Lake Bled

6th April 2010

As predicted the weather for our day trip to the Triglav national park was beautiful. We were up early for the 9am bus to Lake Bled. The trip took just over and hour and the whole way we were treated to lovely scenery; green fields surrounded by massive mountains.

When we arrived we found the tourist information centre to find out about walking tracks and times. We set off to circle the lake, which was almost 7km around, and surrounded by stunning snow capped mountains (Including Slovenia's highest peak Mt Triglav). In the centre of the lake is a small island, which is home to a church, and on one edge of the lake, perched high up on a rocky cliff is a castle. Heading clockwise, it took us just over an hour to get ¾ of the way around. We found a small, somewhat marked path up through the forest, which should hopefully take us up the back way to the castle. The hike was pretty grueling, and it completely wore me out. It felt like we'd been climbing straight up for half an hour. After much complaining we eventually reached the top, where the views made it all worthwhile. We actually didn't pay the 9 Euros to get into the castle, because it is apparently pretty much empty inside. Once rested we made our way down the faster side of the cliff. It was still pretty steep but we were down in less than 10 minutes… We finished off the loop of the lake and headed for the city centre to find some lunch.

From about halfway around the lake I had been busting to use the toilet and was not game enough to pop a squat behind a tree, so the first stop was the public WC in town. It machine wasn't working and would not let me in, so I had to start searching. I asked one man in his restaurant if I could use his toilet and he said No, so I went elsewhere. When I found that there was nowhere else I went back to the mean man, and shoved 50 cent on the counter and told him that I was using his toilet. I was not going to wait around for him to tell me no again.

We bough lunch at a take away shop and had some burgers. They were monsters, absolutely huge with everything on them you'd like; I had coleslaw, onion, tomato and cheese. We sat out on the steps in the beautiful sun (Not even a need for a jumper or jacket yay!) and ate. After lunch we had planned to do a 10km round trip up to the Vintgar Gorge. The lady had said that it didn't officially open until the 27th of April, but we would have to find our own way and that it was all at our own risk. We were fine with that until I ate my burger. Because it had also take us much longer than we'd planned to go around the lake and up to the castle I was concerned that we wouldn't make it back from the gorge before night. We decided that we'd give it a pass. Instead we set off in search of one of Bled's 'Cream cakes'. We found one and luckily decided to share because it was a monster of a cake. Imagine a vanilla slice, but about 15cm Square, topped with an inch of cream before being wedged between the pastry. That's a Bled cream cake. We washed down with one of Europe's best coffees. We'd managed to undo all the fantastic hiking we'd done in the morning.

The afternoon was spent back down at the lake enjoying the weather and the sunshine. We sat on a bench and watched the ducks fight and all the different people going by. We actually both managed to get a little bit sun burnt.

By about 3pm we'd decided that we should probably start to make a move to find the bus to take us back to Ljubljana. The bus trip home had no hassle and I think I actually managed a little nap on the journey back to Ljubljana. We stopped in at the small supermarket on our walk back to the hostel and collected some cheap local beer and some pasta for dinner. It was around 5.30 by the time we got back to the hostel so Dan played some DS while I typed up some older blogs.

After dinner we watched some TV before getting an early nights sleep before leaving for Zagreb, Croatia early the next morning.