Keeping the faith

When backpacking on your own you have to have heaps and take leaps of faith. If I didn't, I would probably have taken a different bus to a more popular tourist destination the weekend I spent in Slovenia, and missed out on seeing one of the most magnificent places I've seen in my whole life.
 

I was very indecisive about what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to try something that was not very touristy. So I opened my map and saw that someone I came across during the course of the week (I couldn't remember who) circled Bovec (pronounced Bovitz), a town in the northwest of the country.

It was quite difficult to find accommodation on the internet,and by 02:00 on the Saturday morning I was emailing an adventure eco camp to find out whether they have a place for me to stay. The only problem was that there were no trains from Ljubljana to Bovec and the bus was either leaving at 06:30 or after 15:00 (which would be way too late). That meant I would get the early morning bus to Bovec without knowing if I had a place to stay that evening.   

I must admit I was a bit nervous when getting on the bus and seriously considered going to more of a tourist destination like Lake Bled, since I wouldn't have a way out of Bovec if I couldn't find a place to sleep. But after seeing that Bovec is at the foothills of the Alps, I thought if I take the bus there, phone the eco camp while on the bus and they tell me they don’t have a bed for me, I’ll just stay on the bus and go back to Ljubljana. The scenery would probably make it worth my while.

And it would have... I was in awe (and in luck, since they had one tent left). I don't have enough adjectives in my vocabulary to describe this part of Slovenia (and even if I had, I still don't know if I'd do it justice). From a distance it looks as if the mountain tops are covered in snow, but what you see are actually snow-white "naked rocks" as a Slovenian girl I met on the bus calls them.

It was the scariest and most beautiful bus ride I've ever been on. As we were crawling up the mountains, the bus driver (who gained my respect within minutes) had to make one 180 degree turn after the other - on a road so narrow that it sometimes looked as if two cars wouldn't be able to pass each other. I've never been that relieved that I was in a bus and not in a car on the road next to it.

The approximately 140 km-drive took almost four hours. We did, however, stop at one of the villages for 40 minutes and at some others for a minute or so.

Nothing - not even the picturesque drive there - could prepare me for the beauty of the Soča river. Although the white sand and crystal clear turquoise water reminded me of Zanzibar's beaches, it wasn't really like anything I've seen before. 

To think I almost didn’t get onto that bus and it turned out to be one of the best weekends of my entire life. I river rafted with locals, faced my fear of heights by jumping into the river from a very high rock, took long walks along the river and cycled in the mountains.   

And it all happened because I was keeping the faith (or maybe pushing my luck)!

• Watch these videos to see just how beautiful the area is. They were both taken while river rafting on the Soča. In the second one I jump from the rock. I used a GoPro HD HERO2 camera that was attached to my helmet.