Interrailing - Day 5: Lots of Trains

We woke bright and early at 6am to pack and prepare for our long, long day of train travelling. As scheduled, our journey would've been almost 11 hours. We were on our way to Ljubljana, Slovenia, a roughly 700km journey. As one kind parting gift, our host also woke up with us and made us some hojicha, a kind of roasted green tea that both perfectly punctuated our time in Germany and kickstarted our journey. We narrowly made the tram to the train station, and hopped on our first of many trains of the day to Stuttgart.

This was fairly uneventful but perfectly pleasant. It took around an hour or total. We then had to change to train 2 from Stuttgart to Munich. The issue with staying in Karlsruhe is it wasn't super directly connected to long distance trains, so we sadly would've had to wake up even early if we wanted to make the direct train from Munich to Ljubljana.

However, even if we had done this, there is the issue that Munich station sucks. Despite only having to change from platform 6 to 9, the signs sent us on an extremely roundabout route that took us outside the station and then back in, leading us to miss our connection. This was a little frustrating but there was another one only ~30 minutes later. This took us on our first Austrian RailJet train which would've gone all the way to Budapest if we'd stayed on. This train was annoyingly busy but pleasant enough, and took us to Salzberg in Austria.

After a very tight connection here, we were on our fourth train of the day at 1pm, going from Salzberg to Villach, also in Austria. This train was much older – and warmer, with the weak air conditioning trying its best. The route, however, was so beautiful it made up for any shortcomings on the train. We were taken up through the Alps, through mountain tunnels and over bridges, with beautifully clear rivers flowing alongside us. It even made up for the (very friendly) conductor charging me €4.40 for a bottle of water.

When we reached Villach, we had a ~1.5 hour layover, and were very hungry, so stopped to look around the town for food. We got a (painfully expensive) Mango Matcha, and then went to a burger place for some food. We also stopped at a Spar and found some nice reduced snacks. Villach was actually surprisingly pretty for a town in the middle of nowhere. Everyone was friendly, and it had a beautiful view of the Alps and local Church

Finally, we boarded our final, fifth train of the journey, a ~2 hour journey from Villach to Ljubljana, Slovenia. This was a slightly funky journey, feeling a bit like you were on a London Overground train despite being quite long-distance – especially since it seemingly used the exact same beeping sound effects. Once again though, it was a beautiful journey that went through the foothills of the Alps, past blue lakes and tall trees, until we finally reached Ljubljana at about 18:00.

Amusingly, Ljubljana station was undergoing a lot of refurbishment when we visited. In fact, it would be easier to describe what was still intact: the platforms, the ticket office, and a bit of the subway, and that was it. The rest was all building work, which made the station feel incredibly barebones. This unfortunately also extended to the main road where the main bus station was, so it was very difficult to actually figure out where to get a bus to our hotel from. We ended up waiting in vain at various points for about 25 minutes before giving up and just walking 10 minutes to a more normal bus stop.

We finally reached our hotel, quickly dropped our bags off, and then headed back into the city. Luckily we were only a ~15 minute bus ride away from our destination – a weekly food market only on Fridays with live music and lots of food stalls. On the way, we got to see some of the old city, with pretty bridges and interesting terracotta -looking buildings. The food market, however, was unfortunately not our cup of tea. It was extremely busy, and rather than a market as we were expecting, it was a bit more of a gentrified (and I hesitate to use that word) food court as you'd see in the South Bank in London. Except worse, since there was no seating, and not much traditional Slovenian food, let alone anything vegan. We did manage to find a Sirovi štruklji, a sort of steamed bun cake loaf. We shared one filled with pineapple and coconut, which was very tasty.

Eventually however, we gave up with eating out, and resigned ourselves to Lidl's finest instant pasta and soup. The market was just far too overwhelming and expensive for us after such a long day of travelling. We returned to our hotel a little disappointed, but not too torn up, and aimed to get a good night's rest for the next day...