Bled - its Bleeding beautiful!

Time to hit the road again – onto the small town of Bled in the southern Limestone Alps dividing Slovenia from Austria.

Our first impression –sickeningly beautiful! Emerald green lake with a picturesque island in the middle – the Church of the Assumption covering its entire surface, with a cute little town around the outside and castle standing on a cliff-top on one side.

The lake

We checked into the aptly named Camping Bled, on the Western side of the lake and found a great spot in the middle of the valley. At this campground there were also super cute wooden bungalow/tents in an A-frame shape that you could rent out to stay in.

Mulder in his spot

We decided to walk the 3km around the lake into town, first checking out the beach right out the front of the campground – the water felt a little too cold for my liking, just fine to Dave though.

The beach

In town we had hoped to find a hairdresser for Dave to get a haircut to for his unruly hair. Unfortunately it was a bank holiday in Slovenia and so everything was mostly closed. With the thought we could leave it 1 more day we checked out the town centre some more, including the art and craft markets and admired the set up for the upcoming 2011 World Rowing Championships being held on the lake later this month.

We headed back up into town to the 3glav Adventures store of book a trip for tomorrow as well as hiring some bikes, while waiting for the store to reopen (Slovenia also observes the 2-3 hour siesta in the middle of the day) we had some of Bled’s culinary specialty – the Krema Reszina (vanilla cream cake, like vanilla slice) at one of the nearby cafes – Yum!

Yum yum!

To work off some of those callories i made Dave row us across the lake to the island in the middle home to the church. We had a ball trying to row - Dave eventually got the hang of it although we defiantely had a tendancy to head right all the time.

Hmmm ... here goes nothing

Put ur back into it Dave - theres still a long way to the island!

Ahhh what a terrible view!

We hired some Scott mountain bikes to work off the cake and were allowed to take them overnight to use the next morning. Dave got a flat tyre on the way back to the campground (keeping his flat tyre record intact!)

That night we had a rather disturbed sleep and vowed to rememeber never to camp near French women with dogs. 5 ladies staying in a bungalow near us had 6-7 dogs between them (no exaduration) which they locked in cages in their car boot overnight (parked right next to Mulder). The poor things cried and cried and kept us awake!

Anyway seeing we were already awake we decided to get on with our adventured filled day. We grabbed the bikes and headed out of Bled uphill to Gorje and Spadnje, both to the north of Lake Bled.
We came back to reached the foot of the hill where Bled castle stands, and of course we decided to ride up. This was pretty much the steepest hill I have ever ridden up (Dave said this was probably true for him too), in granny gear and zigzagging  and still struggling, but We MADE IT!


View from the top



King of the castle (well the castle wall anyway)

From the castle we had great views over the lake towards the main town. We didn’t have enough time to justify spending the 8€ each ti enter and so flew back down the hill (much more fun than going up) and headed back to the campground for lunch – energy for the next part of the action packed day!

Next it was back to 3glav to drop back the bikes and jump aboard Canyoning Bob’s van for Canyoning in the Sava Bohinjka river between Bled and Bohinj. Our little group of 6 (2Irish and 1 English girl and 1Irish guy living in Brisbane and us 2 full blooded Aussies) joined another group of 6 (A Dutch couple and a French family) for a fun afternoon.

All dressed up and ready to party!

The canyoning crew (hope to have some more photos if they ever get sent to us by the canyoning company - somre pretty spectacular photos of the jumps and scenery

We kitted up in a paddock (this was a challenge of its own) and then hiked out to the top of aravine From here it was abseiling, rock scrambling and jumping into rock pools all the way back down the canyon. Dave did 2 x 10m jumps as well as 2 x 6m and a small 3m. I had been skipping the 10m jumps by abseiling part of the way down, but decided to give the last 10m jump a go and was prud to say I was the only girl who did! Scary but heaps of fun!

After all the action we got to float down the more tranquil part of the river back to our starting point. The water in this part was much warmer than it had been higher up, which made the floating trip very relaxing.

A perfect end to an exciting day!

Watch out Masterchef - Dave has perfected the omlette!