Veliki Otok

A fierce, fire breathing dragon once lived in Postonja caves. Everybody was terrified of it. A brave shepherd called Jacob also lived nearby and was always going on saying things like "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen" and similar annoying phrases. So it all came to a head one day and the villagers told him that if he was such a smarty pants he could find a way to deal with it. "Go! Quench the flames of the reptile's ardour". And so on.
"All right," quoth the valiant sheep guardian, "I will."
So he devised a cunning plan to fill some tasty calf carcasses with quicklime and tempt the dragon to eat them. Cunning because he used someone else's veal rather than his own mutton.
Sure enough the dragon tossed the lot down and went for a quenching pale afterwards. No sooner had he drunk his fill when he thought, "My that was a good meal - I'm fit to burst." Then he did.
In gratitude for his amazing victory the townsfolk collected all the bits of dragon skin and created a faux crocadile bag for him. And ever since they have been bag makers in this town.

However, I am not here for the bag but for another so-called dragon, the Proteus or Olm, symbol of the town.
I can't face paying 65 Euros for the combo so have handed over 10.9 after queueing 30 minutes at the ticket booths. You know you are in a commercial enterprise when only 3 booths out of 7 are manned and the queue exits the building and lines the street.

In the caves of S.E. Europe lives the inspiration for both Peter Pan and Gollum. It’s the olm, a blind, cave-dwelling salamander, also called the proteus and the “human fish”, for its pale, pinkish skin. It has spent so long adapting to life in caves that it’s mostly blind, hunting instead with various supersenses including the ability to sense electricity. It never grows up, retaining the red, feathery gills of its larval form even when it becomes sexually mature at sweet sixteen. It stays this way for the rest of its remarkably long life, and it can live past 100 though 50 to 60 seems more normal. It’s essentially blind although its hidden eyes and even parts of its skin can still detect the presence of light. It also has an array of supersenses, including heightened smell and hearing and possibly even the ability to sense electric and magnetic fields.

The caves here have provided the olm with safe haven for over 20 million years, but pollutants leaching into the caves and the attentions of eager black market collectors have seriously hit the olm population, and it is now vulnerable to extinction.
The "Vivarium" is an interesting zoo, where samples of cave biota including the olm are kept in tanks in part of the cave system. Visitors can see them under ultra-violet light. I was more impressed by the CaveCricket though: for ruthless appetite they take some beating. First they eat anything they can find in the cave; then when they can't find any other animal they turn cannibal! And then, when all the other crickets have been devoured, they start eating their own limbs.

Another piece of trivia from the cave. Graffiti have been found dating back hundreds of years although thankfully the practice has ended now. The earliest is dated 1213 & if you want to see it look at a 2 euro coin.
(So they say, I don't have one to hand.)Read more