Interrailing - Day 7: Lake Bled

We woke up early today, with a determination to visit Lake Bled. This is a beautiful town around a large alpine lake, with a smaller island with a church on in the middle. It was only about 50km away from Ljubljana with frequent bus/coach services, so we figured it should be an easy visit. Unfortunately, we were not entirely correct.

The bus services to Bled were run by Arriva, which if you know much about UK travel, you may suspect to be a red flag. We managed to decipher their Slovenian-only website to buy tickets, which were only about 4 euros each, and, conveniently, stopped right next to our hotel!

One important detail about the ticketing here is that rather than booking a specific service, all tickets are flexible like a normal bus. This initially seemed like a great thing, but you may be beginning to see what's going wrong here.

We packed up and got ready for the bus. We rushed out the house to make the 9:03 bus, which promptly arrived... and then drove straight past us. We figured maybe we hadn't signalled clearly enough so shrugged it off and waited for the next one 15 minutes later... which did the same thing. Another group of tourists were with us, and we collectively theorised that maybe the information was wrong, and you actually had to board at the central bus station. Fortunately, we still had our incredibly cheap bike rental subscription, so we were able to cycle to the bus station for free in just under 15 minutes.

We arrived at the bus station, and first asked if our tickets would still be valid, and were told they would be. When got out to the bays we realised the underlying issue – there were huge queues around the bus services to Bled. In essence, because the buses were first-come first-serve rather than ticketed for a time, by the time they got to our original stop, they would be 100% (or more!) full, and so have to skip our stop.

These queues were also entirely structureless: the buses would use both bays 7 and 8, seemingly at random. Everyone queued up for bay 8, but when a bus would arrive in 7, it would bisect the queue, and leave the people at the previous front on the wrong side of the bus entrance, which happened to us once or twice. To make matters worse, there was no live tracker, and the buses were often late, so you were truly waiting in the dark for whenever the next bus would come, and if you'd be lucky enough to get it.

We ended up queueing for almost an hour and a half in total, being pursued by wasps for half the time, and in the direct sun the other half. Slovenia is also apparently a country where almost everything is closed on Sundays, so we hadn't been able to get much for lunch, or even for breakfast. We sent one of us off to a nearby KFC to at least get a few cold drinks, at which point another bus arrived that we were finally lucky enough to get on. The driver immediately told us we couldn't drink our drinks on the bus and had to throw them away, and then said that our ticket wasn't valid because it wasn't from the bus station. After much broken conversation in a pleading tone, he said he could let us on as long as we covered the difference in fare, which thankfully was only €1.50 each, but this was not entirely pleasant.

Anyway, we were on the bus at last, which, to its credit was quite nice: a modern-ish coach-style bus with actually good air conditioning. The driver seemed to have accidentally let too many people on, so two poor souls were left sitting on the stairs to the back door. But thankfully, the journey was smooth enough, despite a bit of traffic, and had some great views of the mountains beyond.

Bled

About an hour later we had finally arrived at Bled! The bus dropped us off a ~5 minute walk away from the lake, which was truly worth all the stress of getting there. This place was clearly much more tourist-focused (making the bus fiasco all the more bizarre), with lots of English-menu restaurants and cafes around, and a few bars. Interestingly, this still felt a lot more "genuine" than places like Benidorm or Sunny Beach – they were still serving Slovenian food rather than English breakfasts, I think partly because this place is far more popular among German, French, and Italian tourists than English due to its proximity (a mere 40 miles away from the Italian border, for example).

The water at the lake was so clear, and there was a perfect view of the nearby landmarks: a chairlift and toboggan to your left, the island and church in the middle of the lake ahead of you, and the castle on the hill to your right. We started by just wandering around the radius anticlockwise, to get the lay of the land. We first passed a boat rental shop and a small paid swimming area, complete with boardwalks and slides. We figured it wasn't worth the money, despite looking lovely, so moved on for a short while.

We stopped for a quick food break and then made it to the main free public swimming area, on the far end of the lake (relative to the above photo). It had a small boardwalk, a couple of cafes and toilets, but not much more. It was very popular though, and had a much nicer view of the church. It also had a few alpine streams joining the lake, bringing much colder water (and swans!).

We swam in the lake for a bit, which had the inevitable first few minutes of feeling cold, but then felt genuinely pleasantly warm. The water was clear, fresh, and it was so sunny outside you dried off very quickly.

I could've stayed for much longer, but we had other things to do. We shared an apricot and blackcurrant sorbet, and then resolved to at least walk around the whole perimeter of the island. We decided that the boat trip to the island (~€15 pp) and entrance fee for the church (€12 pp) didn't seem worth it, so figured a better use of our money would be the chairlift and toboggan.

This was a roughly 1 hour walk away, including a bit of dawdling, and stopping to take photos. We passed the other free swimming spot, which weirdly seemed much more expensive – all the cafes and ice cream places were about 1 euro more than our place, and a fancy hotel, and then it got a little bit residential with some expensive holiday homes and modest small houses. Walking around the perimeter was really interesting because every angle revealed a new, equally beautiful view of the surroundings: sometimes the mountains were the highlight, sometimes the church, sometimes the lake itself.

We made it to the chairlift area, bought our tickets (€15 pp for a chairlift and then toboggan ride), queued for a little while, anxiously listening to the thunder brewing in the distance, and then hopped on! The chairlift was as fun and scary as an average one, and felt really high, especially when looking behind yourself to see the lake and mountains. One of us was unfortunately pursued by an incredibly persistent wasp the entire time, which was probably less fun. The toboggan was fun, a fairly average length but it had some really steep parts where you built up a lot of speed.

After this, it was time to head home, which was thankfully a short walk away. We had a similar issue with the buses on the way back, but even more painfully ironic this time: we picked up conversation with an Australian guy who was holding the queue for his wife and kids, sharing stories about our adventures. In the end, we were all going to get on the quickly-filling bus (the third one we had tried to get on so far), and his wife and 3 children returning perfectly filled up the bus, meaning we had to wait another ~25 minutes. I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but him saying "Safe travels, guys" as he got on, followed by the driver announcing the bus was full certainly stung.

Anyway, we eventually made it back at about 9PM, hungry and very conscious that we had very little to eat. We found a nearby Chinese place that happened to do takeaway, and spent about 14 euros on the blandest Pad Thai we've ever had 😭 we combined that with getting delivery from a kebab place, which was also pretty bad, but worked out a little cheaper thanks to the app's signup offer.

It was a long day, full of challenges, but also full of some of the most beautiful scenes and experiences I've seen. We went to sleep early as our train out of Ljubljana was at 9am, tired but satisfied.