It’s not often you can say you were in three countries in one day when cycle touring. We left Trieste with grey skies again threatening rain, with Matt doing a great job navigating us through some rather hectic italian traffic. As we were cycling down one of the busier roads, we stopped to get our bearings and heard shouting. We turned around to find the manager of the previous nights B&B leaning out the window of his car waving manically with a big grin on his face. What a nice start to the day.
Although not marked on the map, the OsmAnd navigation then took us right onto a sign-posted cycle route (that we later found out went all the way from Italy, across Slovenia to the Croatian border).
Soon after, we crossed the Slovenian border. No border guards, no check points – just a beautiful cycle path through the woods.
Cycling through the stretch of Slovenian cost in between Italy and Croatia was a pure unexpected delight – and the perfect tonic to cure our cycling pessimism brought on by the past few days. The path weaved its way through vineyards and olive groves dotted with terracotta coloured houses, and down to the sea. We had a gelato in Koper, met a German cycle tourist who had just hit his 13000th kilometre, and cycled right beside the gorgeous Adriatic. The route then headed up over another hill before dropping us down beside a large salt pan, which was now almost unused, and then popped us onto the road about 40 meters before the border crossing. Could you ask for more?
The most surprising part of the day, was when about 20 meters after entering Croatia, we managed to find another cycle route (another old railway line) that took us to within about 2 kilometres of our apartment. We had been convinced that we’d be navigating roads from now on, so it was awesome to find that the rail trail continues through a large chunk of Istria.
From here, the OsmAnd route plotter took us on a rather interesting route through the back of houses, in the path of chickens and almost across a farmers field before popping out around the corner from our apartment. A slightly unconventional arrival I’m sure.
We’d managed to book a beautiful apartment on the top floor of a house, about 4km outside of Umag. Its in a completely rural, non-touristy neighbourhood, and comes complete with a kitchen and most importantly – a washing machine (confession time – we had started to officially smell, and no amount of hand washing was solving the problem). We made a great dinner out of the ingredients we’d picked up from the markets in Trieste that morning – fresh borlotti beans, leaks and cherry tomatoes, with some grilled eggplant and polenta.
We have two nights here and plan on doing as little as is humanly possible.
4ks an hour 