The poor guy ended up neglected and bored after starting working on promising research about brown bears. What's worse, it got painfully obvious that working on a bear project meant everything but actually seeing one of them, which is - for the Frenchman - unspeakably shameful. As he sadly said once, "..the whole République will laugh at me if I return without a story of seeing a bear in the forests of the Balkans..".
And somehow I felt responsible for his misery.
Thus, I decided I would help my friend see a bear. I'd take him around, from the primeval forests in the South to the mountains in the North (perhaps make a D-tour to the seaside in between). To find the bears, to see the contrasting faces of Slovenia and to enjoy whatever we meet on our way.
So, first stop. Notranjska.
After retrievning the submerged canoe (which was done with the power of Frenchman's bare hands and the mental support of the golden retriever – see below), we boarded the vessel and almost sank it again (the boat usually takes 2 persons, we were 4 + 1).
Then we spend an hour paddling around the lake, with the middle volunteers sitting only on loose wooden poles, dangerously close to the water, balancing the dog's playful maneuvers (see below).
Clearly, there we had no reason to stop but those evil stormy clouds broke the idle and forced us to beach.
Bearing the bears in mind, we decided to visit a local cave, which is famous for the many remnants of cave bears that hibernated underground during the harsh Pleistocene winters. The beasts were huge, here's a comparison of the size of their scull (inside the showcase) and the scull of today's brown bear (placed on it).
Imagine walking into that one, modern cave-man! (here, I'm relating to a recent news article about a speleologist, waking up a bear from its winter sleep while crawling into one of the yet-unregistered caves)
To a biologist like me, the cave surprised with another, at least equally fascinating as the bear bones, form of life. Not because the fungi on the photo were a living cave organism while the hairy vegetarians were, well, extinct, but because of their looks and the way they were hanging from the wooden fence.
I must add at this point that my conservationist heart felt horribly proud when the guide asked us not to use the fence but rather risk slipping on the ground and breaking a thigh bone because those mushrooms were still unknown to science and needed to stay protected.
We agreed that this trip to Notranjska was a good start – we saw a bear, somehow (or at least parts of it). And - we didn't drown in the waters of the Karst.
