Lake Bled

July 23^rd July

Today we had our earliest of early days, we were up at 6.15am to get ready for and catch a bus to Lake Bled, Slovenia! Rory is on a mission to increase his list of conquered countries and as Slovenia is so close we thought we might pop over the boarder for a quick visit. We booked with a travel company, thinking they were merely drive and deposit us in said country, however, the tour guide had other ideas and talked for the entire journey which is quite an accomplishment given that we left at 7.20am and arrived at 12.30pm. She was nice enough but she seemed intent on telling us everything she has ever learnt, ever. We received a brief history of every pretty much every country in Europe, we even learnt a bit about her mother and her favourite dessert.

Despite our talkative host, we arrived at Lake Bled in one piece and proceeded to explore the castle. I didn’t know much about Lake Bled so I wasn’t sure what to expect, I didn’t even know there was a castle, so I was pleasantly surprised when we finally caught a glimpse. It’s literally set on a cliff face and the views are spectacular. It was a warm but overcast day which made it difficult to take pictures that would do the area justice but I tried and here are a few...

Once we’d had a good nosey around the castle we heading down to the actual lake where we had some free time to explore and more importantly, get lunch. We didn’t have many Euros with us and we didn’t want to waste lots of time by having a sit down restaurant so instead went to a fast food restaurant called Ham Ham. It was not fast and it was disgusting. In fact, I was so repulsed I couldn’t eat my burger; thankfully Rory was on hand to eat it. Waste not want not and all that. After our disappointing lunch we took a boat ride across the lake, stopping off and exploring the little island. I don’t know much about the island, after eight hours of constant talking I became good at tuning out our tour guide and I have no internet connection to do research that I could pass off as my own knowledge, but it’s really nice. The water around the island is lovely and blue and if we had been staying for the night I would’ve had a good mountainous swim!  But alas, our time was short so we just had a short walk and in no time we were back on the boat and back in the bus, heading home to Rovinj.

Solvenia has been a real surprise, maybe because I had no expectations, but it really impressed me. Lake Bled was really picturesque and even the drive to get there was scenic. It’s probably bad to say but I hadn’t expected the area to be so advanced and tourist friendly but at the same time it wasn’t overwhelmingly touristy. If you are ever in the area I would definitely recommend a trip to Slovenia and especially Lake Bled, I wish we could have stayed for longer but alas, we are slaves to public transport/tourist excursions and I didn’t fancy hitchhiking back to Rovinj – we’ve all seen Taken.