View from the Pillion - Corvara to Bovec

With the Triumph sidelined for the duration, we are given the BMW GS that Dan has been riding. He and his daughter take the smaller bike. It has been raining and the roads are wet. The low clouds still look threatening  so we all start the day wearing our rain gear. 

Peter is following behind Dan, still getting the feel of the bike as we head out of town and up our first mountain road at a fairly sedate pace. And then suddenly, the bike skids out on a corner and we're down. I land on the road, but in an instant I assess that I am fine. I watch Peter, still with the bike, sliding towards the looming wall of the mountain. It stops short of the rock face and Peter is up on his feet. Very quickly our fellow riders are beside us, checking that we're okay. John and Ross help Peter pick the bike up. Someone keeps an eye out for oncoming traffic and waves them down. All I can think of is the positive things - no one is hurt; we avoided hurtling over the cliff-edge or slamming into the rock face; there was no oncoming traffic; because this particular bike has an engine guard, there is no serious damage and it is still in good working order. There are some scrapes on the tail box and engine guard and  a few broken pieces of plastic from the front faring. Both of us have small tears in our rain gear and the leather has been completely scraped off the knuckle guard on my one glove. Well, that's why we wear safety gear.

Feeling a bit shaken, but in one piece, we get back on the horse, in a manner of speaking, and continue on route. I can sense that Peter is apprehensive and is taking it very cautiously, but after a coffee break, and with the sun out again, he soon gets his mojo back.


One of our stops today is the memorial and site of a terrible tragedy where in 1963 almost 2000 people died when a landslide  at the newly built Vajont Dam caused an unprecedented tsunami which swept downstream, destroying villages and wiping out almost a third of the population of the largest village, Langarone. It is a sombre visit making us all very thoughtful and speculative about nature and man's effect on it. In this case, warnings of geological instability of Monte Toc were not given proper consideration, with tragic results. The dam, which didn't suffer any damage, has been abandoned.

 

At the roadside restaurant where we stop for lunch, we have a perfect spectator view of a bicycle road race. The group of cyclists whiz past us, accompanied by a big contingent of support vans, security and police vehicles.

Continuing our journey, we travel up and down passes, through tunnels and along valleys and eventually we cross back into Slovenia and follow the lovely Soca River to the Hotel Mangart in Bovec.