Saturday 11th September mileage 9498 Bled Slovinia

Breakfast on own in a huge canteen style dining room, the girl serving the food was very pleasant and told me where to go to see the caves in Postojna.

The caves were fantastic, they cost €20 but included a train journey to get you to the deep caverns. There were very good examples of stalagmites and stalactites and different types of formations, but the overpowering effect was just the sheer size of the place.

After the caves I set tomtom for Bovec as part of the great motorcycle journey in Slovinia  from the book I have. 

This was a really good journey and at one point I met a group of motorcyclists who were parked at the start of a small road.  This turned out to be the Mangart road and went to above 2000m in height.
You have to pay €5 to travel on the road and this helps with the upkeep.  This is probably the best motorcycling road I have ridden so far.  It was an amazing series of tight bends and sheer drops with absolutely stunning views along the way.

At the top there were loads of motorcyclists all parked up taking photos.

As I was taking photos an helicopter flew into view and proceeded to hover right close to the sheer rock face of the mountain that was just facing us.  At first we thought it was just possible sight seeing tour, but then it proceeded to winch a stranded climber from the rock face and then bring him back to a flat bit of road just some 500 meteres away from where we were.  All very exciting!!

On the way down from the top I managed to fasten the camera onto the front of the bike and take a set of videos of the journey down!!


Then moved on to Bled a beautiful mountain and lake region in northern Slovinia.  There was a camping ground just close to the lake and I chose to stay here the night.

After pitching the tent I went down to the lake and there was a kind of meet and greet / chill out party at the side of the lake.

Went to bed and in the middle of the night I thought my bike alarm had gone off, so I crawled out of bed after having pressed the cancel button, but could not see anything wrong.  Stayed up for about half an hour looking at the stars because without any light pollution the view on the clear night was fantastic.  You could clearly see the milky way and I also saw a very bright shooting star that went across a 45 deg field of view in less than half a second.  After having been listening to Bill Bryson " A Brief History of Nearly Everything" it got me thinking about why this particular shooting star had only been small and maybe I could have been the last person to see anything at all if it had been a large asteroid!!!

Back to bed and then again in another hour the alarm!!  This time I realised it was the car that belonged to a bunch of lads parked right behind me.  They didn´t seem bothered, in fact I got to thinking that maybe they had deliberately set it off to get me up thinking it was my bike alarm!!( In the morning they were the kind of people who played pop music very load ignoring the effect it was having on the other campers!!   Youths heh !!  thank god I was never like that !!

More later
TOR