Beautiful Bled and Gorgeous Gorge
A better known town in a lesser known country
Slovenija… Who would have thought of visiting this lesser known, not really popular, and not really touristy country? Especially from India. I bet very few people. Nevertheless it’s a beautiful country with a not so bright capital. (we’ll get to why we think capital is not so bright in a separate blog). The real beauty of Slovenia lies in it’s country side. The country has a numerous hiking trails with beautiful views and pristine nature. If you haven’t been there… well, you should.
Bled is a small Alpine town in Slovenia about 90 minute drive from the capital, Ljubljana. Actually Slovenia is such a small country, that any part of the country is just about 2 hours away from any other part. Bled is better known for it’s beautiful, clear blue, glacial “Lake Bled” on whose shores, resides the town Bled. And overlooking this majestic view of Lake Bled is the iconic Castle Bled. And this town is just outside of Triglav National Park. So it also servers as an entry point to Triglav National Park.
Vintgar gorge is another place to visit while you’re in Bled. This Gorge is actually part of Triglav national park. Simply put, it’s a 2 km long scenic beauty walk.
How we decided on the place? We met couple of Slovenians while we were on Himalayan Trekking expedition at Sarpass. And from them, we knew it’s a small country with lot of hiking trails. And Slovenia was right on our way to Venice from Budapest, which meant we need not take a detour or travel out of our way to visit the small nation. And when you’re in the country, it’s really hard to miss Bled.
You can anyway know more about how to get there and around from wikitravel. So I’ll just get to our experiences in the town.
The first thing that hits you in when you enter Bled is, it’s serene beauty. When you sit by the Lake, you feel a sense of immense calmness and peacefulness in yourself.
You can sit and watch these beautiful aquatic creatures play around. Or… You can feed them and play with them all by yourself. There are no guards or lake keepers to stop you from playing with these aquatic animals.
Whatever you do, don’t miss the opportunity to row the rowboat. The rowboat rental shops can be found for about €15/hour near to the lake itself. The rowboat looks like this.
Among the four of us, I was the only one who knew how to swim, but the water was too cold to swim though. None of us had ever rowed a boat before and the boat rental guy didn’t even offer us life jackets, knowing fully well that most of us didn’t know how to swim. I wish we had half the confidence in ourselves than he had on us.
So we set sail… ☺ For a while we didn’t even know which way to row in order to go forward and maintain the direction to the Island. But eventually we figured out. On the way to Bled Island, my friend commandeered (nautical terms ☺) while I did the crewing. I did the Captain Jack Sparrow act when returning while my friends did the crew part. The rowing was really fun thing to do but it also took quite a bit of energy. The people with prior experience were rowing past us and probably laughing at us, for our skills in rowing were as good as the skills of a bicycle mechanic trying to fix a f1 car☺ And when you get to the middle of the lake, with cold water all around you, you realize that going back is more difficult than going ahead. So you keep rowing and keep going ahead. That’s the life lesson you get ☺ Keep pushing yourself in forward direction, and reverse is not the way to go.
Ring the bell and your wish will come true. The special interest in church of Assumption, which is on the Bled Island, is the wishing bell. It is said that if you ring the bell (with whatever energy left in your hands after rowing) and wish what you want (or don’t want ☺), your wish will come true.
On that evening, we decided to cook Indian food, as we were in dire need of some spicy food. European food was too dull for us. So we set out to collect the required ingredients from a local grocery shop. The lady at the store wasn’t speaking much English. After making couple of futile attempts to convey our intent, we had to open the offline Google translator app and show her the results, to get what we want. Anyway, we collect everything and start cooking in our hostel. There were bunch of Australians and Kiwis having beer and making lot of noise. When they catch the smell of us cooking Indian food, we started getting good comments. “That looks good.” “Oh, that smells good…” “Oh, you’re making curry!! Can I taste it?” ☺Good comments or not, that food was just heaven for our tongue, which was missing these spices for more than 2 weeks.
After we finish having food, we were having some interesting philosophical discussions about food, culture, travel and what not, with a man from Australia. While we were in the middle of our discussion, the group from down under, now completely drunk, got up and asked us, “We are going for a quick dip in the lake. You guys wanna join?” WTF!!… It was freezing cold outside and we wouldn’t dare step outside without proper shield. And these guys were taking a dip in the bloody cold water! The man from Australia urged us to join them saying, “There will be couple of naked girls too enjoying the cold dip”. Even that failed to motivate us to join them. Maybe it has got to do with the fact that we had already spent about two weeks travelling across Europe. ☺
Now off to the The Gorge… Vintgar gorge is a scenic walk of about 2 kms in the Triglav National Park. During the whole length of the walk you’ll see almost picture perfect beauty of the Radovna river. And there is a small waterfall at the end of this walk. The people call it photo point. Every photo you take will be like a wallpaper.
If the sun is out on your visit to the Gorge, it’s a bonus. Because the shining sun adds to the beauty of the Gorge. From what we gathered, the place won’t be very crowded even during the summer. You have to pay nominal amount of €3 to enter the walk. And this place is around 3 km far from Bled town. I suggest you to walk to the place, because the Slovenian country side is really beautiful. You get to walk through surroundings like this below.
You will see lot of Apple and Nectarine trees on the way. If you feel like eating fresh fruits, you can just pluck it out and eat. But if you think the tree belongs to someone (lot of them are near to someone’s house on the way), just ask and eat.
Now to the Iconic, castle Bled. It is said that Castle Bled is the oldest castle in all of Slovenia. Oldest or not, it is nevertheless good and the view it provides of Lake Bled is just out of the world. To get to the Castle Bled, there is a motorable road. There are also steps to reach the Castle from Lake Bled itself. I suggest you spend an entire evening there, just like we did. You won’t regret it for sure.
One more thing to do while you’re in Bled is, to eat the local delicacy called Kremšnita. It’s basically a custard cake. Honestly I’m not much of a sweet fan. And neither me nor any of my friends enjoyed it really. But it’s what local people suggest and I myself would suggest you to try it once, if you ever go there. It’s available in a hotel adjacent to local tourist office which is near to far end of the lake.
There are couple more places to visit in Triglav. But due to time crunch, we couldn’t visit them. But if you have time, don’t miss Lake Bohinj and Ojstrica. Lake Bohinj is inside Triglav and just as beautiful as Bled. And Ojstrica is around 20-30 minutes hike from Bled town with panoramic view of the Lake Bled. We couldn’t go there because, the trail was completely wet due to bad weather. Lake Bohinj is half a day plan at the least. It’s around 40 minutes away from Bled by Bus.
If you want to have a look at full photo album of the place, you can browse through them here. msvbhat’s google+ photos
Even though Slovenia is not a better known country (At least for Indians) the places are really beautiful. These places are one of the most visited places in Slovenia. I like exploring these, not so touristy places and fortunate to have friends with similar mindsets. Together me and my friends will try to cover as many places of our travel as possible.
FYI: All these photos are taken by ourselves. And therefore you might find better quality photos in the web. But these are 100% original and not stolen from web.
NOTE: This is my first attempt at blogging. Please comment, criticize. We plan to write more stories of our travels like this.
