23: Lake Bohinj // Their Earlier Stuff is Better

Seriously, just look at it // © Gasper Janos / shutterstock

I got tremendously sunburnt at Lake Bohinj once. You can put the pieces of this puzzle together yourself, a classic case of over-exuberance and dismissive planning, the old ‘I’m going to get me a tan so I won’t bother with suncream’. I sat by the lake for four or five hours, soaking up the rays of the summer sun in the most literal of ways, and my skin was cracking before I made it back to Ljubljana. It was the worst preparation for a night bus, although my rapidly decaying skin did eventually make me a good friend in a German lady called Katharina. Win some, lose some.

That isn’t to say that all of my memories of Bohinj are tinged by burnt skin and another failure to get a tan, but that sort of stuff sticks in your craw. My first visit to Lake Bohinj came way back in 2008 when I made a solo trip to Slovenia for my 23rd birthday, although that is the extent to which I remember that trip. Every other visit to Bohinj had been with a purpose, even the one that left me burnt and tender.

There was the time I went for a long walk with Jerry and Sonja, natives of Kranj who I had met on my very first trip to the country in 2007, with whom I celebrated the aforementioned 23rd birthday. We made a day of it at Bohinj in 2014 or ’15, taking the cable car up to Vogel and hanging out with goats before heading back down to the lake for relaxation and a spot of rowing. Throw in a number of In Your Pocket-related trips, and it all adds up to a very lucky boy indeed.

Always wise to cover the basic facts and stats, right? Lake Bohinj is the largest permanent lake in Slovenia, the crowning glory of an Alpine valley within Triglav National Park, located half an hour west of Bled and offering much of the beauty with none of the fanfare.

Although that’s just the problem, right? Mention Bled to a healthy percentage of Slovenes and you’ll get a disappointed sort of response, one capped with a defiant claim that ‘Bohinj is better’, that it is an altogether more down to earth spot, more peaceful, more ‘real’, whatever that means. Lonely Planet says it is ‘in many ways more authentic’. In terms of perception and reputation, the two are inseparable, or maybe it is more accurate to say that they are never too far away from each other. Bled is the major label record, Bohinj the earlier stuff released independently.

Of course, it isn’t, because Bohinj has no shortage of commercialised adventure opportunities surrounding it, but allow me to sit in that analogy for the time being.

Heck, I’m making the same mistake that everyone else seems to make, focusing on Bohinj in relation to Bled as opposed to Bohinj in relation to Bohinj.

The word ‘mistake’ shouldn’t be ignored there. Bohinj stands on its own, it isn’t the first three Biffy albums compared to however many there have been since Infinity Land. Bohinj isn’t marvellous purely in comparison. Proximity doesn’t necessarily have to condemn this to beauty to eternal parallels. The Ottomans stopped here because they thought it was the end of the world, after all.

That might not be true, but Bohinj is the sort of place that inspires myth and grandiose exclamations of creativity, fictional or not. Karel Dežman’s Goldhorn used to roam the hills around the lake, which explains the famous statue that gets attacked by photographers all year round. Bohinj isn’t the end of the world, it isn’t home to an Alpine ibex with golden horns, and it isn’t the hipster’s version of Lake Bled.

What it is, is a magnificent place to get sunburnt, a stunning place for a morning of rowing (or bobbing, depending on your technique) and a gorgeous piece of the world to simply look at, falling deeper in love with either the stretch of land in front of you or maybe with your own eyes, self-love renewed for creating this quite dazzling spectacle. For the solipsists, Lake Bohinj is an exercise in self-love. For everyone else, it is a quite breathtaking piece of natural scenery in a country defined by the stuff.

It isn’t why we chose to visit the world, in an active sense. We travel because we can, quite frankly, because ‘we should go on holiday’ has become as throwaway a phrase as ‘fancy a pint?’ or ‘takeaway?’, terms that are always an option in this excessively comfortable world. I say that, COVID-19 has put the kibosh on such ideas, but you get the point. Many people, from the UK at least, go on holiday because ‘I need a holiday’ is how people start conversations.

We should travel because of the all-sensory enrichment provided by places like Bohinj, nuggets of natural genius that engage the eyes while embracing the heart, all while providing fresh air for the lungs and the soul. We should travel to better ourselves and to make ourselves feel better, and you can put them in whichever order you prefer.

Bohinj doesn’t just tick those boxes. It redefines them. It reminds you that those boxes must be attended to.

So don’t think of Lake Bohinj as the Contrarian’s Lake Bled, as the hipster’s favourite, as the Bleach to Bled’s Nevermind. Think of it as Lake Bohinj, another cannon-heavy string on Europe’s most delightful bow.