Ciao Italia

Today was a new record — three countries in one day.

We climbed out of Croatia on a pleasant backroad, which dealt with the traffic, but increased the gradients enormously. We had 10% climbs for multiple kilometres at a time, which really starts to bit after a while. There weren’t a lot of people around, and no shops or cafés, so we stopped at a war memorial and ate our emergency rations.

I’d chosen the bars for today and there was a certain amount of disquiet from the enlisted ranks about them being something like “dog biscuits”. They seemed to do the job as far as I was concerned, and we’ve all got lovely shiny coats now.

We pressed on through more uninhabited hills and stopped at a roadside kiosk a few kilometres before the border. There was no-one around and we were about to give up and leave when the owner arrived. This at least gave us some more water and an ice cream for lunch. The owner explained that the village used to have 900 inhabitants before the Second World War, but many left to escape the Nazis and the village was now home to 15 people. It seems amazing that none came back over the ensuing decades, but there’s not a huge amount going on in the area except forestry. Once there may have been a dairy industry, but that’s long gone.

The last stretch to the border wasn’t even much of a climb, and then we descended through a closed border crossing to leave Croatia. To our surprise though, the Slovenians still had a man posted at their border. He duly checked our passports and triggered the barrier to open so that he could go back to frivolities that seemed to be going on in his office.

So, Slovenia. It took us 45 minutes to cross the country, and excluding car drivers, the only Slovenian we saw in all that time was the border guard and one woman mucking out her stable. We know that Primoz Roglic (famous cyclist) comes from Slovenia, we know the capital is Ljubljana (but can’t say it) and we know it’s not Slovakia, which is further north. Apart from that, we learned nothing new about the country during our visit.

We had, luckily, pre-purchased flags, as we couldn’t have bought a packet of chips anywhere on the road we followed, let alone a Slovenian flag.

Before we knew it we were descending past a sign saying “Italia” and we were in the land of espressos and Piaggios.

Italy feels so comfortable. For the first time in a very long time we’re in a country that Sarina and I have visited a number of times before. We know at least a little of the language and the buildings, signs and landscape seem familiar. We must be getting close to home!