Expedition '08: Slovenia

This summer our adventures took us to the eastern European country of Slovenia, home of mountains, lakes... and pivo! Some of us flew, some of us drove, and we all arrived on different days but by the 29th June everyone had arrived at the campsite by Lake Bohinj.

Here we spent our days climbing at the local crag in Bohinj and walking in the nearby mountains. One of this routes involved walking up possibly the longest, sweatiest zigzag path I have ever seen followed by a quick strip off and a dip in the lake at the top (as far as I’m aware there was no pre-season naked lake bagging!) Some of us also spent an afternoon paragliding, and quite a few made the epic mile swim across the lake and back. With all our climbing and walking giving us healthy appetites we managed to eat most of the food in the nearby restaurant one evening. It was touch and go as to whether they would have enough for us but except for a few lasagnes burnt beyond recognition, and wine that they should have been paying us to drink, it wasn’t too bad in the end!

Great as Bohinj was it wasn’t long until we decided to move on to our next campsite in a nearby valley, at Trenta. This involved either a number of buses, a ride in a car crammed with lots of kit or a very long walk over the mountains. I don’t know about the bus ride, but I know the car journey involved 51 hair pin bends for the UBES wannabe rally drivers to test their tyres on! The walk over the mountains took two days, with an overnight bivi spot by a lake which we turned into what looked like a UBES refugee camp with our orange bags. The next day we made it up Kanjavec, had a brief snow ball fight and then headed down to Trenta to join the others.

Trenta was close to more crags than Bohinj so there were quite a few days spent climbing/sunbathing at the bottom of crags. Our main focus from Trenta was the summit of Triglav; at 2864m and the highest mountain in Slovenia it was the one we all wanted to tick off. The first group headed up to the hut just below the summit and stayed there overnight. A 3.30am wake up meant that we were on the summit to watch the sun rise as we cooked breakfast!

A big thunderstorm and lightning stopped a second group from getting to the summit (with a fair bit of easy via ferrata on the route, walking up during a lightning storm really wasn’t a good plan!). The same thunderstorm hit those left in the valley with a night of rain and marble sized hailstones but the tents didn’t get washed away, so thumbs up for UBES tent building skills!

We spent a few days trying to find some decent ferrata routes- what was marked as via ferrata on the map often turned out to be a normal path with a bit of wire next to it! But indisputably the best via ferrata we found was the Cathedral route which involved a bit of wriggling between a sandwich of rock, a scramble up a fairly unstable scree slope and ended with climbing up through a cathedral sized opening in the rock.

With all our expeditioning, climbing, via ferrataing and the occasional bimble up the Soča trail our time in Slovenia flew by far too quickly and we were all sad to leave. Those flying from Ljubljana spent a day in the capital and saw some fancy looking caves, while the others drove back through Europe with one car making a quick stop off in Font for some bouldering. All of us had amazing time and can’t wait for more UBES adventures!