With our cruise ship docked at Trieste, Italy, and with us having been to Italy on numerous occasions before – although not, it has to be admitted, to Trieste – we’d opted to book an excursion through P&O Cruises to take us over the nearby border into Slovenia for the day, and if you’ve been following along with this website’s travel content updates then you’ll already know that we’d been shown some highlights of the capital city then had some free time to enjoy the abstract public art sculptures in Ljubljana already. The final part of the day’s organised activities took us to what’s probably Slovenia’s most popular tourist destinations, Lake Bled. Sometimes we like to do things differently, and sometimes we like to do what everyone else does. We’re unpredictable like that.
Have I mentioned that Lake Bled is popular? I have. Good. Then you won’t be surprised to learn that this is reflected in the amount of traffic that heads there throughout the year and we encountered a fair amount of it in April so should you be thinking of visiting this bit of Slovenia during warmer months then brace yourself for a lot of crawling along in jams.
Anyway, we eventually arrived, parked up, and were led down to the lake, catching some glimpses of the local parish church and the impressive-looking, eleventh century Bled Castle built on a precipice overlooking the water.
The weather wasn’t perfect for our Lake Bled visit. We had cloud cover – which we were fine with even if it did mean there would be none of those ever-so-pretty and vibrant (sometimes overly vibrant) pictures as a result – but we also had persistent, very light, very spitty rain. None of this spoiled the view across the lake to the Assumption of Maria Church, though.
Our guide gave us the time and place at which we were to meet back up then left us all to our own devices. We were told that we could probably head up to the castle if we went straight there, didn’t waste time, and didn’t spend too long at the top. We were also told that while we might technically be able to get around to one of the special boats taking people to and from the island, get over there, have a quick look, then get back, the timing of crossings wasn’t to a set schedule, might result in us being left behind, and this was highly discouraged. We were finally told that we might, maybe, possibly, could have just enough time to walk a complete circuit of Lake Bled if we were fit, fast walkers, and set off immediately. We sniggered at that suggestion.
We’d already decided we were simply going to walk around part of the shoreline of the lake for a bit at a leisurely pace and see if we had time for a snack and drink on the way back.
Our short walk started from roughly the north eastern edge of Lake Bled and would proceed clockwise for about a third of its circumference before turning around and retracing our steps. Initial sights of interest included a sculpture called Ciklama by Slavko Oblak; Slovenia appeared to enjoy abstract sculptures and that’s handy because so do we. A marker stone also commemorated the design of the park adjoining the lake by the Swedish landscape architect Carl Gustav Svensson in 1890. And, of course, Bled Castle could be seen in all its glory now.
Fans of selfies for social media were catered for with the presence of a heart sculpture and a small wooden jetty jutting out onto the lake. We are not fans of selfies for social media but you possibly already knew that. There was a queue of people lined up beside, taking turns to race out and grab a snapshot for posterity but I was still able to grab a photo without any of them in it.
The type of boat that takes tourists across Lake Bled and to the island is a pletna. They are a flat-bottomed boat similar in shape to gondolas, hand-made, and propelled by two oars. They’re generally considered to have been in use since the sixteenth century and from 1740 onwards the oarsmen could only come from twenty two noble families in the region following a decree by Maria Theresa of Austria, the head of the Habsburg dominions at that time.
You might think that, crowds of people notwithstanding, Lake Bled would be a very peaceful area but that wasn’t exactly the case around the southern shore where a road that at one point passed through a tunnel in the surrounding rocky landscape carried a constant stream of traffic. The views across the lake were still very nice but picture them accompanied by the white noise of car after car driving through for the proper effect. There were also some buildings around this part of the lake’s edge, some hotels, some looking rather abandoned but still appealing.
We spotted a viewpoint that would give us a reasonably close look at the Assumption of Maria Church on Bled Island and decided that would be the point at which we’d turn around and head back as the light drizzle was starting to soak through our hoodies by this time. A church on the island has long been a destination for pilgrims and the present Baroque church dates from the late 1600s although with some Gothic decorative elements recovered from an earlier incarnation on the spot.
We broke up our return to the tour bus with a stop in a café outside which we’d seen a sign that simply said “Beer”. We like beer, especially local beer, and will tolerate it even if it’s a rather generic lager. We also tucked into some of the local speciality, the kremna rezina, a puff pastry, custard, and cream slice cake. Tricky to eat without making an absolute mess of yourself and also exceedingly sweet, but nice.
Lake Bled was lovely and with a full day to enjoy it we’d have definitely made our way up to the castle and across to the lake, but this was a cruise ship excursion and they never have enough time for that sort of thing. Our only cause for concern was the volume of traffic given that the area around the lake wasn’t that packed with tourists as you can see from the pictures. We couldn’t help but shudder at imagining the location in the heart and heat of summer.
In the next post in this Azura Adriatic cruise travelogue series we’ll return to Trieste where our expectation was that we would simply get back on the ship until a chance comment from our tour guide made us change our minds.