Day 34 – Rovinj to Ljubljana (Thursday 16th May 2024)

With a long day ahead the alarm woke us at 6:15am. We threw our last few not-yet-packed items together and hit road pretty much at 7:00am. ETA for arrival in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, is 3:12pm, to be precise. Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, is 251kms from Rovinj – travel time about 2hrs 50mins. Motorway, almost all the way. A wrong turn near Rijeka cost us ten minutes but we were quickly back on track. Somewhere after Rijeka but before the turn-off down to Split the weather turned pretty horrible. The country was quite mountainous and a very thick fog had settled on the pine-clad slopes around us. It became difficult to see much further than 50m down the road. The tail-lights of the cars ahead were no longer in view so all perception of distance was lost. At times it became quite disconcerting when suddenly, out of the fog, rushed a tunnel entrance at you. The whole scene evoked images from the Dire Straits song “Brothers In Arms”, the opening line of which is “These mist covered mountains…..”, ….one of my favourite songs.

The fog dissipated as we descended to the flatter land on the approach to Zagreb. The road into the Sixt rental office near the Zagreb Main Bus station was very straight forward and we soon arrived at the address we’d given GPS-girl. Only problem was the lack of a Sixt office anywhere in the observable vicinity. We did a lap around the block just in case we missed it and wound up at the same place again. I grabbed my phone and plugged “Sixt Car Rental Zagreb Main Bus Station” rather than a specific street address. Google Maps came up with a different target destination, 100m further down the same street. We followed that instruction and found the office. Turns out, I had asked GPS-girl to take us to street number “71” rather than “71a”, because she didn’t know about “71a”. I figured they would be right next to each other. Not the case, so we discovered, they were 100m apart.

The next challenge soon presented itself – the office was open, despite it being well within the advertised office hours. An American/Croatian chap was there trying to rent a car. He called the numbers on the door but got no answer. A young girl from the nail beautician shop next came to the rescue. She somehow got onto Sixt and confirmed for me the “outside office hours” drop-off instructions printed on the front door. I drove the car to the car-park across the street, took a video of it there, dropped the key into the secure drop-box on the office wall and started the walk to the Zagreb Main Train Station 1.6km further down the street. The last I saw of our American friend he was climbing into a taxi, presumably to find a car rental office that was open. Fail for the Zagreb Sixt franchise owner.

 

Despite our challenges dropping off the car and our long walk to the station we made it there with loads of time to spare. As I’ve said in other blogs, you don’t want time working against you when travelling in or to foreign lands. Plan to give yourself plenty of room in the itinerary for accommodating any unplanned adjustments required. Zagreb station is nothing flash at all, just a small hall in an old 19^th century building with no seats, a single departure board and an “out of the way” information desk. We sat out on Platform 1 for about an hour waiting for our already ten minute late train chatting to an English couple who came to share our park-bench seat. When the train did come a strange thing happened. The train was four carriages in length. The first one was First Class at the engine end and Second Class at the end that stopped in front of us. Every other carriage was Second Class. Al the people wanting to board the train were jostling for position to get on to carriages 2, 3 and 4. Nobody was climbing up to (literally) the door directly in front of us. I asked a police officer if the giant “2” printed next to the door indicated it was a Second Class carriage which he confirmed so we boarded. The carriage was all but empty! Ten minutes later the train left, now 30 minutes late, and no one else had boarded. We waited in anticipation, expecting to be booted back to the next carriage at any time. At the border our passports were checked and the ticket inspector came along. She scanned the QR code on our tickets on my phone and moved on to the next passenger! All good! That was a win!

 

Two and a half hours later we arrived in Ljubljana. To our great surprise we stepped off the train at the same time as Laurie and Doug with whom we travelled up the Dalmatian coast last week. They’d joined another Intrepid tour in Split immediately after ours had finished. What a coincidence! As we stepped out of the station light rain began to fall but not enough to stop us walking the 900m to our apartment at 5 Vodnikoc Trg. It’s an old building at the base of the hill upon which the Ljubljana Castle sits, right in the heart of the tourist precinct, next to St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the market and the extensive car-free walking area that extends along and around the river. When we were settled in our tiny, second floor room we ducked out to find a supermarket to get some dinner for the night. Although tiny, the apartment has a kitchen with an oven and cook-top so a “home cooked” meal (packed, fresh pasta) was on the menu today, which was a really nice change.