Pelotome –
around Slovenia on a bicycle.
“It is a great pity that this corner of Europe is so little visited.
Whoever wants to live among an unsophisticated people and quaint manners and picturesque life, let him hie hither.
I wish it for the sake of the tourist, but for my own taste I should prefer to see the people remain as they are.”
~ From The Clyde to The Jordan – Hugh Callan (1895).
My Life and Times
by Jerome K. Jerome
From £4,75
August 1888 – Published 1895.
From the Clyde to The Jordan.
“Narrative of a bicycle journey” was the first illustrated account by a rider of a “modern day bicycle”, and followed Scottish clergyman Hugh Callan – the same author of “Wanderings on Wheel and on Foot Through Europe” – on his ride from Glasgow to Jerusalem, which had previously appeared seven years earlier as a more in depth series of articles in the Glasgow Herald – the Slovenian section (then part of the Austrian Empire) published on 6th October, 1888.
Charting the author’s progress on a “Singer” safety bicycle, he cycles from Bruneck, South Tyrol (now Italy) and “the Crownlands of Austria” with its “ever-changing degrees of races,” to “Krainburg, Carniola” (Kranj in modern day Slovenia), passing “the Wocheiver and Veldes Lakes” (Lake Bohinj and Lake Bled), “little but of a grandeur and loveliness possessed by few in Europe.”
Continuing onward to “Laibach” (Ljubljana), and then “sixty miles to Rudolfsworth” (Novo Mesto), “one succession of great rolling hills,” he meets the “beautiful blue” Sava river, on his way to “Agram” (Zagreb), “the capital (of Croatia)”.
- By Hugh Callan.
- Published by Blackie & Son, London.
THE CROWNLANDS OF AUSTRIA.
“From Laibach [Ljubljana], sixty miles to Rudolfswerth [Novo Mesto], is one succession of great rolling hills, all of which have to be climbed by the road.
But owing to the scarcity of traffic, that stage, compared with my next day’s stage, was a pleasure. The next was frightful.
On a narrow sandy road, where two carts can scarcely pass each other, all day long I had to encounter a ceaseless traffic – great droves of pigs and dun or gray oxen, waggon-carts driving at a rattling pace, laden with hens and pigs and wine-barrels and fruits.
My appearance was the signal all along the line for the greatest disorder – pigs scampered over the fields, and horses reared and bolted back the way they came, trembling like sheep.
However much I was willing to lessen the disturbance, it was quite out of the question to dismount at every horse, or rather every animal, met, for that was every ten yards.
So befell many a catastrophe.”
– Hugh Callan, From The Clyde to The Jordan, 1895.