We are in Italy for two weeks with our friend Lina, and started our sojourn with a daytrip to Slovenia. We booked a day tour on the web a while back, and we were waiting for our tour bus to turn up outside our hotel in Trieste, when a guy in a black Mercedes pulls up. He has my name written on a piece of paper, but the only word in English he knows is “okay”, and the only word I know in Italian is “grazie”, so we are unable to communicate further. We shrug and hop inside the car, and off he zooms. We pass the border crossing between Italy and Slovenia, now only indicated by a few blue signs on the side of the road. Our driver speeds us down the deserted highway, and we end up at the Postojnska Jama caves by 9 AM.

The tour doesn’t start until 10, so we spend an hour walking past the river and poking through the souvenir stores. They have some beautiful crystals and fossils, but the ones that we like don’t look like they would be easy to fit into a suitcase. Soon it is time for the tour to begin. They load us onto the world’s first underground railway, and it zooms off like a roller-coaster. Suddenly we are inside enormous limestone caves, ducking our heads to avoid the stalactites that come whizzing past at 20 km/hour.

We end up in a grand cave, filled with sparking and dripping columns. Slender stalactites reach down from the ceiling, and squat stalagmites inch form thick turrets from the ground. The stalagmites grow faster than the stalactites, at a speedy rate of one centimetre every hundred years.  Out guide then takes on a guided walking tour for the next two kilometres, over the Russian ridge originally build by Russian prisoners of war, though the spaghetti room with a ceiling cascading with fine noodle-like appendages, the white room dominated by pure calcium carbonate structures, the red room tinted with iron oxide, and then we get to meet a curious proteus, the blind cave-swelling amphibian. Off again for another train trip through the caves, this time past black manganese-tinted towers, and then over the underground river that first carved out these caves eons ago.

We pick up some interesting looking blueberry honey, cinnamon honey, and honey liquor from a stall outside, and then find our driver who is waiting for us, smoking a cigar and reading the paper. In less than an hour, we are back in Trieste, ready for a delicious lunch of gnocchi and pizza.

Even though Brussels and Milan airports have been snowed in for the past several days, yesterday our flight managed to find the one brief window of blue sky get us to our destination. Then it was merely a late bus, an infrequent train, a confusing metro, and a one more delayed train to get to Genova. Our flight landed at 10:30 AM, and we arrived here at 5:00 PM, thankful to have arrived at all. Much to our dismay, most of the restaurants here don’t even think about opening until at least 7:00pm, but we managed to find a great little pizza place nearby for our first taste of Italian Italian.

Today, we explore Genova before boarding the cruise ship that will be our home for the next nine nights, as it takes us through the Mediterranean.