Destination: Slovenia
From the Substack Mindful Travel Confessions by Camila Castro
Forty-eight hours before my flight, I got on a call with Explorer X.
Until that moment, I had known almost nothing … not even where I was headed. Layers. Hiking gear and city clothes. A 10-plus hour flight followed by a connection. April temperatures in the 40s and 50s. For months, that had been everything I knew about my upcoming 2-week trip.
And then, on a Sunday afternoon at my kitchen counter, I heard the word: Slovenia.
I’ve been asked what that moment felt like. The honest answer is, like something completing itself. Three years ago, I took my first trip to that corner of the world — Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro — and came home knowing I’d only scratched the surface of a region I wanted to explore and understand more deeply. Slovenia had been on my list ever since. So when I heard that’s where I was going, what I felt wasn’t shock. It was delight. It felt like kismet.
If you’ve been following along, you know I boarded that flight as part of a Destination: Unknown experience with Explorer X: a trip designed entirely by someone else, and a destination kept secret until 48 hours before departure.
If you’re new here, my previous post on ‘trust fall travel’ is worth a read before this one.
“I handed the map to someone else. And what they found for me was better than anything I could have planned myself.”
In the weeks leading up to departure, almost everyone I knew had a theory about where I was going. Ushuaia was a top contender. Also popular were Romania, Taiwan, and Finland. Nobody guessed correctly. And on reveal day, messages came flooding in — everyone wanted to know: just where was I headed? I loved every minute of it.
For the next two days, I resisted the urge to deep dive into everything Slovenia online. I wanted to arrive with genuinely open eyes and few expectations. Traveling like this feels like relief … relief and gratitude for the experience as it is.
There’s something particular about how long-haul travel feels in the body. By the time you land, you’ve been suspended between places for so long — out of sync with time zones, routines, the ordinary rhythm of your days — that you exist in a kind of in-between state. Untethered, slightly unreal. Arrival, when it finally comes, feels like re-entering … yourself, your life, the world.
Flying in on a clear morning, I watched the Alps appear below; endless snow-capped peaks slowly giving way to forests and pastures threaded with rivers, small villages scattered throughout. Everything was in bloom, and Slovenia from above was vibrant and green in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There were more shades of green than I knew existed, the whole country visibly alive with spring.
Tired as I was, pressing my face to that window, all I felt was wonder. And then, as the wheels touched down: This is where I’m going. The in-between was over. I had arrived.
My driver’s name was Tim. On the way to the hotel, he pointed out a distant peak: Triglav, Slovenia’s highest mountain at 2,864 meters, visible only because the day was so clear. He said most people don’t get to see it on arrival and that it is a right of passage of sorts to summit it in order to call yourself Slovenian.
I told him I was born at almost exactly that same altitude in Quito, Ecuador. 2,850 meters above sea level.
He looked at me in the rearview mirror like I’d said something slightly unbelievable, and we both laughed.
It was a small moment, a shared laugh between strangers on a highway outside Ljubljana. But it was my first real connection with Slovenia, and it set the tone for everything that followed … a trip full of unexpected moments and the recurring feeling that I had landed, somehow, exactly where I was supposed to be.
Over the next 14 days, Slovenia gave me more than I expected.
I spent four nights in Ljubljana, and the city got under my skin quickly. It looks like a fairytale. The old town is almost entirely pedestrianized — little electric green-and-white vehicles (Kavalirs) gliding silently through cobblestoned streets, riverside terraces humming with locals and visitors moving at a genuinely unhurried pace. I wandered, climbed to the castle, learned about the dragon that has protected the city for centuries, joined a yoga class full of locals, and ate very well: ričet, a warming barley stew, Carniolian sausage at Klobasarna, and the most delicious walnut-and-honey dumplings at Moji Štruklji. I also spent an afternoon in the home of Jože Plečnik, the architect whose vision is stamped on almost every corner of Ljubljana, from its bridges to its market to its library. Learning how one person quietly shaped an entire city stayed with me in ways I’m still thinking about.
Beyond the capital: alpine pastures that seemed to go on forever, forests that felt like an embrace, traditional crafts learned from the hands that have always made them, food that kept surprising me, charming villages and the people who invited me in — into their homes, their tables, their daily lives — in ways I hadn’t anticipated and won’t soon forget.
But I’ll get to all of that.
For now, I want to stay at the beginning. At the word Slovenia arriving like a quiet yes. At a plane window and a landscape I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t have imagined.
I handed the map to someone else. And what they found for me was better than anything I could have planned myself. There’s something quietly radical about that kind of trust … about saying: I don’t need to control this. What surprised me most wasn’t the destination. It was what the destination revealed about me. About what I crave, what enlivens me, what I hadn’t known I was seeking until someone who’d listened carefully went looking for it on my behalf.
With love + curiosity …
Camila
About Mindful Travel Confessions by Camila Castro on Substack
For seekers bridging who they've been with who they're becoming, one journey at a time. Writer & Mindful Travel Coach sharing honest stories from the road, frameworks for intentional travel, and updates from my creative journey.