Slovenia and Croatia

by Tim Grimes

My wife and I, and our 11-year old and 12-year old children, flew into Zagreb earlier this year. We hired a car, and drove around coastal Croatia and Slovenia - and into Italy and Austria.

We had already seen Slovenia and wanted to return, to see more of the former Yugoslavia. We spent two or three weeks there, at the end of July, when the outside temperature varied between 18 degrees at mountain top, and 30 degrees  at the coast. The heat was a good excuse to try the consistently excellent ice-cream - most places sell 15 to 20 varieties at about 25p a shot.

Mt Triglav

We flew into Zagreb by Croatia Airlines. It is an older airport with a “Follow Me” car and a bus to immigration. We were greeted in English and speeded through to the adjacent baggage hall, where the bags were already circulating. As arranged much earlier in the year, we were met at the Airport by our taxi driver, who charged us the pre-arranged fare. So, it all worked efficiently and why shouldn't it? Because, actually, it doesn't always. But here, in Zagreb, we began to notice the unobtrusive efficiency which we saw everywhere else in the country. Most Croatians seem to speak English as a second language - those who don't speak German or Italian.

We spent the first few days at the Palace Hotel, Zagreb, which worked very well. The food reached the excellent standard which we came to expect throughout Croatia. Croatia works: the waiter brought a phone to the dinner table - it was the Budget's Airport franchise asking what time we wanted the car delivered. I left the car parked in a nearby street and collected a parking ticket. The hotel porter took the ticket away for cancellation.

Zagreb is a pleasant and attractive town, dominated by an ancient cathedral with a Nineteenth Century twin-spired facade. The place is 99% Roman Catholic, but we also saw Baptist and Orthodox churches. The old town, accessible by an 1898 funicular, also contains the Parliament in a cobbled square around St Mark's spectacular church. Our visit fell in with an international folk festival, which solved the question “Do the denizens of Zagreb really wander around dressed like this?” Zagreb is a young town seemingly populated largely by teenage boys on skateboards. The guide books say that, by 23, one is too old for the night clubs - and that is believable.

We drove to Porec on the coast, via Opatia, an imperial resort with its elegant villa hotels. The roads are excellent and far from crowded and the direction signs fairly good, despite the absence of road numbers even for the trans-European “E” roads. The route took us through spectacular wooded hills and across magnificent valleys on high viaducts.

Porec was a disappointment. Our research had identified it as a prime coastal resort, but it transpired to be the Croatian equivalent of Weymouth with a few ancient ruins. We had chosen a hotel which turned out to have the feel of an Airtours resort. We moved to the Melia Eden Hotel in neighbouring Rovinj - not a typing mistake, but an enchanting yachting and fishing harbour with labyrinthine stone passages between tall tenements, which radiated from the town square. The Venetian style St Euphemia's church tops the hill which dominates the little town. The newspapers were £3 a shot, but the internet cafe cost pocket change.

The Eden Hotel was renovated in 1999 and bears all the hallmarks of Croatian efficiency. A well-named four star resort with smiling staff, an outstanding restaurant and pool, and all the activities you would expect, is adjacent to a quiet stony beach in a holiday-brochure bay.

As in Rovinj itself, visitors came from Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland and Italy - there were even a few cars from as far away as Estonia, Latvia and Sweden. We heard few English voices. As in the town, the charm of the place is enhanced by its cosmopolitan nature. We talked to staff and guests in pidgin Croat (recognisably similar to Polish and Czech, which we had picked up on previous trips), and in German, English, Italian and (despite the absence of anyone from France) French.

A short drive away is the hilltop village of Motovun. Just 1000 narrow twisting stone steps up from the car park, in the baking mid-day heat, found us the church, hotel, post office - and an ATM. And breathtaking views of the wooded hills and valleys and the sea some 15 mles distant. An unusual location for an antiquarian bookshop offering a wide range of Russian classical literature, the works of Thackeray, Winston Churchill's World War II and Boswell's Life of Johnson. Again we found St Mark's lion of Venice adorning the architecture.

The Croatian coast is full of small towns on promontories. Rovinj was the most attractive which we found, Porec is another and Umag is a small, quiet, town, which probably attracts the yachtie crowd in the evenings.

We had planned to spend a few days based in Trieste, and to see the Slovenian coast from there. We drove out of Croatia, along the spectacular coast of Slovenia and out the other side, into Italy, without formality and in about 40 minutes. We entered Trieste via the heavy industry end of town and through some really run down housing estates. Finding the centre was difficult, not helped by frenetic Italian driving. We spent the next day exploring the city, but only found the Piazza Unita d'Italia to be of any interest. It is a massive square bordered on three sides by romantic Nineteenth Century facades and on the fourth by the coast road. A blizzard of litter and dust swirled around, obscuring visibility. This may account for the Italian habit of trying to walk into a space already occupied by someone else. To be fair, our decision was also affected by the massive traffic jam of Italian cars approaching the Slovenian border at the coastal crossing, on its way south for Italian holidays. It is essential to get out of Croatia before the end of July, when Italians move in.

So we decided to call a halt to Trieste after a day, and moved on to the Lipica in Slovenia, the stud where the Lipizzaner horses of Spanish Riding School were originally bred. Following the “Slovenia” signs from Trieste, we were relieved to be returning to the developed world. We toured the stud and watched a presentation by the riding school (free to hotel guests), but we weren't allowed to ride - because we hadn't brought our riding boots! That's a rather important travel tip to note. We stayed at the Maestoso Hotel on campus; there is also the more reasonably priced Club Hotel, a casino, a golf course and plenty of cafes, bars and restaurants.

International treaties have left Slovenia with less than 20 miles of coast and one port - Koper - approached by an attractive coastal road bounded by trees and cycle lanes and, for a major deep-water container and oil port, a pleasant town centre. Portoroz, the popular resort, is a long, wide, coastal road with hotels overlooking the sea and shops and activities of the mini-golf kind along the shore. For such a resort, it is inoffensive.

Piran

Next door, Piran is a delightful fishing and yachting port. We paid a parking fee at the village checkpoint, which seemed a sensible arrangement The town is dominated by the hill-top Baroque St George's church, its fantastic religious paintings adorning the wooden ceiling and the walls in the closing stages of renovation. The Venetian influence is present again in St Mark's lion cast into the town hall at the circular marble-floored piazza in the centre of the town

On our way to Lake Bled - on even better and even less-used roads than in Croatia - we stopped at the Postojna caves, the largest cave complex in Europe. There are more than a dozen miles of underground passages resplendent with millions of stalactites and stalagmites in passages and huge halls big enough to accommodate the occasional orchestral concert. Entry is hourly by a small train, then by foot, on a 90 minute journey through parts of the caves.

Slovenia is only a small country. A non-stop journey from the Mediterranean coastal resorts to the Alpine lake resort of Bled, in the far north, would take a couple of hours, by well-surfaced and clear roads (mind the speed cameras enforced by police motorcycles!). The lake is surrounded by woods and the foothills of the Julian Alps. There is a small town at one shore, with hotels and campsites dotted around the lake. We stayed at the Kompas Hotel, comfortable with an excellent a la carte restaurant, but breakfast was less than exciting and hot water ran out at a time of day more often associated with Blackpool B&Bs than international hotels. In the middle of the lake is the island church, accessed only by 18-seater boats each rowed by one man. The legendary castle, dating from 1004 stands on a high rock overlooking the lake but, mercifully, can be accessed by road.

An alternative lakeside venue is Velden am Wörthersee, just 45 minutes, and an uneventful border crossing, away in Austria: a much more developed resort, offering all kinds of water sports on a massive lake. Numerous riding stables are nearby; we paid SIT3,000 per hour at the nearest  - the Hippodrome - for a hack though the woods and a canter across fields, and my son an introductory lesson. We spent an undemanding morning white water rafting on the Sava Dolinka  - more exhilarating courses are available from the same operator.

Nearby is the Triglav National Park - thickly wooded mountains and valleys full of crystal clear water, presided over by Mt Triglav 2,864 metres. We had lunch at a recommended pizza restaurant in Kranska Gora and drove up 30 numbered hairpin bends, ascending over 1,000 metres in half an hour - not for the faint-hearted, but fantastic views of the mountain system and its valleys.

Wiser counsel would have returned us to Bled by the less direct main roads. Instead, we took, what looked from the map, like a short cut. It took us up three mountains and down again, around countless hairpins, narrow made and unmade mountain tracks, scary gradients, and remote villages where only hermits, or Sherpa Tensing, might be found.

Ljubljana is Slovenia's tiny but stylish capital. Because the city was largely rebuilt (by nationalist Slovene architects) following an earthquake in 1895, much of the architecture is consistent and what they call the Austrian Secessionist style, reflecting nationalist aspirations - and (after 1918, by Josip Plecnik) nationalist testimony - to the Kingdom of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.

The classical tree-lined river Ljubljana contrasts today's “off-the-wall” sense of humour e.g. the skateboard shop where opening the door mechanically raised a brick above a prone Tellytubby. On closing the door, the brick descend with some force, onto the unfortunate creature which shrieked in pain. There is style here, including the roads full of boutiques selling the latest designer-label teenage fashions which, my children told me, are quite a lot cheaper than at home. And where else would the street cleaners dress in white shirts and black bow ties?

Ljubljana is a university town, as we saw from the age of its population and the general ambience of the place. There are so many bars and restaurants to eat and drink, along the riverside and the chic cobbled roads - but the restaurateurs would be better advised to remove “cutlet of foal” from English menu translations.

Why don't the British come to this part of the world? It is so easy - just pick up the phone to the London-based national tourist offices, nick the hotels from the brochures and a browse through WH Smith's travel guides. There's also so much information now on the net although, to negotiate prices, there's no substitute for a phone call. OK, we got a couple of venues wrong. So what - change it on arrival!

And it is so different in central and eastern Europe - each country is so different from the hackneyed and increasingly homogenising France and Spain - and so different than each other. It must be like our grandparents' travels in Western Europe - but easier. Prices in Croatia are a bit lower than at home. Slovenia is a little cheaper again.

It is worth actually buying the Lonely Planet Guides at Smiths. When you arrive (or by internet in advance) the In Your Pocket guides to central and eastern European capitals, written by locally based authors and updated quarterly, give a genuine insight and are cheap.

Hotels quoted us rates in euros, but charged in local currencies. At a push, restaurants etc will accept euros in payment if you are a bit short of local currency. Visa is not as widely accepted as Eurocard, Mastercard, and neither is quite as widely accepted as at home - if in doubt, ask first.

For the idle, a couple of tour operators specialising in this area but, of course, that loses the flexibility of private travel.

First published in VISA issue 48 (winter 2002)