Karst the first stone

30.10.2019 - 30.10.2019
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I have always liked caves. They both terrify me and intrigue me at the same time. I remember my parents taking me and my brother on a short holiday to Wellington Caves in the Central West of New South Wales when I was four. I recall having the living daylights scared out of me by all the bats - bats still give me the chills - but also being amazed by all the stalactites and stalagmites and columns and all the other bizarre formations. Caves are a glimpse into another world, a world beneath our feet that we human beings rarely give a second thought, a fairytale universe in which monsters are real and rivers disappear into darkness and all the furniture is made of limestone.

Slovenia is the ideal destination for someone who likes caves. To make a cave, you only really need two things - limestone fairly close to the surface and water. Water, being one of the most powerful solvents on earth, reacts with limestone to form calcium carbonate suspended in solution. The limestone is slowly but relentlessly eroded away, forming the cavities that we all know as caves. Water drips through the limestone into the caves, depositing the dissolved calcium carbonate on the ceilings, floors and walls, forming those beautiful spikes and columns and curtains that tourists love to take photos of.

The best landscape for the formation of caves is karst - typically, karsts are highland plateaus where the limestone forms a large relatively flat surface easily accessible to rainwater. Karst is found all over the world, but the granddaddy of all karsts is its namesake, the Karst region of southwestern Slovenia.

So I got up early in the morning and caught a train to the Karst plateau. I walked fifteen minutes to Ljubljana station, bought my ticket from the counter - unusually for a European railway, Slovenske železnice doesn't have ticket machines - then bought a small McDonald's breakfast to take on the train. It wasn't long before my train, the 08:15 local train to Opčine, departed. This small modern two-car electric train, very sleek and smart in its dark red livery, departed on time, the polite conductor stamped my ticket, the train was comfortable and clean and didn't smell of urine at all and it didn't stop halfway through its journey to dump everyone onto trackwork buses that never come. What a change from Hungary!

Another great thing about this train - there were four different bins for recycling. Slovenes would have to be the most fastidious, pedantic recyclers in the world. Wherever you go you see people at street bins carefully sort through their waste to make sure they put the right things in the right bin. Back home, I always nearly have an aneurysm whenever I open the recycling wheelie bins only to find other residents in my apartment building have put unrecyclable waste or unseparated items in garbage bags or dirty nappies in them. Why do people have to be so damn stupid!

The train went through Ljubljana's western suburbs then crossed a green agricultural plain, after which it slowly climbed up into mountains clad with pines and beeches with views across emerald valleys studded with villages of neat two-storey family homes with steep roofs. The line was quite twisty. Slovenian railways remind me a bit of the railways in New South Wales - the track, signal, electrical and the trains themselves are all reasonably modern and well maintained, but they still follow the same antiquated nineteenth century alignments as when they were built, meaning that the trains travel at a snail's pace.

A bit over one and a half hours after leaving Ljubljana, I disembarked at Divača, a few kilometres from the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Škocjan Caves. I and four other visitors didn't have to wait long for the free shuttle bus to the caves, a mere five minutes away by minibus but an hour's walk.

There are two tours available for the Škocjan Caves, and I bought a ticket to both. The first tour was "Following The Reka River Underground", a hike along the Reka River canyon including through natural tunnels where it goes underground for short distances. There was a short while before this tour began so I went on a short walk to a nearby lookout. This lookout gave an excellent overview of the layout of the Skocjan Caves. The Reka River - "Rijeka" in Croatian; the Croatian port city of Rijeka is at the river's mouth - flows across the Karst plateau and has carved out an enormous canyon. The canyon isn't complete though; there are portions where the Reka disappears completely, only to reappear out of a tunnel portal.

At eleven o'clock the first tour began. We followed the tour leader for a hike across nearby farmland then descended very steep stairs into the canyon. The path then followed the gushing Reka river along the canyon and through two large natural tunnels. After the second tunnel we emerged into a giant bowl-shaped cavity, the Big Collapse Doline. What happened is that previosuly, the Reka was completely underground here. But erosion action over time from surface water (e.g., rainfall) permeating the limestone slowly makes the ceiling get thinner and thinner until the ground collapses. Essentially, the Big Collapse Doline is one giant sinkhole. Further erosion has carved out a massive bowl-shaped natural ampitheatre with the river still flowing through the bottom.

We ascended back to the visitor centre on a funicular railway and I had a deeply unsatisfying lunch at a restaurant with the slowest, most indifferent service. I should have learned by now that restaurants at national parks and other natural attractions remote from urban areas is always expensive and horrible, and that I should always bring my own food. These places are effectively monopolies and they damn well know it, and visitors have no choice but to cop it on the chin. I paid €3.50 for a 500mL bottle of Coke Zero (the going rate elsewhere in Slovenia is about €1.50). Even by Australian standards, A$5.60 is outrageous.

At one o'clock the second tour began, "Through The Underground Canyon". This is by far the more popular tour, it goes into the caves proper, not just the tunnels. The friendly and knowledgable guide - yet also quite rightly strict; the rules quite clearly stated no photographs on this tour and she came down hard on the flagrant rule breakers - led us on another hike for a kilometre or so across farmland, down another very steep staircase into the canyon, then through the cave entrance.

The next hour - wow. What awe and reverence these caves inspired. The scale of the caves defies belief. In some chambers, the tour leader would shine her torch into the darkness and the beam of light would touch no wall. The Škocjan Caves make the Jenolan Caves west of Sydney look like somebody's basement. The immensity of the caves swallows anybody who visits them and turns them into mere inconsequential atoms.

It was hard work. There were very steep staircases connecting the different chambers, the wet, slippery path didn't help things. The tour guide made it all worthwhile, she was patient and answered everyone's question in turn. I asked a question about why photography was prohibited on this tour and not the other one. She politely explained it was all about safety - when people take photos they take unsafe risks like leaning over the many precipices and crevices, and also about timing - the caves are massive and there is only so much time, and if everyone took photographs it would take up too much time. So I have no photographs of this tour. Just do a Google Images search for "Škocjan Caves". You will see what I am banging on about.

After about ninety minutes we all went back up to the visitor centre on the same funicular railway, then there was a half hour wait for the shuttle bus back to Divača station. I went to the ticket office at the railway station but it was closed, the roller shutter well and truly locked. They don't have railway ticket machines in Slovenia. How on earth was I supposed to buy a ticket? The other caves visitors were scratching their heads too.

It wasn't too long until the train back to Ljubljana appeared, the "Pohorje", an Intercity train that travels the entire length of the country from the port of Koper on the Adriatic coast to Hodoš on the Hungarian border. We boarded this sleek little three-car tilting train but we needn't have worried. In Slovenia, railway conductors sell tickets on board. Such a relief! In New South Wales boarding without a ticket is a $200 fine and I was worried it might be the same here in Slovenia.

After resting for a bit at the Dežnik guesthouse, I went out for dinner. I chose a Bosnian restaurant, Sarajevo '84, that specialises in Bosnian cuisine as well as čevapi, the spiced skinless sausages that are a staple all across ex-Yugoslavia. I must confess that before I came to Slovenia, I imagined that all the former Yugoslav people still hated each other after the toxic hatreds, suppressed for decades by Marshal Tito's slogan of Brotherhood and Unity, were unleashed in the 1990s Yugoslav Wars.

If Slovenia is anything to judge by, this is nonsense.

There is this Bosnian restauarant. The airwaves on Slovenian radio are full of cheesy synth-pop by Croatian and Serbian musicians. (By the way, cheesy synth-pop from the ex-Yugoslav countries is like crack for the ears. It burrows through your eardrums, buries itself in your brain and never, ever leaves. I'm hooked.) Every day I meet people who live in Slovenia but whose origins are in the other ex-Yugoslav republics. The roads are full of cars with Croatian and Serbian plates.

Anyway, I went to Sarajevo '84. Because the place is so popular I was seated with others and I was placed next to a Parisian lady my age or perhaps a little younger, Irene. Irene, a good-eccentric traveller (I don't think I've met a bad-eccentric traveller on this trip yet, thank heavens), is on a personal project to visit as many capital cities as she can. She is starting with all the European countries, has also clinched a few Asian capitals, and will then branch out to the rest of the world.

I talked about my own project of climbing as many national high points that I am capable of climbing and she laughed. We got to talking about our travels, the things we have seen. We swapped tips on what to see in Ljubljana and swapped phone numbers in case I ever visit Paris or she ever visits Canberra.

It was a pleasant end to a pleasant day exploring one of the world's most impressive cave systems.

Train from Ljubljana to Divača