Two sights in the karst country south-west of Ljubljana, close enough together to do in a single day. We took a small bus private tour from Ljubljana, calling at both and then down to Piran on the coast.
Sights & Culture
Postojna Cave
One of the largest cave networks in the world, 29km in total, though the tour only covers about 5km total. It opens at 10am and gets busy, so pre-book and get there early to avoid at least some of the crowds. A train takes you about 3.5km into the cave, followed by a guided walk of about 1.5km. The formations are very impressive, and the caves are almost all vast. I'm very claustrophobic, but other than one section walking through a tunnel, you have so much space it didn't bother me. The stalactites and stalagmites are sizable in many cases, with some needle thing taking a thousand years to grow a single centimeter.
The tour also takes in a small aquarium of olms, the pale, blind cave salamanders that live only in these karst systems also known as Baby Dragons because they look like tiny dragons or Human Fish because they live to be 100 years old. The salamanders are very small, perhaps the length of my index finger, so don't expect anything too dramatic.
At the end of the cave, before the train out, there's a small gift shop and post office, so if you want to send someone a card from below the earth, this is the place.
Predjama Castle
Impressive, and really well preserved. A castle built into the mouth of a cave in a cliff face, with a further cave castle behind the main one, reached across a drawbridge. It is famously unassailable, and was used in Armour of God with Jackie Chan.
Its 15th-century lord, Erazem Lueger, held out here against an imperial siege. The besiegers expected to starve him out, so when he gifted them with fresh cherries they concluded he must have demonic powers rather than the more logical and true answer that he had a secret passage out of the back of the castle into a nearby valley full of fruit trees and animals. Folklore says he was eventually betrayed by a servant and killed by a cannonball while on the toilet as the outhouse was the least fortified position in the building.
The castle is in good shape, with a really interesting audio tour included in the ticket. The castle has a second 'backup' castle reached by drawbridge set into the cave itself, so even if the main building is captured, the defenders can retreat into the cave and hold off the attackers.
There are two gift shops in the building.