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08:27: Up at 07:20. I skipped washing. I’ve had breakfast, about to wash up. The promising mayonnaise tube burst, so I’ll chuck that and keep the peanut butter which was sharing the same bag. I slept well. It’s a misty, damp morning. I was too hot in my bag until I opened a slit at the calf. Towards dawn I zipped it up again. The bag is starting to stink. I’ll wash it in Zagreb. I hate the bag1.
08:46: I tossed the peanut butter too. Couldn’t be arsed washing the tub. I don’t even like peanut butter that much - I was only eating it for its high calorific content. Packing now while my phone charges. (I had plugged it in overnight at another socket, but it had no power. Thankfully my phone will be charged by the time I’ve broken camp.)
09:18: Ready to pay and leave.
09:20: Paid €17.20 to a grizzled but less unpleasant man at reception. Heading for the pass. The overcast is clearing over the valley, but not the mountains. My phone has a 96% charge. It’s enough.
09:24:05 
09:33:21
09:54: Unterbergen. “Last shop for 1,000 miles” kind of place.
10:04: Leaving Unterbergen. 541m. That was steep.
10:11: Unterloibl.
10:18:34 
10:21:03
10:28: Leaving Unterloibl. 579m.
10:51:56 
10:58:49
10:59: 722m.
11:02:56
11:04: Over an intermediate pass; descending again. There are blue skies on this side of the pass.
11:12: At the turn for Bodental. The Loiblpass is 8km away.
11:15:31 
11:16:28 
11:18:33 
11:20:43
11:25: I’ve been descending since the turn for Bodenthal.
11:33: About to start ascending again. 668m. I’m getting hungry for lunch.
12:22:33 
12:27:28
12:32: 929m. Almost at the turn that takes me over the pass as the road goes through the tunnel2.
12:50: At the turn for the Alter Loiblpass. My Garmin GPS’s built-in maps run out at the Slovenian border! I have my phone as back-up.3
13:04:18 
13:20:40 
13:20:45 
13:20:56
13:25: Sweating profusely, walking up a gravel track that is the old road. 1218m.
13:31:30 
13:35:55 
13:36:05 
13:36:10 
13:36:26 
13:36:41
13:49: At the top of the pass. Spectacular blue sky and view into Slovenia - into the sun, so unphotographable.
13:49:21 
13:49:30 
13:50:18 
13:53:11 
13:54:00
14:19: Ate the sweaty cheddar cheese on about half the brown bread. I still have two bars of chocolate and a tin of fish for dinner. I’m looking forward to being down in the valley again, as spectacular as it is here. I’ll rest my feet for another 20 minutes and then hit the road.
14:28: I’m sitting on the verandah [of a cafe in a hut perched on the edge of a cliff at the old border post] on the Slovenian side of the border [along with a few hiking couples, gazing out over a spectacular vista of endless steep mountain ridges stetching to the horizon.]. The language is Slovenian. I’m hearing barely any German being spoken.
14:48: Moving again. €2.40 for a Cockta (Slovenian Cola) and €1.50 for a chai. (Tepid sweet tea.)
14:49:59 
14:51:52 
14:53:39 
14:55:29 
14:58:04 
14:59:10 
15:01:20 
15:04:23 
15:04:46 
15:06:32 
15:12:11 
15:19:45 
15:22:59
15:22: Back on the motor road at the tunnel mouth. 1049m ASL.
15:27:58 
15:40:27 
15:41:04 
15:53:24: “Here, from 1943 to 1945, stood the section of the Nazi extermination camp Mauthausen-Ljubelj in which political internees from France, Poland, The Soviet Union, Czecheslovakia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Norway and Yugoslavia suffered and died during the excavation of the Ljubelj tunnel.” 
15:54:37 
16:14:17
16:22: I’ve decided to head to a campsite at Podlubelj listed in MAPS.ME4. It’s only 2km away. That gives me a chance to get orientated and then get to Ljubljana in two days via Kranj.
16:26:27 
16:32:14
16:33: 722m ASL.
16:52: At the campsite! €8.50 for one night, including a welcome drink. I’m having a Cockta.
17:08: Right, so I can’t get connected to any of the mobile networks. However I have been able to find out that Kranj (You don’t pronounce the ‘j’) is 22km from here and Ljubljana is 28km from Kranj. I’ve bookmarked a couple of hostels in Ljubljana. I’ll ask Gregor, the campsite proprietor - and a most excellent chap - if there’s a campsite in Kranj. (We’re at 682m, still in the mountains! I’m glad to have found a place to stay, though.)
17:30: Excellent advice from Gregor about getting to Kranj and Ljubljana - he’s given me two maps that are good enough to get to Ljubljana. He says petrol stations sell maps and there’s one in Tržič. He’s also given me access to the Wifi. Need to get my tent up, check in with Aisling and pop back to the bistro [I passed on the way to the campsite] before dinner.
This is the lightweight Summer bag I picked up in Augsburg. I paid €70 for it (as far as I remember) and never liked it. It was shorter than the bag I’d used during the Spring, it had a horrible slick nylon interior and the finish of it was terrible. I spent ages choosing it, but I was optimising for cheap price and light weight. I binned it with extreme prejudice as soon as I got home.↩
The Nazis used slave labour to dig the current road tunnel through the mountain. There’s a concentration camp a little further down from the mouth of the tunnel on the Slovenian side. I walked over the pass via the old pre-war road, which is now an eerie, virtually unused trail of broken tarmac.↩
Not Google Maps, which depends on an ever-present network connection to work properly (for without it, how can your phone report your every movement to the maw of Google’s machine learning system?) but MAPS.ME, a commercial offering built on top of Open Street Map data, which works very successfully offline and is often richer and more correct than Google Maps. The further East I travelled, the worse the local maps became and the more I came to depend on the excellent Open Street Map data. I had been using it all along, but not directly. I often transcribed routes determined by MAPS.ME’s route-finding algorithm onto my paper maps and used those throughout the day.↩
Already my ability to find what I need on my electronic maps has improved compared to the slow, recalcitrant Garmin GPS device which uses the same underlying crowd-sourced Open Street Map data but bizarrely fails to present it in a meaningful or usefully searchable way. During the course of my trip, my estimation of Garmin equipment took a steep nosedive. They’ve been sitting on their laurels for a decade.↩
