Slovenia - Ljubljana - 9th-10th March

And so my trip draws to an end...Friday morning myself and my Brazilian Bud Des left our hostel in Zagreb and hopped on a train across the border to Ljubljana, Slovenia. As the ticket inspector entered our booth, I realised with a tinge of sorrow that this would be the last time I was to use my interrail card...Yes, my month in Eastern (mainly) Europe was up, and due to a slight change of plan, Slovenia was to be my last official holiday stop before I got back to business with arranging the final leg of my year out in Berlin.

As soon as we crossed the border, the views from the train were amazing. I was only a wee bairn last time I was in Slovenia, but I could see why I remember liking it. The weather was radically more clement than it had been in Croatia, and the whole mountain-and-lakes (and rivers, and other green and blue things) scenery was amazing, even more so than it had been in Slovakia. I really love this kind of environment, it's just a shame that travelling by train doesn't afford one the luxury of actually being in it that much. Maybe sometime I'll go to some of these places again with a more flexible form of transport...

Anyway, we arrived in Ljubljana at midday, and as Des was catching the late night train out again, we pretty much immediately set about seeing the place. After visiting my hostel and discovering no staff around, we shouldered our backpacks again and wandered off (with an Aussie we found knocking around - there's always one, even when there's no staff!) up the big hill with the castle on it in the middle of the city. Not really a clever move considering the weather, but after backpacking for a while these things tend to become irrelevant. It's a relatively nice castle, offering good views over the city, though we opted out of going up the tower as they wanted to rob us of 3 Euro for the pleasure.

After this, and a spot of lunch, we finally got to dump our bags and went off to investigate Tivoli Park. Now, being as we'd been somewhat lax in our preparations for touristing the city, we were rather hoping to find another castle with dragons there, and spent a good part of the afternoon searching to that end. It was only after we'd got lost a couple of times, and asked for directions a few more, that we realised 2 things:

1. There aren't any real castles in the park. Just a couple of mansions.
2. The dragons aren't in front of a castle. They're guarding a bridge in the city centre.

You can't keep a good backpacker down, so we just took these things in our stride and strode to the aforementioned bridge, where we were happy indeed to find the dragons we had long searched for.
Quite impressive dragons they are too, though they didn't breathe fire. Well, not in public, anyway. We even waited a while to make sure, but when they still refused, we wandered off to explore a little more, eventually finding our way to a little pub with its own microbrewery (that is to say, home-made beer). We sampled said beer, and found it to be good. Then went back to the hostel, satisfied with our findings for the day.

The next day was Saturday, and the town being quite small and the weather not being museum-y, I opted to make the most of the landscape again and go for a wander in the woods behind Tivoli. This was most pleasant and relaxing, and a rather nice way to spend the last morning of my holiday, I think. In the afternoon I took my rovings back to the old town to capture a few more photos and souvenirs, before finally saying goodbye to "the East" and hopping on a night train to München...