Wandering Memories #1: Exciting Slovenia - or how I got lost at a height of 2500 meters

Hello Steemians!

As I promised in my introduction post, before I set out on my next expedition, I will describe some of the most interesting adventures and trips in the cycle Wandering Memories. The posts will be accompanied by analog and digital photos that I have taken along the way. I'm not a professional photographer, so some of them are blurred, moved, overexposed, etc. But I hope that they will satisfy you :) Posts in the near future will describe the most interesting fragments of my two-month hitch-hiking journey, which I made during my summer holidays in 2015. Before you, the first entry from this series!

After spending a few days with my Hungarian friend in Budapest and Balaton lake, I started hitch-hiking towards Slovenia. The road leading to Ljubljana was a rather modest road and led mainly through poor, but very charming Hungarian villages. Hitch-hiking is the most interesting on such roads - cars usually take you no more than 50km (because they twist "to your village") and you have the opportunity to see some life in the country's province. Many times the whole village has to be walked all on foot, just to stand on its "exit gate" for further car-catching. The view of a man crossing the middle of the village with a big backpack aroused interest. One young Hungarian came to me, he didn't speak English at all, I didn't speak Hungarian at all, so I just said "Lengyel" (which means Polish), we shook hands and he shared with me an incredibly cool beer, which in the ever-present heat was really salutary:) I set off from Balaton quite late and didn't really hurry up, so I arrived at the border with Slovenia when it was getting dark, but I was still able to catch a lorry driver straight to the Slovenian capital!

The flag of Slovenia shows the country's highest peak (2864 m n.p.m),
Triglav, the highest summit of the country (Triglav means "three-headed").

It was so late that I didn't think too much about looking a place to sleep and found a hostel nearby. The next day, through CouchSurfing Andrej invited me to join him, a nice computer scientist with whom I spent a couple of hours talking and enjoying beers. Andrej lent me a bicycle and together we went to the city center, where he showed me Ljubljana and told the history of the city. He also showed me less known places, completely free from tourists but as interesting as the main attractions. He told me about the mayor of the city, who jumped into a river wrapped in the flag of Yugoslavia after Italians who just annexed Ljubljana offered him to remain in the position.

A nice photo given that I was riding a bike!

Andrej drank water from the Bombay Saphire bottle,
which has always amazed all the guests.

The next day I visited the capital city myself. Ljubljana is a charming city - the size of more or less of my Poznań, and at the same time it has all the advantages of the capital, such as it's the most important cultural centre of the country, has the best universities and highest salaries. At the same time, you don't feel it as such a big city, there are no huge skyscrapers or big traffic there. Ljubljana seems to be a very friendly city and an ideal place to live.

I spent the day just like a typical tourist - I visited 3 (!) museums, climbed a hill to see the castle, saw the amazing cultural centre of Metelkova, which was transformed from squatted barracks of the former Yugoslavia army.

One of the sculptures in the Metelkova town

Ljubljana Castle visible from below

Burek, that is cheap and delicious Balkan fast food.
I tried it for the first time in Ljubljana and it accompanied me until the end of the journey.

Triglav in a painting

Type of installation art(?). Hundreds of VHS tapes
with various movies from different decades.
There was also an old TV and a video player:)

Slovenian band Laibach's poster
as part of a brilliant exhibition devoted to Neue Slowenische Kunst.

For the evening I made an appointment through CouchSurfing to grab a beer with Slovenian girl named Misa and.... a Basque man living in Finland. This time Misa hosted me on her floor in the dormitory :) When I told her about my plans to conquer Triglav, she said that if I did it I would be more Slovenian than she is - supposedly it is the duty of every Slovene to conquer Triglav at least once in my life, and she has not done so yet.

Bled lake

The next day in the morning I got to the Julian Alps. On the way to Triglav I wanted to see two more picturesque lakes - Bled and Bohinj. The island with a church, which is in the middle of Lake Bled, can be seen on every second postcard from Slovenia. Indeed, it looked impressive and lovely, although the place seemed to me to be too crowded with tourists. Fortunately, Bohinj was only 20 km away and was much less "populated" and much more beautiful! From here I could see the dignity of the mountains that I was about to conquer. I arrived to the place with a nice group of four Finns, one of whom was in the mountains for the first time in his life :) We spent the whole afternoon together and bathed in a fairly cool lake water.

Bohinj lake

It is probably a good time to mention that I have had really little experience of mountains so far. The biggest peaks I got were a couple of Bieszczady peaks (1346 m) and Śnieżka mountain (1,603 m.) :) So it was quite a challenge for me to climb on almost a 3,000 meters high mountain. As it turned out later, the task almost overwhelmed me and I was not well prepared for such an effort. In any case, in the evening I arrived at the shelter, and after 5 a. m. I was already on the trail. In the brisk morning, I was accompanied by music by Tomaž Pengova, a Slovenian folk musician from the 70s, who perfectly matched the circumstances of nature.

Triglav

Triglav overwhelmed me. The peak seemed to be tens of kilometers away and I couldn't imagine that I was getting there. I did not expect the route to be so challenging. Vertical, ten-metre walls with metal pins, very narrow passages over the chasms or simply huge, brick stairs were norm on the way.

The route should be crossed with safety wire ropes, which I obviously did not have :) But I was not the only one. The problem was also that my backpack, although almost empty, was a bit too big for such climbing. For this reason I travelled the route slower than most of them, probably more experienced climbers. Under the top there is a shelter, where after a short regeneration and a meal I ascend the peak - the most difficult part of climbing.

Such tombstones were every few hundred meters and they were not encouraging at all!

Summit ascent

A bit more than an hour later I look at Slovenia from above. Satisfaction mixed with fatigue reaches the zenith. But it's so late that I can't enjoy the view for a long time. I passed the shelter and probably as the last one I started to come down from Triglav. At some point I realized that I had lost the trail. I tried to do a shortcut and step on the main path again (so as not to go backwards), unfortunately it turned out that I was getting further and further away from the right path. I realized that I got lost at a height of approx. 2500 metres.

View from the top

Triumphing on top!

My body was already very exhausted, my knees' hurt and skin burned on my legs and hands. The air was thinned out. I struggled with time, because there was not much time left until the evening. I suddenly felt an adrenaline kick and that a survival instinct was triggered - the situation was really bad. I noticed that my mind worked differently, less rationally, I had problems with concentration and strange mood fluctuations (from fear to excitement) started to appear. The experience itself was very interesting for me due to the fact that I studied psychology. Anyway, I was retreating back following my own footsteps, breaking through the snow and fragments of the rock again.

It took me an hour to find the right path. The only thing left was to go down, fighting with time and myself. At one point I saw that.... I was being watched by a mountain goat, who staring at me strangely. My mind started to play tricks so I sensed the danger - I got the crazy idea that the goat could harm me. Later I met two others, all of them seemed to follow me. So I had an additional motivation not to stop. The goats, however, kept their distance and now it is clear to me that there was no danger at all.

I arrived at the shelter at the bottom of Triglav at about 9 p.m. Completely physically destroyed, looking like a zombie, I asked for a bed in a common room in the attic. The receptionist looked at me and with compassion gave me the keys to my own room with a comfortable bed, without taking a correspondingly larger amount and threw "have a good sleep" with a smile. He was an angel!

The night was tough, I couldn't sleep out of pain and the sleep resembled more fever-like illnesses. In the morning it wasn't better than - my body seemed to be of stone, I barely made any movements. I don't know how could I hitch-hike back to Ljubljana in that state but I did it. I didn't plan to go back to the capital city, but I was just to worn out to be able to get to Croatia that day. I called Misa if she could not host me on her floor in her room again. Misa welcomedme and gave me a wonderful ointment for the burned skin, which gave me a huge relief.

Misa's recomvalescence worked so the next day I felt much better and my strength returned. My last stop in Slovenia were Škocjan Caves - a system of huge caves adapted for sightseeing. Unfortunately, it was hard to take a photo in such a place, so you can see how it looks like here. I was non-stop accompanied by the feeling of visiting the Moraia Mines from Lord of the Rings!

After visiting the caves, I hitch-hiked towards Croatia. Still tired, still with burnt skin, but with great satisfaction from overcoming my own weaknesses and from conquering, after all, quite a big mountain. The Slovenian start of my Balkan trip was a good herald of the next few weeks!

Wandering Memories #1: Exciting Slovenia - or how I got lost at a height of 2500 meters

Hello Steemians!

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