Alps + Adriatic, part 1 (Slovenia)

I had hoped to keep an ongoing account of our inaugural trip to Croatia and Slovenia: daily posts, photos, movies, etc... But when you bring together 2 writers, 1 photographer, 1 German, an American and a handful of Canucks for an adventure through the Balkans, there tends to be a bit of socializing. A lot of socializing, in fact. Which leaves little time for blogging.

But lots of time for sampling plum brandy and local trails.

We started our trip in the Karawanke mountain range of northern Slovenia, only a few kms from the Austrian border. This is Sound of Music scenery: big rolling grass hills, flanked by rocky, jagged peaks. Spectacular in every sense. My local Slovenian guide Dixi has a beautiful lodge perched on top of a hill, with an organic garden, a few cows, a swimming pool, and a massive network of singletrack surrounding his property.

Our first day got off to an auspicious start. Doug - the Aussie - and I were early arrivals, so we went for a spin to nearby Crna na Koroskem to visit a local potato festival (see below). Upon arriving back at the lodge, we were greeted by Alex - the German - with a fresh case of German Weis beer. Nice. Later that night the rest of our group arrived, suitably excited for the upcoming adventure. A few beers and some late night ping-pong followed, with The Dragon - yours truly - once again demonstrating his prowess, vanquishing the American journalist Rob Story with pinpoint precision (next time, P. Willow!)

The next morning didn't start quite so smoothly. Just half an hour into our first ride, Alex - the German - impaled his hand on a branch sticking out from the side of the trail. Shortly after that Peter, one of our local guides, went down hard on a tricky descent and gave himself an 8-stitch reminder of the trail. 'What are we in for?' I wondered. The rest of the group looked a little uneasy. Nevertheless, I knew from experience that these things tend to happen in bunches, often at the start of a trip as post-flight nerves and fatigue wreak hacov on riders' abilities, so I felt confident we'd made our sacrifices to the local mountain gods and could continue on with relative ease.

The rest of the morning was sweet - beautiful flowy singletrack, including one ride along a spectacular ridge, with some nice challenging steeps. We stopped for lunch at a remote little inn under the shadow of a 14th-century church, and crawled up into the belltower for a little dose of history, followed by delicious local mushroom soup and goulash.

We rode another beautiful singletrack trail after lunch, and then what followed was simply sublime and surreal: a 90-minute ride through the heart of a mountain, underground. The 500-year-old Crna mine was shut down in 1996, leaving a legacy of 800 kilometres of underground passages. We would be riding along one of the main shafts, in total darkness (with lights, of course).

We met our guide - a former-miner-turned-underground-mountain-bike-guide - and strapped on our headlamps before heading in to the mine. Just a few metres into the mine the temperature plummeted, from a comfortable 25 degrees to a downright chilly 10 degrees.

The shaft was narrow, leaving just a foot or two on each side of the riders. The effect was surreal and adrenaline-filling. As the walls rushed by, we rode on in silence, stopping every few minutes to listen to our guide talk about the history of the mine, showing us eery caverns and shafts down to other levels (there are 21 different levels in the mine!). Turning off our lamps at one point, I experienced darkness like I'd never 'seen' before in my life. I tried to imagine spending my days down here, 14 hours at a time. It must have seemed like one of the lower circles of Dante's hell to its inhabitants. Thankfully, we were only here for 90 minutes.

We finished the last kilometre with a high-speed chase to the end of the tunnel, emerging into the heat and light of the day with smiles on our faces. It was easily the most unique experience I've ever had on a mountain bike.

We finished up our first day with a grueling but short climb to another local singletrack, and bombed our way back down to Crna along a beautiful patch of trail. Reaching the bottom, shooters of local whiskey awaited us all - a perfect cap on an amazing day.

The next 3 days were spend exploring the beautiful country of Slovenia. We visited stunning Lake Bled, a spectacular alpine lake with a picturesque island church in its waters; rode along an old WWII where Hemingway cut his war teeth and lived the experiences which led to For Whom The Bell Tolls; gawked at the stunning scenery of the Julian Alps; ate delicious - and massive - local meals, and cursed the Legend, our 2nd van, as it broke down in southern Alps.

I'd visited Slovenia once before, many years ago, but hadn't had the time to properly appreciate how beautiful this country is. Everywhere you look there are beautiful mountains and green, untouched forests. I asked Dixi's son Anej how they manage the country's natural resources and he replied 'very carefully.' I didn't see a single clearcut during our 4 days there, despite thick forests full of valuable timber. Logging is heavily regulated in Slovenia, and you have to get special permission and submit a long-term, sustainable logging plan if you want to do any logging at all. Canada could learn from our Balkan neighbours.

Next stop: Croatia, the Adriatic, and mistletoe brandy.

Bud the Spud

Bet you've never been to a potato festival before. I've certainly never been to one, let alone in the Balkans. So when Susanna, the proprietor of our amazing hotel in the Slovenian Alps, told us about a potato festival happening in the nearby town of Crna na Koroskem (yes, I know, it's a beautiful name for a town, isn't it?), we jumped at the chance.

Ride our bikes in the Alps and go to a potato festival? You have to carpe the diem when opportunities like this arrive.

It's still one more day until we start the official 'guided' portion of the tour, so Doug and I decided to do some exploring of our own. Just below the hotel (which sits on a ridge high up in the Alps, with Austria across the valley) an overgrown donkey track veers off into the woods. We saw it last night while riding back to the hotel, so we'd vowed to check it out today.

It turned out to be an almost-perfect piece of singletrack snaking through the woods. It looked to be brand-new, and a fair bit of work had gone into it. I suspect Dixi, our guide, had cut this piece of trail. It ended in a 8-foot deep and 6-foot wide ditch that made one feel like they were doing a luge course on a mountain bike. The trail spit us out onto the highway - a perfect start to the day!

The ride to Crna Na Koroskem took us through some spectacular scenery. Slovenia is green - way greener than I expected - and streams and rivers abound. You can't go more than 1 km before another stream or waterfall passes by. And the mountains are incredible - big, rocky and postcard-worthy.

We ended up in Crna and followed the signs pointing us to the festival. We'd both expected a small low-key affair, maybe 30 or 40 Slovenes gathered around a few potatoes in a fire, with an accordion, a donkey and a bottle of plum brandy, Borat-style (hey, I'm Croatian - allow me 1 Borat joke about my people).

What we found instead was a massive festival. The first sign that this wasn't a low-key affair was the parking lot - hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars parked in an open field. We biked past the gates and entered the festival grounds, where dozens of stalls advertised potatoe dishes. We went to one stall and were instantly greeted with a shot of blueberry brandy, followed by a plate of boiled potatoes. More brandy (pear this time) followed. Fearing a drunken, potato-filled uphill ride back to our hotel, we extricated ourselves from the booth.

We visited a few more booths, each one offering potato dishes, for free no less. You would think at a potato festival you could get several styles of potato dishes: baked, mashed, fried, etc... Not at this potato festival. Every booth featured some slight variation of 'boiled potato with various random bits of meat.' Nevertheless, extremely yummy, especially after a 25-km ride.

There were accordions everywhere, a marching band, some sort of strange theatre involving wooden staffs, a giant beer tent, and the requisite 'drunken people singing folk songs with their arms around each other.' It reminded of the summers of my youth spent on the Croatian seaside. Doug was suitably amused by this display of traditional Balkan culture, and after some cevapcici (Croatian spice meat sandwiches) we decided to hit the road before the brandy hit us again.

We arrived at the hotel 2 hours later after a grueling uphill climb, spent and satiated, collapsing in the late afternoon sun in the sublime Slovenian Alps.

Balkan bikin'

I made it. After 9 hours of flying, 10 hours of airport sitting, 2 bus rides, a 2-hour car ride and a 4-hour train ride, I am sitting on top of a mountain in the Slovenia Alps, looking out over a beautiful green valley toward Austria.

We're at The Mountain Bike Park Hotel, a beautiful hotel on the side of a mountain in a beautiful valley in northern Slovenia, just south of Austria and a couple of hours from the capital Ljubljana. We're doing a sneak preview of a new 8-day mountain bike tour to be offered in 2009, with 4 days in Slovenia and 4 days in the Istrian Peninsula region of Croatia. I arrived to find Doug, Sacred Rides über-client (5 tours so far) in heavy relax mode on the porch of the hotel.

The hotel is also a working organic farm, with cows, pigs, chickens and a variety of fruit trees and vegetables. It's a pastoral paradise here, and you can almost feel the clocks slow down as you arrive.

Dixi, the owner, greeted me with a shot of local whiskey that could have peeled the paint off the next door barn, but which tasted surprisingly good. Tomorrow the rest of our trip mates join us: 2 writers, 1 photographer, and 5 of our clients. For now it's just me, Doug, Dixi and his family, and a lot of livestock.

After a delicious homemade lunch prepared by Dixi's wife using local vegetables, Doug and I were itching to hit the bikes. Dixi had to do some farming, so it would be just us two, me and Doug deep in the heavily forested Alps of Slovenia. Luckily I can speak Croatian, which is similar enough to Slovenian to help out in a pinch.

Dixi's son gave us some basic directions ("go that way, then stay left"). We headed up the road, climbing in the late afternoon light. The road soon passed a farmhouse then dropped into the forest, a nasty, burly affair that had us on the backs of our seats and on our brakes. We dropped into an overgrown section alongside a creek, with branches whipping our legs and arms. At that point we were pretty sure we hadn't followed Dixi's son's directions, had made a wrong turn, and were lost in Slovenia. Eventually we came to a creek crossing and found a local who pointed us in the right direction. We eventually ended up back on the road and followed it for a while until we spied a tantalizing climb on our right.

We jumped at the chance to get off the asphalt and began climbing. After 2 days of traveling, it sure felt good to be climbing on a bike again. After about 3 or 4 km of climbing, I spied the faint remains of a trail dropping in to the forest. We dropped our bikes to take a further look: the trail wasn't much more than a game trail, but looked like it had been ridden, perhaps ages ago. We didn't need much more encouragement. Doug dropped in first and I followed. The singletrack was rough but beautiful. The forest was full of giant fir trees stretching 100 feet into the air, with little underbrush: perfect territory for mountain biking.

We whooped and hollered our way down the trail as the afternoon light faded. Eventually the trail spit us out back onto the road as the sun ducked behind a balkan mountain. There wasn't a car in sight for miles, just quite farmland and spectacular peaks.

It's going to be a great 8 days.

Mike

off to the old country

Whew, it's been a while since I've posted. We've had a busy summer in British Columbia, with almost all of our trips sold out and 95% of all of our seats sold - our best summer yet!

We also just got our waste-vegetable-oil-powered van on the road this past week. Our new van has been outfitted with an onboard system that filters and heats used vegetable oil - the kind you get from your local fast food joint or pub. We're now burning 100% clean vegetable oil!

Tonight I'm off to Slovenia to lead a group of clients and journalists on a sneak preview of our new Alps and Adriatic trip in Slovenia and Croatia. Stay posted over the coming 10 days for photos, videos and stories from the old country!

Mike