Eastern Europe Tour - Day 27 - Postojna Caves and Piran

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Today we headed off for a look at what is apparently Slovenia most popular tourist attraction, the Postojna Caves. These caves are about an hours drive southish from Ljubljana (a little longer when you factor in the road works and traffic time). The caves themselves are massive and are apparently the largest in Slovenia, at 20km long, although not the largest in the world which are located in the USA and are over 500km long. The tourist section of the Posotjna Caves are only 5.7kms long. The only problem with visiting these caves is the fact that they are sooooo popular and that you can only get into the caves if you can take a guided tour, and the tours only leave every hour. We got there at 9:08am which meant that we had to wait until 10am for the next tour to start. Unfortunately while we were waiting for the next tour to start a gizllion other people start to arrive in tour buses to look at the caves as well. And of course all the tour buses are full of older asian tourists and older american tourists, which meant that they didn't follow any of the instructions of the caves (ie take no photos) and were totally noisy, chatting all the time. The caves themselves were amazing, but the experience was totally ruined by the sear number of people that the cave management try to put through every hour. We must have had about 300 people trying to go through the caves with us, and having that many people with you really does ruin the atmosphere of the place.

The caves themselves were amazing. They are full of stalactities and stalacmites and are very beautiful. The lonely planet describes the caves as a part of the journey to the centre of the earth and I can totally see how that would be the case. You could easily imagine yourself on that journey as you wander through these caves. The tour of the caves actually starts with a 2km tourist train ride and then you complete about a 1.7km walk through the caves that is then finished off with another 2km train ride back to the surface. The caves are apparently about 85m underneath the surface.

We had planned on going to the Skocjan Caves after the Postojna Caves but after the shear hell of going through these lovely caves, we couldn't face another cave experience. The travellers bible (the lonely planet) said that the Skocjan Caves, were potentially even better than the Postojna caves, but we just couldn't do it. Instead we decided to head for the Adriatic Coast and to take a look at the little town of Piran. Piran was a delightful little tourist town and it looked as though it would have been just magical in the sunshine. Unfortunately we managed to hit it right in the middle of a lovely series of black clouds that dropped a little bit of rain on us. In fact at one point the land came down a little too hard for us and we had to duck into a cafe to get a hot drink and shelter from the rain.

Tomorrow it is off to Vienna, where I will join my next tour with Intrepid (for the next 42 days!....eeek!)

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Comments

[MatevzH]

Skocjan cave
Actually, Skocjan caves are as beautiful as Postojna caves, and are a lot less touristy. Enjoy the rest of your trip in Europe!