Saturday, May 17, 2025
Stage 5 of the Juliana Trail
Bled to Goreljek on Pokljuka ~ 36,000 Steps
At this point, after a full 8 hour day of hiking, a sit down shower, two glasses of wine and a cheese plate, I’m so tired I’m not sure what to say.
We both slept much better last night. Earplugs solved the mysterious, middle of the night animal noise, and we both woke up refreshed at 5:30 am.
Breakfast is served at 7, so we prepped lunch, our bags, and generally got ourselves packed and ready for the day. Today will be one of our hardest on the Juliana Trail.
After breakfast, we left our big bags with the reception desk, and set off on our hike. I’ve arranged for a couple taxi/tour companies to shuttle the luggage between hotels, so that we can hike with just daypacks. It’s a little leap of faith to set off hiking and hope your luggage arrives at your destination.
The first section of the hike is around the lake and through the towns on the outskirts of Bled. Its a lot of asphalt walking, and primarily up hill.
On the way out of town, we stop at a bakery for a pastry and two buns for our lunch sandwich, and we run into our pletna boat captain from yesterday. We also passed by an ATM, so we grabbed a bit more cash for the journey ahead.
From there, we walked to the edge of Triglav National Park, and started our hike.
Right away, its uphill on a rocky, steep path. Today’s elevation gain is 867 meters or 2,844 feet. There are fallen leaves and the rocks are pretty slippery. It’s clear that this path is a drainage, and part of it is wet with water running down the path.
After 25 minutes (by now its 11:25) we decide to have a little snack of trail mix and our bakery pastry.
From there, we climb again into a gorge and through a cave. It’s pretty steep, and quite slippery.
We continue walking, uphill, and through the forest. We don’t cross paths with many people, and we went hours during the day without seeing other people.
We stopped to have our lunch at 1 pm, and by now we feel that we might be behind schedule. This was supposed to be our biggest, most difficult day, and we want to get to our next hotel sometime during the afternoon.
The afternoon was spent walking through alpine meadows, past small farm buildings, and taking in the scenery. It’s all really quite beautiful and interesting, and we are hiking, but not rushing so that we take it all in.
Our map has waypoints listed on it, and on each stage there is a place to collect a stamp. The stamp for this stage is well over half way through the day, and immediately past a high alpine meadow.
We excitedly track down the stamp only to discover that there’s no ink. I was supposed to bring ink? Nathan attempts to ink the stamp with a felt tip pen, but we gave up about as soon as we started. A photo will have to do!
Nathan had guessed that we’d make it to our hotel at 3 pm, so we were a little disappointed at 3 pm when we were still 3 km away from our hotel. How many miles is that? We try to figure it out, but we’re tired and our feet hurt.
More than anything, we just want to sit and get off our feet. The day was a lot of hard surface walking – asphalt paths and hard rocky roads, and not enough forest paths.
Around 3:45, we finally come out to a road and the first signs of life, more than just an isolated farm. We walk into our hotel, and they immediately know who we are, where we’ve come from, and send us up to our room. Our bags have arrived and they were placed in our room. (Not auctioned on Ebay, as they joked!)
We get up to our room, take off our boots, and take turns relaxing in the tub shower. The reception gals told us they didn’t have many guests at the moment (we’re in room 1).
There’s not much more the ask for. There’s heat, (the temp ranged from 56 to 49 all day), a big balcony, hot water, super fast wi-fi, and a restaurant on site. We may or may not be the only people staying here. I guess we’ll find out at breakfast. There are bar flys in the bar, but they all seem like locals.
