The Julian Alps

As you may have noticed, I was on a road trip in Balkan countries for two weeks, and just came back to Finland on Sunday.

The trip was nothing short of incredible, since we were able to see so many cool places in just 14 days and the feeling of freedom when you can drive around in completely new areas without any specific plan is something that I can never get bored with.

The first destination on our trip was Slovenia – a small European Union country right next to Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia – and this first blog post regarding the trip will be all about that lovely and beautiful small country.

Just to give a sneak peak in advance of what I’m going to cover in the next posts, the whole road trip went like this:

Ljubljana – Bled – Bohinj (Slovenia) – Venice (Italy) – Crikvenica – Split – Dubrovnik (Croatia) – Mostar – Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina) – Skopje (Macedonia) – Thessaloniki (Greece) – Belgrade (Serbia) – Zagreb (Croatia) and finally back to Ljubljana again.

So there’s a lot of places to cover – I hope you don’t mind if I try to write a separate post about each of the countries we travelled through.

I feel sLOVEnia

The Slovenian slogan goes like that, and I can understand why.

Right after jumping out of the plane to the Ljubljana airport I could see the amazing Alps in the horizon with snow still in the mountain tops in the middle of the hot summer.

Another thing that I noticed besides the Alps was the green and fresh looking forests and green fields that were everywhere when we drove with a cab to the city center.

Ljubljana is a small city with about 280 000 inhabitants, and it is the capital of Slovenia. It has gained influences over time from Germanic, Latin and Slavic cultures, but compared to other Balkan countries it feels very modern and European.

Ljubljana by Night

Even though Slovenia was a part of the Yugoslavia for a long time, it was interesting for me to notice how different they still appear to be from other former Yugoslavian countries in many ways.

The people there are very kind (like in other Balkan countries, too), but they seem to be more calm and “European” in many ways, and they seem to be in many ways just like us Finns – kind, maybe a little bit shy, calm, wise, and honest. Those are some of the reasons I like them a lot.

I know a couple of Slovenes, so we met my friend Daša there and she showed us around in the capital.

The city center is really beautiful and the atmosphere along the river that goes through the city is really nice. There are street musicians playing, and people are hanging around in modern cafés and restaurants and watching people walk by.

A Street Musician in Ljubljana

There’s also a beautiful castle on a hill right next to the river where you can see the whole city from a panoramic view, which is definitely worth climbing onto.

We also walked in the biggest park of Ljubljana and found the so called “little Christiania” in the city, which is a small and eccentric hippie part of the city where the atmosphere is completely different from the rest of the city, so it was definitely worth seeing.

Experiencing the Alps in the Northern Slovenia

After we had spend one day in the capital city and finally got our rental car that was going to be the second home for the next two weeks, we decided to drive to Northern Slovenia where you have a couple of lovely small towns with amazing sceneries towards Julian Alps and beautiful lakes. We rented a boat in Bohinj, and rowed in the lake enjoying the sun and watching the picturesque view.

There’s also a waterfall in Bohinj, but it would have taken a 20 minute walk to see it, so we decided to skip it and do something little bit less exhausting. Lazy Finns, you know.

Another small town we went to was Bled, which is quite a famous tourist destination as well. There’s a small island in the lake of Bled that has a church in it. Behind the church you can again see the Julian Alps, so the view is truly beautiful. Maybe there were a little bit too many tourists to our taste in Bled, so we didn’t spend that much time there.

It is quite easy to actually drive to the mountains from Bled and that’s what we decided to do next.

Mount Triglav is the highest mountain in Slovenia, so we tried to find that with our priceless Eastern Europe Lonely Planet book that has crucial information of all the countries we went to (except for Greece).

The Julian Alps and Some Locals

I don’t know what happened to my map reading skills, but we couldn’t find a way to get to that mountain, so I’m not actually sure which mountain we drove onto, but the scene was spectacular anyway.

Our initial plan was to drive around Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Serbia, but because we realized that the distances between different countries and destinations were really short, we decided spontaneously to drive during the same evening to Venice, Italy, because I have never been there even though my travel companion has, and it just is one of those famous places in the world that you must seen once during your life.

It took a little bit more than we thought to finally get to legendary Venice with all the canals and gondolas, but we managed to arrive there finally at 1 AM – tired but happy. I’ll write about our experiences in Venice next, so stay tuned.

More Photos of Slovenia

The Church and the Moon in Bled

Bled Sceneries

The Church that Lays On the Small Island in Bled

The Famous Picturesque Church of Bohinj

The Lake in Bohinj

A Walk in the Park

Hole in the Stairs

The Castle Viewed from the City

Some Artsy Stuff

Statues

The Castle from the Inside

View from the Castle

Ljubljana by Day

The Castle in Ljubljana

Related articles:

1. Continuing the Road Trip to Venice, the Floating City
2. Driving Along the Stunning Croatian Coast
3. How Beautiful Mostar in Bosnia & Herzegovina Made Me Question Humanity
4. How to Make Your Photos Look More Professional
5. How to Get 3 Seats on a Plane For the Price of 1 (and Sleep Well the Whole Flight)
6. 5 Tips for Making the Most of Your Travels