After Boris…

Four countries in one week! We left Budapest just before storm Boris hit, skirted Lake Balaton to Croatia where we spent a night by the Drava River, drove through Slovenia from east to northwest, and arrived in Italy for the weekend…

Storm Boris shook all of Central Europe, and Hungary was no exception. Although the effects were limited in Budapest, we still got a lot of rain when the storm was approaching… And obviously, photos in the rain are less fun… But we still managed to take a few. And to reward us for our perseverance, the weather gave us a brief clearing without rain in the evening, enough to enjoy the lights of the city once more. It was just when we were coming out of our three hours of thermal baths and massages, like the icing on the cake… 😉

After Boris… (14-15/09/2024)

In the morning, after a good breakfast and a visit to the market right next to our parking lot, we took the road to the southwest and Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Central Europe, famous for its wine region on the north shore and its resorts on the south shore. Obviously we chose the north shore…

And to get to Lake Balaton, we had to cross the Danube (yes, we finally did it!…). For this, we had at least 10 bridges at our disposal in Budapest alone, but we preferred a more… glamorous way: a ferry! After all, you either have style or you don’t! 😜 Of course, crossing the Danube by ferry with Storm Boris on top of us was perhaps not the best idea… But on the other hand, if there had really been too much current, the ferry would have stopped… That said, it was quite impressive to see this little boat pushing the big transport platform with Marvin on it and fighting against the current of a “angry” Danube carrying all the rain from the day before…

The worst of Boris was expected on Saturday, so we settled on a hill, well sheltered at the edge of a forest whose first rows of trees protected us. The place was quite nice, with large grass areas right in front, but with this weather, we didn’t really feel like exploring the surroundings (more like turning on the heating and… waiting for Boris to pass by)… 😉

Sunday: Boris passed by during the night. Lots of rain and strong gusts of wind, but as we were rather south of the centre of the depression, and our little forest protected us quite well, we spent the night without any problem. Leaving, that morning, was however a bit more… muddy (and Marvin definitely doesn’t like mud). Fortunately, we only had to go a short kilometre of mud track (99% flat terrain) before getting to a paved road.

We thus reached the western tip of Lake Balaton, where we settled again at the edge of a forest to protect ourselves from the “tail” of the depression, which was due to pass between that day and the following night. On Monday, we would return to normality for our last kilometres in Hungary… We would finally be able to take some photos of Lake Balaton and these landscapes that look very much like Mediterranean scrub. It is quite beautiful, with these chimney-shaped hills emerging from the plain in some places…

PS: In the first photos, yes, it is a statue of Inspector Colombo and his dog that we found on a street… Why a statue of Colombo in the middle of Budapest?… Mystery…

PPS: And the shoes on the banks of the Danube are a sculpture in homage to the Jews massacred by the Hungarian fascist militias of the Arrow Cross during World War II. They were ordered to take off their shoes (which were sold by the militias after the massacre) and they were shot on the banks of the Danube so that their bodies would fall into the river and be washed away.

Wrong border! (16/09/2024)

If we look at a map and draw a line from Hungary to Andorra, the next country on our list should logically have been Slovenia… But with all this fuss about storm Boris, the poor visibility due to the rain, the gusts of wind and the catastrophic state of Hungarian roads (even before the storm), we deviated a bit from our course and ended up in Croatia… In short, we crossed the wrong border! 😱

No, in fact, the weather was supposed to improve from today onwards, but it seems that Boris wants to prolong his stay in Central Europe and it is still raining, although the wind has almost completely died down. A slightly longer storm tail than expected, in a way… So we thought that, since we would drive all the way under the rain, and since the border was only a few kilometres away, we might as well spend a night in Croatia, just to add one more country to our list.

So we are in the Republika Hrvatska (also known by those who know how to use vowels and consonants correctly as “Croatia” 😁). We are actually not far from the Hungarian border (barely fifteen kilometres to the east), and neither from the Slovenian one (less than 50 kilometres to the north). We are officially in the Balkans, in this country that used to belong to Yugoslavia and that, after the death of Tito (and the fall of communism), was dragged into the fratricidal wars between Serbia and the other states of the region: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo and, to a lesser extent, Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Slovenia. We all still have in mind Bono’s song, Miss Sarajevo, or Bernard-Henri Lévy’s open white shirt braving the bombs for a few more seconds of camera time. All this happened around here barely thirty years ago (well, a little further south to be exact, since most of the fighting took place in Bosnia…).

Today, Croatia is a developed economy, although some traces of the Balkan war still persist, such as the portraits of militiamen wanted by the International Criminal Court hanging on the balconies of some houses to reaffirm their possible innocence, or the fact that the country is still riddled with undeactivated landmines, which is why it is strongly advised not to leave the marked trails…

We will therefore spend a (rainy) night in Croatia before reaching Slovenia tomorrow, hoping that by then the good weather (or at least better weather) will have returned… And for that, we settled on the banks of the Drava River, the fifth longest tributary of the Danube whose flow is strictly controlled by a canal, just a few hundred meters from where we are. So… no danger of overflow at this point, especially since we have fishermen installed right next to us who also monitor the water level… For the photos, however, sorry but with this weather, we could not achieve anything better… 😉

Holy land… (17/09/2024)

The 62 minutes of sunshine forecasted for today have not yet arrived so… we are holding out hope that by the end of the afternoon the sky will become a bit more light grey if not pale blue… At least it is not raining anymore and, although it may not seem like it, it is a great relief. Today we crossed two rivers (the borders tend to follow rivers around here) and both were close to overflowing (and yet we are much further south than the area affected by Boris)…

We left our little corner on the banks of the Drava this morning after a short walk along the river. The place is actually a small peninsula between the river and the channel that regulates it, covered by a forest so humid that it looks like a jungle. Consequently, the area is full of birds and other water moles. In less than 15 minutes of walking, we saw a group of swans, egrets, cormorants, some ducks and an white-tailed eagle.

Today’s journey was quite short (only 80 kilometres), just to cross the border and get to Slovenia. So, back on familiar ground, in this country where everything seems well-ordered, well-cut, in its place and clean (it almost looks like Switzerland 😜)… Considering that we had already been to Slovenia last year to see bears, this time we will explore the northern part of the country (which was flooded during our last visit).

In the meantime, we will spend our first night in the Slovenian wine region, and more precisely in Jeruzalem (no joke… and no, we did not cross any wrong borders this time 😁). The region is quite beautiful, like a postcard, with its hills covered, alternately, by forests or vineyards running down the slopes. We will sleep at a homestay (since wild camping is prohibited in Slovenia) and, obviously, we have an appointment at 6 pm for a tasting of Pavel’s organic wines (who lets us sleep on a grassy area, between two of his vineyards)… So yes, it would be even better with sun, but who knows, maybe tomorrow we will wake up with some rays… In the meantime, the house cat has already adopted us! As soon as he approaches, he purs almost as loudly as Marvin! 🤣

Old chap (18/09/2024)

The sun is back, in small doses (to avoid a thermal shock 😜) and as announced, yesterday we had our 62 minutes of sunshine at the end of the afternoon, just before seeing the huge full moon rise over the hills of the Slovenian vineyards. .. This was after our organic wine tasting and a nice conversation with Pavel about the fact that things are changing, also for his vineyards… Cold, snowy winters are just a distant memory, and the gradual rise in temperatures means that it is no longer possible to produce “ice wine” in this part of the country, and that white grapes are inexorably doomed to be replaced by black grapes, given that it will soon be warm enough to produce (good) red wine… For an organic producer like him, all this also means that he has to adapt to new parasites and find new grape varieties, more resistant both to parasites and to the climate… Where big global studies may seem a bit abstract, the fact that a winegrower under 40 confirms that he is seeing changes in his own vineyard, year after year, is a bit worrying as to the extent of future damage…

After this wine break, we left that morning for Maribor, Slovenia’s second largest city and the country’s economic capital. A pretty little town with a historic centre of about ten streets, but which still has some very nice buildings, as well as a whole series of cafés and restaurants that seemed very welcoming. Life must be quite sweet in Maribor, and perhaps that is why, in addition to its beautiful buildings, the city is also known for being home to the oldest vine in the world (confirmed by the Guinness Book of Records), which still produces grapes more than 400 years after it was planted!… The other peculiarity of Maribor is that it also has a Tito Avenue… Which shows that Slovenians are not resentful… 😜

Finally, for our stop of the day, we reached the Julian Alps, this massif of the Eastern Prealps that occupies the north of Slovenia and part of the Friuli-Veneto region in Italy. We are not going to lie, it feels so good to be back in the mountains! If the Slovenian lowlands are already beautiful, the mountainous area is even more so, with this series of mountains (up to 2.864 m) in shades of grey as far as the horizon… We spent the night at 790 m above sea level, with a 360º view of the surrounding mountains and two beautiful churches perched on top of two peaks, as is often the case in Slovenia. A very pleasant place to enjoy the reappearing sun (hopefully it will lasts…).

Down in the valley… (19/09/2024)

Slovenia is a relatively small country. It is therefore quite logical that its capital is a little less exuberant than its neighbours (apart from Zagreb, obviously). But being small doesn’t mean you can’t be cute and, well, as we all know, size doesn’t matter for many things, really… So after a second full moon last night (yes, it’s the moon in the first photo, even if it looks like the sun) and a night of absolute calm, barely disturbed by some deer in the distance, we came down from our mountain to reach Ljubljana and spend one last night in Slovenia, in the central valley…

If Slovenia is best known for its landscapes (and for having given the world essential historical figures such as… Melania Trump), Ljubljana is best known for its Dragons Bridge. So yes, cynics will say that if a city is only known for a bridge, it must have very little to offer… This would be forgetting the Golden Gate in San Francisco, the bridges of Paris as a whole or even the Millau Viaduct, and it would also be neglecting a large part of Greek literature since according to the legend, the hero Jason and his Argonauts, after having found the famous Golden Fleece in Colchis, headed north up the Danube River instead of returning to the Aegean Sea. Going up the Danube, they would have headed towards its tributary the Sava and then towards the source of the Ljubljanica River. There they dismantled their ship to transport it to the Adriatic Sea and return home. Between the present-day municipalities of Vrhnika and Ljubljana, the Argonauts found a large lake surrounded by a swamp. It was there that Jason defeated a monster, and more precisely a dragon, the Ljubljana dragon, which today adorns the city’s coat of arms and flag, as well as the famous Dragons Bridge (or Zmajski Most in Slovenian). Yes, sir! The Ljubljana dragon was defeated by Jason himself. Not feeling so smart after that, eh!?

Ljubljana is admittedly a (very) small city (at least its historic centre), but it is very pretty. Along the streets and facades of old buildings one can see the various influences that have shaped the city and, beyond, the country: Germanic, Latin and Slavic. It really doesn’t take more than a few hours to get around it, but it is still a pleasant city, whose predominantly pedestrian historic centre invites you to stroll through its streets or take some time on the terrace of a café, looking at the city castle, perched on its hill.

For our part, we also took advantage of our stopover in Ljubljana to find a shop selling motorhome accessories (we were out of water tanks products and we also needed filters, but we couldn’t find that…) and, much more importantly, to find a hairdresser, because since Rovaniemi we were starting to look a bit like hippies travelling through Europe 😜. Tomorrow we go north again and close our Slovenian chapter (trying not to end up in Austria instead of Italy, like the last time we tried to leave Slovenia… 🤣)…

Déjà-vu… (20/09/2024)

Exactly one year ago, we were returning from Slovenia to continue our crossing of the Alps and spent our first night in Amaro, or more precisely, in the bed of the Tagliamento river. It is precisely this same path that we followed (in part) today to settle back in the same place as on 20 September 2023, in the bed of the Tagliamento river, in Amaro… The only difference is that this time, we did not take the wrong tunnel and we did not find ourselves, without a vignette, on an Austrian highway, with two customs officers as funny as Dobermans, who did not even open their booth when we wanted to explain the situation to them and limited themselves to waving their hands at us to move forward…

This year, we were able to fully enjoy the magnificent landscapes of the triple border between Slovenia, Austria and Italy (and the road leading there, which seems to have been strategically placed between the most beautiful peaks of Slovenia, lightly snowed for the occasion), we saw a customs officer, but this time it was an Italian (he didn’t come out of his booth either, but we had nothing to ask him, so…), and we passed by the same EuroSpar supermarket in Tarvisio where we had stopped last year. Aaaahh… a real supermarket with desserts (vanilla creams, tiramisus, Liégeois, panacotta, etc.), good speck, well-cut meat, fresh pasta, good cheese, good cold cuts and good wine… We felt a bit like a kid in Disneyland!… 🤣

We then settled back in the same spot as a year ago, in the bed of the Tagliamento River. Besides being a rather impressive place, with this river of clear turquoise waters flowing quietly through a large gravel area that occupies almost the entire valley, with high mountains all around it, it is also a symbolic place since the Tagliamento is considered the last morphologically intact river in the Alps (that is, its course has not been modified by any human intervention). Where we are, it meets the Fiume Fella (which comes from the triple border area), and we are installed exactly between the arms of this “Y” formed by the two rivers. It is difficult to say where one and the other flow since both are “braided rivers”, that is, rivers with extremely wide beds (and without too much gradient), and which form a network of river channels separated by small, often temporary islands, called braid bars. We are thus on the edge of a large area of ​​white gravel, with the river about a hundred metres away from us, following its current course, which will undoubtedly change during the next rains… This is where we will spend the weekend with, on the programme, walks along the riverbed, a visit to the village of Amaro and, of course, tasting the liqueur of the same name since this is where the original recipe comes from (since copied and adapted in almost all of Italy and some other countries)…

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With or without a storm, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.