Day 37 – Ljubljana to Bled (Sunday 19th May 2024)

A tip for travellers in the Balkan States….. don’t travel anywhere and don’t expect to shop anywhere, except for restaurants and cafes, on a Sunday. It could be your undoing! Oh, and add public holidays into the mix too. Find out when they are in a given country before you finalise your transport plans.

Today we travelled from Ljubljana to Bled, a pretty simple proposition one might think – travelling from the nation’s capital to the nation’s number one tourist destination in the regions. Not so as it turned out. Our plan was to catch the train from Ljubljana station Bled station. Pretty simple. We arrived at the station with plenty of time to spare. This was the only leg of the entire trip for which I had not booked the transport already. Not required, I learned from a number of different sources – a train goes to Bled every hour. Too easy!! Well, that’s not the case on Sunday’s in May. First challenge – there were no trains running at all! But replacement buses had been arranged. Beaut! The girl and the chap at the ticket window were trying to be very helpful to the bemused foreigners (and I’m not just talking about Kerry and me). We got our tickets pretty easily (€2.40 ea.) from Ljubljana to Bled Jezero (Lake Bled station) but the station staff couldn’t tell us categorically where the bus would leave from, when it would leave and how to identify it. After pressing her a little, the girl decided that the best bus for us to catch was the 11:35am bus to Lesce-Bled station. “But the ticket I just bought says Bled Jezero station”, I remarked. “You can got to Bled Jezerio with that ticket. The bus will leave from near Platform 1”, she replied.

Without a great deal of confidence we made or way to a big car-park adjacent to Platform 1 where a few busses were parked. None of them had a sign in their front window saying where they were going. Forget about any fixed signs that might indicate where a given bus might leave from. We chatted with a couple from the UK who were equally bemused (and concerned). Ten minutes before the scheduled departure time a young girl in uniform appeared at the front of two of the buses and was immediately best upon by three dozen anxious travellers. She calmly scanned their tickets and told them which bus to get on. For us, our UK friends and some others the process was not quite so straight-forward. She directed us to one bus, we put our bags underneath and found a seat. Then she appeared on the bus and told us to move to the other bus. We did, but only us, not the others. It’s always a little unsettling when that happens and the bus driver can be seen throwing his hands and shoulders up in the universally known “Don’t ask me!” shrug. Three minutes later a bunch more people, including our UK friends, also changed buses. Only one minute behind schedule the buses left….. for who knows where.

Out of Ljubljana we went on our magical mystery tour. Ljubljana’s not big so it wasn’t long before we were in the fields and forests. The Julian Alps loomed large on the near horizon - tall, magnificent, craggy peaks, some of which still held last season’s snow - and seemed to encircle the flat plain upon which Ljubljana sits. After one stop and an hour’s travel over some winding, narrow roads (for a big bus, that is), passing numerous wannabe Tadej Pogačar’s and Primož Roglič’s on the way (Slovenia’s premier Grand Tour cyclists) we reached the town of Lesce and the Lesce-Bled station. Despite what the girl at the Ljubljana train station had said, the bus driver wasn’t going any further. So the entire busload alighted and we were left to work out for ourselves how to get to our respective destinations. The bus shelter had a timetable that advised that the next bus to Bled Jezero would be in eight minutes. No probs. Thirty-eight minutes later it was still nowhere to be seen

The bus shelter also had information advertising a number of taxi services. Out came the mobiles phones and discussions along the lines of “where going here, where are you going, do you want to share?” ensued. We were the only ones going to the south of the lake so we were on our own. I called Brane using WhatsApp and ten minutes later we were away in his very nice car. Brane was a chap about our age and we quickly could see he was reliable and trustworthy so before we’d finished the first kilometre of our seven kilometre journey we’d booked him to pick us up for the return journey to the station on Wednesday morning.

 

We arrived at our hostel at 2:00pm, right in check-in time. A young girl was there to greet us and show us our room. Dolar Rooms hostel is two kms out of the Bled CBD in a cluster of other hostels and apartment-style accommodation houses and in a lovely rural setting. Outside the first floor window of our room is nothing but a green, pine-clad, forested hillside. No cathedral bells here, just the birds twittering in the trees. Our neighbours across the road are a couple of jersey cows. The hostel is clean and tidy and fresh. The lake is just a couple of hundred meters up the lane-way. A good hotel with cafe attached sits on the main road around the lake’s edge a further 100 metres on. Here we visited to sample the famous (in Bled, at least) Bled cream cake, essentially a vanilla slice with cream making up the top third of the dessert. After a short stroll along the lake to check out the boat hire/cruise scene we returned to the hostel via a “short cut” up a steep set of steps through the forest.