The Triglav Road

Bled is the picture of Slovenia: a green lake, an island with a church, a castle on a cliff and Triglav behind it, to the west. The island is reached only by pletna, the village's rowing boat, and in the church you pull the wishing bell. Above, the castle of 1011 is the oldest in the country. And in the café you eat kremšnita, the cream cake that became a national symbol in 1953.

Bohinj is twice the size of Bled and ten times emptier: no island, no castle, no cake, just water between mountains. It lies inside the national park and it is the lake you climb Triglav from. At its far end the Savica waterfall bursts out of the wall at 78 metres — the source of the Sava Bohinjka. And the Vogel cable car climbs to 1,500 metres, from where you see the whole mountain.

Kranjska Gora is Slovenia's ski resort and the village at the foot of the Vršič. Three kilometres away, Zelenci: an eye of emerald water two metres deep, where the Sava rises, the country's longest river. Five kilometres away, Planica, the valley of the ski-flying hills, where 200 metres was first jumped. The mountain above is Jalovec, not Triglav — Triglav is beyond the pass.

The Vršič is the highest road pass in Slovenia and was built in 1915 by Russian prisoners of war to supply the Soča front. In March 1916 an avalanche buried several hundred of them. The wooden chapel at the eighth hairpin was raised by the survivors for the dead, and it is where Slovenia and Russia still meet once a year. From the pass, Triglav is ten kilometres east, closer than anywhere else on the route.

The Soča comes out of the rock at the end of a gorge, at 990 metres, into a pool so clear you do not see the bottom but the stones on it. From here down, the river is a colour no other river in Europe has — a milky turquoise that comes from dissolved limestone. Trenta is the valley of the source: a few villages, the Juliana alpine botanical garden, and the park museum.

Bovec is where the Soča becomes a playground: rafting, kayaking, canyoning, zip lines, all on a river that stays cold and green even in August. Five kilometres away, the Boka waterfall drops 106 metres straight out of the wall, the highest in Slovenia, and is seen from the road. Above the village, Mangart, the country's third summit, has a tarmac road to 2,055 m — the highest in Slovenia.

Kobarid is Caporetto in Italian: here, in October 1917, the German and Austrian armies broke the Italian line in Italy's greatest defeat of the war, and Hemingway wrote about the retreat in A Farewell to Arms. The museum in the village is the best war museum in the Alps. Above it, the Italian ossuary holds 7,000 dead. And three kilometres away, the Kozjak waterfall falls into a cave of green limestone, like a cathedral.