Ljubljana; Monday, 04 August, 2014

Having checked out of the hotel I had a few hours to fill before the train towards the Italian border, so to get into the mood for visiting Italy I headed out to follow the town Roman trail that takes you round some of the key remains of the former Roman settlement of Emona, that modern day Ljubljana has been built on top of.

After walking most of the route I headed back into the centre of town and had a look round the Cathedral before joining one of the numerous river cruises that sail up and down the city’s river taking in the views.

By the time I arrived back at the landing stage it was time to head back to the hotel, collect my things and head round to the railway station to catch the train over to the Italian Border.

The original plan was to catch the train all the way to Villa Opicina just over the border in Italy, and as far as the trains go these days, TrenItalia having abandoned all attempts to run anything approaching a helpful service a few years earlier. However, on arriving at the station it became clear that the journey was about to become significantly more complicated.

There were no trains running, and there hadn’t been for many months, due to extensive damage caused by severe winter storms so it was the most dreaded and English of phrases – Rail Replacement Bus Service.

The next problem was that the international tickets queue was full of people who weren’t fully understanding how they got to Villa Opicina, and with time counting down to the departure time of the replacement bus it was clear I wasn’t going to be able to get a ticket in time, so I opted for the alternative which was to get a ticket to the previous station – Sezana which is still in Slovenia and could be purchased from the self-service ticket machines and hope that I could pick up a taxi from the rank at the station there through to Trieste.

Given that the railway ride to Sezana and Villa Opicina is describe as very pretty it was a bit of a shame then that virtually the whole journey was a reapat of the run down the motorway that the tour had done the previous day.

Despite being the express bus making virtually none of the scheduled stops and bombing down the motorway we still ended up arriving into Sezana 30 minutes later than the train would have done. Adding to the problems there was no taxi rank as it was being used to run the rail replacement buses out of, so after a bit of a wander to try and find if there was a taxi rank I eventually had to ask the very nice receptionist in the station hotel to call a cab for me. Given she knew what I wanted as soon as I walked through the door, and had the taxi number on speed dial I can only assume that this has become a very regular occurrence for her.

And so for the first time on my travels public transport had failed and I crossed into Italy in the back of a taxi.