tomas calls us to inform us the car is ready.  We flag down a taxi who charges us 15 euros for a seven-minute drive. This country is expensive.

Tomas and his team have taken great care with our truck and replaced several things we’d forgot to mention to them, as well as cleaning out the automatic gearbox.  He’s still not worried about the fuel injectors and actually, we trust him.  He sincerely wishes us good luck and safe travels as he waves us away. 

We leave the capital heading south, towards the border with Croatia and our final stop in Slovenia.  The forecast for the evening is grim – more thunderstorms and rain – so Nina’s found an entire house that we can rent for the night, on a little farm half an hour from Ljubljana.

As is always the case in this country, half an hour from the capital gets us somewhere wonderfully remote, this time on a hilly, narrow track, winding through alternating but equally soggy farmland and woodland. 

As we turn down the track to her farm, Sabine’s husband waves at us from a vegetable plot, then Sabine greets us and guides us to our little house – tucked away behind their barns and overlooking their fields and what presumably would be a lovely view, if it wasn’t for the mist and rain.

Our accommodation for the night is luxurious – a little house, all to ourselves, with two bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen / dining / sitting room downstairs.  In between violent, lightning filled thunderstorms, Sabine takes us to visit her rabbits in one of the barns (they’re massive – all bred for meat) and we admire the orderly manner in which all their equipment is stored.  No junk lying around anywhere, quite unlike any UK farm.

We cook supper in the little kitchen, congratulating ourselves on not camping tonight, as the rain hammers down. 

After supper the boys treat us to one of their ‘teddy circuses’.  Laurie concocted these years ago, but they’ve become a bit of a tradition for the boys to do together, every time we stay somewhere that isn’t camping.  All their teddy bears get together to put on a show or a sports event, and the boys work together to devise their script. 

They create a stage and lighting and make little tickets for us, which we must show at their bedroom door before entering.  It’s always a reminder that whilst they’re putting up brilliantly with being driven all the way round Europe, never really knowing where the next night’s accommodation is going to be, they are still only nine and eleven, and need their own downtime.

Day 78, June 30th.  nr. Bzuljack, Slovenia – Plitvice, Croatia, 20 - 24C, sunny, cloudy

The rain has cleared this morning and after breakfast we can admire Sabine and her family’s little farm in all it’s glory.  She has beautifully tended vegetable beds, brimming with sweetcorn, beans, potatoes and courgettes, and horses, donkeys, goats, geese and sheep – alongside the rabbits.

Everything is small scale; we ask her whether she sells anything – the answer is firmly no.  Everything is kept, bottled, pickled and used by her and her family, sometimes swapped with neighbours.  The rural Slovenians appear to have mastered self-sufficiency – perhaps it’s in the blood, or borne out of necessity during the Soviet era.  Their work ethic is something to behold – we can’t think of another country where the population works so hard to keep their neighbourhoods and their belongings so clean, ordered and well-maintained.  There is no Slovenian word for siesta.  

We bid our goodbyes and make our final three visits before crossing the border.  First, the picturesque and impenetrable Predjama Castle, built into the side of a cliff, then the vast cave complex of Postonjo, so big you need to take an electric train inside it to explore it. As we admire its spectacular collection of stalagmites and stalactites through multiple caverns, glad for our jackets (it’s a steady 10C all year round in the caves), Ralph once again amazes us with the breadth of his general knowledge, as he talks us through the compositions of the mineral deposits we’re admiring.  

We round off our week in Slovenia with a stop at the Park of Military History – packed full of Soviet-era (and newer) tanks, jets, helicopters and submarines, alongside sobering descriptions of Slovenia’s fight for independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.  It’s a plucky little country, blessed with copious natural beauty, and it punches above its weight in many respects.  But for all the calm, orderly courtesy and friendliness that we’ve enjoyed here, beneath the surface there is a steely, hard-working determination to do things properly, the Slovenian way.