The Piran Experience

Day 9 - August 7

Back to Slovenia - this could be the theme of the day. I soon got back to the main road, the border crossing with eternal traffic jams, but as a biker, there was no waiting for me. A few weeks prior to this, I crossed here with my partner by car, we had to wait close to an hour. I reached Portoroz, taking a nice swim in a well-kept beach area. The only problem was that the sea was waaay to calm.

After the swim, the road takes you through a campground (I had crossed it on an earlier bike trip from the other direction) and you end up in downtown Portoroz. A highlight is the beautiful Palace hotel, overlooking the sea.

Now I was in unchartered territory (i.e. a place I had not been earlier) and this was one of the major surprises of this trip (discounting Corsica, more on this later….), and this was the town of Piran. Let the pictures speak for themselves...

The town reminded me a bit of Venice, a bit of Rovinj - it is a place where I could have spent a couple of days. I met an older man, who told me he had moved to Piran to study at the maritime university in 1970 and he is still discovering little new details every single day...

Not only was the town really pretty, it also had a nice beach. So, yet again, I was in the water...

Serious climbing began: I stayed on the coast and on some roller-coaster hills on partly dirt roads, I proceeded towards the next town, Izola. I had some amazing views of the Gulf of Triest, looking back at Piran - and the villages were quite breathtaking, too.

See what I mean?

I then made quite a big mistake. You see, I was on a hilltop and there was a path that disappeared in a forest and you could hear the waves crashing on the shore somewhere below. I was sure that path would leave me to a beach. So I locked up my bike, hid it and started heading down the path on foot. It was tough going, quite steep, with lot of throngs, but I could see me drifting in the azure water. Well, here is what happened: the path ended some 20 meters above the sea. I guess I could have jumped in, but that might have hurt and how would I have gotten back? It was game over for me: there was no other option than turning back and crawling back up. Oh well...

A few kilometers away I corrected the error: I found a campground, left my bike with a Frech couple, from there, there was an "official" path down to the water, taking me about 20 minutes to reach the water. It was super refreshing, after all the effort in making it there. The one challenge was having to head all the way back after the swim.

Back at the camping, I took an illegal shower, changed and was off towards the north. I finally reached the town of Izola, which was pretty,though half as interesting as Piran.

From Izola there was an excellent bike path on the coast leading to the port of Koper, with showers every 300 meters (for the swimmers) - it was like a biker's paradise. In Koper, I skipped downtown, as it was one of the destinations with my partner earlier this summer and wanted to give the Slovenian McDonald's one more chance. A few years ago, I had a piss-poor breakfast there, well, this time the dinner was not much better either. It was to save time, as my goal was to reach Triest that evening, from where I was to take an early train to Venice the next day. You see, I had ridden the coast around Triest earlier in 2017 and it is not really a fun place. I had visited Grado earlier, there are so many mosquitoes, plus the sea is flat - so decided to skip section altogether. More importantly, my partner was on her way from Vienna to Venice that night and our meeting point was at the train station Venice Santa Lucia the next morning.

Did you know that the world headquarter of Illy is in Triest?

In Triest I found a cheap hotel, called Villa Nazareth, for Eur 40, the caretaker spoke fairly good English, was very polite and addressed me the entire time as "Mr. Deri". As soon as I got to the hotel, it started raining - so I guess I was lucky not to get wet.

Here is the map of the day...it was only about 50 km and 600 meters of altitude change, though I felt it to be a lot more, I have to admit. Lots of ups and downs that day...