Breakfast this morning wasn’t anything close to the big German breakfasts from my last trip, but better than anything you get in the States. We left Ljubljana early to get to Postojnska Jama by 9 am. I saw a hawk during our drive. The Slovenian country is beautiful. It is mostly deciduous forests with mixed marshland, mountains and farmland. Postojnska Jama is a cave system, one of the largest in the world. You take a small train down into the caves. The stalactites and stalagmites form many different shapes. Quite an amazing sight. We were able to see a Proteus or “Human Fish” which is an amphibian that lives in the caves. There are about 48 species of animals, mostly small insects and arachnids. I found them absolutely adorable. I promised myself I wouldn’t buy any t-shirts or plushies…failed. The proteus was so cute, I bought some souvenirs. As we left the caves we drove past the mountain Namos (name meaning “snow drift”). We also past a small river, which our tour guide told us was named “river” in Slovenian. A little while later we stopped at a small inn/restaurant for lunch before border crossing. I had a beef noodle soup and a cold cut platter. There was also a small fruit and veggie stand and an open lot with donkeys and miniature horses, which I went over and made friends with. Here I started to develop sinusitis and a resulting post nasal drip. Trying to get that cleared soon. The border crossing was funny. We got to the Slovenian side and the police asked for our passports while we sat on the bus. Our tour guide Wentz, collected them and presented them to the police outside the bus with our driver Jani. He was handing them back to us when we got to the Croatian checkpoint, only a couple hundred feet away. The Croatian police got angry that we didn’t have passports in our hands. When told that the Slovenian had us do it that way, he couldn’t be bothered. He asked what we were (nationalities) and then sent us on our way without checking the passports. We drove through the Croatian motorway passing through constantly changing landscape, habitat, climate and altitude. We got to Zadar in mid afternoon and had a city tour. When we arrived, we got our first real look at the Adriatic Sea. The old city of Zadar is small. Towards evening, groups of locals come dressed in traditional costumes and sing and dance in the squares. Villages are represented by a group of a dozen or so members. It was amazing to see old Roman ruins in the middle of the city with children playing on or around them. Our hotel was outside the city so we had a buffet style dinner in the hotel. There we had some overly cooked frozen veggies, local grilled fish with a ton of bones, stuffed cabbage and potatoes. Tomorrow we drive down the Dalmatian coast and I get a prime seat on the bus. Yay for good planning.
