Bikepacking the Slovenia West Loop
Valentin and Jonas were crossing Slovenia when we met them. They were following the Slovenia West Loop, a bikepacking route starting and ending in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital.
Their bikes were fully equipped with all the needs for camping, cooking outdoors and crossing desertified lands for days (by desertified we mean places with no water or electricity). They had no problem going through forests and seriously unpaved terrains on the big tires they had. Even though their bikes didn’t have any suspensions, this was to hold better the speed on asphalt and long distances giving more stability to the bike asset.
Valentin was traveling on his bike for 9 months (nine!). He started in France, where he’s from, going through all Spain to Morocco, where he spent the winter, then back to Europe: Spain, France, Italy and Slovenia. He cycled solo most of the time, but a few months before our encounters he met up with Jonas in France and they continued together towards Croatia.
Being on the road for such a long time must have taught you so much. We were thrilled to know everything about their lifestyle. So after two days of riding with them we finally had the chance to interview them and ask these questions:
- What’s freedom?
VALENTIN – Well, for me freedom is not being bound to anything. Either way we travel, as we start the day, we don’t know where we will sleep. So it’s total freedom in terms of where we are going, where we are sleeping. Sure, it can be a bit daunting at first, because there’s a lot of uncertainty. The more freedom you have, the more uncertainty you have.
JONAS – It’s about not having constraints. So when we don’t know where we are gonna sleep, it’s like a blank page. And we have all the freedom we want to end the day, where we want to.
When we are traveling like this, we’re living life in a way where we don’t have as many obligations to work, to be on time. So it opens up new ways of interacting with the world, where you can just sit for an hour in front of a scenery and just take it in.
Day to day we’re always doing something, always after a certain goal or, just working towards something. And taking this step back by traveling allows you to slow down.
So the way we travel is by wild camping. It means we set up a tent in the forest near a river, in nature. So we don’t stay in hotels that much.
We resupply for food in villages, cities, for 1 to 2 days. So we have a good autonomy, which means we can go in pretty remote places and our style so far has been riding on offroad tracks as much as possible.
It took us in pretty wild places and high altitude plateaus in the Alps, and yeah, it’s all made possible because we were sleeping in a tent and we don’t rely on anything else. It’s all self-supported.
