Ljubljana

Slovenia's capital is a fantastic place, but not the best for pictures. There's lovely hills in the distance. The castle's quite cool (and the only real tourist attraction), but we couldn't work out a good angle on it (too many trees in the way). The best we could do was the freaky heads on a door of the cathedral:

There's a better shot on our flickr site, which you can get to from the side bar, but unfortunately I foolishly don't have that photo with me.

Beyond that there's just a good photo of Joanna looking geeky at the castle's 3D history film of the city...

Well, it made Ben laugh.

The city has a lovely cafe/bar culture, even if there's not a lot of touristy things to see. Seriously nice, relaxed place to hang out. Not much to report back.

Beyond that we moved onto Maribor (Slovenia's 2nd city), which we've just arrived back in. We have a small confession to make, but we'll give ourselves a day or 2 to work ourselves up to it...

Lord of the Rings Special

So after our exciting border crossing we journeyed through beautiful green Slovenia. We did however fail to take a picture of any of the many houses adorned amazingly in flowers. We took back roads, as suggested by the border guards, because Byways Are More Exciting Than Highways. Such a spacious country as well, the people just seemed to disappear after Italy.

And so we made it into Postojna, which we were later to realise is Slovenia's main tourist attraction. Bled is the other main place to see, but we didn't make it there. Postojna's great though. Quite quiet and sleepy, even if having a major horse festival the day we turned up. It hadn't taken us very long from Verona (despite stopping in the world's most confusing services for lunch, which took us a while to work out), so we had time to go see a local castle at Predjama.




As you can see, it's built halfway up a cliff, mostly in a massive cave. It is Helm's Deep, from Lord of the Rings' Two Towers. It is a bit confusing whether you're "inside" or "outside" at the back, as walls aren't there, where the cave will do. Quite a good fortress though. The cave goes for miles back, eventually coming out at some cherry-growing village. A famous knight from the days of yore, Erazem, held out here for "a year and a day" (sending down roast bullock and cherries to the frustrated sieging forces), until a servant was bribed to reveal his wearabouts. When Erazem went "where even the Sultan must go alone", the servant turned on a light and the catapult smashed the appropriate outhouse...

Now we said Slovenia was green, but this is possibly taking it a bit far:

This was a little Noah's Ark that we found the next day when we visited Postojna Jama (Cave).

Once in (2km train ride in from the cave entrance), we discovered another Lord Of The Rings set: The Mines of Moria. With lots of Joanna's Gimli impressions we went for a 1.5km walk, with vast caverns, and very exciting stalagtite & stalagmite formations. There were amazing curtain things, and ones that looked like spaghetti which were hollow and grew only 1mm every 80 years. There were white ones, red ones, green ones...


Also in the cave were "human fish" - pink (pigment-less) eyeless salamanders, (kind of amphibian lizard things), which spend there entire lives in the dark - hence no need for eyes. They can live 80-100 years, and only need to eat every 8 years. Freaky.