8 Sep,2025 By Fake Travel News
Here’s how you know you’ve made interesting career choices: when someone tells you you’ve been fatally poisoned, your first thought isn’t ‘call my family’—it’s ‘I wonder what Slovenia is like this time of year.’
Shakespeare wrote “the readiness is all.” He clearly never had Dr. Matthews from MI6’s medical unit cheerfully inform him over a secure line that he’d been exposed to polonium-210. Twenty-four hours, Matthews said. Maybe less. Polonium-210, for anyone lucky enough not to know, is the radioactive bastard that Marie Curie discovered—kills you in doses smaller than table salt, which really puts a damper on one’s afternoon plans.
Tuesday morning, I was Ian Caldwell—career operative, company flat in Vauxhall, zero friends outside the Service. Tuesday afternoon, I was Ian Caldwell with roughly the life expectancy of cut flowers.
The exposure happened during a routine brush pass in Prague. The USB drive was hotter than Chernobyl’s gift shop, apparently. Amazing what they leave out of the training manual—like what to do when your intel starts glowing.
With my internal Geiger counter ticking toward zero, I made a decision that would’ve horrified my handlers: I was going to spend my last day on Earth doing absolutely nothing operationally useful.
Destination: Slovenia’s Adriatic Coast
Mission Objective: Learn what “living” actually means
Operational Status: Completely compromised, utterly liberated
Slovenia wasn’t on any bucket list—spies don’t maintain bucket lists, we maintain cover identities and an unhealthy relationship with paranoia. But when death comes calling, Switzerland feels clichéd. I’d already seen enough of Eastern Europe’s grimmer offerings during extractions and asset meetings in basement cafés.
Besides, Slovenia has a poet for a national hero. France Prešeren wrote about love and longing—topics I’d avoided more successfully than foreign surveillance. If I was checking out, maybe I should finally understand what the fuss was about.
“Too soon the fruits of knowledge did I eat! Where dripped their poison, faded all delight…”
Prešeren’s words hit differently when you’re literally poisoned and your delight has, indeed, faded completely.
I caught a budget flight to Trieste—because even facing death, MI6’s expense policy remains surprisingly inflexible. The irony struck me crossing the border: after years of elaborate identity swaps and enough fake passports to stock a theater company, my final international journey involved showing my actual documents to a customs official reading a football magazine.
Izola hit me like a training exercise designed by someone’s grandmother. A local festival sprawled across the town center—crowds, noise, no clear egress routes, everything I’d been conditioned to avoid. Instead of conducting a threat assessment, I bought beer and something called artichoke gelato.
The gelato was revelatory. Not because it tasted good—it didn’t—but because for thirty-seven years, I’d never eaten ice cream in public without scanning for hostile surveillance. Today my biggest concern was whether artichoke complemented the local Laško beer (it doesn’t).
A man played what I can only describe as a broomstick with a string attached. After years of encrypted radio chatter and dead drops, this simple folk music hit me like a psychological freight train. I actually teared up watching an elderly accordion player. Apparently, polonium poisoning comes with unexpected emotional side effects.
The crowd swayed to rhythms older than any intelligence service. Children danced unselfconsciously while parents clapped along. I stood there—trained killer, keeper of state secrets, professional paranoid—watching normal people be happy for no strategic reason whatsoever.
Death countdown: 18 hours remaining
Slovenia’s coast stretches only 43 kilometers, but when you’re counting down final hours, even short coastlines feel infinite. I’d seen stunning landscapes during operations—Swiss Alps during winter extractions, Greek islands while tracking arms dealers—but I’d never simply looked at them.
I parked myself on a seat overlooking the Adriatic and did something I hadn’t done since childhood: watched clouds without analyzing their potential for satellite obscuration or extraction cover. Just… clouds being clouds. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked at anything without wondering what it was hiding or how it might betray me.
The view was almost offensively beautiful—turquoise water, rolling hills dotted with terracotta roofs, the kind of scenery that makes normal people plan return visits. I was planning nothing beyond dinner, which somehow made everything more vivid than any high-stakes operation ever had.
Death countdown: 14 hours remaining
A weathered fisherman approached, perhaps drawn by my obvious tourist confusion about why anyone would sit motionless for two hours. ‘First time in Slovenia?’ he asked in decent English. When I nodded, he smiled. ‘Prešeren wrote that we must learn to see beauty even in sorrow. You look like maybe you learning this lesson.’ He gestured toward the water. ‘This place, it teaches many things. Mostly it teaches us to stop running.’ The words hit harder than any intelligence briefing I’d ever received.
In Piran, I decided to try truffles. Not because I’d developed sophisticated taste buds in my final hours, but because they were obscenely expensive and sticking the Service with a ridiculous restaurant bill felt like poetic justice.
The waiter made a proper ceremony of it, going on about “earthy notes” and “seasonal complexity” like he was briefing the Prime Minister. I sat there nodding seriously, as if the last twenty years hadn’t been fueled entirely by instant coffee and whatever questionable meat came in military rations.
The truffle pasta tasted like soil. Rich, pampered soil that had gone to university, but soil nonetheless. Still ate the whole thing though. When you think you’re dying, even overpriced mushrooms feel significant.
Death countdown: 11 hours remaining
A local directed me to Slovenia’s “hidden gem” beach—about as hidden as MI6 headquarters, but populated with actual humans enjoying themselves. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t care about operational security or maintaining cover.
I bought fluorescent pink swim shorts from a tourist shop because dignity becomes negotiable when you’re terminal. Then I built a sandcastle. A proper one, with towers and a defensive perimeter and everything. When had I last created anything that wasn’t forged documents or improvised weapons? The answer was embarrassingly never.
Then I committed an act that would’ve triggered immediate psychological evaluation: I played on the children’s playground equipment. There’s something transcendent about riding a spring-mounted horse when you’re convinced you’ll be dead by sunset. Other parents looked confused, but their children seemed impressed by my commitment to the bouncing motion.
Death countdown: 8 hours remaining
Piran’s car-free center initially terrified my tactical brain—no vehicle extraction routes, no rapid egress options, no way to disappear quickly. For someone trained to always have three exit strategies, the constraint felt like operational suicide.
Then it became liberating.
Without escape options, I was forced to simply exist. I wandered narrow streets without checking for surveillance. I sat in cafés without positioning myself to monitor entrances and watched street performers without analyzing crowd dynamics for potential threats.
In the main square, a full orchestra played Vivaldi while tourists and locals stopped to listen. The music echoed off medieval stones under gathering dusk. I’d attended state functions with world-class entertainment, but this impromptu concert moved me more than any formal performance ever had. Maybe because for once I wasn’t scanning the crowd for threats—I was part of it.
Death countdown: 6 hours remaining
Slovenia’s drinking culture became my crash course in being human. Laško beer, Istrian wine, something called Hugo that tasted like summer in a glass. I’d consumed alcohol operationally before—always strategically, always maintaining awareness.
Tonight I got properly drunk for the first time since university. Not blackout drunk—my training wouldn’t allow that—but drunk enough to laugh at the cosmic joke of my situation. Career spy spending his last night getting tipsy on herbed Prosecco. The absurdity was overwhelming.
Death countdown: 3 hours remaining
As sunset painted the Adriatic in gold and orange, I realized I’d learned more about living in ten hours than in thirty-seven years of existence. All that careful planning, risk assessment, strategic thinking—and I’d never actually lived.
I’d survived. Accomplished. Served Queen and country with distinction. But I’d never sat on a Mediterranean terrace, watching light change on water, feeling genuinely at peace.
The irony was exquisite: it took a death sentence to teach me about life.
Near midnight, I witnessed something that completed my transformation from operative to human: a traditional kolo dance in Piran’s main square. Locals and tourists joined hands, forming a circle, moving to ancient rhythms under starlight.
I joined them.
Ian Caldwell—MI6 operative, holder of state secrets, trained in seventeen ways to kill with household objects—held hands with strangers and danced in a circle like some medieval peasant. It was glorious.
The kolo represents community, continuity, the eternal cycle. For someone facing the latter half of that equation, participating felt like a final gift—connection, belonging, joy without agenda or objective.
Death countdown: 2 hours remaining
I woke in my Piran hotel room at sunrise, hungover but definitely not dead. According to my calculations, I should’ve been experiencing organ failure. Instead, I was experiencing regret and the kind of headache associated with poor life choices.
My secure phone rang at 6:47 AM.
“Caldwell? Matthews here. Bit of good news about that polonium situation…”
Laboratory error, he explained diplomatically. The USB contained polonium, certainly, but my exposure levels were “negligible to nonexistent.” I wasn’t dying, or wasn’t even particularly unwell.
I was, however, profoundly changed.
I’m still with the Service, but I’ve made operational adjustments. I take actual lunch breaks. I’ve learned to cook beyond opening tins. I own civilian clothes in colors other than charcoal and navy. I’ve also stopped volunteering for the dangerous assignments that used to define my career. Turns out when you learn what living feels like, you become considerably less eager to die for Queen and country.
Most importantly, I return to Slovenia every few months—not for operations, but because I like it there. I have favorite restaurants, know locals by name, and I’ve become surprisingly competent at the kolo.
My handlers find this development “concerning” and “potentially compromising to operational security.” They’ve recommended evaluation.
They’re not wrong. Getting a fake death sentence was the best thing that happened to me. It taught me that survival isn’t living, that professional competence isn’t personal fulfillment, and that sometimes the most crucial intelligence you can gather is about yourself.
Slovenia’s tiny coast holds more life lessons per square meter than anywhere I’ve operated. The country whose national hero wrote poetry taught a spy how to feel.
Not bad for a mistaken death sentence.
Final Mission Report: Slovenia’s Adriatic coast highly recommended for existential breakthroughs and learning basic humanity. Operational security compromised but worth it.
Threat Assessment: Low for actual danger, high for emotional breakthrough.
Return Protocol: Already implemented monthly.
Ian Caldwell still works for the Service but now takes actual weekends—usually in small Slovenian towns where his biggest threat assessment involves choosing between gelato flavors. His psychological evaluation is pending indefinitely.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on the stunningly beautiful coast of Slovenia, you can visit the following link: Exploring the Magnificent Coast of Slovenia – Piran, Izola, Koper, and more!
