It was a little overcast as Azura came into Trieste port early in the morning, adding a touch of coolness to the day that was a marked contrast to the one that had preceded it in Split, and a quick check of the weather forecast for the day’s excursion destinations indicated it was going to get cooler too, and likely damper.

Breakfast on the ship was an improvement on the days before but still poor. We boarded our bus not long after and headed off, quickly crossing the border with no checks required (thank you, EU (fuck you, UK)), and passed hilly areas, often passing through heavy downpours en route to Slovenia’s capital.

When we arrived in Ljubljana the rain, thankfully, hadn’t followed us. Our bus dropped us off at Kongresni Trg (Congress Square), an early nineteenth century plaza used for ceremonies and protests like all good squares. You might be wondering how to pronounce Trg but I’m afraid I’m not Welsh so have no real experience of saying words without vowels in them.

Baroque architecture featured very heavily in Ljubljana and I was immediately taken by the Ursuline church across the road from the square while the majority of people on our tour used the free public toilets situated in the square’s centre. The Ursulines are not lovers of bears if that’s what you’re thinking (I was); they are a monastic order of women who cloister themselves away from everyday life, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a fancy church.

Our visit to Ljubljana would incorporate a short tour with some free time to explore afterwards, as is common with many city visits. A question was raised by one of our fellow passengers about Ljubljana Castle which could be seen on a low hill overlooking the capital city: could we visit it? The response was that if someone were to set off right at that moment they would have enough time to touch its wall before needing to turn around and come back to the meeting place. So, no.

Once all those who’d needed to relieve themselves had done so our guide led us the short distance to the next square, Prešernov Trg, the main square of Ljubljana. The square is circular just to mess with the minds of literalists and geometrists.

A sculpture in the middle of the square depicts the poet Prešeren and some scenes from his works, and the most prominent of the buildings surrounding the square is the Franciscan Church of the Annunciation on account of its pink-toned façade. The square’s current design and a lot of the architecture surrounding it owes much to the redevelopment that took place in the wake of a destructive earthquake that hit Ljubljana in 1895 when elements of Art Nouveau became incorporated into the surviving Baroque parts of the city.

The river Ljubljanica runs through Ljubljana so the city is adorned with numerous bridges. We crossed the Triple Bridge as it connected with Prešernov Trg in order to reach the final location our tour guide wanted to show us.

The last of the squares we were to be shown was Mestni Trg (Town Square) where, in front of the Town Hall (the building with the flags in front of it above) there was the Robba Fountain or, more accurately, a copy of it. This twenty first century replica allows the original eighteenth century piece to be kept safe in the country’s National Gallery. The pool of the fountain is local limestone and the obelisk at its centre is local marble while the decorative elements are marble from northern Italy.

At this point we were told when and where we had to meet up again and we were left to have a wander around on our own. We initially had a walk along the banks of the Ljubljanica because if you know anything about us at all by now then you know how much we like the water. It did make for some lovely views even if the weather was overcast and seemed to threaten rain at any minute.

Our walk took us towards the Dragon Bridge because our guide had mentioned that this was an important symbol for Ljubljana, and the final spot of interest we passed before reaching it was beside Saint Nicholas’s Cathedral. The Baroque (naturally) building replaces an earlier Gothic church on the same site that itself replaced an earlier Romanesque one that (also naturally) burned down. Churches do that a lot.

Our time in Ljubljana was too limited to allow us to venture inside any of the churches we’d seen, but that’s pretty typical for any cruise tour, but what we’d seen of Slovenia’s capital city left us knowing that this was a place we’d love to come back to for a long weekend to do it justice.

Our wander around Ljubljana has been split into two parts because someone – and it might be me – got a little camera-happy around all the abstract pieces of public sculpture artwork in the city, so in the next part of this cruise travelogue series we’ll reach the Dragon Bridge and I’ll continue our walk through Ljubljana and show off some more of its sights before we depart for the second destination in Slovenia on this day ashore.

We had reached Dragon Bridge, easily identifiable thanks to its dragons. Like much of Ljubljana – and you’ll know this if you’ve read the first part of this exploration of the city; you have, haven’t you? – the bridge dates from the early twentieth century during much of the city’s rebuilding following the earthquake. Dragon Bridge was one of the earliest bridges in Europe to use reinforced concrete and the architectural style is from the Vienna Succession, a more all-embracing offshoot of Art Nouveau.

We then started coming across lots of public art sculptures, made from bronze, abstract, with varying themes including myths (Adam and Eve, Prometheus, a Satyr), human faces, and wildlife (birds, a tentacle, a wolf). These were almost exclusively the work of Jakov Brdar, and we loved them. Upon one of the many bridges over the Ljubljanica – Butcher’s Bridge – we also saw a lot of that most popular of pastimes for travellers with an odd sense of romanticism about them, padlocks, some of which were attached to some of the smaller sculptural pieces. My thoughts about attaching rusty eyesores to monuments is less than positive but that’s subjectivity for you.

After admiring the public art sculptures we continued towards the square we’d originally been dropped off at, taking in a few more sights of the architecture and just overall pleasant feel of Ljubljana along the way.

We were back at Kongresni Trg with plenty of time to spare (no rocking up late and spoiling other people’s plans for us, thank you very much) and that gave us the opportunity to take a quick look at the university building on the south eastern corner. Its entrance was approached by a curving path around a fountain and lined with busts of prominent men connected with academia. Only men, apparently. Different times. Anyway, a few are shown below but you can always hunt down the others if you’re so-inclined, and you can always visit Ljubljana to see them for yourself.

The siren call of the water reached out to us and drew us down some steps towards the river we’d crossed a few times already during the day, and here we passed another abstract piece of artwork – a cylindrical monument to lost lives in World War I – plus a bronze statue of Gustav Mahler. Early in his musical career he was appointed as a conductor of operas and operettas in Ljubljana.

The final few photos were from in front of the Ursuline church that had attracted my attention earlier in the day and of a pillar which I’d not been able to get near before on account of another tour group – not from the cruise ship – gathered near it. The Corinthian order capital was topped with a sculpture to the Holy Trinity.

That brought our time in Ljubljana to an end. As with all cruise tours (and probably most tours in general) there wasn’t anywhere near enough time to see as much as we’d have liked. We’d have loved to visit the castle, for instance. Additionally, the day and timing of our visit made for a quiet experience; it would have been nice to see more things open, more sense that this was a bustling capital. Ljubljana at night, for instance, feels like it would be a vastly different place, and it’s something we’d love to see. We came away from our visit to Ljubljana loving the architecture and layout, adoring the abstract public art pieces, and thinking it would be a superb destination for a weekend city break.

We still had one more stop to make in Slovenia before heading across the border and back to the Italian port, and that would be to the very popular tourist destination of Lake Bled.

Have I mentioned that Lake Bled is popular? I have. Good. Then you won’t be surprised to learn that this is reflected in the amount of traffic that heads there throughout the year and we encountered a fair amount of it in April so should you be thinking of visiting this bit of Slovenia during warmer months then brace yourself for a lot of crawling along in jams.

Anyway, we eventually arrived, parked up, and were led down to the lake, catching some glimpses of the local parish church and the impressive-looking, eleventh century Bled Castle built on a precipice overlooking the water.

The weather wasn’t perfect for our Lake Bled visit. We had cloud cover – which we were fine with even if it did mean there would be none of those ever-so-pretty and vibrant (sometimes overly vibrant) pictures as a result – but we also had persistent, very light, very spitty rain. None of this spoiled the view across the lake to the Assumption of Maria Church, though.

Our guide gave us the time and place at which we were to meet back up then left us all to our own devices. We were told that we could probably head up to the castle if we went straight there, didn’t waste time, and didn’t spend too long at the top. We were also told that while we might technically be able to get around to one of the special boats taking people to and from the island, get over there, have a quick look, then get back, the timing of crossings wasn’t to a set schedule, might result in us being left behind, and this was highly discouraged. We were finally told that we might, maybe, possibly, could have just enough time to walk a complete circuit of Lake Bled if we were fit, fast walkers, and set off immediately. We sniggered at that suggestion.

We’d already decided we were simply going to walk around part of the shoreline of the lake for a bit at a leisurely pace and see if we had time for a snack and drink on the way back.

Our short walk started from roughly the north eastern edge of Lake Bled and would proceed clockwise for about a third of its circumference before turning around and retracing our steps. Initial sights of interest included a sculpture called Ciklama by Slavko Oblak; Slovenia appeared to enjoy abstract sculptures and that’s handy because so do we. A marker stone also commemorated the design of the park adjoining the lake by the Swedish landscape architect Carl Gustav Svensson in 1890. And, of course, Bled Castle could be seen in all its glory now.

Fans of selfies for social media were catered for with the presence of a heart sculpture and a small wooden jetty jutting out onto the lake. We are not fans of selfies for social media but you possibly already knew that. There was a queue of people lined up beside, taking turns to race out and grab a snapshot for posterity but I was still able to grab a photo without any of them in it.

The type of boat that takes tourists across Lake Bled and to the island is a pletna. They are a flat-bottomed boat similar in shape to gondolas, hand-made, and propelled by two oars. They’re generally considered to have been in use since the sixteenth century and from 1740 onwards the oarsmen could only come from twenty two noble families in the region following a decree by Maria Theresa of Austria, the head of the Habsburg dominions at that time.

You might think that, crowds of people notwithstanding, Lake Bled would be a very peaceful area but that wasn’t exactly the case around the southern shore where a road that at one point passed through a tunnel in the surrounding rocky landscape carried a constant stream of traffic. The views across the lake were still very nice but picture them accompanied by the white noise of car after car driving through for the proper effect. There were also some buildings around this part of the lake’s edge, some hotels, some looking rather abandoned but still appealing.

We spotted a viewpoint that would give us a reasonably close look at the Assumption of Maria Church on Bled Island and decided that would be the point at which we’d turn around and head back as the light drizzle was starting to soak through our hoodies by this time. A church on the island has long been a destination for pilgrims and the present Baroque church dates from the late 1600s although with some Gothic decorative elements recovered from an earlier incarnation on the spot.

We broke up our return to the tour bus with a stop in a café outside which we’d seen a sign that simply said “Beer”. We like beer, especially local beer, and will tolerate it even if it’s a rather generic lager. We also tucked into some of the local speciality, the kremna rezina, a puff pastry, custard, and cream slice cake. Tricky to eat without making an absolute mess of yourself and also exceedingly sweet, but nice.

Lake Bled was lovely and with a full day to enjoy it we’d have definitely made our way up to the castle and across to the lake, but this was a cruise ship excursion and they never have enough time for that sort of thing. Our only cause for concern was the volume of traffic given that the area around the lake wasn’t that packed with tourists as you can see from the pictures. We couldn’t help but shudder at imagining the location in the heart and heat of summer.

In the next post in this Azura Adriatic cruise travelogue series we’ll return to Trieste where our expectation was that we would simply get back on the ship until a chance comment from our tour guide made us change our minds.