Today was a super touristy day. Postojna is most known for its incredible cave system and nearby castle built into a cave. Because this is the most popular tourist sight in Slovenia we arrived at the ticket office early and took the 9am (first) tour into the famous caves. It’s a 24km long set of caves that are joined follow a river that drains into the Black Sea. The tour starts with a train ride, immediately we were impressed with the density of the stalactites and stalagmites (‘speleothems’ I learned today). The cave tour takes an hour and a half and the walk is around 1.2 km. Some of the cave spaces are huge all are covered in speleothems. There’s a free shuttle bus that takes you up to the castle, 10 km away. The castle ... read more

Another lovely day walking around an area of great natural beauty. Plitvice lakes is also a UNESCO world heritage site for the huge number of waterfalls and the beech forested hills. It is beautiful here and is again super popular with visitors. We arrived at the ticket office as it opened at 7am and had to queue (unexpectedly). When we eventually left around 2:30, we were very pleased to have started early as not only were the main waterfalls in better light but we didn’t have to queue for the boat rides or to see the sights, the whole return walk was unpleasant due to the crowds, narrow walkways and people randomly stopping to take photos. Having walked in both directions the walk is best done from entrance 1 towards entrance 2. We did a combination ... read more

En-route to Rab Island we stopped in two towns to see the sights. Sibenik is very close to Skradin, lovely old town centre to wander around, the big cathedral of St James is particularly impressive. It took around one hundred years to build starting in 1431 and is a UNESCO world heritage site for its architecture. St Michael’s fortress has amazing views and is worth a visit for this, it was recently renovated, originally built in the 15thcentury. Zadar is an old Roman town, ruins are scattered around the town, the forum being the most impressive area. The main reason to go was to hear the sea organ and sun salutation on the waterfront. The sea organ is an art installation designed by Nikola Bašić that uses the sea to make random organ-like noises, it sounds ... read more

Sometimes the journey is better than the destination and sometimes the journey just never seems to end. Let’s just say that we had an interesting journey from Zabljak to Mostar. It started well; we chose to start with the windy route through more of the National Park and it was lovely, more valleys and meadows. Then we continued the journey towards the BiH border, the problem came when we came to a junction on the Tara river; the gps was quite insistent that we turn right and the route we had looked at the day before said turn left. As we had neither a paper map nor access to the internet we decided to trust our gps machine. This was fine to the border then suddenly became not so ok; a narrow road in very poor ... read more

We left Kotor via the narrow twisty road that goes up above the town where there were great views back over the town and Bay of Kotor. As we continued to drive upwards the road became more and more narrow and such tight switchbacks it was just a thick line on the gps. The road leads up to the top of Mt Lovcen and on top of that is the mausoleum of Njegus, an incredible location for the communist looking mausoleum. The views were excellent, I read somewhere that you can see as far as Italy, not sure at all about that but is was a BIG view. Back down again and we stopped for lunch at the beach looking out to the island of Sveti Stefan, incredible blue waters and very busy. Spent the night ... read more