Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

August 1, 2025

1395m

Istria, Croatia

Vojak is the only P600m objective (actually boasts over 900 m prominence) in Istria County of the NW corner of Croatia not far from the border with Slovenia. There aren’t a lot of prominent peaks in this country so Croatia was not on the original itinerary, but Adam and I happened to be doing Snežnik in southern Slovenia mostly to dodge the fickle weather. It was late in the afternoon but the forecast was still calling for “promising conditions” further to the south, and we were both keen to visit a new country.

While driving south following Google’s direction we could see some intense thunderstorms building up behind us. Where we were an hour or two ago (Snežnik) was already soaked. The storms were moving rapidly towards south so I sped up hoping to beat the system. There are lots of trails on Vojak but due to the incoming weather and our time/energy constraint we decided for the simplest way, the drive-up on paved (but narrow and potholed) road from the north. This was my first trip to Europe so it was quite a mind blowing experience that the border crossing was completely free with no patrolling whatsoever. I had no idea how these countries with different culture, history and languages can be so friendly to each other. Elsewhere in the world (especially in Asia) the border guarding is usually considered a “big thing”. In any case we got onto the winding and heavily potholed access road. There was thankfully not much incoming traffic and we did successfully beat the storm to the highest parking lot.

This was basically a “drive up” but not entirely, as we couldn’t park the vehicle right on the very summit of Vojak. There was about 200 m of walking (on paved trail) required, so I don’t know if it could actually be called a “mechanized ascent”. On many occasions I ended up parking the car 20 m away from the very top of the mountain and those could be classified as “transport to summit – car”, but 200 m of walking isn’t nothing, so I’m not quite sure. The very summit of Vojak was a artificial tower made of stones. The views were better up on the tower so we lingered there watching the storms. The system never actually went this far south so never got rained on. This was also my first time seeing Mediterranean Sea even though what we saw was actually Adriatic Sea which is only part of the Mediterranean.

We still had to do dinner and some grocery shopping so we quickly drove down the mountain. The traffic situation going back towards Ljubljana was still terrible via the direct way so instead of waiting in the jam we re-routed by going east into the city of Rijeka of Croatia. This route was longer and probably took just as much time, but at least we were driving and seeing different things. About 2 hours later we got to the vicinity of Ljubljana and checked into the hotel. This was basically the cheapest we could find (about 70 EUR) in this part of Europe so we reluctantly accepted it. The weather was terrible on the following day so the plan was to sleep in and ride out the rain, so we desperately needed a hotel stay. The weather did end up improving for areas far to the west so we still managed to bag something.