We’re not accustomed to it. Our normal “WotNexDo” touring regime has been laid to rest for now. With Ljubljana under our belt and Maribor (Slovenia’s second city) not on our radar, we have time to spare.
With fewer than seventy towns in Slovenia, all smaller than Christchurch’s 40,000, it’s easy to see why there’s so much green space here. Our walk and cycle ways being simple connections from one village to another. In fact, more often than not, we come across no more than a few houses. Randomly linked together settlements. Peppering the hillsides like shotgun pellets. View enhancing man-made fractals adding to nature’s own.
Today, we cycle down one such path. Accessible directly from our site.
Some of the cows still wear their prize garlands.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin . . . the following morning sees us head towards Postojna and its world famous cave system. We have a halfway site planned. This turns out to be just as well. We leave at 10.10am. By 11.55am we cover a fraction under 27 miles – almost all in the wrong direction. Doh! You may have already guessed the reason why. That often repeated phrase ‘circumstances conspired against us’, not really a good enough excuse. It starts within 2K of leaving camp. Our route takes us straight through the middle of Bohinjska Bistrica. The road is up – all of it. We carefully circumnavigate the narrow back streets. Head towards where we think we should be heading. We’re not exactly sure how, or where we go wrong, but we do. Missy, doesn’t inform us. Silently recalculates a new ‘extended’ route. I’m aware we’re heading east and not west. Due to the very hilly landscape I assume we’re simply going up and around a particularly big hill, with no other option and will soon re-orientate on the other side. At this point, oblivious to the fact that at precisely 11.55am we are going to end up lost. Unperturbed we continue. We climb higher and higher in never ending spirals. We feel like the itsy-bitsy spider. Then the tarmac runs out. By now the road width is no more than three metres and becomes a wide gravel track in the middle of a massive forest. The sort I favour when out on my MTB. In hindsight we seem to have overlooked a number of clues. Although Birmingham born and bred, Cluedo was never a game I excelled at. Unperturbed we continue. We expect the tarmac to reappear soon. It doesn’t. Then out of nowhere a huge heavily laden logging lorry looms around a bend. It’s not going to stop. It could have had Beastie for lunch. Somehow we squeeze past. Mrs S is having kittens. Beastie’s a right hand drive. She’s in the firing line! She wasn’t expecting a white knuckle ride. We pass orderly pile after orderly pile of felled trees waiting for collection. We’re in dread of meeting another lorry. Unperturbed we continue. “If a huge lorry that size is up here, then the way down and out can’t be far” I suggest optimistically. It falls on deaf ears. Suddenly Missy wakes up and ‘invites’ us to “Turn around”; we wake up too. Come to our senses. Realise she’s no idea where we are.
Eventually we make it to a confusing T-junction. Confusing only because we are confused. There is no road out. Just single gravel tracks. We are coming to grips with the fact that we’re high up in loony lumberjack land. I step down. Adopt my famous (and familiar to Mary-Ann) confused look. Load an offline map of Slovenia on the tablet and walk 50 metres along one of the tracks as I scratch my head. Watch for the magic marker to move. There’s only one sensible way out. Hate to do it, but that’s back to where we came from. It seems the track in is considered one way by the truckers. We meet no trucks. Join the 403. We’re safe. It’s got real tarmac and white lines . . . onwards and upwards?