Bled

Lake Bled

Slovenia was pretty much what I expected. While Bled is definitely a tourist area, it is still a small quiet town with lots of character. Thankfully lots of people here speak at least a little English, which is good because Slovenian, like Czech, is very complicated. We were in German speaking countries for enough time to pick up a few words here and there, but not a hope here!

Entrance to the castle

As far as things to do here, if you aren't an outdoors person, its not a great place to come. There is a very old (and in my opinion, quite anticlimactic) castle that has pretty decent views, even if you have to do a bit of rock climbing to get to the good spots! The main focus of Bled is Lake Bled, which is a decent size lake with a tiny island in the middle with a church on it. Its about a 5 km walk around the lake, which Sarah and I did in pouring rain. Actually a lot of the stuff we did in Bled was in pouring rain... We also hiked up to a lookout point which had an absolutely amazing view of the lake, but it was a very rough climb up because everything was basically pure mud.

I was thirsty

After the sun came out we went over to the gorge, which is a little way out of town. There is a long walk through a canyon-like area on boardwalks built into the side of the cliff and then you get to the huge waterfall, which was where we turned around to go back. It was really pretty and the water tasted delicious!!

Yep, we were freezing

One of the reasons we came to Bled was the plethora of outdoor activities. We decided to go white water rafting, which was extremely fun and now I want to take it up as a serious hobby. Even though it wasn't extremely warm, and the water was FREEZING (try 5-7 degrees Celsius), we still had a blast. We even jumped out of the raft once and went swimming. And then got dumped out by our very kind guide/instructor person.

So if you want to do go some cool stuff, and happen to be in eastern Europe, you should probably come here.

1 second exposure without a tripod. Pretty impressed with myself!