Last night we walked to a pizza restaurant in a shopping mall, a short distance from the hotel. As we approached, we felt as if we were back in the Middle East, as there were groups of Asian men sitting on the grass. The mall had a discount supermarket, and a shop familiar from the back streets of Abu Dhabi, selling plastic flowers and all sorts of Chinese produced junk. There were even notices in Arabic in the shops. The pizza was very good and we saved enough for today’s lunch.
We couldn’t get a bus ticket; the Thai in the bar that sold bus tickets assured us that “you don’t need one to travel in town”, so we walked back into town to the start of the stage. Today’s stage was going to be long and hot, so we had already identified a few possibilities for short cuts. The bridge out of town took us over the river Isonzo, which we had crossed many times in Slovenia as the Soca. We followed the road to San Martino de Carso. There was a small museum (closed) but the board outside had a photo of the village at the end of WWI. All the buildings had been reduced to rubble. The inhabitants had been evacuated to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and only a few chose to return after the war. We then followed the path through scrubland, passing a memorial to Hungarian soldiers, to the next village, which had also been totally destroyed in WWI. The village also had a large war memorial, with a red star, dedicated to the partisans who had died between 1943 and 1945. This area has a very complicated history.
We left the village and again decided to walk along the road. A short distance along it, there were signs to a walk along the edge of a lake. The lake’s depth is controlled by the water volume in the nearby rivers, and recent rain, as the whole area is karstified, with hundreds of caves. As usual, though, we didn’t see the lake because of all the trees and bushes. We reached Jamiano, and now had to keep to the trail as the built-up area along the coast was approaching. The path took us back into the woods, which were showing significant damage from last year’s fires. There was a climb up a hill, and finally we could see the Adriatic, complete with a foreground of railway, motorway, refineries, docks, and other assorted industrial areas. We crossed the motorway and reached the estuary of the Timavo. This river flows in Slovenia and then disappears underground for over 40kms before reappearing on the coast. The path took us around a marina, past an old fishing village, and then uphill into the scrubland again. Thankfully, this section was short and we soon reached our destination of Duino.
Reading the comments about tomorrow’s stage, the general theme is “too much walking in scrubland again”, so we are planning to follow a Cammino trail along the coast instead.
