Today is a day-trip from Ljubljana out to Postojna Caves, a large
complex of limestone caves. This is a bus trip for about an hour out of
Ljubljana. There are very few photos of this day because Goofeth here
forgot the camera, but I managed to take a few plus a couple of videos
on my phone.
We got the bus and arrived at the bus-stop at Postojna with about 10
minutes until the 10am tour in English. Rushed inside the bus terminal -
"How do we get to the caves please???" Down there, then turn right, then
keep going straight. Ok great, thanks. Out the door, in the general
direction, hmm there seems to be a lot of roadwork happening here, as
in, they're building a road. We sort of look at one of the construction
guys, with a "please let us through!" look, and he waves us through, so
in we go, over the broken stone everywhere, wait, wait, ok run UNDER the
backhoe, then we're through. Start running as we're not sure how far it
is. Of course we JUST make it, and jump on the last train thing which
takes you deep into the caves.
These caves are amazing, apparently the stalactites and stalagmites grow
at a rate of 1mm every (approximately) 50 years. We were pointing out
pairs that had almost joined, saying things like "ooh that one's
probably only got about 5000 years to go!" "Check out this one, I reckon
it'll be about 25000 years for these to join".
At the end of the tour there was a bit of a bonus, with the
reconstructed skeleton of a Mamenchisaurus, which for some reason had
the longest neck of all the dinosaurs, apparently up to 11m. I have no
idea why, as it didn't extend vertically, like a giraffe, to be able to
eat stuff up high, but out horizontally, to provide a really easy way of
killing it if you wanted to, for example, break it's neck. It's no
wonder these things died out.
After the dinosaur, it was another ~10 minute train ride back out into
open air, man it's bright out here. Grab some lunch quickly, then catch
the tourist bus to the other attraction in the area, Predjama Castle.
"Predjama" literally means "in front of cave/hole", because this castle
was built halfway into a cave. Good way to save on building materials.
We do the rounds of the castle, including the secret exit they had which
went through a number of caves and came out some miles away, although
you couldn't do the whole thing unfortunately. We still had an hour and
a bit to go until the turistico bus turned up so we amused ourselves
with some travel Boggle (Thanks Chez & Ka :) )
1 comment:
You guys are regular travel hounds :)
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