One of the goals that I had in mind when I came to Slovenia was to travel as much as possible. Piran struck me as a good place for travelling because it is so close to both Italy and Croatia. I didn’t know before coming that, after some months here, I would have the feeling of “being stuck at the coast”.
Don’t get me wrong: of course we travelled. We went around Slovenia and we visited other volunteers, which is very convenient for free accommodation. We have been in Croatia a couple of times, and I also went to Palermo, Trieste, Switzerland and Serbia. So it’s not like I haven’t travelled, but it’s true that it turned out to be a little bit more complicated than I anticipated.
First of all, bus connections to Piran are scarce, there is no other way to say it. You have to go to Ljubljana for everything, and we have been in that city so many times already that I have a love-hate relationship with it. Getting to Ljubljana by car is easy, but by bus… the schedules just drive me mad. Most of the time you have to get Prevozi, a shared car, which is also difficult to arrange because we don’t have Slovenian phone numbers. Most of the time our coordinator, Varja, is the one that saves us and arranges it for us.
Apart from this, travelling by bus should be easy, just tiring for the long hours you spend to reach any destination. That’s when you book your buses correctly. If you are like me and you tend to mix dates and hours, you will have to book the same bus two times and lose money, which, being a volunteer, is not something hardly affordable. And that’s only if you don’t mix also the dates of your flights, your accommodation or literally everything else (yes, it has happened to me more times that I am willing to accept).
But at the end, I guess everything works out just fine. So even if it’s a little bit complicated, we still managed to travel from Piran to places, both inside and outside of Slovenia. And, trust me, the effort is well worth-it!
