I had heard about Bled from Cat the Canadian in Salzburg. It was apparently full of hiking, biking, scenery and various types of guided adventures. It happened to be in the exact direction I was going anyway so I didn’t need any more convincing. The train from Bad Gastein was perfect because it was direct. The train station you get off at is actually a few kilometres away from Bled, so when I got off the train I just had to walk across the road to the bus station and get on the bus, pretty simple really if you research your stuff. Problem is the stops aren’t very well signed so when the bus stopped at a station in Bled and the entire bus got off I just followed suit. Turns out that was one stop too early. I still found my hostel though, the town is small so I just guessed where I was and walked where I thought the hostel should be from memory of maps. It worked and I arrived.
The hostel was pretty sweet, it was ‘Travellers Haven’, and is widely known as the best hostel in Bled. Its an old Slovenian house thats been converted. It had a good common room/lounge room/kitchen area. The kitchen was actually really good, the best one ive come across. And for the first time ever a fridge that had some organisation, there was little bins that each person put their food in. I actually cooked dinner every night there it was that good. The supermarket was just across the street as well. Two of my days here were done with adventures, the emerald river adventure and canyoning, which are separate blogs. Another day was pouring with rain so I decided to have some rest and down time and only left the hostel to walk across the street to get lunch.
One of the most beautiful places to go is Vintgar Gorge, and I actually went there twice. Its a massive naturally cut out gorge with a huge waterfall down towards the bottom. I went there first with one of the chicks from the hostel, I obviously didn’t bring a lot of camera stuff, because stopping every two seconds to take photos doesn’t really go down well with others. So I went back a few days later with tripod and cokins and stayed there for a few hours taking shots of it all. Its one of the few places that being Autumn is a good thing, all of the trees surrounding the water had bright orange and red leaves. I took what is probably one of my favourite photos of the whole trip, a really nice portrait oriented photo of the water flow.
The rest of my days were filled in with enjoying the scenery and not having to ‘tick’ things off a tourist list. I took a bike from the hostel quite a few times and just rode around the lake, stopping half way around to hike up the top of a hill which overlooks Lake Bled, and what is probably the most known photo of Bled. However with the weather not being the best I was still not able to get a clear shot showing the Julian Alps in the background. There were some other cool Aussies staying in the hostel so I spent a day with them just hanging out and walking around. We went up to the castle and instead of paying the entrance fee we just walked around the side and climbed up a small rock wall to get the same view but for free. I flirted with the idea of climbing Mt Triglav with a guide, but at 150 euros and the possibility of zero visibility it just wasn’t worth doing. Maybe next year.
Even though the weather wasn’t that great while I was here (for photography anyway) im still glad I went. I met quite a few cool travellers that are going to some of the same cities as me in the future so we will probably meet up. Its 100% on the list for the next trip during summer though. Theres a lot of biking trails to be done, and a hell of a lot of hiking, including a lot of via ferrata which id like to get in to.
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