Travelling around Europe for several months staying in hostels you are bound to come across a lot of weirdos, annoying people, morons, etc etc. Below is a description of the ones that really grind my gears. Ill add to it over time if I think of others.

– The Rustler
This person is constantly fiddling with their bag to get clothes out or whatever. They often have a seemingly endless supply of plastic bags in their backpack that are impossible to not make noise with. They are also the person that always gets up super early and has to leave so they wake everyone up taking three hours to get a pair of pants and tshirt out of their bag. Is it so hard to get your shit organised the night before? Get what clothes you are going to wear the next day out of your bag.

– The Slow Photo Taker
This one is something that probably isn’t noticed by most people, but seeing as though I notice nearly everything to do with photography, I notice this. They are the person that stands infront of a monument, statue, whatever, and takes five minutes to take what will likely be a shit photo anyway. It should take five seconds to take a photo. I just don’t understand how it could take any longer. I walk up to something, point click bam, walk away. Then admire the whatever from somewhere that isn’t in the middle of everyone.

– The Stand In The Middle Of The Door Way
This person is everywhere, and not just in door ways. They are the person that generally just feels the need to stop anywhere where there is a constant flow of people. Doors, staircases, pathways, etc. They are usually tourists that have no idea where they are going. A good example is when they arrive at a train station in a new city, walk to the exit, and for some reason when they see the light of day they just stop and decide yeah sweet ill figure out where to go right here in the middle of the door way.

– The Snorer
This person is the bane of everyone who ever stays in a hostel. This is a tricky one because although they are pissing off every other person in the room, they don’t really have any other options apart from staying in a single room. The most annoying part of it all is that while the person next to you sounds like a plane taking off and keeping you awake, they are sleeping quite happily without a care in the world. The worst case of this ive had is when a guy asked me if I snored (I never have) because he hates snorers. He snored that night. Spanner. Another problem with snorers is that if you need to set an alarm for the next morning you cant sleep with ear bud things because then you wont hear your alarm.

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Within the first 30 minutes of walking around Ljubljana it became obvious that were was a small but good street art scene. Right in the middle of the city there is the tag ‘Vixen’ scrawled everywhere, sometimes accompanied by a cartoony duck head. Ever since visiting Berlin last year and doing a tour of the graffiti areas there ive had a new appreciation for street art. I still hate stupid little punks that ‘tag’ everything with no talent or skill what-so-ever. But the guys that throw up genuine pieces of huge art on a wall is brilliant. I think it should be legalised in more areas of more cities as it can look really good.

So I basically spent an entire day just walking all of the streets I could and taking photos of it all. There is one area in particular, a squat where local artists have taken up residency. Along with some weirdo freaky art installations around the place, all of the walls were covered in really good pieces. Continue for shitload of pics.

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The beautiful car free cobble walking streets of Ljubljana

From Bled I moved on to their tiny little capital city called Ljubljana. Its the largest city in Slovenia, but don’t let that fool you, the population is 280 thousand. All of Slovenia is only 2 million. One thing about little countries though is that its piss easy to get anywhere. All I had to do was walk down the road from my hostel in Bled, jump on a bus that comes every hour every day, pay something close to nothing, and arrive in the middle of Ljubljana one hour later. Brilliant.

I had a few dilemmas though. One was where to stay and for how long. From talking to multiple people in Bled about both things I still had no idea. There were bad stories about all the hostels, but then also positive ones. I was told to stay there for two hours as theres nothing to do from one person, and then told to stay three days by another. In the end I decided on the hostel that was smaller with no social aspect to it, but that was better than staying somewhere with filthy bathrooms and weirdos. And I also compromised on two days there. The hostel actually ended up being really good (albeit quiet, but thats good sometimes), and two days was a good amount of time.

Its definitely true of what blogs and guides say about the city though. Its very very beautiful, but its tiny and theres nothing to do there. Its a city that you just relax in and walk around and take in the place. I don’t really mind this, not having to be a tourist and tick off all the museums is great (even though I don’t go to museums anyway). On the first night there wandering around the place I happened to bump in to two people that were staying in the same hostel in Bled, total fluke. So we went out that night to a traditional Slovenian restaurant, and I ate a gigantic Florentine steak. I gotta say though, ill take an Aussie steak that ive cooked myself any day. After that we headed to a place called Skeleton Bar, well I think it was at least. Its in an old cellar and its really dark with skeletons and stuff on the walls, pretty cool atmosphere. They are quite known for their cocktails, and offer buy one get one free, which is crazy. So that turned out to be a good night with nice people.

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At the end of the day of canyoning

Another one of the ‘adventure’ things I wanted to do in Bled was canyoning. I enquired about doing it and they said they needed a minimum of two people to do it. Yeah, awesome. So id either have to find some random on the street wanting to do it or not do it. Whilst cooking dinner in the hostel I got talking to two Melbourne dudes that said they were doing canyoning the next morning. Sweet! So I woke up the next day and went outside just before the supposed pickup time hoping to see the guys there. They hadn’t shown up yet and it was five minutes before pickup. I went in to the reception chick and asked her about doing canyoning today. She quickly rang someone up and it was go go time. Got picked up a few minutes later, and there was three other people doing it too. Turns out the Melbourne guys just decided not to do it, but didn’t tell anyone.

We drove for a while until we got to the edge of the forest area that surrounds the canyons. Suited up in our wetsuits and were given helmets and harnesses. We were told not to pee in the suits because the type of suit they are means that they let water in, but not out. So you would be sitting in your own piss for a while, and theres no showers when you finish. We then walked in to the forest and went up and up. Had to walk up the equivalent of what we would be coming down in the canyon. Finally we reached where we would be starting from and we got the whole reel of safety talk like you usually get. Jumped in the water and it didnt actually seem that bad, the wetsuits were quite good.

And then it was about an hour and a half of canyoning our way down to the bottom. For anyone that doesn’t know what im talking about, then ill try explain. The ‘canyon’ is exactly what you think, a water stream thats carved out the rock. You have to jump down some parts, landing in pools at the bottom. Slide on your arse down other parts that have been sufficiently smoothed over the years. And then theres the abseiling down a few of the steeper waterfalls. Its really really fun, way better than the white water rafting. But just like the water rafting, i found it quite tame. I wanted more jumps, and bigger ones. I wanted crazy abseils down bigger waterfalls. But they obviously cant do that when they’re catering for all sorts of people. Speaking to the guide though there is some seriously hektik stuff that they do personally on their days off.

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The 12m bridge jump. One of those times where I wish I could have taken the photos of myself.

Coming to Slovenia was going to be the start of the trip where I could think about saving money as things get progressively cheaper the further east you go in Europe. However Bled is a little different because its a sporty little place with heaps of companies offering all sorts of adventures. And these aren’t cheap. When I checked in to my hostel I found out the Emerald River Adventure day trip was running the next day. I had planned to do this all along so there goes 88 euros. The outing consists of being driven to various places around Bled, including canyons, waterfalls, rivers, towns, etc. Its a great way to see the beautiful scenery that Slovenia has to offer.

I was picked up outside the hostel with 3 others at 8am the next morning. The weather wasn’t that great, it was really cloudy, but I wasn’t going to take the risk of not doing it that day and hoping they ran it again while I was still in Bled. I can’t remember the names of any of the places that we went to, but I couldn’t even pronounce them at the time either. One of the first stops was to a set of artificial swimming lakes that had a mountain goat statue on the shoreline. The guides explained the story behind the legend of the goat, and it wasn’t that happy. It ended with the goat kicking a young boy off a cliff to his death. Interesting. We drove up and down various mountain passes, with the fog covering basically everything. The whole day started with the thought of ‘wow this tour would be amazing in summer’. Went to a section of the Soca river and did a walk/hike to where the water comes out of the mountain. Pretty sketchy walk, fair part of it was basically like via ferrata climbing (holding on to a metal rope or you will fall and die). Pretty weird place, theres just a hole in the mountain with a pool of water inside that the water flows out of. In times of huge rainfall the water shoots out of the mountain.

After lunch we drove to another part of the Soca river to do some white water rafting. I have never done this before so it was quite exciting, even though it was obvious it was going to be rather tame. And thats exactly what it was. The time rafting is split in to three different parts with the first being cat 1, the second being cat 2 and the third, thats right, cat 3. Cat 1 rafting is basically just floating down a river, and cat 2 isn’t much different. The guide was obviously trying to make it interesting and steering us into as much shit as possible which was good. We had a rest before the cat 3 part because i don’t know maybe certain fat bats who do it get tired or something by this stage. The cat 3 part was ok, but the cool parts were too few and far between. The consensus between the people I knew was that if the entire thing was the good parts from the cat 3 section then it would have been wicked. Still glad I did it…but in the future I now know I have to go on more advanced guided rafting.

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