Piran and salt marshes

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We stayed just across the border from Croatia, right next to the salt-marshes where we started our tour of Slovenia. Initially disappointed by the 1km walk but ended up spending all morning there. The 1km walk was not very interesting as there were too few birds and those mainly gulls with a few egrets. The museum at the end was interesting, especially seeing locals still working the salt pans in traditional methods with their wooden sandals, wooden ‘rakes’ for gathering the salt and carts on tracks that run up the mud banks. We drove back over the border and turned off in no-man’s land to visit the other half of the park. This was wilder and we saw quite a lot of water birds and looked around another museum, including a renovated old salt workers cottage. We used the provided bikes to get around this section as there were several km of tracks to cycle around.

Went back into Piran as the day was sunny (we had visited the previous day but there was a torrential downpour), so much pleasanter in the sunshine. Another pretty town with cobbled streets and red-roofed buildings with some Venetian style buildings and churches.

Drove in to the Church of the Holy Trinity in Hrastovlje, a small village church that was once an important church-fortress, fortified for battles with the Ottomans. The outside of the church and the location are pretty but inside is amazing. The walls and ceiling are completely covered with 15^th century frescoes by Janez iz Kastra, they tell the story of creation, the nativity and have paintings of saints and a wall length fresco called the “Dance of Death” that shows Death holding hands with various local looking people from a child through to a King. This was all discovered by a local plasterer in the 1940s.

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