Having enjoyed the Austrian roads I found the Italians also make beautiful roads and the viaducts are engineering marvels. Tunnels that seem to go on forever through the mountains.
We rode down from the Alps into the Italian city of Trieste. It is a city of congested traffic, dilapidated high rise apartments, dirty streets, industrial zones and all the smell that goes with that.
Our decision to spend the night there dissolved very quickly - there just wasn't anything attractive about the city at all. To be fair I was only there for a couple of hours and it is my first impression only.
It was early afternoon so we rode into Slovenia. Slovenia is a member state of the European Community so there was no border crossing. It was immediately obvious that Slovenia is still emerging from some difficult economic times. The cars were fewer and older. The towns and people also looked as if better financial times were still to come.
A comfortable ride to the town of Koper. The town had two hotels and both would not have been out of place in post Second World War Russia. We secured a room and we were waited on like special guests - rich westerners - everything is relative I guess. The young male receptionist spoke very good English and helped us through the process of checking in.
Sorry Trieste and Koper you will not make the short list of my favourite places.
Croatia welcomed us with our first border control. Once the formalities were over we were riding down the Dalmatian coast with the Adriatic on our right.
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