Slovenian Coast: Koper and Piran
July 10, Koper (Capodistria) and Piran (Pirano)
Most of the day today was spent traveling from Lake Bled, up in the Alps, to the towns along Slovenia’s Adriatic Coast. I changed bus in Ljubljana, and the ride from the capital to Koper was about 2.5 hours, passing through the famous Karst region of limestone caves and the Lipica horse ranch along the way. The change from the Alpine zone to the Mediterranean coast is astounding – one could fly for hours on an airplane and not find the change of scenery, temperature, attitudes etc. that one finds from the drive from northern Slovenia to the coast, a sliver of several fishing villages and resort towns wedged in between Italy to the north and Croatia’s Istrian peninsula to the south. Mentally, I’ve started to thing I’m already in Croatia, I need to remind myself that I’m actually still in Slovenia. The bus from Ljubljana ony took me as far as Koper, Slovenia’s chief port with an old center that is less cute and less touristy than nearby Piran. I decided to check the place out so I stashed my bag at the train station and rented a bike from the rail company for 2 hours. Koper is an interesting place indeed. The town, like the others, was founded as a Venetian colony and has a distinctive Venetian-Gothic style, complete with a towering bell-tower copied from St. Marks. Most of the buildings look like they were last restored or redone in the 1920s or 30s, and the relative few tourists – especially compared to the number that a similar town would have in Italy – give the place a bit of a time-warp quality to the seedy elegance of the Interwar period, when this whole region, all the way down to Rijeka, was part of Fascist Italy. It was definetly worth a stop-over, even if only for 1.5 hours.
About 20 minutes down the road is Piran, another Venetian outpost, situated just at the point where the small Bay of Piran meets the larger Gulf of Trieste. Unlike Koper, Piran is not surrounded by light industry but by resort complexes, and the place had lots of tourists from Italy and northern Europe, although by no means jam-packed. I’m trying to savor the relative lack of crowds in Slovenia while mentally preparing myself for the human zoological exhibition that is the Croatian coast. As for Piran, it is pretty, small, and picturesque, if not that interesting. The interior is a dense tangle of streets, punctuated by small hidden squares a la Italiana. It is well preserved and not that commercialized but due to its size there isn’t a whole lot to do. I got the idea pretty quickly and searched around town looking for the best spot to get that magic photo, which I found at the top of the Old Town walls guarding the rear of the town from mainland attack. That night I had dinner at an excellent seafood restauarant with a guy who I had previously met at the Ljubljana hostel and two Canadian guys from McGill that were doing the Eurotrip. Also staying in our room was a French woman who was bizarrely walking everywhere. I saw that she had booked the next night in Izola and I commented that that was only 10 minutes away. Yes, by car, she said, but it will be maybe a half a days walk. Uh, yeah, you’re crazy.
“Ricky Kasso, Jimmy Troiano, and Gary Lauwers were three kids from good homes. But by the time they hit high school they were bad boys…cutting class, smoking marijuana, taking LSD, and angel dust. Everyone knew that they were headed for trouble. But no one guessed that there were also ‘getting into Satan’…until one night in the chic town of Northport, Satan said to kill…” -Say you Love Satan, by David St. Clair. This is the back cover of the very entertaining pulp-crime true story novel that I’ve been reading as I’ve traveling by bus up and down Slovenia’s mountains and into Croatia.
posted by Andy Schloss @ 3:56 PM
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