Ljubljana Blog

I'm sitting in the hostel on my final night in Ljubljana and what a wonderful 5 days it's been. When I first arrived, I was chatting with Rok, the owner of the hostel. I told him how much I loved Zagreb and he was quick to tell me that I'd like Ljubljana better. I then went off for a wander for a couple of hours and decided that I agreed with him and changed my booking from 3 nights to 5. There are about 300,000 people that live here so it's quite small for a capital city. But then, Slovenia is quite a small country. From Ljubljana it only takes an hour or two to get anywhere so it's an excellent place to be based. I did the usual walking tour and then spent a very leisurely few days doing not much at all! Today and tomorrow are public holidays so people also took Monday off so that they'd have an extra long weekend. This meant that most of the old city was just tourists and cafe owners. Like Zagreb, sitting and drinking coffee seems to be the favorite thing to do during the day and drinking beer by the river very popular in the evening. The river meanders its way through the middle of the old city and, now that it's spring time, the trees on the banks are a beautiful green colour. The place reminded me a bit of Brugge, in Belgium. The economy is not so good here though. One of the main reasons is that education is completely free and, if you're a student, you get 50% discount at loads of places - buses, restaurants, museums etc. This means that people are hesitant to leave university so, once they complete one degree, they go on and do another one. So you end up with a city full of over-educated citizens and no one with the practical skills needed to keep a place running. On one of my days here, I took a bus and went north to Lake Bled. Gorgeous spot! I walked around the lake and then decided that I had enough energy to climb the hill up to the castle. It was quite a tough climb and I was a bit peeved when I found out that you had to pay €8 just to enter the castle grounds to get the view. I paid though cos that's why I'd climbed up there, which of course they know that most people will do! Today I went to the Postjan caves, south of here. They're a bit like the Waitomo Caves, lots of stalacmites and stalactites. The caves run for 21km and are 3 levels deep. We boarded a train that took us 2km into the cave and then we followed a guide, on foot, for another km while he explained a few things about the caves. This is also the home of the white salamander, endemic to just a few places around the Dalmation area. They had a couple of them in an aquarium, deep inside the caves, so that we could see them. Every two days they are released back into the river and two more are caught. This is because they're used to being in the total dark and don't particularly like the soft light shining on them, even though they're blind. They were bigger than I thought, about 10cm in length with a funny protruding nose. I guess this is because they need a sharpened sense of smell to make up for not being able to see. Even though they're not a fish, they have gills and prefer being under the water than out of it. Tomorrow I'm heading back to Croatia. I'll spend a few days in the Istria Peninsula area and then head down the coast to Split. Now that the temperature has climbed to 30 degrees each day, it'll be lovely being by the sea.