Slap in the face

03.11.2019 - 03.11.2019 8 °C
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I am the kind of person who likes to have everything planned in advance. This includes holidays. I might not plan exactly what I am doing on every single day, but before leaving Australia I like at the very least to know how many nights I will be spending in each destination.

But I have learned from previous trips. Sometimes I have given myself far too little time in a place I ended up falling in love with (*cough* Taiwan *cough*), and spent far too much time in a place that I found less than pleasant (*cough* South Korea *cough*).

I have fallen in love with Slovenia in a way I had not anticipated and if it wasn’t for the fact that I had already booked my flight home from Italy months before leaving home, I would have been perfectly content to spend the rest of my time in this magical alpine republic.

With my blasted cold accompanied by persistent coughing, I had not been able to do all the things in the Lake Bled region I had intended to do. Also, Slovenia is full of Italian tourists. In contrast to the rather more congenial Slovenes, many of the Italians I encountered were quarrelsome, rude, disorderly, can’t drive for shit and can’t queue for shit. Motorists on Slovenian roads are on the whole very competent, safe drivers, but every time I nearly got killed by a driver going the wrong way down a one-way street or not stopping at a zebra crossing while going thirty kilometres an hour over the limit, the car always – ALWAYS – had Italian plates.

So despite my preference to have things planned beforehand, I am prepared to be flexible. Italy could wait. Thus it was with very little regret that I sent Natalija and Jure a message on the Airbnb app to ask if I could book another two nights at their holiday apartment in Bled. They joyfully agreed.

Not that I was planning to spend the extra two days in Slovenia moping around in the apartment. It was time to go chase waterfalls. Of course, perhaps going on a long hike in torrential rain on an 8 °C day isn’t the wisest course of action for someone recovering from a respiratory infection. But I have spent a lot of money on this holiday, I only get four weeks a year off work, and damned if I’m going to let some stupid microbes stop me. Also, the weather forecast for Slovenia showed rain every single day for the foreseeable future – it had barely stopped raining since I crossed the border with Hungary. If I wanted to see stuff, I had to brave the rain and suck it up.

I packed my daypack with some drinks and groceries I had bought the night before from the Mercator supermarket, zipped up my Macpac hooded rain jacket, tightened the straps on my daypack, and walked across the road to the bus interchange. The bus to Lake Bohinj arrived on time and took me around the southern shore of Lake Bled then west up the Bohinj valley along roads lined with thick layers of autumn leaves.
Bohinj is a basin-shaped east-west valley surrounded by the soaring peaks of the Julian Alps. As the valley gets higher towards the west, the valley walls get narrower and steeper. The jewel of the valley is Lake Bohinj in the valley’s upper reaches, a perfect gem of a lake fringed with pines, framed by kilometre-high cliffs studded with waterfalls.

The most famous waterfall is Slap Savica – “slap” being the Slovene word for “waterfall” - at the westernmost extremity of the valley, where water collected across the Triglav plateau tumbles down to the lake far below. The bus terminated at Zlatorog, a campground at the western end of the lake. It was a four kilometre walk from the bus terminus up the valley to the waterfall.

The rain had been steady yet bearable all morning but a few minutes after disembarking from the bus it became almost indescribable. I used to live in Brisbane, a city with a humid subtropical climate notorious for its summer afternoon thunderstorms. Many afternoons around four o’clock in summer the heavens would open and rain would not fall from the sky as individual drops, but as sheets of water. At least the saving grace of Brisbane thunderstorms was that they were always over within fifteen minutes. The rain here in Bohinj was like a Brisbane storm, but it didn’t end.

Despite my rain jacket and wrapping things up in my backpack in plastic grocery bags and wearing good hiking boots, I got soaked to the bone within minutes. Every part of me, even the bits under three layers of clothing like my upper body, every single possession, were utterly saturated. My Lonely Planet guidebook for Slovenia was turned into mush. I am lucky that my passport was stored in a ziplock sandwich bag inside a passport pouch around my neck, it stayed dry.

Muttering self-admonitions under my breath along the lines of “I’m a f#$%ing idiot” and “what the f@#k was I thinking?”, I walked up the wide gravel bushwalking track from the Zlatorog campground. It paralleled the Sava Bohinjka river, a swollen cloudy grey torrent, the water impatient to reach the Black Sea off the Romanian coast via the Sava and Danube rivers.

After about forty-five minutes I reached a car park, this was the entrance to the Slap Savica in Triglav National Park. There was a small two-storey guesthouse and restaurant only open to guests, and a tiny little kiosk – a cabin that sold lollies, soft drinks and souvenirs. The lovely lady who operated the kiosk saw me trudge up the track dripping wet. I sought shelter for a little while under the tiny verandah at the front of the kiosk hoping that the rain would ease a little. Without me even asking for it, she offered me an umbrella. I love Slovenia.

The rain wasn’t getting any lighter, it was no use waiting any longer. I continued on my way up the steep track with plenty of stairs and tree roots to negotiate. About twenty minutes later, my efforts were copiously rewarded. Slap Savica is not the most powerful or majestic waterfall I have ever seen – thank you, Iceland, for spoiling every single waterfall I will ever see henceforth – but what a magical place nonetheless. It is one of the more unusual waterfalls I have encountered. My ears were nearly deafened by the enormous roar of water falling – no, not merely falling by mere gravity alone, but shooting – through a narrow limestone chute from the top of the Triglav alpine tundra plateau down into the Bohinj valley. The water was being ejected down the chute with such force that the spray assaulted my face like pins and needles. I guess you could call it a Slap in the face.

The sound was so uncomfortable and the spray was so annoying that I kept walking away, I couldn’t tolerate it for more than a minute at a time. But every time I started to walk back down the hill, I kept being drawn back. There was something almost magnetic about Slap Savica, it had a preternatural quality that I could not quite put my finger on.

There wasn’t much else around. The viewing platform was a small platform with a timber roof that did nothing to stop the spray attacking visitors. Inside the platform was a stone tablet erected in the nineteenth century commemorating the visit of some minor Austrian royal. Whoop-de-doo. Has there ever been a royal household so pompous, so narcissistic, as the Habsburgs?

I walked back down the hill and handed in the umbrella to the lady at the kiosk. I was so grateful that I bought some drinks even though I had brought plenty with me from Lake Bled. I even bought a Slap Savica fridge magnet which now graces my refrigerator. I then went back down the same track along the Sava Bohinjka to the Zlatorog campground and walked about another kilometre east along the south shore of Lake Bohinj. This lake is one of the most spectacular I have ever seen. It looked magnificent even in the low cloud and driving rain. I can’t imagine how great it would look on a sunny day. Lake Bohinj stretches east-west along the line of the Bohinj valley and on either side of the lake to the north and south the Julian Alps soar into the sky. The lower parts of the slopes are full of pine trees and autumn colours while the upper slopes are sheer limestone precipices with waterfalls rushing down the sides. It’s the kind of scenery Australians only ever see in deodorant commercials.

On the highway just east of Zlatorog on the south shore is a cable car station. I bought a ticket and didn’t have to wait too long for a cable car to take me up to Vogel, a ski resort in the southern Julian Alps.

The cable car ride up to Vogel was a tad scary thanks to the wind and rain. The view over the lake and valley was magnificent – what little I could see through the raindrops on the windows of the cable car was magnificent, I mean – but about two-thirds of the way up there was no view at all due to cloud. After a few minutes I arrived at Vogel. Being November there was very little snow on the ground and no skiers, I had the place to myself. I went outside to explore but lasted all of five seconds before I rushed back into the main building to hide from the dreadful wind and cold.

I spent about an hour up there, drinking coffee in the empty resort bar and restaurant. I tried to dry off. Downstairs there was an enormous public toilet, presumably with enough room for all the people to change in and out of their ski clothes. There was a bank of electric hand dryers along the wall. Since I had pretty much the entire resort to myself I stripped off to my underpants and tried to dry my clothes. I wrung my clothes out as best as I could but it was no use – the dryer was no match for my saturated clothing and footwear.

After about thirty minutes I thought I was making progress – at least my socks were semi-dry. It was no use for my pants or shirt or boots. As I was waving my clothes in front of the dryer the door to the restroom suddenly burst open. A whole army of garrulous Chinese tourists barged in and marched past while I was standing there almost naked waving my wet clothes in front of the hand dryer like a madman. Christ almighty.

There was absolutely nothing to detain me at Vogel so I caught the cable car back down to the lake. I hung around in the equally desolate base station waiting for the next bus back to Lake Bled. The bus was very empty at the lake but filled up at each little village the bus stopped at further down the valley, mostly university students returning to Ljubljana on a Sunday evening after a weekend at home. It was well after sunset when the bus got back to Lake Bled.

I went back into my apartment, spread out all my clothes on every single piece of furniture I could find, had the hottest, longest shower – I am amazed that I didn’t break the apartment building’s hot water system – and ate an enormous yet unsatisfying pizza at a nearby gostilna. I returned to my room coughing my lungs up, hoping that I hadn’t given myself pneumonia.

Bohinj valley at Zlatorog campground