Day 15 - Venice to Ljubljana via Aurtria

Our train from Venice today didn't leave till 4 o'clock so we killed time in the hotel before setting off for Ljubljana in Slovenia. This looked like it was going to be our most awkward journey with so many different options to get there including changing 4 times or getting trains and buses, but we settled for the easiest, a train to Villach in Austria then a connection to Ljubljana arriving at about 9pm. This is meant to be one of the most scenic train routes in Europe as you travel high up into the mountains so it sounded great, but nothing is that easy and never goes to plan does it.... Our train left Venice on time and set off for the Italian area of the Alps up to Villach in Austria. The further north we went the darker the sky became until we noticed around us that the fields were flooded, trees appeared to have been blown over everywhere next to the rail line, the cars on the roads were struggling through huge puddles that had flooded some roads and the small burns had turned into rivers. The train suddenly started to slow until it eventually came to rest. Of course with our minimal Italian, the driver was informing us via the radio of the situation but with us not understanding a word of what he was saying – except that there was a 50 minute delay (thanks to our translation book) - meaning we would miss our connecting train. Once the train started moving again we discovered the cause of the delay, trees had been uprooted and blown onto the track and the overhead lines so rail workers were quickly attempting to shift the damage to allow our train to pass through. As we looked around, hundreds of trees had broken in half, fences were blown over, the whole place looked like a tornado had come through it!!! Oh dear we thought.....

They say it rains in Scotland, THIS was something else!!!! RAIN like we've never seen it before, absolutely thundering down for about 2 hours solid throughout our journey. No connecting train, no spectacular views just stress about when the next train would be and hope that we'd make it to Austria safely. The train even had to slow right down to continue travelling though the horrendous thunder storm.

We arrived in Villach an hour after our connecting train had left only to discover the next train to Ljubljana was 8 hours later meaning an 8 hour wait in the train station. Absolutely bored stiff we sat it out until our train at 4am. However, we did have some comedy value watching all the young bored Austrian kids out on their Saturday night rampage – obviously just as bored as we were as they appeared drunk when we arrived at 8pm and continued drinking to the early hours tormenting the security staff at the train station, going down one side of the escalator and up the other...so we've come to the conclusion it must be a pretty dull place to live.

We then got talking to a Macedonian woman who taught English and German so that passed some time before we got speaking to a random German guy who was born in Ljubljana who gave us lots of information and tips about what to see and do. We managed to escape him and made our way to our first “hostel” experience of the trip.

Marko, the owner, got up at 6 am just to let us in where we were shown to our room to get some much needed sleep before we got to see Ljubljana in the afternoon. As we missed our connecting train we missed our first night in the hostel too but nothing could have been done about it.