Lake Bled, Slovenia

Dan: After a few train rides and a short bus trip, we arrived at Nova Gorica train station in Slovenia on the border with Italy. The station felt like we had gone back in time a few hundred years, with no computer screens telling us the departure times and only one major 'platform'. After asking an equally confused English couple where our train was going to show up, we were told platform 3 - a strip of concrete no wider than 2 feet, which required you to cross track 1 and 2 on foot!

Platform 3

Once on the train we made our way through some very scenic valleys complete with winding roads and rivers that made it one of the most enjoyable journeys so far. We arrived at Bled station a couple of hours later and could partially see the lake when exiting the station.

View of the lake from the station

After dumping our stuff in our accommodation we went for a nice stroll round the lake, made friends with some ducks and bought some much needed ice cream (at a much nicer price than in Italy). There is a pedestrianised path that goes round the whole lake, with the town being on the east side of it. We are staying on the west side which means a 20 minute walk to the main town, but to be honest it's worth it. We spent the evening in and cooked our own food to recover from our long travel day.

Lake Bled

The second day we took a morning walk to the supermarket then came back and hired some bikes from our hosts. We slowly ventured round the lake and stopped off several times to take some pictures. Unfortunately the clouds started to appear which made the weather much colder than what we were used to. We had a quiet night again after our strenuous exercise.

New friend

Our third and final full day was spent contemplating if we wanted to go out in the rain. We eventually decided to waterproof up and walk to the castle that overlooks the lake. After a bit of treacherous hill climbing on some wet rocks and gravel, we got to a little secluded spot round the side of the castle which gave us an amazing view of the lake (better than paying the €8 entrance fee). We took a dodgy detour down and stumbled across a pizza place where I had a gigantic burger and Sally had an equally huge pizza for a reasonable price. At this point we were pretty miserable in the wet and cold so we went back to dry off, warm up and watch some Animal Planet on the TV!

View of the lake from near the castle

It makes a nice change staying in such a rural area for the first time during the trip; I almost got used to scary pedestrian crossings, crammed pavements and long queues! I think Slovenia is my favourite country so far because of the landscape and scenery. We're heading to Ljubljana tomorrow which is the capital so it'll be interesting to see how different that is to where we are now and to the other capitals we've visited.