Bloody border towns!

View from the train into the valley near Bohinj
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This won't be necessary for much longer because the border is disappearing in the new EU borders but at the moment you still have to go through the official international border crossing in the middle of town.

Getting to Nova Gorica was easy enough. There are a couple of trains a day to the city from Bled Jezero station. It's a nice trip through the valley and we even had clear weather for a little while so could see some of the mountains. It's when you get to the station that the problems arise. I had kind of thought that maybe there would be instructions on how to cross the border at the station or maybe an info office that could help but the info office was closed until 1pm and there were no signs at all. I wandered outside the station and found the square that has the border running through it and you can literally just walk across but I thought that I should be good and do it the right way. The large decorative map at the border was completely useless and I struggled to find the station in Gorizia at all and the border crossings weren't marked.

Me standing with one foot in Slovenia and one foot in Italy
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I had met a man from Korea on the train who was doing the same thing so we set off together to try and find either a bus or a crossing. We found one at the end of the street but it was for people with Schengen passports only and the man told us in broken english that we had to go 1km further down the road to find the international crossing. So off we headed. We figured that it was easier to walk the one km than try and find a bus so we walked along the bicycle track. After a little while we passed another border crossing that had no people on the Slovenian side and not even a building on the Italian side so we figured that wasn't it. We kept going and eventually found the crossing but there was no way off the path we were on and down to the crossing. So back we went to a little underpass about 200m behind us and crossed under the railway line and over to the Slovenian crossing. What really annoyed us both was after all that walking, they just looked at our passports. We didn't get scanned and we didn't get stamps. We might as well have gone across at the unmanned one.

Transborder Travelbear!
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We were hoping that there would be instructions on how to get to the station on the Italian side at the crossing but there was only another decorative map that was completely useless and no sign of a bus stop. We set off in the direction of the centre hoping to find something there that could help us. We did find a busstop (bus number 8) just up the road from the crossing which it turns out does go to the station but also doesn't run very frequently. In the whole time that we were walking to the station we only saw 2 buses and both were headed away from the station.

The first sign to the station (can you tell that I was excited!)
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We found some people in town and asked them for directions but neither of them spoke any english but did find a man who did for us. It turns out that it is quite a walk. I took us probably close to 45 minutes with our bags. The man told us that it was after the second set of lights so we thought that it must be fairly close. What he couldn't explain to us was that it was at least three blocks between each set of lights. We walked for ages and eventually came across a sign that pointed in the direction of the station. It was one of only two that we were to see on the entire walk. So at least we now knew that we were walking in the right direction.

We finally found the station on the left (the man had told us right) and arrived just as our train to Venice was leaving. Luckily there was another one in about 50 minutes so we jumped on that. So you can walk to the station from the station in Slovenia but it will take you at least an hour and 15 minutes and is quite a hike with luggage. There are buses from the Italian border crossing (go straight ahead in the direction of the centre and it is opposite the university) but they don't appear to run very frequently. If you have the money, it is probably easier to catch a taxi but we didn't see any of them at the station either so you would probably have to ring one. Though it seems that in six weeks time none of this will be happening anymore and you will be able to walk straight through the square and onto the Italian side (where you will have to look for a bus and probably end up walking anyway!).