Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is a small city that, despite being
under communist rule, is actually quite beautiful (Slovenian communism was
apparently about as close as anyone came to creating a benign regime behind the
iron curtain). There’s probably more
going on there than I managed to see, but as it was it felt more like a calm,
restful stop on my way to my next major destination, Vienna. Still, I managed to see a few things that were
interesting.
DAY HALF
The first thing I noticed upon crossing the border into Slovenia was
that it was raining. I hadn’t seen rain
since Plovdiv about a month earlier, and this concerned me since much of my
planned activity in Ljubljana was to be outdoors.
Fortunately by the time I reached Ljubljana the rain had stopped. It was about 3pm. I was staying at Hostel Cecilia, the one in
an old converted prison. I guessed it
must be the main hostel in the city since my instructions told me to follow the
road signs from the station. Any hostel
with road signs directing you there is a major place (only other place I’ve
seen that is Bern, where the hostel I stayed at was pretty much the only hostel
in town).
So, upon leaving the station, I followed the road. Ahead I saw some signs. Wonderful.
They all pointed to various hotels, attractions and public transport
hubs. Nothing about Hostel Cecilia.
Never mind, I thought. The next
sign will be the one.
It wasn’t.
Nor was the one after that.
At this point it might be worth mentioning that there was snow on the
ground. Like, a LOT of snow on the
ground. Like piles that reached my waist
(obviously those piles had been created by the guys shoveling the snow from the
footpath, though there was still a considerable amount on the footpath). I was slipping and sliding my way along the
roadside when I decided to turn around.
Directly behind me was a sign pointing to Hostel Cecilia.
Well, damn.
So I headed back the way I had come, went the correct direction out of
the train station this time, and reached the hostel.
It didn’t really look like a prison at all – maybe there were some hints
of it on the exterior, but inside it was just a slick, somewhat sterile hostel
(pretty sure it was one of the HI hostels as well).
They had a list of all the exciting activities available that week on
the door. That night was shisha night,
followed by a foosball tournament. I was
like… yeaaaaah, nah.
My room was like an attic complete with wooden beams and a kind of triangular
prism shape. The beds weren’t bunks –
rather, they were these bizarre wooden slabs directly on the ground with a
mattress on them. There were twelve
shoved into quite a small space, and most of them were already occupied by a
gang of architecture students who were attending some kind of seminar the next
day. As they weren’t actually travellers
they were a difficult group to crack into, so I ended up spending the afternoon
planning for future things. I booked a
bus ticket to Krakow, a concert in Vienna (Four
Seasons by Vivaldi) and a ballet in Prague (Swan Lake) and came upon a rather problematic realization.
So far I haven’t had any challenges using my debit card online. Booking hostels has been straight forward in
that respect, and even the payment for the ferry to Greece went fine. But when I went to pay for the bus ticket and
concert tickets I cam upon a form of security I had not seen before. On attempting payment, my bank sent me a text
message with a one-off password.
Unfortunately the phone they sent it to was in Australia since I hadn’t
seen any reason to bring it. As a result
I couldn’t actually pay for anything.
Fortunately the bus site allowed me to use paypal, which I did with no
troubles. I was able to email the Vienna
concert people and get the tickets reserved with the option of paying in cash
on the day – no worries there. The
ballet is another story – they reserved the tickets, but now I need to go to
their offices before the 6th of March and pay. I don’t get to Prague until the 11th. Fortunately this is a Slovakian company, so
they have an office in Bratislava, meaning that while I’m passing through
Bratislava I’ll have to go and see whether they let me pay for my tickets
there. Which would probably be easier
for me anyway.
So now that I’ve explained in great detail the petty annoyances I’ve had
with online payment (which, in all honesty, is probably worth the hassle for
the security it provides, though I kind of wish I’d known about this security
measure BEFORE travelling) I can explain in great detail the hassle of
dinner. I basically hadn’t eaten all day
(other than pancakes for breakfast… which I suppose is kind of awesome, though
they had been in another country and therefore felt a lifetime ago) and wanted
something for dinner.
They had a bar on the ground floor that had been advertising an all you
can eat dinner, but it turned out that was only on Wednesday (what’s special
about Wednesday?) I looked up the
nearest supermarket, though that wasn’t as easy as I felt it ought to have been
since google maps didn’t seem to understand the concept of a supermarket. Oh, and a lot of them were closed on a Sunday
evening.
I found a SPAR and headed in that direction. I needed to cross the river, but couldn’t
find the river, so gave up. It was
snowing very heavily and I was not keen on staying out for hours trying to find
my way.
Instead I found one of those little 24 hour spots, though I’m pretty
sure it was just about to close when I went in.
I got some spaghetti, I got some pesto and I got some cheese.
The hassle was that I was going to be in Ljubljana only two nights,
which is not much time in which to eat 500g of pasta, 250g of pesto and 300g of
cheese (that was the smallest pack of grated cheese they had – the kitchen in
the hostel wasn’t that well stocked).
Fortunately I was hungry, so ate most of it in the first night anyway.
Then I went to bed. The city
looked dead on Sunday.
DAY ONE
I skipped breakfast because it was going to cost me 3 euro, and screw
that. I had a plan that day – Skocjan
Caves (the actual name of the place has all sorts of circumflexes and accents
over the letters, but I can’t be bothered with all that).
I really like caves, and there were two in the vicinity of Ljubljana –
Skocjan, smack bang in the middle of a UNESCO heritage national park, and
Potsjana, the more touristy one. I like
being difficult, and the Skocjan caves looked more remote, so Skocjan it was.
It was a one-and-a-half hour train ride to the station from which I
intended to walk to Skocjan (it actually also passed through Potsjana). Skocjan offered two tours each day – one at
10am and one at 1pm. I had woken at
7:30am to catch an 8:20am train so as to have plenty of time to walk to the
cave (there weren’t that many trains and I was never going to make the 10am
tour).
Upon arrival I went looking for a sign of where the caves were. There was an awful lot of track work going
on, and the roads were thick with mud from the melting snow and constant
passing of trucks.
After plodding around the train station for a bit, I found a bike
map. Not terribly helpful, as it was
very vague, but it did give me a general direction. Then I saw a sign pointing to the caves (or
at least I assumed it was – it had the word ‘Skocjan’ written on it). The problem was the sign pointed in the
opposite direction to the way I had thought the caves were based on the
map. Concluding that the map was a bit
vague, and anyway maybe this was the official trail and did a kind of loop back
over the train tracks, or maybe I just couldn’t read the map, I decided to
follow the sign.
For a while I followed the bike track signs. Then the bike track signs stopped
appearing. Five minutes later I was
completely lost.
The main problem was that there was simply no indication of where the
track was. Everything was completely
snowed over, and the ground was criss-crossed with footprints and tire marks,
which, for all I knew, didn’t even follow an official path but just went off
randomly through the trees (all of which looked the same anyway).
After one-and-a-half hours of tramping through snow and ice, I was sick
of it and ready to head back. Oh, and I
was hungry. Because I’d skipped
breakfast and there was nowhere in the town where the station was that had breakfast-y
options.
I walked back to the town, discovered that I would have to wait two
hours for the next train, decided it was worth it, and went to the
supermarket. I bought two bananas, a
yoghurt drink (though I think it was actually just regular yoghurt in a small
milk container) and some chocolate. At
checkout, a little too late, I noticed that everyone had already had their
fruit and vegetables weighed and wrapped with a barcode, and that the checkout
counter didn’t have a scale. I, of
course, had just grabbed two bananas and not even put them in a bag.
The guy at the counter took one look at me, realized I couldn’t speak
Slovene, and decided the price of two bananas probably wasn’t worth the hassle
of communication. So I got two free
bananas. Yay me. It probably helped that he was a newbie (his
badge read: “STUDENT” except in Slovene, so I assume it meant the same thing).
Then I sat in a deserted park (about the size of a small room) outside
the train station and ate my brunch, waiting for the train.
By this point I had obviously missed the final Skocjan tour of the day,
so there was no point even trying to find the caves, but I didn’t want the day
to be a complete failure. The best thing
to do, I thought, would be to head to Potsjana in order to at least see one
cave, even if it wasn’t exactly the cave I had planned to see.
I didn’t want to wait in the station itself, so stayed in the park until
about fifteen minutes before the train was supposed to arrive. As soon as I walked into the train station I
saw a sign indicating the walking trail to Skocjan Caves. Of bloody course. In case you are wondering, it pointed in the
direction I’d thought I had to go based on the map.
Well, it was too late at this point so I took the train to Potsjana. Luckily those caves are far more touristy and
therefore far more clearly signed.
Unluckily those signs are road signs, and the snow had piled up along
the gutters forcing pedestrians onto the narrow roads. You’ll be relieved (or perhaps not) to hear
that I didn’t get hit.
Potsjana caves are quite impressive and, despite being a bit less
natural than I normally prefer in a cave it still managed to improve my mood
and make me feel as though I had had a worthwhile day.
I arrived just before 3pm, which was lucky since 3pm was the last tour
of the day. I went in with a huge group
of English, Italian and Slovene-speaking people. The tours start by placing the group on a
long train that snakes its way through the underground caverns at some speed,
whipping you through some impressive-looking rooms, including a ballroom with
chandelier and everything. Then, upon
arriving at a spot called the ‘mountain’ everyone hops out and has a guided
tour. The area they take you through has
a definite Khaza-Dum (you know what I mean) feel to it. Especially when you cross the little bridge,
which, if they took out the handrails, is exactly the sort of place you could
imagine facing a giant flaming monster and politely informing it that it was
not to pass.
After the 2km train journey back (it’s a fairly extensive cave system) I
headed back to Ljubljana and the hostel.
Apparently there was a beer pong game scheduled for that evening, but it
really didn’t seem like the right crowd for that kind of excitement, so I
declined to participate. Instead, as I
ate what was left of my pasta and pesto (mostly cheese was left, to be honest)
I struck up a conversation with an American girl. She was leaving early the next morning, and
the conversation felt a little forced and stilted, so it didn’t last long.
Two other girls were lazing around the room, but I just felt like going
to bed. So I did.
DAY TWO
After a quick shower I went down and paid the three euros for breakfast
since I felt I needed something real to eat.
I had almost a full day in which to explore Ljubljana because my train
to Vienna would only leave at 4pm. My
plan was: castle. Shut up, castle is a
good plan.
Anyway, Ljubljana Castle is a large white rectangle that sits at the top
of the hill in the middle of the city.
To get there I passed through a market and over the river. There are two ways up the hill to the castle
– one is the funicular (“pfft, only invalids and old people would need that!”)
and the other is a frozen-over, slippery, steep footpath up the side of the
hill (“oh God, I should have taken the funicular!”).
At the top I immediately walked into what seemed to be the ticket office
(basically a big glass room at the entrance to the castle) where a middle-aged
American couple were chatting with the store clerk. They were marveling at the fact that this guy
could speak English, and he was calmly explaining that pretty much everyone
below a certain age in Slovenia could speak English. They managed to carry this conversation on
far longer than I assumed would normally be its natural lifespan before I
finally managed to talk with the guy and found out that this was the gift shop,
not the ticket office.
At the ticket office (a tiny room in the corner of the castle walls) the
staff were outside having a ciggy. When
they saw me waiting they came in and sold me a three euro ticket for the
history museum, the tower and the virtual castle. I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about
the latter two since I got stuck in the history museum (I like to read everything,
and this place had a hell of a lot of information stored in these touchscreen
computers).
The museum was small and was basically made up of a series of computer
monitors that would turn on when they sensed you and provide you with
information. Except when they didn’t
sense you. After dancing around, trying
to hit the motion sensor on one of the displays for the billionth time I
started to just skip the ones that didn’t turn on.
The main thing I took from the history museum was that, actually, their
communist regime wasn’t too bad. They
had a few years of Stalinism (which was bad, of course) and then a new guy got
in charge who actually believed in civil liberties and allowed people to have
personal freedoms whilst also ensuring distribution of wealth. I’m fairly sure people still remember him
fondly.
This is something interesting to note – of all the communist regimes,
the only ones that were ‘bad’ were those based on the Soviet model – quite a
few actually seemed reasonably successful (based on the descriptions and
explanations of the museums I’ve visited).
Of course, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, all of the communist
governments collapsed, partly I suppose due to pressures from the West, but
also because even the nice ones were partly reliant on Soviet support.
Oh, and I learned about Yugoslavia, something I had no idea about
before. There seems to have been a
habit, between the first and second world wars, of shoving ethnically varied
regions together and calling them a country under one government. Yugoslavia definitely consisted of Slovenia
and Croatia and at least one other country.
Apparently Slovenia managed to split rather peacefully, but I’m sure I’ve
heard something about a major war involving the former Yugoslavia, so I might
have to look into it a little more when I get an opportunity (as a side note –
Central European history is SO MUCH more interesting than the Western-centric stuff
we get force fed at school in pretty much every period of history).
I had to rush the last section, which was about Slovenia’s developing
democracy and market economy because it was getting on, I had a train to catch
and wanted something to eat first. What
did I want to eat, I imagine you ask? A
horse burger. Yes, pure, genuine horse
meat.
Don’t worry, though. I couldn’t
find the restaurant I was looking for and just ended up walking around until it
was too late, I was completely lost, and had to go get my bags from the hostel.
Long story short (the story involves walking down a long road, so not
that exciting) I got to the train station with my bags in plenty of time and
was soon on my way to Vienna! Which you
will have to wait to hear about when this story is
TO BE CONTINUED
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