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Published: April 15th 2006
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will we make it there? questionable.
here we are in the bus, as opposed to the supposedly direct train to koper, abandoned in the background. Again, getting to the Adriatic
seemed easy enough - we bought a ticket from one city to another, on a direct train. But somehow, in a mix of Slovenian and Italian, we were directed off the train, put on a bus, and driven around the countryside. I went to the driver to try to make sure we were still going to Koper, but suddenly the English, so ubiquitous in Ljubljana, was gone. Lindsay, who had previously loved the sound and happy cadence of Slovenian (after French and German, "It's phonetic! It's like Spanish!"), could only comment after trying to save my seat on the bus that, "It doesn't sound like Spanish anymore..." and it didn't, it sounded like the deepest darkest indecipherable Russian. We were confused but somewhat reassured when the train man got on the bus with us. Apparently everyone was abandoning ship and not the least bit concerned, so we shouldn't be either. Anyway, it didn't really matter where we ended up, as long as we were on the coast!
Lindsay and I had been flip-flopping about where to go - originally I was set on Croatia, but when we couldn't find a direct bus and realized how long
it would take to get there, and that we only had a few days, and that we still had thousands of Slovenian Tolar to spend, and seeing as we love Slovenia, we thought heck, maybe we should check out the Slovenian coast! We could go to Croatia from there if it wasn't good. So we decided to take a train to Koper and then just go wherever the buses were headed. We realized that our guidebooks (Let's Go Eastern Europe and Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring) had been written with the high season (summer) in mind, and that the published buses, times and destinations were not consistant with what was actually running this time of April.
Luckily, the train/bus combo took us to the bus station in Koper, and we were presented with an array of buses. The guidebook didn't have much to say in regard to accomodations in the various beach towns and fishing villages, so we decided on Portoroz, because the bus was about to leave and it looked like the bigger of the towns. It was a short drive there, and though the tourist buro was closed, in a typical display of Slovenian kindness the girl
working there immediately left her lunch, and opened up just to help us find somewhere to stay. We were directed to walk up a motha of a hill, which made me curse my pack to the deepest circle of hell, to a pension where the man named Boris gave us the keys to a room without asking for any personal information or money. Later, later, he said. The room had pilars painted a shimmery pink and a little balcony. It was Quality.
Portoroz is beeeeeeeeautiful. The pension looked out on red tiled roofs piled on rolling hills covered in poplars and olive trees and the Adriatic, blue with bobbing sailboats. We went down to the beach and had lunch by the docks, shared our cookies with friendly German children and marvelled that this was Slovenia. We just kept saying, "Slovenia - who knew!?!" because we were really there only through a combination of luck and laziness. The place must be packed in the summer, parts of it are quite developed for (mainly German, it seems) tourism. But now it was just us.
You can walk to Piran, Lucia and Izola. We walked to Piran, but do to lack of coffee,
it took nearly three hours cuz we kept stopping and lying down. Then we got to Piran, hit up a cafe, got some delicious cappucino in our systems, and things got going. Piran is adorable. The colors are fabulous, the town is quiet, the people are friendly, and there were hardly any tourists (again, probably in a few weeks when the summer season starts, things will be more kicking). But we enjoyed having stuff to ourselves. The water was stunning, the views were great... again, Sovenia - who knew!? We walked through a sea-salt exporting joint, sampled the seafood, and it only took us about 1/2 hr to walk back to Portoroz that evening. (through the rain, hehe.)
Other highlights of Piran - we rented bicycles from people in a village to the south of Portoroz, Lucia, and rode up the coastline to Piran, soaked up some sun on the rocks. I also got a haircut. Slovenia hadn't let us down yet, so i trusted i could get a good 'do (without a rattail, faux-hawk, or mullet, all of which are very popular in europe but which i CANNOT pull off.) She assured me, "I do not speak much English,
but i understand," and she did! I said goodbye to about 9 inches, yikes, but it had to go and she did a great job.
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