At MOYO, we’re proud to count Petra Draškovič Pelc among our community of guides and experts, and we’re lucky enough to sit down with her and hear the raw story of how she got where she is today and what experiences have shaped her path.
Petra guides visitors through Slovenia’s Kočevsko region, a place she affectionately calls “Alaska in miniature, although there are no towering peaks or glaciers; they both share the same untouched essence of the wild’’ as Petra described it, the same essence that changed the course of her life more than twenty years ago and which she has now found again right in her own backyard.
A childhood rooted in the wild
Petra’s connection to nature didn’t begin as a career plan; it started long before she was even aware of it: with solitude. As a child, and later as a young photographer, she spent hours wandering the forest alone, simply observing.
“I liked being alone, listening to the forest, observing animals, trees,” she says. “I could spend hours just observing, and this is where the magic starts happening.”
Every encounter with wildlife felt like a gift, never something to chase. This same instinct and deep respect for the natural world still defines how she guides today.
“This is my mantra even today, as a guide,” she says. “To put nature first.”
It was five months spent in Alaska in 2003 and 2004 that Petra credits with shaping her the most. Standing among untouched mountains and free-flowing rivers, she felt her own scale shift. “You are becoming aware that we are so small, so tiny, so unimportant in the whole scenario of nature,” she reflects. “But yet, this brings respect, care, deeper connection and even more admiration.”
The experience that changed her path
Petra’s path to guiding wasn’t a straight line. She trained as a scientist, earning a PhD in biomedical science, and seemed set on a career in Biochemical research and pharmaceuticals.
Then, during that same formative stretch in Alaska, nature gave her a moment she never expected. Petra fell from a cliff, catching herself on a blueberry bush and holding on above a 300-meter drop for seventeen hours before she was rescued. Alone with the wild for all those hours, she found something unexpected: clarity.
“This gave me enough time to reflect on my life, who I am, what I want to do, and see what matters in life,” she says.
She didn’t leave science behind right away; she went home and completed her PhD, but something in her had already started to shift. It wasn’t until she later moved to Kočevsko that she recognized the moment had come to build the life she’d manifested in her mind for years after that experience.
Finding her way to bears
In some ways, bears were always part of Petra’s story. Her mother’s family name is Medved, the Slovenian word for bear. But her first real encounter came in Alaska, watching black bears and grizzlies for hours on end.
That fascination eventually led her to Kamchatka, where she spent 40 days on a bear-and-tourism project run through Lomonosov University in Moscow and the Kronotsky Nature Reserve, working alongside leading bear scientists in the field, a long-time dream come true.
Getting here took years of work, an official guiding license through the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and, more importantly, she says, an education that never really ends.
“You gain most experience from the field, by yourself, day after day, in the rain, in the mud, in winter tracking, watching trail cameras,” she explains.
That hands-on learning has been backed by an ongoing exchange with bear experts across Slovenia, Croatia, Alaska, and the rest of Europe. She’s completed guide training through Rewilding Europe, as featured in The Guardian, and more recently MOYO’s Nature Positive Tourism Training. Even her guests, she adds, have been among her greatest teachers.
Her dedication to the region hasn’t gone unnoticed elsewhere either. Petra and her agency have been recognized as ‘Bear Friendly Ambassadors’ under the LIFE DINALP BEAR project. Her nature photography has been honored internationally, including an award in the Big Picture Natural World Photography Competition at the California Academy of Sciences. She’s also a member of the Nature First Photography Alliance, reflecting a guiding principle she carries on every tour, that the well-being of wild places and animals always comes first, even before the photograph.
What MOYO training gave her
Petra speaks warmly about MOYO’s Nature Positive Tourism Training as a genuine turning point in her career, not only for the knowledge, but for the community it revealed. Meeting other like-minded guides showed her that she wasn’t alone in the way she thought about her work.
It refined her approach to driving real impact locally, enhancing the guest experience, building genuine connections with the community, and delivering benefits that extend far beyond the tour.
“I would highly recommend this training to everyone,” she explains, “Not only does it provide you with knowledge, it leaves you with very deep emotions and connection.”
A shared home
For Petra, guiding through Kočevsko is more than a job, it’s her mission; her way of life. It’s a kind of homecoming and finally being able to show the very wilderness she once traveled to Alaska to find.
“I feel so happy and proud to be able to show what I was searching for years ago in Alaska, now in my home area,” she says. “Basically, in my backyard.”
She describes guiding as an act of opening her heart to a guest, sharing the most precious places of her home in the hope they’ll meet it with the same care she does. But her hope is further than admiration. She wants visitors to understand that this landscape isn’t only her home, or a place to pass through on holiday. It’s shared, too, with the bear, the wolf, the owl, the beetle, and countless other lives who call it home first.
“When you accept this,” she says, “many of your actions change.”
That shift from seeing to acting is perhaps the truest thing Petra hopes every guest carries home. It’s not about a photo of a bear, but a changed sense of whose home we are standing in when visiting these wild places.
If you want to experience the magic for yourself, check out our Journeys in Slovenia!
All images © Petra Draškovič Pelc