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Published: August 13th 2006
Chain Bridge
Over the Danube - BudapestSlovenia really makes me happy!!
But first I should talk about my time in Budapest...
So after waking up obscenely early (like 4am, after staying up packing until 1am) to get to the airport and flying to Budapest, and then eventually finding my hostel I was decidedly tired and ended up doing exactly nothing on my first day in Hungary. I spent alot of time on the internet writing the last blog entry and looking up places to go after Budapest. Talking to the owner of the Hostel about where I should go, he strongly suggested sarajevo... said it was amazing and that I should go there before everyone finds it... all I could think of was poor mum and dad having concurrent heart attacks if I told them I was going to sarajevo. So i decided to stick with my original slovenia plan.
The second day in Budapest I started fairly late because I had to psych myself up to going outside... everyone I had dealt with outside the hostel was kind of well... hostile... and i really couldn't be arsed dealing with the language barrier etc... But I figured I couldn't very well stay in the
Castle
on Castle Hill... ofcourse. Budapest hostel for three days, so I eventually headed out on foot, walked over to the buda side of budapest and along the waterfront until i found a queue which looked to be populated mostly by tourists. So of course I joined it, quickly establishing that it was the queue for the tram car thing up Castle Hill. So I walked around up there for what ended up to be about four hours. Coming for New Zealand that has little to no history and similar levels of fanfare, the statues and grand buildings were really beautiful. After that I made a rushed visit to the Hungary National Museum in search of saint stephen's crown (or something; he's sort of the forefather of Hungary or some such), but didn't find it.
The next day I set out a little earlier and, after a number of wrong turns (I hate pulling out a map on foreign streets, way to ask for trouble), I eventually found the tourist bus that went to Statue Park - a plot of land on the outskirts of Budapest that is home to a number of former statues from communist russia etc. Very interesting and some good photo
ops too. Then back in the town centre I walked along the main road and visited St Stephen's Basilica, but again, the main attraction - the actual hand of saint stephen - was closed for maintenance or something (I suppose a thousand-year-old hand does require a bit of maintenance). Then I walked up to City Park and found the szechenyi baths... one of many turkish baths in Budapest. After soaking in multiple pools of different temperatures and trying not to accidentally find myself in some male-only area, I walked back to the hostel and that was about the end of my Budapest leg.
The next morning I figured out how to catch the train to Ljubljana (capital of Slovenia). I arrived in ljubljana after a much-smoother-than-expected train journey... some guys at the hostel in budapest had caught the train from vienna through slovenia and had had nightmares with the slovenian police and ended up having to pay thirty euros each to stop from being arrested or something... at least that's how they told it... So I was a little nervous about this train trip, but it couldn't have gone smoother! I threw my passport at whoever asked for it
Communist Statue in the foreground...
Tourist bus in the background - the definition of irony. Budapest and got nothing but stamps and smiles in return... maybe the guys had trouble cos they were mexican... or maybe it was cos i was wearing a lowcut top... Whatever it was, the minute I crossed the border I was bloody glad I had ignored the advice of the budapest hostel owner guy... It was about then that i decided that Slovenia was the laos of central europe - very hilly, nice and laid back and everyone was super friendly... except it's better than laos because all the young men, as well as being really friendly, are also hot hot hot!!
Methamphetamines? crack cocaine? various forms of opiates?... bollocks to them. give me a hit a slovenia!! both adam and the folks had to put up with my inane babbling while i was under the influence of this enchanting wee country.
ljubljana is fantastic... nice weather, gorgeous old buildings flanking a river and just generally and really good vibe... it's a student city so the population's really young and trendy. The first night I was there I was getting ready for bed when I looked at my watch and realised it was just past 8 o'clock! I decided
Dragon Bridge - Ljubljana
Legend has it the dragons wag their tails when a virgin walks over the bridge.. but I never witnessed such an event. Perhaps that's why slovenians are such a happy bunch, they're all getting laid. that really wouldn't do so I went out drinking with these finnish guys, one of whom is studying there so he took us to all the cool places, including this old abandoned bike factory that has been set aside specifically for young people to hang out in... if it had been anywhere else in the world it would have been super-dodgy, but there was a security guard at the door who doesn't let junkies and stuff in, so it was just this alternative crowd. very weird. but really cool... then we went to this compound that used to be the slovenian headquarters for the yugoslav police but now, once again, has been overrun by the alternative youth culture and this mad maybe russian guy started talking to all of us in different languages... what he could of english to me, swedish to the finnish guy and russian to the finnish guy who was originally from estonia. After covering topics ranging from life under communist rule, the fin's role in WWII and the fact that NZ is, in fact, NOT a year-round tropical paradise (honestly, where do people get this idea from??), we went for the slovenian version of a pie-at-2am-after-a-night-of-drinking
- the burek which (aside from maybe being even greasier and laden with fat-soaked pastry than a pie) wasn't half bad.
Then after a day of basking in the glorious sunshine and climbing up hills to castles, this mildly annoying american guy accompanied me to the Depeche Mode (famous for such eighties classics as personal jesus and enjoy the silence) concert....
What about that time I saw Depeche Mode in Slovenia?? wicked!!
So after two nights and nothing but good times, I reluctantly said goodbye to ljubljana and caught a train to Bled in the north-west of slovenia. People had said that Bled was very touristy, but I am firmly of the belief that places become touristy because they are actually worth visiting, and this was absolutely true for Bled (which wasn't THAT touristy anyway). Talk about your picture perfect scenery! It was put to me a number of times that the scenery was similar to that of NZ, but of course growing up there you can't really appreciate the beauty of your own country, but the beauty of Slovenia took my breath away on more than one occasion.
I had a fairly open schedule and
had booked two nights in bled, but wasn't sure where I'd head from there, knowing only that i had to be in Zagreb six days later to catch my flight to Split to meet Dave and Ev for our cruise (the next - and final! - blog). But as soon as I arrived in Bled I knew this was not a place to could be done justice in 2 days... I ended up staying the full six and even then was extremely reluctant to leave.
The central focus of Bled is Lake Bled; an alpine lake of the most amazingly clear turquoise water with an island in the middle just big enough for a quaint little church. My first afternoon in Bled was spent walking around said lake with a bunch of fellow travellers from my hostel. Unfortunately I was ill-prepared and sweltered in jeans and a black t-shirt while the boys (lucky sods) stripped to their boxers and jumped right in.
The next day i was not so silly. After walking through the amazing vintgar gorge (I was going to use the adjective 'gorgeous' but, well..) and back down to the lake, a fellow kiwi couple and
Lake Bled
Picture perfect, if only i'd get out of the foreground I parked ourselves on the edge of the lake and jumped right in. It was fantastic... just cold enough to be refreshing and being fresh water you felt great afterwards.
The next few days involved continually being amazed by the increbile beauty of Slovenia and the people that inhabit it, who were nothing but polite and caring, right down to the waitresses in the restaurants...
I hired a bike and biked around the lake (how very european) before parking up for another swim, stopping in the middle for an ice cream of course.
I went paragliding - strapped between the legs of an extremely attractive young slovene - where we could see italy on one side, austria on the other and hungary on the other, it really is a small country.
I went on a day trip around Triglav National park which involved hiking to the source of the soca river to fill up our drink bottles with water that is fresher than evian, then rafting down the same river, which is so clear that it's hard to imagine that it ran red with the blood of soldiers during some of the worst battles of WWI.
Vintgar Gorge
Now that's picture perfect I rowed a boat (a team effort with a couple of australian girls) to the island in the middle of Lake Bled and rang the bell in the church on the top, after making the compulsory wish.
I spent alot of time at the "public lido" which is a fenced off area on the side of the lake that you pay a minimal amount to enter and they have sun loungers and umbrellas and music playing and diving boards and ladders, making getting in and out of the lake much less hassle.
And it was about then that I, with aforementioned extreme reluctance, got on a bus to head back to Ljubljana for the train to Zagreb... which is will in the next blog. Hopefully I won't take quite so long to finish that one.
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