Slovenia1

Slovenia & Vienna

Guidebooks: We are traveling with TimeOut's Vienna (2005), Rick Steves' Best of Eastern Europe 2006, and Slovenia: The Bradt Travel Guide (2005). We're not big fans of the TimeOut guide, maybe because it seems aimed at travelers with a higher budget than ours. Rick Steves and Bradt are consistently reliable in their content; of course the information is almost 2 years old by now, so prices are higher across the board. Our only real complaint with both Rick Steves and Bradt is their maps are lacking. In their defense, every town we visit has at least one TI (Tourist Information) office that provides local maps. One thing I like about Rick Steves' guide - he provides helpful pronunciations of many phrases and destination names.

Currency: Austria is part of the European Union and we spend Euros (E) in Vienna. Slovenia has joined the EU but will not switch to the Euro until January 1, 2007, so we're using the Slovenian Tolar (SIT). The exchange rate during our trip is about $1US = 0.78E, and $1US = 190SIT. We prefer to travel with traveler's checks; banks are readily available and most will cash them for no fee. The only time this is inconvenient is on weekends when most banks are closed or have limited hours; then we resort to ATMs, and those are also very accessible.

A quiet moment in Vienna (Day 2)

Gennero has the white triangular sign near the center

Shopping along Graben in Vienna (Day 2)

Preseren Square and the Franciscan Church (Day 3)

The view from Ljubljana Castle (Day 4)

Slovenians know gas mileage

These little cars were a common site, especially in Ljubljana

(Note the construction fence in the background)

Dragon Bridge in Ljubljana (Day 4)

Note the construction crane disrupting my composition

Predjama Castle (Day 5)

Piran, Slovenia (Day 5)

The construction crane will be a recurring theme

Days 1-2: St. Petersburg, Florida to Vienna

Various legs of our flight are operated by Lufthansa, US Airways, and Austrian Air. I especially like Lufthansa's service. We arrive in Vienna, via Charlotte, North Carolina, and Munich, on Sunday morning. The airport is considerably outside the city center. We take Vienna's City Airport Train (CAT) from the airport into town. We purchased our CAT tickets prior to the trip; the CAT website has a convenient "Buy and Print" feature. It's a 16-minute ride into town (8E each), then a taxi ride (10E with tip) to our hotel. We've reserved a room at Pension Nosek (via e-mail), a guest house in Vienna's old town. The Pension is in an old, mixed-use building; the rooms have high ceilings and wood floors. The staff is a little stand-offish, but the room is comfortable and the pension is quiet enough that we never even hear any of the other guests. Be prepared before checking in, they accept cash only.

Too jet-lagged for serious site-seeing, we walk around the area near Pension Nosek and enjoy watching the people and the architecture. We are on Graben, a pedestrian district filled with shiny, modern retailers set up inside beautiful 19th Century architecture. We walk off onto a side street for lunch at Pizzeria Ristorante da Gennero; I have delicious potato gnocchi with tomato and mozzarella for 10E; the service is good and we sit outdoors on a warm afternoon.

Later we have dinner at Zum Leupold, a restaurant we picked completely at random during our walk around town. Julie has a hearty goulash (13.5E) and I have pork cutlet with salad (9.8E). Good service in a warm, pub-like setting. At least in the old town, tourism is important enough that speaking at least two languages seems to be a fact of life in service occupations. Despite my knowing only a few German phrases, we have no trouble communicating with anyone.

We get (almost) hopelessly lost on the walk back to our hotel, but eventually get our bearings without having to resort to a taxi. The streets are quieter than I expected for such a large city. Tonight, as in almost every night on our trip, we sleep with the windows open. Temperatures are consistently in the sixties and seventies during the day, and usually jacket-comfortable at night. For me, I'm just thrilled to be in Vienna.

Day 3: Vienna to Ljubljana

On every day of our trip, a true continental breakfast is provided by our hotel. Nosek provides a similar breakfast as the others; sliced meats and cheeses, a variety of fruit, breads and cereals, yogurt and hard-boiled eggs; occasionally we see sausages and scrambled eggs also. It doesn't take long before we're enjoying this traditional start to our day.

The real purpose of our vacation is to tour Slovenia. We have read nothing but good things about this country, so we're looking forward to getting started. We taxi (10E) from Pension Nosek to Vienna's Sudbahnhof, the rail station on the south side of old town. The rail fare from Vienna to Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana (pronounced LOOB-lyanna), is 116E for both of us. The train ride is about 6.5 hours. The scenery is beautiful and constantly changing; cities, small towns, large and small farms, mountains and pastures. We change trains at the Austrian town of Leoben; at Spielfeld, the last Austrian stop before entering Slovenia, customs officials for both countries walk through the train and check our passports. We enjoy a couple of ham-and-cheese sandwiches on the train, delivered to our seats by a friendly young man from the restaurant car (10E total for two sandwiches and 2 mineral waters).

Once in Ljubljana, it is about a five-minute walk from the rail station to the City Hotel. The hotel itself is a few minutes' walk from the city center. Everywhere we go on our trip, we see construction and renovation projects. Construction cranes and scaffolding are always present. City Hotel is no exception; they are undergoing a major renovation and I think when they are finished it will be a top-notch hotel. A little pricy at 129E/night for a double, but we enjoy good service and a comfortable (if small) room. We're on the top (7th) floor with a great view of the city.

We stroll around Ljubljana and take in the sites. What a great city this is. The city center has phenomenal architecture, and it is a lively college town. The inner city is spread along the Ljubljanica River. I get the impression Ljubljana offers most of what large, western European cities offer, but on a much more accessible scale (population 300,000). We walk through the heart of the city, Preseren Square, overlooked by the Franciscan Church of the Anunciation.

Tonight we have dinner at Zlita Ribica, with outdoor seating right on the busy pedestrian thoroughfare along the river. I have pork loin with gnocchi, mushrooms and vegetables, Julie has grilled rumpsteak with potatoes. With mineral water and soft drink our bill comes to 5,900SIT.

Everywhere we go people are friendly, and we feel perfectly safe walking day and night.

Honestly, until a few months ago I had barely heard of Slovenia. Now I am quite happy to be here. Throughout Slovenia, most of the tourists we encounter are German, Austrian, or Italian. We see very few U.S. citizens.

Day 4: Ljubljana

After breakfast at the City Hotel, we hike across the Dragon Bridge over the Ljubljanica River. The bridge was designed by Jose Plecnik, an early 20th Century architect, born in Ljubljanna, who designed numerous structures in the city.

We hike up the hill overlooking the city to Ljubljana Castle. Just finding the right footpath takes some doing; construction of what appears to be a lift, to carry tourists who don't want to walk up the hill, blocks one of the paths to the top. We finally find our way to the castle; it is tremendously windy up there but we get great views of the entire city.

We hike back down the hill and have lunch at Ribca, with open-air seating right along the river. Food and service are excellent (this will be a consistent theme on our trip). We each have a plate of shrimp and calamari with fries and a Greek salad, bread and beverage (total 4,900SIT). To drink we have Cockta, a Slovenian-made soft drink; when Slovenia was part of Communist Yugoslavia, Coca-Cola was rarely available; the country came up with its own imitation Coke. I'm not big on soft drinks, but Cockta tastes less sugary than "the real thing" and I prefer it.

Day 5: Predjama Castle, Skojcan Caves, Lipica, Piran

After breakfast we check out of City Hotel. Our initial plan was to take a bus to Divaca in southeastern Slovenia and try to make our way to the Skocjan (SKOTS-yan) Caves; we've read that the caves are not easily accessible by public transport. During our checkout we see brochures for a tour company offering a day tour of Predjama Castle, Skojcan Caves, Lipica, and Piran. All but Predjama were already on our agenda, so on the spur of the moment we sign up. The fee is 9,500SIT per person.

The tour company picks us up at the hotel at 8:30AM. Our driver is a native Slovenian named Vanya who speaks fluent English. The drive with her is interesting enough, as she gives us a little more insight into Slovenia. For example, college students in Slovenia currently receive free tuition and subsidized room and board. (Countries that don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars on warfare and pork barrel projects can afford to do that.) She says there is some discussion in the government of ending this program and students are, understandably, opposed to this movement.

The 700-year-old Predjama (prayd-YAH-ma) Castle is beautiful, built into the side of a cliff. However, our tour only includes viewing the outside, we never go into the Castle. This feels a little chintzy, but we hadn't planned on seeing Predjama anyway, so it's not a big loss for us.

Lipica (LEE-peet-suh) is more interesting, but still essentially a drive-by. Lipica is the site of a horse farm where the famous Lipizzaner horses were first bred and where most of them are still born. It's not a secure operation; a large group of mares and foals grazes in a fenced pasture along the road. Numerous tourists, including us, stop alongside the road. Some of the horses approach us almost immediately, probably looking for food. We spend some time petting and photographing the horses. Our tour doesn't include a tour of the farm, so we move on.

We stop at a roadside pub in the Lipica area for a hearty snack of cheese, bread, olives, and prsut (per-SHOOT). The prsut is ham that has been air-dried by the winds of the Karst, the region of Slovenia we're in. This is truly delicious. Again, however, it seems chintzy that our tour fee doesn't cover this; we're charged 9E each.

We move on to Skojcan Caves. I've toured several cave systems in and around my home state of Indiana, and I expect Skojcan to be similar. Our entry fee (again not covered by the tour!) is 10E/person. We hike out to the cave with a mob of well over 100 people. We are broken into 4 groups by language. Our English-speaking guides walk us through the cave, which consists of two sections. The first section is reminiscent of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, large "rooms" with beautiful and well-preserved cave formations. The second section is unlike anything I've ever seen, like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. We walk through a truly massive cavern, with a river roaring below us and the ceiling high above. At one point we walk across a narrow bridge that gives a genuine feeling of floating in this enormous space. We do feel rushed, the tour only lasts 50 minutes. Still, the cave is magnificent and well worth seeing.

Next on to Piran, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Slovenia only has about 30 miles of coastline on the Adriatic, so we can easily see Italy to the west and Croatia to the south. Piran's proximity to Italy invites numerous Italian tourists, and many signs in town are in both Slovenian and Italian.

Vanya takes the rest of the group back to Ljubljana this evening, but we decide to stay the night in Piran. We check into the Hotel Tartini (21,500SIT/night for a double) a comfy hotel with a great view of Tartini Square. Giuseppe Tartini was an 18th Century composer born in Piran, and half the town seems to be named after him. The square seems to be the hot spot in town, all through the night we hear people socializing there. We enjoy walking through the cobblestone streets of the town. There is a line of cookie-cutter restaurants, all with apparently identical menus and high prices, along the water. We pick one where I have shrimp/calamari/fries and Julie has steak and fries, with lemonade, for 8,000SIT. The food is good and the service is mediocre. It's the setting that counts here, watching a flawless sunset over the Adriatic.

After dinner we stroll along the waterfront, then have dessert at a little cafe; called Oaza; baklava, apple strudel, and 2 hot teas for 1,100SIT.

Skojcan Caves (Day 5)

The cave exit is the gaping hole behind the tree on the right. For scale, hikers are visible near the lower-left. Many ignored it, but there was a “no photography” policy that prevented me from taking pictures inside the cave.