Day 13 - Lake Bohinj

We woke up to another beautiful day with a stunning vista outside our hotel window overlooking Lake Bohinj and the mountains beyond. We took an early morning walk around our town of Stara Fužina in search of breakfast, but as it’s a sleepy, small village nothing was open yet except for a cafe that mostly served pastries. Since our hotel room had a small kitchenette, we opted to drop by a little market and make our own breakfast from fare we found. We had a great meal on the hotel room terrace with fried eggs, local cheese, salami, apricots and pears, whole grain bread and cottage cheese. While we ate, we watched paragliders descend down from a launch point to the north and land a few hundred meters away from us on the shore of the lake.

On our last full day in Slovenia, we decided to “take it easy” and settled on spending the afternoon hiking the trail that circumnavigates Lake Bohinj (about 7 miles). Shortly after leaving Stara Fužina, which is situated on the eastern shore of the lake, the trail goes through the town of Ribčev Laz. At the edge of town, there is a picturesque stone bridge leading up to an old church - the Church of St. John the Baptist which was built sometime in the 10th or 11th centuries (almost one thousand years old!). We continued along the south shore of the lake and on to the far western shore where the trail leads through the town of Ukanc (there we passed a nice little restaurant where we returned later for dinner). As we worked our way along the north shore of the lake, we were treated to great views of the towns we passed through and of the various boaters out on the lake. This area of Slovenia is known for rowing and produces many athletes that compete in crew or rowing and rank among the top in the world (a recent olympic medalist in rowing was from Lake Bled). In fact the New Zealand olympic rowing team was currently residing in the Lake Bohinj region and I’m pretty sure we saw them training on the lake as we hiked around it.Read more