26/08/2011 Day 17. Skocjanske jame and Bohinj camp site.

Early start this morning, we were up at 6 and ready for a 7am kick off. We had a 7 hour drive in front of us. It got to 9.30 and we saw the temperature in Croatia was 33.4 degrees already. It was hot n sweaty in the back, oh yes. We arrived at the caves, skocjanske, at about 1.45. It was sweaty outside too! We waited for about 15 minutes and a man shouted saying that we were setting off to the caves for the tour. I looked around and this guy was the spitting image of The Lion Man. I was loving it. We were then told, just as we went into the caves, no pictures at all. Well gutted!! Stalactites and stalagmites everywhere. The stalactites grow from the ceiling very slowly by the slow evaporation of mineral containing water. They take thousands of years to grow, one millimetre takes 150 years. We saw the oldest stalagmite in the caves was 250,000 years old and was was almost 35 metres tall. We went into the canyon which was 3km long, 125 metres high! We walked over a bridge which was 45m above the water's surface. The river flowing through is called reika, translates to river. He then showed us how dark it was when the lights were off how the original explorers would have seen it in 1851. It was very dark I can tell you that. As we exited we went out of a natural exit, unlike the man made entrance tunnel we got in through, we saw why it took so long to get it explored. There was 160m sheer cliffs above us. We managed to get up an easy way though, we took a cable car, bliss! We went for the van again, it ha been left in the afternoon sun until 3pm and was very warm and into the back I went. As we drove to Bohinj I fell asleep because I was shattered. The sleep was short lived though as Nick splashed me with water, I felt rubbish when I woke up. We arrived at the campsite about 5.30pm. Had a doss around and then went for a walk into the little town after using the computer to check emails and whatnot. We went to a restaurant thing and got a beer from a woman who knew 0 English, at all. After we had finished the beer we thought, oo I could do with one more. We asked the woman for some more beers and she said some stuff none of us understood and started couting out bottles telling us the prices in German. She must have thought we didn't want to pay for them so we paid that bill and I asked, ok so now can we have more an she said something else and walked off. We called it at that and went back to the van. Now we're listening to Ricky Gervais' podcast listening to the brilliant views of Karl Pilkington. Tomorrow we're going to Lake Bled, again, exciting times!