We woke up to a lovely warm morning with the sun peeking through a few clouds high in the sky. A gorgeous view of Kvarner bay lay before us as we lazily had breakfast and got ourselves ready to go.
This was going to be our last day in Croatia and we were both pretty surprised that we had spent the last nine days in a country that wasn’t even on our radar. Overall it was a wonderful time. The country side was for the most part beautiful, the roads and traffic were pretty good, the riding was interesting and challenging, the people were friendly … and if you were in Zagreb or Opatija, the food was great. If you weren’t … well ….
We started the day with the decent down the short 25% grade hill from the hotel. This lasted about 25 seconds. Then we started up a 20% grade hill that moderated at times to 10%. This lasted for about 2 hours, 25 minutes and 25 seconds! We were on our way to Slovenia and then Trieste in Italy, but to get there we had to traverse the Istrian peninsula. I swear that when they divvied up the old Yugoslavia, the Croatians asked for a double helping of hills! Today wasn’t quite as tough as our day into Opatija, but only because it was just half as long.
We took a very quiet, almost deserted, country road the crossed over into Slovenia at almost the furthest north west corner of Croatia. When we looked back on our trip across this country, we realized that we (re)entered it at the furthest south east point. It’s not a very big country, but we managed to traverse it and go to places that few tourists probably get too. I’m basing this on the fact that we saw exactly two other cycle tourists, a young French couple, on our first day. They had just crossed the Serb border at Ilok as we were about to go into Serbia. After that, nada. After the first 40 minutes or so out of Opatija, we were in pretty much deserted country side all the way to the Slovenian border. Great riding and beautiful country. Amazingly, once we crossed the border, the hills more or less ended, and we had a gentle downhill ride towards the coast. Slovenia was our ninth country, but we were in it for about 15 km and less than an hour. We stopped for a few pics, and before we knew it, we climbed one small ridge and crossed into Italy and made the plunge down into Trieste.
There were a couple of interesting things on the way through though. As we were approaching the Italian border, we saw a guy on a loaded bike coming towards us. Since it was the first tourer we’d seen in over a week, I braked to a stop, with my discs giving a pretty good squeal as I did so. The guy was stopped, straddling his bike and fiddling with his phone. He didn’t look up. Me, now stopped, said ‘Hi”. The guy continued to stare and fiddle with his phone. K then arrived, her brakes squealing pretty good too. Once again, no reaction from the phone fiddler. We pedaled on … you can try to be sociable but…
The next interesting thing (to me at least) was when we got to the Italian border. Slovenia and Italy are both in the Schengen zone, so the border is just a sign, but when we saw it, it reminded me of the first time I came into Italy in 1982. Once again, I was on a bike with a friend, and we came in from Switzerland over Splugen pass. Almost nobody comes over that pass and the road is insane on the Italian side (basically drops into a canyon). Well first thing was that the pavement went from perfect swiss to non existent. Then after we wore our brake pads down to nothing and rolled into the first significant town, Chiavenna, we needed a new map (in the days before GPS!). We pulled into a gas station, and as we were rolling to a stop, a little Fiat 500 (the original) also pulled in at the gas pump. While the car was still rolling, the passenger got out and shoved the gas hose into the car, it was still running, and rolling.
By this time, the station attendant is running toward them from the Kiosk, shouting and waving his arms. The passenger then throws the gas hose towards the attendant … gas is spraying over the ground … and jumps back in the car and they tear away, as best a Fiat 500 can. This place is pure chaos, but it seems to work. Nobody knows why, but it does. I think an Anarchist party was a real force in Italian politics at that time. It was a fitting intro. Welcome to Italy!
Now roll the clock forward, 35 years. We’ve all aged and mellowed, even the Italians I think, but the EU Italy sign had been spray painted over and in faint script, there was some type of (Anarchist?) political slogan scrawled over it. Ahh, some things never change. Fortunately we had a good downhill run into Trieste but as usual, we spent a good hour working through an industrial area on the outskirts. We had also booked a B&B that turned out to be back up a viciously steep hill about 2 km’s from the city centre, most of it uphill. To make matters worse, once when arrived (within the arrival time window specified) there was no one around and no one even answering the phone! We hadn’t paid anything, we were tired, and now a little pissed, so we found a hotel in the centre of town, and 15 minutes of downhill riding we were there and checked in.
Italy. What a difference to Croatia. Sure there are café’s everywhere, and people hanging out and smoking in them, But there is also food everywhere. Where in small town Croatia there would be seven bar /café’s on one street, here we had seven Gelatiera’s within 100 m of our hotel! So of course our first action was to try one out!
We had a great night strolling around Trieste. There’s a yacht race in town so the dock area was a carnival, the streets were full of people, the café’s and bars were lively, and we had a great dinner at another M. Michelin recommendation … Al Bagatto … small, family run, focused on seafood … superb.
Tomorrow we are heading toward Grado which is the start of the Ciclovia Alpe Adria Radweg (CAAR) bike route that goes to Salzburg. It looks like it just got put together in 2015 and uses a rail line that was just decommissioned in the mid ‘90’s to go through the Alps at Tarvisio on the Italian Austrian border. This means we’ll miss Slovenia, other than the 15 km re rode today! However, we’ve traded that for 3 -4 days in Italy!
..after a couple of hours of continuous climbing we did have some nice rolling sections as we headed towards the Slovienian border. The traffic level was about what you see in this picture ... perfect!
... a little out of order ... one pic of Slovenia ... Italy is on the other side of the ridge on the horizon ... we caught this woman out on her afternoon ride ... nice day for it
We slogged up this hill to the B&B we had booked, only to find no one around. It looked a little dodgy too so we beat a retreat back into the main part of town
