Slovenia, Into the Soča

Eight in the morning at Vintgar, as early as the gorge lets anybody in. A line of wooden boardwalks and bridges follows the Radovna for 1.6 kilometers, over pools of green water between walls of gray rock. It has been open to visitors since 1893. The helmet they hand you is compulsory, and it suits nobody.

Then Bled, which you have seen on a thousand screens and which turns out to be real. Twenty-three pletna boats work the lake, wooden and flat-bottomed, each rowed by one oarsman standing up, a job handed down in families since Maria Theresa. Yours lands under the island's 99 stone steps. At the top, in the church, is the bell you ring for a wish.

The cream cake by the lake has been made the same way since 1953. Ten million of them later, it is still the right call.

In 1915 the Austro-Hungarian army needed a road over the Julian Alps to its front on the Soča, and it set about ten thousand Russian prisoners of war to building one. Their road still climbs to Vršič, at 1,611 meters the highest pass in Slovenia, on fifty hairpin bends, some of them still laid in cobblestones.

On the way up stands a small wooden chapel the prisoners built. In March 1916 an avalanche came down on their camp, and nobody ever agreed how many it killed. The chapel is their memorial now, and the group goes quiet there without anybody asking.

Day 3 is mostly a road. It is an extremely good road. Over the top and down the other side comes your first look at the Soča, a green that makes every photograph look edited. Tomorrow you are in it.

The Soča runs 138 kilometers from the Trenta valley to the Adriatic and keeps that green nearly the whole way, which very few rivers bother to do. This morning you get in it: wetsuit, helmet, paddle, a licensed guide at the back of the raft, and about ten kilometers below Bovec that start gentle and do not stay that way.

Nobody needs experience. Everybody needs to swim, because somebody always ends up in the water, usually on purpose, off a rock, shrieking. Ninety minutes on the river goes faster than ninety minutes has any right to.

The afternoon is yours, and most people spend it horizontal. Dinner is frika, potato and Tolminc cheese fried into one golden thing, a shepherds' dish from these valleys. It is exactly what a body wants after a morning on the Soča.

In 1879 the poet Simon Gregorčič wrote the Soča a poem that many Slovenes now read as a forecast of war on its banks. Thirty-six years later the front arrived. Kobarid, about 1,100 people, gave its Italian name, Caporetto, to the last of the twelve battles fought along the river, and Hemingway wrote the retreat into A Farewell to Arms. Up a side valley, the Kozjak waterfall drops into a hall of rock.

Then Idrija. In 1490, the story goes, a man who made wooden tubs left one soaking in a stream and found it heavy with drops of something silver. Some tellings say it was a bucket. We are going with those. The mercury mine that followed kept the town going for five hundred years, and UNESCO listed it in 2012.

Lunch first: žlikrofi, little potato dumplings the EU protects down to the recipe. Then overalls, a helmet and Anthony's Main Road, dug in 1500. Back in Ljubljana the farewell dinner is the loudest table in the room, and nobody has mentioned their job since day 1.

Last morning, and the dragons from day 1 are where you left them. Five days ago this group was a list of names. Now there is a group chat renamed after a raft, a camera roll that is mostly green water, and a lot of people to hug.

Anyone with a late flight has the old center for a few more hours, and the market by the river for something to carry home very carefully.