Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia, and is a very small city with only about 270,000 people. As you can imagine, the city itself is quite small, but as it is located pretty much in the middle of Slovenia it is very easy to do day trips from. There is an interesting story about how Ljubljana got the dragon for its coat of arms (and there are dragons all over the city). The Wikipedia explanations is pretty good: “
According to the celebrated Greek legend, the Argonauts on their return home after having taken the Golden Fleece found a large lake surrounded by a marsh between the present-day cities of Vrhnika and Ljubljana. It is there that Jason struck down a monster. This monster has become the dragon that today is present on the city's coat of arms and flag.”
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| A dragon on Dragon Bridge |
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| People who are in love write their names on padlocks and then lock them to the bridge. |
My first day trip was to the Skocjan Caves in the south-west of Slovenia. The caves are a UNESCO natural world heritage site and were recommended to me by lots of other backpackers. It turned out to be quite easy to get there. A one and a half hour train trip, and the train was met by a free bus to the caves. I hadn’t expected the bus and had planned a one hour walk to get to the caves so I had heaps of extra time to look around before the tour. There were a few little museums nearby too so I went to some of them, and also a few lookouts. The caves themselves were amazing! It actually reminded me a bit of the caves in the Lord of the Rings movie, with huge caverns and a river flowing below. There were no photos allowed in the caves so I have added a link to google pictures, although even those pictures don’t show how beautiful it was.
Friday was the day I had planned for looking around Ljubljana. It was raining (it has rained every day so far) so I didn’t end up doing much. I had planned to join the free walking tour but it was cancelled (and won’t run again until after I leave) so instead I wandered round the old town and then visited the castle. Inside there was an excellent exhibition on the history of Slovenia. I quite like history so but by the end of the exhibition I was exhausted from attempting to take in so much information! So many empires have tried (with quite a few succeeding) to invade Slovenia over the last 2000 years. The 20th century history is also really interesting. Afterwards I went for a late lunch with some people I met at the castle and had a quiet night at the hostel planning the next week.
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| Old Town, Ljubljana |
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| Ljubljana Castle |
Rain every day.. just like Ballarat :)
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