Today’s walk was meant to be about 17km (ended up being 20km) along a valley towards Begunje. It was relatively flat and we began by walking through the industrial town of Jesenice which wasn’t the most scenic of routes we have taken but I guess it’s something that is always going to happen on a multi day hike of this length. When you drive to a hike to do a specific section the start and finish points will ensure that you get the best of the hike whereas we are having to connect between areas so some days are going to be quite different to others which is actually quite nice.
So we were wondering what the rest of the day was going to bring us as our start was a little drab but we soon exited the town and were on gravel roads and began meandering through villages and farmland. It was actually quite pleasant and in a country with only 2 million people we have worked out that the towns are never going to be that big!
We spent most of the day on gravel and small roads winding through villages. Apart from the cleanliness and tidiness of everywhere which we have already mentioned we have noticed that everywhere we go people have great veggie patches. Be it in fields or in their gardens the practice of growing your own vegetables is ubiquitous. We have seen it before in countries with a more socialist background and I do wonder whether it was because they didn’t get the variety of vegetables back then and this was a way of getting good quality vegetables.
A second very common sight as we walk through the countryside are these wooden structures with about half a dozen or so horizontal wooden posts and a roof. They are usually placed in fields and it took us a while to work out what they were for. It turns out they are for drying cut grass/hay presumably before storing in their hay barns.
The third (and last for now) sight has been the huge amounts of firewood. A lot of houses here must be heated solely with wood fires as everywhere we go we see the evidence of the process of manufacturing firewood. We have seen logging going on by small groups of men with chainsaws and small tractors to drag the felled trees out. Then we have seen them chopped in farms into smaller sections. Then a log splitter attached to the back of a tractor seems to be used to split the wood before its finally chopped into manageable sized bits of firewood and then stacked (very neatly) around houses or lining garage walls.
It was actually quite a pleasant day and we arrived in Begunje fairly early which left us time to go and explore the Elan museum. Elan, I have always known as a ski company and they come from this tiny village. It wasn’t a huge museum but it was interesting to see what they had been the first to develop in terms of ski technology (they invented carving skis) but not only that they had excelled in a variety of fields including yachts, gymnastic apparatus, gliders and a whole host of other things.
The factory behind the museum was enormous (especially for the area) and it was quite impressive to realise that all these items were being created here.
Our hotel for the night was quite interesting too. We had arrived on a Thursday but if we had been a day earlier or later we would have been treated to a huge show which is apparently sold out more often than not. The show is traditional to the town and involves lots of what we would call “umpa lumpa” music. We thought we were lucky to miss it! T