Perfect place to see the whole country from (Lubijiana (Slovenia))

Member Name: arrnoosa

Product:	Lubijiana (Slovenia)
Date:	23/06/09 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hot chocolate, ice-cream, quiet, beautiful

Disadvantages: not many flight routes from the UK

Slovenia is a beautiful country to visit and Ljubljana is the best place to base yourself. The country is small enough to do day trips out of Ljubljana and it also offers the biggest choice of accommodation. We visited in October and because it was out of season it was so much quieter than it would have been and it felt like it was just us and all the locals - not much sign of many other tourists.

HOT CHOCOLATE to die for!
Ljubljana has a lovely castle that sits on top of the city and is a great walk up to from the main city centre. Its a steepish walk but the views are great and the cafe at the top does the best hot chocolate ever (in fact, the whole of Slovenia does the worlds best hot chocolate. I'm sure they just melt chocolate bars and serve it up in a cup!!). The city centre offers plenty of shops and late night shopping. Markets are very common and it has a huge cafe culture, where the locals are literally drinking coffee and people watch all day. Even in the evenings, people seem to prefer drinking hot beverages than getting drunk which gives a really nice atmosphere.

ICE CREAM!
The other hot tip, besides the hot chocolate, is the ice cream! There are loads of ice cream sellers outside of the cafes which have loads and loads of ice cream flavours to choose from and it is a very good price.

Recommended Day Trips
Postojna Caves - A short bus ride away to a very small town and then the caves are a 20min walk away. You sit on a little train that takes you into the caves and then you get a brilliant guided walk around. Very very impressive and absolutely beautiful.
Lake Bled - Difficult to put into words at how scenic and gorgeous this place is. You can walk around the lake which is lovely in itself because of the amazing castle that sits at one side of the lake and the church that sits on an island in the middle of the lake. The castle is well worth going into just for the view but again its quite steep to walk up. The view you get of the lake is lovely though. We took so many photos of that lake!!! We also hires a rowing boat to go over the to church which was great fun and very cheap. If we were to go back then we would stay at least a couple of nights here.
Ljubljana Zoo - Within walking distance from the city and a good variety of animals. Good one for the kids.
Ljubljana Park - HUGE park that is lovely to walk around or even hire a bike. Has a (pink) church right at the top.

Downside
The downside is that there are not many places that you can fly from, although this obviously means that its not an over popular place and is therefore very unspoilt. So it may mean a bit more traveling to the airport in your own country but its well worth it. We flew from Stanstead to Maribor (there is nothing in Maribor worth mentioning) and got the excellent train service to Ljubljana (about 2 hours).

I'm not going to bore you with irrelevant details like population, size of country, currency, language. The idea of the review is to get you interested in going and give a few tips on what to see.

Summary: A country that has yet to be discovered by the mass