Boy gorge

04.11.2019 - 04.11.2019 12 °C
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When I met my Airbnb hosts Natalija and Jure on my first morning at Lake Bled, they strongly encouraged me to visit Vintgar Gorge, a ravine several kilometres north of Bled town. They did warn me, however, that there was no public transport there, the shuttle bus to the gorge only runs in summer, and that I would have to seek alternative means of getting there.

I had a lazy Monday morning, I had some leftover snacks I had taken with me on yesterday’s hike at Lake Bohinj for breakfast, and I spent a couple of tedious hours at a laundromat just up the hill. Being the first weekday after a four-day long weekend, the town was suddenly D-E-A-D dead dead dead. I could have lain down in the middle of one of the main streets for hours and not get hit by a car.

I had lunch at a bakery-café opposite the bus interchange near my apartment. While I was having my coffee and pastries for lunch, I saw something I had never seen before – sunshine in Slovenia. Sun, glorious sun! I revelled in it, I turned my chair slightly at my outdoor table so my face could get the full force of that weird yellow object in the sky I hadn’t seen for a week since I was in Hungary.

In Australia I avoid the sun like the plague. Being of mostly British heritage, I have extremely fair skin and I burn to a crisp after a few minutes in the harsh Australian sun, even with sunscreen. I schedule my outdoor activities to late afternoons or after dark or days forecast to be cloudy in order to avoid the dreadful excoriating Australian sunlight. I hate being out in the sun and I simply don’t understand what goes on in the brains of Australians who love spending their days at the beach or playing sports or doing other activities that require being scorched by that blinding fireball in the sky. But in Europe, things are different. The European sun is gentle and golden and reassuring and wholesome. The European sun is simply nice. After a week of being denied the innocent joy of having my skin tickled by those life-giving rays, sipping my coffee in the sun was just too marvellous.

There was a small tour agency inside the bus interchange that advertised tours to Vintgar Gorge, I think for about ten euros they would drive you in a van out there and back and entrance was included in the price. I went inside and asked if I could go that afternoon. The tour agency owner sighed and said, yes, he would take me. He made it clear through his body language and tone of voice that he rather wouldn’t. I guess that having only one person in the van wasn’t very economic.

He told me to meet him at the tour office at three, when he picked me up in a van from the bus interchange and drove me north to Vintgar Gorge. The van travelled through gloriously green countryside in the sunshine. Slovenia looks even more bewitching when the sun is out. The Karavanke mountain range to the north, a forbiddingly solid range of mountains topped with snow, loomed in front of the windscreen. The top of the Karavanke range is the Austrian border.

After about ten minutes I arrived at the Vintgar Gorge car park. The driver said he would meet me back there at five o’clock. I showed my ticket to the park ranger at the entrance and entered the canyon.

Vintgar Gorge is a mile-long ravine carved from the rock by the Radovna river through a ridge that separates Lake Bled from the Sava valley around Jesenice. There is a path the entire way, much of it on a timber boardwalk suspended over the rushing river swollen by the heavy rain of the past week. The opaque river was the colour of turquoise, rushing down the gorge like liquified gems. The water bounced form rock to rock, over logs, through whirlpools, down flumes and into caverns along the side of the gorge. Above the river were limestone cliffs and trees at the seasonal pinnacle of riotous autumn colours.

About three-quarters of the way down the gorge was a beautiful bridge, a high stone arch span so far above I had to crane my neck to look at it. I opened Google Maps on my phone. It was a railway bridge on the famous Bohinj Railway. I opened up the Slovenske železnice website and looked up the timetable. A train was coming in eight minutes! Should I wait around to take a video of a train going over the bridge high above the rushing rapids? Well, duh! So I did.

At the downstream end of Vintgar Gorge, the gorge ends in a waterfall, Slap Šum, where the Radovna river falls down to the plains of the Sava valley. It wasn’t a very high waterfall but it was loud and powerful and very pretty. If Margaret & David At The Movies reviewed waterfalls rather than films, they would have given Slap Šum four and a half out of five stars.

It’s such a pity that I had to meet the driver back at the car park at a fixed time because I could have spent forever in Vintgar Gorge. It was just what I needed with my cold, an easy stroll in the pure mountain air along a stupendous white-water canyon on a brilliant autumn afternoon. So I walked back up the gorge along the boardwalks and rocky paths.

The driver met me back at the car park, drove me back to Bled town as the sun began to set, and I farewelled Bled with another stroll around the east end of the lake. I had one more kremšnita, this time at an open-air restaurant on a terrace looking over the lake opposite the castle. This restaurant claims to have invented the kremšnita back in the 1950s. It was very nice, but I still maintain and I don’t care what Slovenes think – the kremšnita is nothing but an Australian vanilla slice with a layer of whipped cream between the custard layer and the top crust.

After doing some packing and another hearty dinner at a traditional Slovenian restaurant – farmer’s sausage, stewed apples, baked millet porridge – I went back to the gostilna near my apartment. This pub is awesome, and not only because the walls are completely covered with licence plates from all around the world, including several from my home state of New South Wales. I had a stimulating farewell conversation with the bartender, the geography nerd whose company and conversation I had thoroughly enjoyed a few nights earlier. I did a very stupid thing – I forgot to ask if we could add each other to social media. I only dimly remember his name. So if anybody meets a friendly, talkative and somewhat awkward bartender with a slight lisp and a tremendous memory for geographic facts at a pub near the Lake Bled bus interchange, tell him that the fat bearded Aussie guy with glasses who used to live in Bathurst and told him all about Australian licence plates says hello and that I want to send him a jar of Vegemite because I found it difficult to explain what it tastes like.

Sun, glorious sun!