More for the Slovenia doesn’t suck file:
Lake Bohinj is one of our very favorite places not only in Slovenia but in the world. Magda and I spent our first getaway there, and have been going back regularly ever since, but had never managed to get up onto the dramatically wild massif above the lake until this past weekend.
Our Canado-Slovene friend Andrej put together a small group of friends and invited us along. Finding Rada willing to take the boys for another overnight, we dug out our gear — which wasn’t easy given how long it had been since we’d done any serious walking. The difficulty was reduced by the nature of hiking in these mountains, where it’s permitted to sleep only in the mountain huts dotting the peaks and valleys in some improbably remote settings. This means that 90% of what a hiker accustomed to, say, the Rocky Mountains, is used to carrying stays at home. No: tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, stove, gas, cooking gear, meals, etc. Stuff in a pullover, rainshell, camera, lunch, and you’re pretty much ready to go with a tiny (and light!) rucksack.
And light is good, because on this trail we had a vertical gain of 1,500 meters, nearly all of it in the first hour of walking. Despite the ridiculously small load on my back, my legs were begging for mercy hours from the upper beer station mountain hut which was our destination.
Not only are you relieved of the great weight involved in self-supported camping, but once you arrive at your destination you find cold beer, hot gulaš, and what some might charitably term a ‘mattress’ waiting.
This hike kicked my ass in more ways than one. After spending the last several years doing nothing more strenuous than opening a beer, I found the walk up to the beers provided at the hut, Koča pri Triglavskih jezerih, more painful in the upper reaches than I remembered hiking ever being, and that had the knock-on effect of making that evening’s first Laško more intensely and amazingly satisfying than I remembered beer ever being. Cramped muscles were quickly salved and we settled in for an evening of sadjevec and picture-taking.
The next morning we were up reasonably early to earn our bed and board through the čistilna akcija, or ‘cleaning sale’. Though technically the clean-up was over, Andrej wangled it with management so that the charges for our meals and accommodation were waived in return for a few hours of gathering whatever scraps of litter we could find in the hut’s surroundings. Here’s my favorite piece of rubbish:
I took the camera with me, and the slow meander around the little valley provided some time for quiet pictures of the place in morning light. The hut has a pond (pair of ponds in the dry season) below it and one above it. Some favorite pictures from that rubbish walk:
Below is a stitched-together panoramic view of the lower pond (also seen in the first picture in this post), called Dvojno jezero. It looks quite nice when viewed in larger format on Flickr.
The same pond in the low dusky light as we arrived:
Another view of the upper pond in morning light:
Brane, the hutman who hooked us up in the čistilna akcija, never stopped joking around, which allowed me to demonstrate my utter obtuseness in Slovene. Following a discussion of camera filters in which I managed to aver that my penis was 72 mm in length, we said goodbye and headed toward the unnervingly sheer wall called Komarča that would bring us back to the valley floor along a trail that was essentially vertical.
Though we did our best, the beauty and drama of the places we walked through was essentially unphotographable. It was soul-cleansing to spend just two days in such a setting, and we’re determined to go back again before we leave Slovenia. Enormous thanks to Andrej for including us on this trip, and to Anja, Polonca, and David for being such great walking companions.
