15th July - Crystal Clear Adriatic

From Villach we travelled to Ljubjana in Slovenia and stayed a night in a pretty awful youth hostel whose saving grace was its close proximity to the main train station. With Kat not feeling up to much I ventured out into the bucketing rain to see if I could book our return journey. Luckily we managed to get pretty much the last tow couchette's available - more of which later.

Ljubjana is a very pretty town with a lovely feel to it and would merrit a longer stay with great looking bars and restaurants. However, our train to Croatia left at 6am so we had a early night and we up with the sparrows...and more rain.

The train took us down to the port city of Rijeka in Croatia. Once a hugely important shipbuilding centre it has seen better days but is still boasts some charming old buildings. We had a day to kill before our ferry at 6 so we caught a bus down to Opatija once the Hapsburg Riviera and swam in the clearest waters we have seen in Europe to date. Then back to Rijeka and onto the fast catamaran to the island of Rab.

We were met at the ferry in old Rab town by our host who drove us back to his home, which he had converted into apartments with a tiny kitchen in the corner! It was fantastic and had a great balcony with a view of the sea. Our host, and all the locals we met, were charming and friendly. All spoke German and it was a mainly German destination, and a bit of English.

Rab is a beautiful island with an ancient old town dating from Roman times with 14th century and earlier campanile's towering over it. The island is surrounded by the most stunningly clear warm water and we spent three lovely days here just relaxing and swimming and wandering around and cooking ourselves dinner in our apartment. Bliss.

We were not ready to leave, probably the only place on our stay we would have liked a day or so more, but dragged ourselves onto the bus on Saturday back to Rijeka for our first ever sleeper train experience to Munich.