Cycling Slovenia one way: four routes that stop being loops

Slovenia is small enough that most of it is reachable in a day on a bike, and shaped so that almost none of it comes back to where you started. The good roads run up one valley and down the next. Ride the best of them properly and you finish sixty kilometres from your luggage, which is why so many people here ride out and back over the same ground instead.

A car with a rack removes that constraint. You get dropped at the start, you ride in one direction, and you are collected where you stop. What follows is the four routes people ask us for, what each one is actually like, and what the driving costs.

The Vršič pass, and why the direction decides the day

Vršič is the highest road pass in Slovenia at 1611 metres, and the climb from Kranjska Gora is 11.8 km for 815 metres of ascent, averaging just under 7 per cent. The average flatters it: the steep pitches sit above 10 per cent and the road barely lets up between them.

The thing nobody tells you until you are on it is the surface. The twenty-four hairpins on the Kranjska Gora side are cobbled, laid by Russian prisoners of war in 1916 who built the road and died doing it. The chapel they left is worth the ten minutes. The Trenta side has twenty-six bends and no cobbles at all, which matters more going down than coming up.

So the direction is not a preference. Ridden from Kranjska Gora you climb the cobbles at walking pace, where they cost you nothing, and descend the smooth side into the Soča valley. Ridden the other way you take the cobbles at speed, on a descent, on a bike with narrow tyres. Kranjska Gora to Bovec is about 45 km with one climb in it.

Out and back on your own, it is that climb twice in a day. Dropped at Kranjska Gora and collected in Bovec, it is a long descent and a valley road along the Soča, and the pass is behind you.

Bled and Bohinj, when the day should not be a climb

Thirty kilometres of road separate the two lakes, and the riding between them is the gentlest in this list. It is the route for a mixed group, a first day, or the day after Vršič, and it works in both directions.

This is also the one route here you might genuinely not need us for: it is close enough to ride out and back from Bled in a day. Worth saying, since the point of the list is which rides the geography makes awkward, and this one it does not.

The Vipava valley, and the wind that decides whether you ride

Vineyards, gentle ground and the best autumn riding in the country. September and October are usually the window: warm, dry, and the valley turning colour.

The burja is the catch. It is a north-easterly that funnels down the valley, and it is not an ordinary wind — gusts have been recorded above 200 km/h, and while it belongs mostly to the winter months it is not unusual outside them. On a burja day the valley floor is not a place to be on a bicycle, and the local advice is to move to the sheltered side rather than to push on.

Which is a practical reason to have a car in the arrangement at all. If the forecast turns on the morning, the drop point moves and the day survives.

The Parenzana, and where the asphalt ends

The Parenzana was a narrow-gauge railway from Trieste to Poreč, closed in the 1930s and now about 123 km of cycling route across three countries. There are nine tunnels on it, a little over 1,500 metres of them in total, and the old railway gradients mean nothing on it is steep.

The surface is the thing to plan around. The Italian and Slovenian sections are paved, including the run through the Valeta tunnel between Strunjan and Portorož. The Croatian section is gravel. On 25 mm tyres the sensible plan is to ride the paved part and be collected at the border rather than to find out where the asphalt stops.

Nobody rides all 123 km in a day unless they mean to. Most people take a section, and the pickup is wherever they decide they have had enough, which is a decision better made at four in the afternoon than at breakfast.

What the rack takes

A THULE rack for three bicycles, mounted outside. The bikes travel on the car and not in it, so the cabin stays free for you, the helmets, the bags and anything wet.

• Three bikes maximum, your own or hired, both the same to us.
• E-bikes ride too, but they are heavy — tell us in advance and we confirm by weight rather than guessing at the roadside.
• Helmets, kit and luggage go inside with you.
• No dismantling, no boxes, no wheels off.
• If you have no bikes we can help arrange hire ones.

What the driving costs

Per car, not per bicycle, and the same tariff as any other transfer we run. From Ljubljana to Kranjska Gora is €100 for the saloon and €140 for the van, to Bled €70, to Bohinj €95, to the Vipava valley €100, to Portorož €135.

The collection at the far end is priced the same way and is a separate leg: Bovec back to Ljubljana is €150 for the saloon, €210 for the van. A Vršič day is therefore two legs, not one, and it is worth knowing that before you plan the budget around a single number.

If you are staying in Bled rather than Ljubljana, say so — most of these routes start closer to Bled than to the capital and the prices change accordingly.

What to tell us when you book

• How many bicycles, and whether any are e-bikes.
• Where you want to start, and roughly where and when you expect to finish.
• Whether the finish is firm or a guess — a guess is fine, it just changes how we hold the afternoon.
• Whether you need hire bikes arranged.
• Where you are staying, since that is usually where the day begins and ends.

And the honest version: if your riding is loops from one hotel, you do not need a transfer at all, and we would rather say so than sell you one. The rack earns its place on the days when riding back is the worst part of the route.