Adventure / Slovenia
Slovenia, Alps, Lakes and Empty Roads
Slovenia · 8 min read
Slovenia does something unusual: you can be in the Alps in the morning, in a limestone cave at lunchtime and swimming in the Adriatic by evening. The whole country is about two hours across.
It is also still much cheaper than its neighbours, and considerably less crowded.
The Julian Alps
Bled is the famous lake and it earns the photographs, though Bohinj twenty minutes away is bigger, wilder and far quieter. Both sit at the edge of Triglav National Park.
The Vrsic pass with its fifty cobbled hairpins is the great alpine drive here, open roughly from May to October.
The Soca valley
The Soca river is an improbable turquoise all the way down its length, and the valley around Bovec and Kobarid is the adventure capital: rafting, canyoning, paragliding, and one of the best trout rivers in Europe.
Kobarid also has a superb First World War museum and, surprisingly, a couple of the country's best restaurants.
Caves, city and coast
Postojna is the big commercial cave with a train through it. Skocjan, a UNESCO site, has a vast underground canyon crossed by a bridge and is the more affecting of the two.
Ljubljana is a compact, riverside, car free capital that deserves two nights. Piran on the coast is a Venetian town in miniature, and forty six kilometres of coastline turns out to be enough.
Why it is worth the effort
Few countries offer this much variety within a two hour drive, and almost none this cheaply.
Base twice: once in the Soca valley, once near Bohinj, with a night in Ljubljana at the end.
