Now it’s time for me to hike. Frankly, I’m in no hurry to leave. Jutting into a pale sky ahead is Triglav, the nation’s highest peak (2,864m). It’s a mesmerising sight. Every Slovenian should ascend it once in a lifetime, they say.
“Climb Triglav?” Vera says when I ask if she’s been up. She laughs. “Why would I? I see it every day. Mountains are where we live. They’re home.”
“Anyway,” she continues, “I get vertigo.”
No understanding of Slovenia’s self-identity is complete without mention of mountains. Any country which tops the world for tractors per capita — 55 per 1,000 people — has a bucolic cant. But it’s Triglav that Slovenia chose to put on its flag when it won independence in 1991. The region has an alpine temperament too. Among the jigsaw of nations which formed Yugoslavia, Slovenia continues to define itself by the traditional virtues of hard graft and honesty. Slovenians are polite to a fault. Everyone on a walk says “dober dan” (hello). Their worst homegrown insult is “May you be kicked by a hen”. “Three hundred hairy bears!” counts as ripe profanity.
Lake Jasna, which is a much quieter alternative to Lake Bled
ALAMY
That most holidaymakers discover little beyond the capital Ljubljana and Lake Bled, the country’s premier resort — “Slovenian Disneyland” one villager said to me — is not the residents’ fault; it’s the visitors’.
Figuring that the way to understand more about a mountainous nation was to be among its mountains, I wanted to walk. A new holiday in Slovenia’s northwest seemed just the job. From four bases, it takes quiet routes of up to ten miles into the foothills of the Julian Alps. I’d been visiting Slovenia for 18 years, had written two books on the place, and hadn’t heard of some destinations in the itinerary.
I had been to Kranjska Gora. Sure, the small town has the hotels and outdoors shops you’d expect of Slovenia’s best ski resort, but you get the feeling it remains an alpine community at heart. Woodpiles are stacked neatly outside chalets. Mums with prams chat beside a frescoed church on the square.
I walk out beside a shallow river divided like a braid of rope. After a mile, Lake Jasna appears. “Jasna” refers to “clear”, which rather undersells the thing. Even by Slovenian standards the lake is bell-pealingly lovely: turquoise water, birch trees in the acid-green flush of spring, snowy peaks against a cobalt sky. The scene has an implausible, cartoonish beauty, as if the Almighty had contracted out the scenery to Disney.
The mountains grow as I walk up the valley, a stream chuckling companionably at my side. Within an hour I’m at the valley head outside a mountain hut with pea-green shutters. Slovenian walkers bask happily in the sunshine on deckchairs. Oompah polkas chirrup over the stereo. It’s terrifically jolly, but you come for the wraparound scenery. On three sides are the sort of peaks a child might draw, a jagged skyline of ice-clawed rock. For 18 years I’d driven the road a mile away unaware this place existed.
The Vrta valley feels like it’s been transported from Yosemite
ALAMY
What explains the fascination of mountains, I wonder. Eva Schmitt, the marketing manager of the Slovenian Alpine Museum in Mojstrana, offers a theory the next day as I rummage through displays of stuffed fauna and vintage climbing gear. “They’re like a crazy drug,” she tells me. “You go hiking and come back exhausted and dirty but it feels so good. You connect with nature in such an intense way.” Slovenes are mountain people, she says. That’s why a Slovene team pioneered the toughest Western Ridge route up Everest in 1979, and in 2000 Davorin Karnicar became the first person to ski down it (five hours, in case you’re wondering). Perhaps it’s also why Tadej Pogacar is favourite to win a third Tour de France title this summer.
Triglav’s three-peaked summit — the name means “three heads” — is tattooed on Eva’s forearm. She has been up “five or six times”. I guess that makes her more Slovenian than most.
In 1895, when Slovenia was the Austro-Hungarian state of Carniola, a local priest called Jakob Aljaz bought Triglav’s summit for a florin. The mountain became a symbol of national identity. Aljaz himself composed the music for a song whose lyrics are on Slovenia’s 50 cent coin: “Oh Triglav, my home, how beautiful you are/How you lure me from the low plains”. Go up on a summer’s weekend and you’ll find Slovenes singing it and sipping a glass of schnapps.
No photo, no purple prose conveys your first encounter with the north face that closes the Vrata valley. Seemingly transported from Yosemite, it is a near-sheer wall of splintered rock a mile and a half high, as if God had gone mad with a pickaxe. A wisp of cloud is snagged on the summit.
Kranjska Gora remains an alpine community at heart
ALAMY
What has drawn us — that’s me, three couples and a family out with the dog — to the mountain? We gaze in silence, like supplicants before some unknowable, ancient pagan deity.
I ponder that on a beautiful walk back down the valley afterwards. Where most visitors discover it from the only road — myself too, previously — I’m on a forest path. Tiny butterflies drift like dandelion seeds in mossy beech forest. Mountains play peek-a-boo through the trees. I see no one except a startled elderly man outside a chalet. Dressed in long johns, he’s washing his smalls. He raises a hand. “Dober dan.”
That evening at Vera’s place in Planina pod Golico (another new name to me, incidentally), I sit on the balcony watching bosky valleys sink into a crepuscular gloom. Triglav stands alone in a pale gold sky. In Mountains of the Mind, the author Robert Macfarlane suggests mountains confront us with “greater spans of time than we can possibly imagine … pose profound questions about our durability and importance”. In short, they take us out of ourselves.
• Read our Slovenia travel guide
That sounds about right. Mention Golica to Slovenes and they’ll grin and talk about Na Golici (On Golica), a chirpy polka by the Slovenian folk heroes Avsenik Brothers Ensemble. I’m sure they love it. For the rest of us the domed mountain (1,836m) is a fair summation of Slovenia’s appeal: a pretty chalet on slopes piebald by snow; a ridge-path where Slovenia tumbles into Austria; alps sawtoothing along the horizon; silence but for birdsong and the sigh of breeze.
Lake Bled pulls me in eventually. How could it not? It appears fantastical after my time among the mountains. Holidaymakers ride glossy gondolas to an island church. Queues form at locations made famous by Instagram. But I go for a walk only to find those same mountains have lost their fascination, relegated to a backdrop for civilisation. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
James Stewart was a guest of On Foot Holidays, which has eight nights’ B&B on a Slovenia Highlands trip from £1,185pp, including two picnics and two dinners (onfootholidays.co.uk). Fly to Ljubljana
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Three more smart places to stay in Slovenia1. Vila Planinka, Jezersko
Vila Planinka is a stylish retreat
MIRAN KAMBIC 2020
It is where Boris Johnson took his mini-moon in 2022, but don’t hold that against this five-star chalet hotel. In the little-visited Kamnik-Savinja Alps, this is a stylish retreat whose ethos is “unplug to recharge”. That means free bikes, wi-fi only in the lobby (it can be set up in your room on request) and no phones — why Johnson stayed, I expect. The reward is to step off life’s helter-skelter among the beauty outside. To help that, things inside are a sort of rustic luxury: woody, with globe pendant lights, cracking views and balconies on all but entry-level rooms. The restaurant is top-notch.
Details B&B doubles from £239 (vilaplaninka.com). Fly to Ljubljana
2. Hotel Bohinj, Lake Bohinj
Hotel Bohinj has wine tastings and live music
INTIHAR
Lake Bohinj had a couple of so-so Yugoslav-era hotels when I first went in 2004. Today serious investment has made the lake resort the thinking holidaymaker’s alternative to Lake Bled — quieter and better sited in the bosom of the Julian Alps. While this 62-room place is certainly a resort hotel, a 2021 overhaul has modernised decor, added a good spa that focuses on nature and water therapies and improved the restaurant. The location? As stellar as ever. Wine tastings and live music are held on lawns, which extend to the lake, and a fire pit crackles in the evenings.
Details B&B doubles from £155 (hotelbohinj.si). Fly to Ljubljana
3. April1550, Ljubljana
Hotel April1550 is in a 16th-century building
ANA SKOBE
There are lots of smart chain hotels in the capital. This four-star, which opened last year, is not one of those, although it is Ljubljana to its core: stylish, historic, charming. On a quiet lane of the old town, moments from the shops and riverside cafés, it is a pipsqueak hotel in a 16th-century building sensitively sharpened up by clever design, where original stone and wooden ceilings, wooden floors and jute rugs soften the architects’ strict minimalism. Some rooms have a balcony, one has access to a central courtyard — a fine spot for breakfast in summer. Staff are lovely. Two nights minimum stay.
Details B&B doubles from £184 (april1550.com)
What are your thoughts on Slovenia? Let us know in the comments below
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Publish date : 2024-06-08 07:00:00
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