The Lost Continent: general thoughts on travels in Europe whilst reading Bill Bryson

Read (kindle): August 2011

I’ve read a few Bill Bryson’s before, probably not as many as I should have though considering I like funny travel writing and this is what Bryson does best! I remember enjoying his Small History of Nearly Everything but then vaguely remember starting Notes on a Small Island at one point and not getting on with it. I decided that it would be a good idea though to read his Lost Continent book in which he travels around Europe, by train, whilst we travel around Europe, by train.

In the book Bryson is travelling around Europe by train, roughly following a route that he and his friend did as teenagers over from the States. The book has three different strands; tales of what he and Katz got up to, comparing what he saw and did 30 years ago with now, and then talking about what he gets up to in the new places he is visiting. I guess our travel logs of our Europe adventure this summer are similar in that we reminisce about the good old days of uni, interrailing and visiting places before stag parties and tourists change them.

Bryson’s is a good read and it definitely gave me ideas of visiting slightly further afield than we made it – he makes it to the eastern reaches of Europe where Istanbul sounds so much like our Middle Eastern experiences and Sofia and Bucharest sound like extensions of our time in the eastern-block. For the rest of this blog though I’m going to compare some of our experiences with Bryson’s and give some general musings on topics that came up time and again on our European summer.

 

Bryson’s quick gettaway

What is really striking chapter after chapter is that Bryson will arrive somewhere and within half a day of walking around will decide he doesn’t like it. It can be after a quick walk through the town that he is already back at the station, booking himself on the next train out of there. I’m proud to say that we are able stick it out a little longer and in fact nearly got to the end of our trip without even contemplating this…Our final stop in Bratislava bucked this trend and it was the run-down station, clustering of bums and winos and then the poor prospects of public transport to help us leave the station are that was driving us to jump back on the train that would take us all the way to Budapest. I’m happy to say that after getting into the Old Town of Bratislava (and getting out to the wonderful Devin Castle) we reconsidered and were actually really happy to be there. It was something that we were really conscious about when booking our trip; we wanted to actually stay in places and see them properly, not a superficial ‘do the top three things on the tourist list and then leave’ approach, but try and see the real city, real people and things beyond the tourist trail.

Which is best though – travelling far and wide, or spending more time and visiting fewer places? We went for the ‘more time in fewer places’ option; booking three nights everywhere, probably because of the way we have discovered Egypt has been through gradually finding out about the place over time, rather than a quick trip. But then when we think about it, this trip has shown us four countries and five cities – is this enough to call it a “European summer”?

 

The walking tour

Something that we and Bryson have in common is that we walk. A lot. It was in Amsterdam that we bought a 3-day travel card and almost immediately regretted the decision as we realised that we far prefer to walk than get transport if it’s possible. Walking you get to see more and with this trip we didn’t want to be in a rush (hence booking 3 nights everywhere to give ourselves a good two full days). Walking you get to stop more too – whether it’s to take a photo, grab some food, or just explore another route that grabs your fancy. Bryson very happily trecks all the way up the mountain in Scicily (how he does this with his luggage I don’t know! It’s never clear whether he is being old school and has a rucksack for everything, or is being middle-aged and middle-class like us and has a wheelie case) and while we don’t quite get to that extreme we do manage three castles (Krakow, Bratislava and Devin) in 30C plus humidity.

One thing we didn’t do when exploring cities, but often spoke about, was to cycle. We really enjoyed a holiday in Brugge once where we hired bikes and over the summer I was really missing having my bike in Raynes Park to just pop out quickly and not have to wait for buses etc. In London we noticed that the Boris Bike has really taken off – there are racks of them everywhere and more often than not over half the bikes were out. We also saw lots on the road being ridden by a mixture of locals and tourists. The tourists were easier to spot as they tended to cycle in groups, rather than in a line, and with a general disregard for traffic rules. Travelling around we saw that the idea of renting a public bike that started as a GCSE Geography case study of Amsterdam has extended beyond the Boris Bike and now includes Merkle Cycles (kind works if you say it funny) and Krakow Peddles.

 

The luggage question

Bryson never speaks about his bag and I remain intrigued as to whether it is a suitcase or rucksack. While rucksack would be the true backpacker option, but we felt there was no point in pretending we were roughing it when actually we were booking first class tickets on train (they weren’t that much more expensive and you get so much more legroom!) so we gave into being a little middle-class and a little middle-aged and took a wheelie case. The cobbles of Amsterdam (our first stop!) soon upset it and create a dodgy wheel that threatens to roll its last during every transfer.

 

It wasn’t like this in my day

We, like Bryson, find ourselves constantly harking back to the good old days of backpacking and seeing places ‘before all the tourists’. Although Bryson is revisiting places he’s been to before (and tries to find his old haunts), we are going to places that neither of us have visited before. We both though make comments about how things have changed and try to seek out places that mean something to us – such as the dive bars we find in Bratislava and Amsterdam. For us a lot of things ring true about the changing nature of tourism in the countries we visit (more stag parties and discovering that Poland is where all the Spanish tourists are, Jane!) and the changing nature of backpacking / interrailing (cue rants about travelling in groups rather than on your own or in a pair, wearing silly pork pie hats that couldn’t possibly be packed into a rucksack, and not even having a rucksack but a wheelie case instead).

 

Money, money, money

Bryson was doing his trip a good few years ago so things have changed between then and now in terms of money abroad. He uses travellers cheques which is a real blast from the past where as we have the Post Office MasterCard (no commission!) and a bit of cash for each country. Our trip is made easier in a way because we have the Euro in three places we visit (Amsterdam, Germany and Bratislava) and then a week in Poland on the Zloty (Warsaw then Krakow). Bryson on the other hand spends his time queuing to cash his travellers cheques or queuing to reclaim them after he has been pickpocketed. We just had the one queue – along Victoria at the exchange booth. We found a brilliant place to get currency before our trip which has the best exchange rate around (thanks to MoneySavingExpert) but sods law it seems that we buy just when the exchange rate is at its lowest – doh! I think we lost out to the tune of thirty quid over the whole trip maybe, so not much in the scheme of things.

Because times have a-changed we manage to use our card in most places for the ‘big’ things but then it’s the art of spending the change we’re unlikely to use again in a hurry (we know spending the Euros won’t be a problem). This is truly an art and more by luck than design we get quite good at it; in Poland we have just a handful of Zloty to our name when we leave (after paying for all of our tours with the tonne of cash we had post-Warsaw (where we managed to pay for nearly everything on card) we find ourselves with literally just enough money to pay for dinner on the last night when the bill comes and we find out that they can’t take card. We get ourselves to a supermarket that will take card to buy supplies for the next days train journey) and similarly in Hungary (our last two days on site at Sziget are spent checking the balance of our Sziget card to see that we have enough for a beer or lunch, and then topping up the exact amount we think we need so that at the end of the festival we don’t have to face the prospect of queuing to reclaim cash off the card. This strategy works well leaving us with enough change to buy a coffee at the airport just before getting the second flight out of Budapest that morning).

The Bloc

When planning our trip we just thought of the countries or cities we were interested in visiting. We knew that we wanted to explore eastern Europe a little more as we love Hungary and hoped that in exploring neighbouring countries we would find other places like it. So unintentionally we found a theme of our trip was visiting eastern bloc countries and finding out loads more about this part of history; our hotel and most of the exploring was in East Berlin following the wall and the DDR museum, then we were in Poland where we visited Auschwitz and drove a Trabant, and again saw the remains of communism in Bratislava. What we loved about our trip was learning about this part of history through actually seeing things – the wall, Nowa Huta. Scotty obviously hard a greater base knowledge than me, but it was all fascinating to learn about and see – and each part of our trip reinforced other things we had seen already. Reading Bryson’s final chapter when he visits Sofia and recalls the difference between his visit now and his visit as a youth, totally support what Cuba, our Crazy Guide, was telling us in Krakow and what we read in DDR museum.

 

Beer

We like our beer and so we wanted to get a taste of different local beers everywhere we went. There was only one evening in Bratislava where we ordered a bottle of wine rather than beer with our meal (as Bratislava is known for its wine, rather than its beer, it seemed right that we should give it a go). Generally there were lagers on tap in restaurants, but we did manage to seek out some ales and some microbreweries that had a little more on offer.

Amsterdam was our first beer experience and here it was lager, and in particular, Heineken, that was being served. We prefer our ales, but we’ll go for the national drink when it’s on offer. What really got us here though was the way in which they served beer. Beer was specifically poured with at least 2 inches of head on top. This was even the case if you ordered a small beer – you would find it 70% beer in your glass and 30% head on top. Yes, the glasses were marked with the correct measure to allow for this ridiculous head, but it just seemed bizarre. We went along to the Heineken Experience (which is more propaganda than brewery tour) and here they explained the huge head as preserving the bubbles in a beer (this doesn’t quite add up as once you have a sip the head fizzes away itself rather quickly). Despite having a huge head on each beer they insisted that you mustn’t drink the head, but should tip the beer back when you drink so that you get down to the beer – as drinking the head gives you a bitter taste (well don’t put so much head on your beer!) They also insisted on describing the beer colour as ‘golden’ rather than any other yellow-based adjective, so we were rather dubious of their science.

Although this head persisted in the beers we tasted over the trip, luckily it seemed to decrease slightly in relative volume the further east we travelled. One thing we noticed as we travelled was that on the drinks menu they would list the beers available (and their price), but then would also list the beer mixes they served and their standard prices. In Germany this was just the price of a beer and sprite a.k.a a shandy, but we did find an '”Orange Beer” listed in one place so thought we’d better give this a go. We’d been hoping that this ‘Orange Beer’ would be a masterful new brewing process, or something like the Blue Moon we fell in love with in the states (wheat beer served with a slice of orange on the side like a cocktail). What it turned out to be though was essentially beer with Fanta – and despite sounding rather dubious it was really quite drinkable and nice! Maybe one to try in Egypt as a way of making Stella more palatable!

There were more beer discoveries in Bratislava – the first being a study on symbols. In the menus of Bratislava each beer was listed with its percentage beside it, but these percentages were scarily high. We’re talking about 8% each beer and some hitting 12% We knew that on the continent they generally had stronger beers (and hence often serving them with a mixer or in smaller glasses than our standard pint and half pint) but this was seriously strong stuff. What was odd though, was that we weren’t feeling it – not feeling as drunk as we should be after a 12% beer! We doubted we were improving our alcohol tolerance and so thoughts back to some confusing beer symbols in Amsterdam. When we were in the Heineken Experience we found that in their brewing room the signs talking about brew temps and heating the wort had percentage signs instead of degrees C after the numbers. We looked around a bit and were quickly about to conclude that they simply had swapped the symbols around (why, we’re not so sure) as the numbers being listed only made sense with this swap. If the Bratislava beers had this symbol swap, then why were they listing the brew temperature? Was it to show that they were real lagers brewed at a cool temp? This couldn’t quite be right still, as a cool temp for lager is far less than 12C. After a few days Scotty got onto the interweb and managed to work it out. The % sign was in the right place, but what they were listing were the % sugars, rather than the % alcohol by volume that we are used to seeing beers described by. Mystery solved.

Our final beer discovery of the trip was the fine art of ordering a drink. In Egypt we’re (getting) used to table service, and we found that table service was the default everywhere we went on this trip. Amsterdam was a wonderful exception where on our first night we stumbled on a local bar with karaoke / sing-a-long bar maids – brilliant. On our first night in Bratislava we decided to visit a dive bar and found a few people sitting at the bar -  musician was setting up and so it seemed more like the place in Amsterdam. With no waitress in sight Scotty approaches the bar to order a drink. Two beers are ordered and the barman asks what kind of beer – as we are out to discover new beers on this trip we say “What you recommend?” and with a flourish two small bottles of ginger ale appear on the counter. Erm. OK. We think and Scotty brings these back to our table. A few minutes later a waitress appears all frazzled and says “They don’t have alcohol” “Erm. That’s OK” we say, not wanting to make a fuss, but then ask for two beers from her. A look around the bar tells us that there are two guys sitting with a bottle of vodka waiting for her to bring them two ginger ales. It seems that by speaking to the barman we disrupted the world order of things. We learn that the barman is only capable of serving the drinks that the waitress asks him to – anything else and it all goes to pot. To order a drink in Europe; don’t speak to the barman.

 

To more things

Everyone in Europe seems to like small dogs. If we passed someone walking their dog, the dog was always small and lots were ‘Jamie dogs’.

The food is rich! We can no longer blame American size portions on our summer waistline. We wanted to try the food of the places we visited, but after having pork every day (and without trying ending up with pork for three meals in one day) we decided that we needed to branch out a bit. The pork was lovely and in Germany I had red cabbage for two nights in a row (it was like Christmas!) then in Bratislava where the national dish is dumplings in a cheese sauce and nothing else (!) we realised that it was OK to diversify. We had some lovely meals though in some lovely restaurants (Dutch Pancakes, the DDR museum and then the old courthouse in Berlin, Five in Warsaw and the brewpub there too, Marmalade in Warsaw and the gorgeous little place we found in Bratislava on our last night).

Day 16: Bratislava to Budapest

We get up early as we want to read more news about riots in London. We’ve been picking up on the story of rioting in Tottenham, and find that it spread to some other parts of London including Enfield and South London. It looks terrible – from what is being shown on TV young people are just out, smashing into shops and taking what they want. We text a few friends who live in the area we later get a reply from Chin who works on Tottenham High Street and things look really bad and terrible there. It’s such a shame to have looting for no real reason and all this destruction. We keep reading the news even though it is so shocking and sad.

We end up leaving the hotel earlier than we need to as we’re all set to go and it means we don’t need to rush in the walk to the port. Outside it’s raining lightly but we put our jackets on as it’s a little chilly too. The breeze by the river wakes us up and we soon get to the port. There are a few people sitting around but it’s not entirely clear what we need to do to ‘check-in’ for a boat. We put the bag down and speak to the person at the ticket office who just tells us to wait in the main area so we settle down with our electronics out to pass the time.

More people arrive and we occasionally get up to walk a circuit around the building to see if any new boats have pulled up, but there’s no sign. It gets closer and closer to 10.30, when we should be leaving, and we ask again about our boat and are told again to just wait. It’s a little disconcerting, but with the other people around at least it means that we haven’t missed it!

The long wait means we could have had breakfast anywhere in town, or even at the coffee shop in the port that opened at 10am – we didn’t as we thought this would surely mean the boat would arrive the moment we were served! To stave off the hunger we start to munch the sandwiches that we bought yesterday, and this does the trick as soon enough we are called through as the boat has finally arrived!

As we booked our tickets online we only have a printed confirmation email with us, but when the skipper sees this he hands us a set of proper tickets that have a post-it note with our name on. We feel all official and so climb aboard. The boat has come down from Vienna this morning and it seems there is already someone sat on every row. However, we’re becoming experts at getting seats and manage to find a row of three to ourselves – it later transpires this is because one of the chairs has a default position of ‘recline’!

It’s cosy inside the hydrofoil with everyone on, but it’s an incredibly smooth ride – more like a train than a boat because even though we’re going at quite some speed there are no waves to disrupt our flow as we just fly over them with the bow rising upwards. Out of the window we see small towns of red brick go past amongst the green trees and landscape. Where there is a path to the river’s edge we can see a sandy approach that some people have taken advantage of on their deck chairs from their gardens, or driven up with their cars, gazebo and barbeque.

Our speed slows and the wide river starts to narrow. We’re in the main cabin, but there is a camera on the front of the boat that is linked to a screen in front of us and we see that we’re approaching a narrow bricked channel. Once we’re closer we see that actually this stretch of the Danube has a lock on it and we’re going down it!

We are moored up and are dwarfed by the size of the lock – we take up only a fraction of what must accommodate huge freight ships and river cruise boats that look a lot like the ones that run up and down the Nile, except with fewer outdoor swimming pools. As we’re stationary (well, our movement is just up and down, rather than along!) they open the top deck and we climb out amongst the smokers to take a look at the massive lock. It’s far larger than the one at Esna, and this makes it slower for the waters to drop, but doesn’t stop it still being a spectacle for all around who gather on decks and on the bank.

 

The journey continues with green trees lining the sandy banks and soon enough our phones beep to tell us that we are finally in Hungary – our final country of this long trip. As we approach the suburbs of Budapest we grab the video camera to film Sziget Island as we pass. The site isn’t nearly as exciting as we’d hoped since dense trees along the banks cover the festival from view and, unless you were looking, you would hardly notice the odd gap revealing large signs or striped tents. Although the press coverage has increased over the years with Sziget becoming more and more prominent on the European festival circuit, the trees have done a good job at hiding it away for it to remain our little secret.

The port for Budapest is in a far grander location than that in Bratislava as we pass the parliament building and alight in the middle of downtown, opposite the Gellert Baths which contain the best wave machine ever, as we discovered in 2007. It’s so odd after all the travelling we’ve done in the two weeks on this journey to be at our final destination. Amongst the excitement there’s certainly a few sighs off relief and hopes that we might now be able to rest a bit…but then we think of Sziget and know that, although we might be cheating by being in a hotel, we’re not going to let a week of intensive music and arts be restful. After all, this is what we came all this way for!

 

Before long we’ve negotiated the Metro and a tram line to get us to our hotel. The public transport carnet we had left over from last time is still valid, and it feels quite fun to be using tickets we bought at the end of our previous visit to come back again two years later. There’s a thrill at the familiarity of our surroundings – we can even still sing the tune that the public transport intercom makes as you pull into the next station. In the hotel itself we smile politely as the trainee receptionist tells us where everything is – we don’t have the heart to tell her this is our third visit to the same hotel.

Heading upstairs we find our room and deposit our bags.  Thirsty, we go to grab our water bottle – the first water bottle we bought when we landed at Heathrow at the end of June. It’s been with us on every part of our summer holiday from London to Buxton (and back) and all the way to here in Hungary. It’s with a touch of sadness that we find the label has finally torn – it’s survived the best part of 1,600 miles of travelling but given up after entering a 5* spa hotel. I like to think it’s the bottle’s small indication of disapproval of our middle-class and middle-aged approach to the festival.

With a quick change of t-shirt, we opt to head to the festival site and sort out our wristbands. Although there’s a bit of queuing to get on site – and a lot of confusion regarding how we get a card for their new payment system – we’re on site less than hour after leaving the hotel. And at this point, dear reader, this written blog ceases. Although it can never do justice to the full 7 days of the festival, our 3-hour Sziget Special radio show attempts to give an idea of the atmosphere of what is, in our opinion, the greatest show of arts and music in the world.

Day 15: Bratislava

We wake up without alarms at 9am, shower and get ready to head out.  It’s 9.30am by this time and – as it’s DaddyP’s birthday – give him a call.  It’s Sunday, after all, and he’s probably already up and about in readiness for a car boot sale. As it turns out he’s not already up, and the phone call at 8.30am in the UK gets the whole house up.  We’re sure that DaddyP appreciates the thought, but feel guilty all day that his birthday began with a rather rude awakening from us.

We leave the hotel and head in the direction of the Old Town to find some breakfast before catching the bus to Devin Castle. It’s a glorious day, weather wise, and considering it’s both earlier than we were out the previous day and it’s a Sunday we’re surprised at how busy the streets are. We assume that people are here for a short city break.

Our wanderings lead us to a cafe which looks to have good coffee, but very little in the way of breakfast-type things. We decide to see if we can find something better, so head out again.

Nearby we find a small supermarket hidden at the end of a dark corridor leading off the main street. It’s a mini-market type place, and we’re able to buy some breakfast snacks here. Snacks in hand, we head back to the cafe where we order a drink (there is a sign on the table explicitly stating that we should order at the till) and two frothy lattes come out. Sadly the froth makes up over 50% of the mug, and by time we’ve got through it to the actual liquid we find the coffee to be tasty but in short supply. With at least something inside us now, we walk the 5 minutes round the back of the Cathedral to bus station where we snack on chocolate covered fruity macaroons while waiting for the 29 to Devin Castle.

The bus station is built under the flyover that leads to the UFO bridge, and the concrete wasteland is enhanced by the various societal misfits that hang around the one snack shop here. Quite why you would choose to go to a grotty bus station to buy a pint of beer is beyond us, but there seemed to be no end of people for whom this was a usual Sunday morning exercise.

Before long the bus arrives, and we board along with a good half dozen others who also seem to be heading to the castle. There’s a couple of other holidaying-types, and a family of Bratislavan locals. The drive itself follows the course of the river, and emerges into green woodland only 15 minutes outside the city. It’s a pleasant drive, and as we begin to see signs to Devin itself we notice that we are driving through the outskirts of a very cute village.

A large car park suggests that this really is quite a popular place to visit. Around this a range of small stalls are arranged, each selling small tourist gifts or local produce.  Nearby are two cafes, each full of people.  Most of the cars in the car park have Slovakian plates, and many have bike racks strapped to the back.

On the high cliffs above are impressive ruins of an enormous stone keep overlooking the We begin to climb the hill to the main gate.  It’s a hard climb up a steep incline, especially considering the heat and humidity.  The entry price is reasonable, and they follow a policy similar to that in Egypt where Slovakian nationals get cheaper entry.  We’re all for free museums, but considering the squeeze on budgets in the UK we don’t see why museums shouldn’t charge a small fee for non-UK citizens and then either allow Brits in for free or for a small charge.  It’s hardly a complicated system, and it would generate masses of much-needed revenue for the museums.

Climbing onto the first terrace of the castle grounds a winding path leads past a series of ruins.  In most cases only foundation stones remain, but excellent signage makes for a very informative walk.  The oldest remains date back to the Bronze Age, but we also see the foundations of a Roman-era basilica and a 4th century chapel.

It’s lovely to be out in the country – we’ve had city break after city break for nearly three weeks, and its great to finally be in the ‘real’ outdoors on such a gorgeous day. The grounds are so big that, despite the number of visitors suggested by the cars in the car park, you’re often alone to wander.

Climbing to the highest point of the cliff we emerge into the central courtyard of the main keep. The majority of this was built while under the control of the Bathory family, of which Elizabeth Bathory is perhaps the most well-known. She is widely assumed to be the most prolific female serial killer of all time, presented by many as a female version of Vlad the Impaler, and reputed to bathe in the blood of virgins to gain immortality.

A well in the centre of the courtyard is covered with an iron grating, but a tap and small bucket is provided for you to pour water down and listen to the splash. It takes nearly 10 seconds for the water to hit the bottom, and indicated just how high we are on the cliff.

  

Inside one of the old basement rooms a well-produced display on ‘defending a castle’ has a wide range of artefacts and just the right amount of information. Scotty can’t help but spend ages reading every single line, plotting ways that he could liven up the Medieval Realms topic for Year 7 with a project on castle design incorporating elements of the settlement topic the students would have already studied in Geography. What better way to implement your Geographical knowledge than plan where to build your castle for the best defence?

We leave the small exhibition and climb the exposed side of part of the keep.  Walking into what was once a sitting room, we find ourselves standing on a balcony overlooking the confluence where the Morava flows into the Danube. The colour difference between the two – the brown Morava and the ‘blue’ Danube – is striking. Below us, perched impossibly on a narrow rocky needle, is an observation turret known as the Maiden Tower where legend says women would take refuge during times of attack.

 

On the other side of the river is Austria, and within seconds a ‘beep beep’ indicates a new text message from Orange. We’re so close that we’re picking up the Austrian mobile phone signal, and so feel that we’ve sort of visited this other country today.

 

In total we spend over 2 hours walking around the site before descending back down to the cafes at the bottom for some lunch.  We’re a little paranoid as they have us over a barrel since it’s not as if there is anywhere else we can eat!  However, the price is very reasonable and the food is good. Alice has a local Devin speciality with her meal – a wine mixed from blackcurrant wine and ‘normal’ red wine. We’d already bought a bottle of this from a guy at one of the stalls nearby. With us not being able to speak Slovakian, and him not being able to speak English, the entire conversation was held in Scott’s badly-remembered GCSE French. But the guy was friendly and nice and gave us a few tasters so we know that what Alice has in front of her is a cross between a cassis and a wine.

At the other end of the beer garden is a band. It seemed completely unnecessary at first, but their Slovak covers of classic country and western songs is actually great fun to listen to, and adds to fun of “a good day out”. On The Road Again worked particularly well in Slovakian.

After lunch we decide not to rush for the bus and so take a walk around the base of the castle, from where we get an amazing view of the curious Maiden Tower. There’s a network of walking and cycling routes along the river and through the woods, and lots of people fishing and canoeing on the river.As a cruise boat steams past, a speedboat crosses the confluence and a bi-plane makes a run up the valley. It’s like something out of an action film. It seems that Devin area is a big draw for outdoorsy people to make it a full day out. Considering it’s only 30 minutes from Bratislava, and bearing in mind our initial disappointment with the concrete of the city, we’re really sold on the area now.

 

Rather than doubling back along the riverside walk, we opt to make a complete circuit of the base of the castle which leads us through the village of Devin, where we see signs for Devin International School! It all seems a little too good to be true, especially when a search on Google later that night reveals that the school teaches IGCSE and IB.

After a brilliant time in Devin we eventually take the bus back to Bratislava. Alice has a strong t-shirt tan and is a little pink from the great weather, but within a couple of hours it resolves itself into suntan – clearly our ‘Egypt base layer’ just needed a bit of topping up.

On the way back to the hotel we call in again at the mini-market we visited earlier in the morning. We pick up a sandwich each for lunch tomorrow, some snacks for the boat journey to Budapest, and a bottle of Kofola – a Slovakian cola-type drink that we saw many people drinking at Devin Castle.

Back at the hotel we prepare for to broadcast the radio show. During the show it starts to rain and get pretty windy, which is a real shame on our last night, but we reflect that at least we had a glorious day for our trip out. If the weather had been like this earlier in the day we probably wouldn’t have discovered what a fantastic place Devin is.

You can download or listen to the radio show by clicking here.

As the weather is still pretty grotty after the show, we decide not to venture too far for dinner.  Looking through the guidebook, Alice finds a place that we passed yesterday on our way down from Bratislava Castle and double checks the reviews online since the guidebook itself is 10 years old!

Heading out, dressed in our wet weather gear, we find ourselves walking into a homely and warm little place that actually appears to be traditional, rather than just decorated to look traditional. They seem to have a range of beers on tap, but the reviews all state that this restaurant has one of the best cellars in Bratislava and so decide to to go for a bottle of wine instead. Although the bottle ends up costing the same price as our main course and dessert combined, it was well worth it and it becomes evident why Slovakian wines are so rare in the UK – the Slovakians choose to keep them for themselves!

The service in the restaurant is perfect – attentive without being over-bearing, helpful without being cringingly deferential. However, we’re the only people in the entire restaurant. It makes for a really special ‘last’ meal on our tour before switching into festival mode in Budapest, but it strikes us a real shame that nobody else has chosen to venture 3 minutes out of the Old Town to experience such a wonderful restaurant.  Wonderful, that is, apart from the incredibly curious nature of Alice’s dessert of ‘peaches in green spice’ which turns out to be caramelised peaches with a load of raw green peppercorns!

Day 14: Bratislava

We’re not in a rush to get up as we saw a lot of the Old Town yesterday when walking around to find dinner, but we head out in search of breakfast and are glad that the weather is still looking good. We decide to talk a walk through the Old Town following the coronation route and will find breakfast once we’re on route.

Our hotel is near the castle and so we are already near the Cathedral that once saw Hungarian kings crowned and entombed. We like our exploring and, up a set of stairs at the back of the church, we find an exhibition of the crowns and golden treasures that have passed through here. In the other direction we find steps cut into the rock below, taking us into the crypt where each branch of the narrow corridor is lined with bricked-in royalty and important clergy. The Cathedral, we assume, was at some point stripped of its grander decoration. The building is simply too impressive for the rather dowdy interior to have done it justice. The ornate carving of the choir stalls, and the intricate designs of the stained glass windows suggest that the Cathedral once experienced much grander times.

 

It’s a lovely morning to be out as not only is the weather in our favour but it’s also incredibly quiet out – we are almost the only people on the streets despite it being after eleven on a Saturday morning. Hardly anything is open and as we walk we start to wonder what time everyone else gets up!

We get breakfast on the main square, choosing a restaurant that didn’t have a table free last night, but it seems this isn’t a guarantee of quality as the food is nothing too special especially considering the price is considerably higher than dining on the main square in Krakow.

We continue on the coronation route and find small streets criss-crossing themselves.  We easily walk every street in the Old Town centre and are happy as the city is winning us back after our poor introduction to it yesterday at the station.  While wandering through the only surviving original city gate we find another way-marker to major international cities. This time we find both Cairo and Budapest.

The route finishes just a street away from the rive,r and so we take the opportunity to find the port. This is obviously not the first port of call (‘scuse the pun!) for most visitors to Bratislava but as we’re getting to our next, and final, city by boat we want to check it out. It’s small with only a few shops and two ticket offices. Maybe we were expecting the international port to be larger but, with only a few boats a day coming through (either upstream to Vienna, or downstream to Budapest), it doesn’t really need to be big and fancy.

As we leave the port building we go on the riverside walk back towards the castle area. The path is lined with benches, and each has a little sticker advertising free WiFi. We’ve got the radio show on tomorrow and there isn’t free internet in the hotel, so we grab a seat and see if it’s for real. It takes a few tries but the touch is eventually connected. Yes it’s internet, but it’s pretty slow. A shame, really, as a proper OB would have been excellent – seems like it will be another hotel-room special!

Back in the Old Town we grab a quick lunch as we’re finally having some luck finding somewhere that does sandwiches (that are cheap too!) for that quick bite. We then grab a cold drink and head up the steep steps to the castle that overlooks Bratislava Old Town and the Danube. On our way we pass a rather curiously-worded plaque, ‘in commemoration of the first witch burnt in Bratislava’.  Even now we’re not sure whether it’s a memorial or a celebration.

The view across the river is absorbing as we try to work out where the border with Austria might be. We’ve read in a travel guide that you can catch a bus and then walk into Austria, and think that this sounds like a cool thing to do tomorrow. The castle is being heavily renovated and so not many rooms are open, which means this is a quick trip. We try to extend our time by walking through the green grounds and gazing at the speed the river is flowing beneath us. The view from here looks straight out onto the UFO Bridge and it’s amazing to see it carve up the city as the road runs between the castle’s steep cliffs and the Old Town.

   

With the walk last night and the walking today we have pretty much exhausted the Old Town. We could do a museum tomorrow, or spend a day sipping and sitting in cafes, but we’re not ones for taking it easy on holiday. We decide to check out the idea of walking to Austria tomorrow and so decide to find some free WiFi since we think investigating it online is going to be more successful than another trip to the railway station. It’s typical, though, that once you start looking for something you can never find it and it takes us a few tries to find a cafe with the ‘free Wi-Fi’ sign. The first place that has it which turns out to be a cocktail bar called Paparazzi so we pick a table out front and get set up. We decide to go against our usual order of beer so opt for cocktails as this is Paparazzi’s speciality (Slovakia’s speciality is wine and we haven’t tried any of that yet!). We end up ordering some cucumber-based drinks (Alice’s is a cucumber gin, and both come with a stick of cucumber as a swizzle stick) which are really quite nice. We manage to sip them perfectly to time with the amount of WiFi access needed. While we sit there, a stark naked woman walks past trailed by a TV crew.

Our research has found that actually it’s not all that practical to walk to Austria, which is a shame. The roads seem too busy, and the towns that are on the bus route don’t have much going for them. The browsing has allowed us to formulate a new plan of action for tomorrow, though, and so we settle on going to a place called Devin Castle. It’s been listed in a few guide books and is at the end of a bus route direct from Bratislava Old Town, so hopefully it won’t be too complicated getting there. If it’s a bit dull then we know we can fall back on the sipping and sitting plan.

We decide to go to dinner at one of the awesomely named places on the main drag and go for Cafe Rock over the Allstar Cafe. Both the food and beer are decent enough and, like the Fighting Cocks pub in Kingston, it seems that you have to have tattoos or Goth-like hair to work here. We have a table outside to take advantage of the nice weather but inside the place is cavernous. It gets us thinking about how mainland Europe is set up for such weather extremes: really pleasant summer evenings with tables lining the streets in the summers, but deep, warm insides ready to be used in the winder months.

While we have dinner there are the occasional interjections from the stag parties that are in town (it is a Saturday after all). There are at least three groups we can see from our table, all at different levels of rowdiness. We can see the attraction of coming here (primarily cheap beer), but we’re finding that it’s actually not as cheap as it could be. The beer was cheaper in Warsaw, and the food was cheaper pretty much everywhere we’ve been, so we wonder how long it’s going to be before the stag-dos cotton on to this.

On the way back to the hotel we decide to stop off for a final drink as it’s an excuse to see what some of the small cafe places are like. We find ourselves in Cafe Hemmingway and manage to mess up the ordering protocol again – after a while of us sitting at a table the barmaid (who is only two metres away) has not taken our order so Scotty heads to the bar.  She responds by saying she’ll be over to take our order shortly. Despite the initial confusion it seems a pretty chilled out place, and it’s quite a relaxing way to end the day. We spend the drink pondering the beer descriptors in the menu. Everywhere in Bratislava describes their beer by percentages, but they seem staggeringly high; this is 12% apparently. We figure that there is no way it can actually be 12% ABV as with this being our second beer of the night we’d be on the floor. We’ve seen % and centigrade interchanged before and wonder if maybe they could be advertising the brewing temperature, but that doesn’t quite seem right either. We leave the bar quite confused.

Day 13: Krakow to Bratislava

Our day starts relatively early as we get up for an early breakfast before catching a (nearly) all-day train to Bratislava in Slovakia. With everything packed, we head to the station in Krakow and find the platform. Although we’re getting used to the platform / track listing system in Poland, it still makes us a little unsure of things and with this being the only train today that will get us to Bratislava we don’t want to get it wrong.  We board this first train with no problems, and arrive in Katowice to change trains.

 

Poland doesn’t seem to use electronic central departure boards.  Instead the stations rely on posters that list all the trains departing, a few key stations that they will visit, and then the platform they will leave from (platform changes don’t seem possible here it seems!) We find a poster that corroborates some of the details we have been given; the time on our ticket, train type and one or two of the stations, but it describes the final station as being Prague at 18.35 and then also Budapest at 20:40 but with no mention of Bratislava at 18.50 (which is what our ticket is due to get us). This starts to concern us – we don’t want to go to Prague, and we can’t see how our train can go there at 18.35 and then arrive in Bratislava at 18.45 as shown on our tickets.  Hmmmm.

We decide that we must be getting a dividing train with part going to Prague and part to Budapest (via Bratislava), but we’re still a little unsure of this assumption. It seems a little ironic that we are going to Sziget in such a slow way that we are getting off a train that would otherwise take us directly to Budapest! We chat to two other pairs of backpackers (not that we are backpackers, but travelling around Europe by train we feel some affinity with them and offer them pearls of wisdom as we are now 30 and can make comments to them about how things were so different/the same (delete as appropriate) when we were at Uni). They restore our faith in backpacking that was slightly destroyed in Amsterdam by the large groups we saw travelling together. They, too, are waiting for this train (one set going to Prague and the other to Budapest) and, although we all agree with the reasoning that the train must divide, everyone is a little wary.

As we’re looking again at the ‘poster of knowledge’ two Polish girls come and check that we are OK working out our train. They speak good English and are very helpful confirming first that they train does indeed divide (so for Bratislava we will end up on the final two coaches which will continue after Bratislava to Budapest) and they also tell us that this train is notoriously late or delayed. They then hand us a magazine and begin talking about being a Jehovah's Witness.

We didn’t mind chatting to the two girls, and it was really lucky that they told us that this train is usually late, because we would have been panicking.  Indeed, it’s nearly and hour after it was due that the train rolls in. We find our seat in the second-to-last coach despite the odd seat numbering.  Somehow seats 16, 17, 18 and 24 make a set of four seats around a table, and there aren’t any seats lower than 12 in the carriage. We’re sat in a pair and the carriage is over half full. We’re travelling second class as there isn’t a first class coach that goes on our part of the route and, although the seats aren’t bad (they’re the size and space we get on the train between London and Stockport), we notice that compartments are smaller than we’d experienced in first class.

We set off and absorb ourselves in the electronic pursuits of blogging, reading and i-pod-ing and it’s only two hours into the journey when “beep beep, beep beep” and our phones tell us that we’re in Czech Republic.When we were at the station the other travellers had asked us why we weren’t going to Prague, as it’s a far more likely stop in this area than Bratislava. On this trip we’ve managed to make stops in cities that neither of us have been to before and, although Prague has probably changed a lot since we were there over five years ago, we wanted to try and see new things.

About an hour later and we are making our long stop in Bohumin for the train to divide. We stay put in our seats at first, but when we notice another passenger from our carriage is on the platform calmly having a cigarette, we deduce that it’s OK to get out for some air and the train won’t pull away without us. Scott gets off just as they’ve finished unhooking us and sees the main train pull away into the distance, leaving our two carriages on their own at this deserted station.

 

While Scotty is outside hoping that another engine will come along soon to pick us up he overhears a funny conversation.  “So, are you sure this is the train to Budapest?”  “Yeah, coz that guy is wearing the t-shirt of that festival”  “Shall we check with him?”  “Nah – he probably doesn’t speak English.”

So, there are advantages to wearing the Sziget t-shirt on every leg of the trip!

After 20 minutes we’re picked up by another engine and continue on our journey, making up some of the time lost from the delay leaving Krakow. It’s our longest journey, and by the time we eventually arrive at Bratislava we feel in need of a shower, some air and some food.

We stand on the platform waiting for the crowds to disperse before making our way through the station. We’ve been through a dozen stations so far on this trip and suddenly we find ourselves in the worst. It’s a grotty, crumbling grey concrete building that is about as welcoming as the vagrants lying around drinking just outside. This isn’t quite what we wanted to greet us, so we look around for ways to make a quick getaway.

We have a list of the trams and buses that will take us to our hotel, but looking at the bus stop it seems none of them go via the station. It takes us a few minutes to find a tram stop because there aren’t really any signs and we’re rushing about trying to get out of the station area. We find a ticket machine – which is a start to getting out of here – but it’s broken. Finally we find some escalators that take us down to the tram area; they are broken too, so we use the stairs. Finally we have some luck as there is a working ticket machine, but we still cannot find the trams we need. We’ve nearly given up the idea of public transport and think we might have to drag the case two kilometres to the hotel, but we find a map of the trams and buses. It seems that there aren’t any trams of buses that leave the station and go anywhere near our hotel. We’re really quite surprised at this as our hotel seems to be in a pretty major area of town on the road to the New Bridge between the old town and the castle but, no, there are no transport links from the station.

Having taken a photo of the public transport map for later reference, we walk five minutes along the road away from the station towards a stop that should take us to the hotel. At the bottom of the station approach we use a massive road bridge to avoid broken concrete streets and a massive road junction in the hope of finding a bus stop that will take us to the hotel and away from the poor first impression we have been given of Bratislava.

It’s a concrete grey mass of a city. Large roads, ineffective transport and unfriendly streets. This is what we feared Warsaw might be like and we’re both quite glum at the prospect of spending three nights here.  We had initially planned two, but when we decided to leave Vienna out of the trip we upped our stay. We’re staying at the Ibis on the edge of the Old Town and find it easily from the bus stop; the building and our room are generic and functional. We don’t want to hang around in the hotel for too long, so we dump our stuff and have a much-needed shower (all-day train journeys are sweaty work!) before we head out.

We’d booked this hotel because it is near to the Old Town, but as it isn’t actually in the Old Town it is a bit more affordable. We need to cross a grey bridge over the dual carriageway that runs around the Old Town to get there. The road was built to connect the second bridge of Bratislava over the Danube. The road and bridge were more gifts from the Soviet cousins, and the bridge features an amazing UFO-like structure on its central span.  It’s known, in a typically functional socialist sort of way, the UFO.

The road itself cuts the only line possible between the Old Town and the emerging cliffs of the castle. We are quickly over the bridge and head down a set of steps on the far side and things are starting to look up! We find ourselves walking through an Old Town of old streets, narrow, winding, passageways, arches and then lots of bars and restaurants. Phew – it’s not all grey! This is more like it!

We find ourselves in the main square and a klezmar band are playing on a small stage set up at one end. This is much more like it! We’re not in a rush and so stop to listen. The band finish after we’ve caught only a few songs but this gives us an excuse to continue our exploring. We try to eat on main square but its restaurants are full – this isn’t surprising considering it is the main square and there are only four restaurants here, instead of each side being covered in restaurants like Krakow. We keep going and soon find ourselves on a broad boulevard where another stage is set up for a concert. It seems that this has already finished and a bar, Verne, that we have been recommended nearby is also full. It seems we’re not having much luck, but we’re enjoying exploring on a nice evening after a day cooped up in the train.

We end up in a restaurant near St Michael's gate where we sit outside and opt to try some Slovakian beer. The beer is good and we’re getting less and less head on the beers as we go further from Amsterdam, but it’s still not quite what we’d pour for our own beer! We go a little more mainstream for our food rather than going full-Slovak on our first meal – we’ve still not quite recovered from not all the pork and cabbage in Germany!

Having paid for our meal we take a meandering route back to the hotel, and find ourselves on the edge of the Old Town where it meets ‘real’ Bratislava.  Always keen to check out the local dive bars, we venture into one which is lit with fluorescent strip lights and has what appears to be a band setup in one corner.  Scotty heads to the bar and orders two beers.  The barman asks what type, to which Scotty replies whatever Slovakian beer the barman suggests.  He nods and heads to the fridge from which he takes two bottles of Schwepps ginger beer, does a flourish with his bottle opener, and slams off the lids.  Confused, Scotty takes the bottles to where Alice is sat and begins ponderously sipping.  Either the barman didn’t understand, he’s tee-total, or he is having a laugh.  Two minutes later a waitress appears, shrieks, “this is not beer, it is tonic!” and clarifies our order.  She heads to the barman, who is given a severe dressing down, and begins laughing uproariously.  He then goes to the fridge, takes out another two ginger beers, and passes them to the barmaid who takes them to a table of older guys sitting with empty glasses and a bottle of gin between them.  It appears Scotty stole their mixer.

Shortly afterwards two lukewarm beers arrive at our table, the smudge marks on the glasses perfectly highlighted by the aggressive light of the fluorescent tubes.  A man who looks like a 1980s Greek waiter then walks to a stack of keyboards and other assorted musical electronics he picked up from a junk sale, and begins singing La Bamba.  As he moves on to Mambo Italiano, we notice that he’s not really playing the keyboards.  They’re not plugged in to anything, and his hand movement is the same for every song.  At one point a guitar solo kicks in and he taps the keys in a haphazard fashion, like a cat walking on a piano.  At one point during a song he completely removes his hands from the keys, combs his hair, and adjusts the microphone volume.  When he spots us watching him he panics and begins stabbing the keys again.  It’s like we have unearthed his secret and he’s afraid we’ll tell the owner and get him sacked.

For 20 minutes while this is going on a steady stream of inline skaters are flying past the door.  Apparently Friday night is skating night.

Day 12: Krakow

We’re not in a rush to get up today as, although there is more we could do in Krakow, we’re giving ourselves a chilled out day of exploring the Jewish Quarter and then in late afternoon we’ll go to the museum in (under!) the main square. Each city that we’ve been to we’ve thought we’d have a “day off” but as we’ve discovered more about each place we’ve not quite got round to this yet!

As with the castle yesterday, we decide to walk to Jewish Quarter instead of taking the tram. Although it’s close to the castle we take a different route from last time and we’re soon off the tourist route and on to regular shopping streets. It’s along here that we spy our first Sziget poster, which we get quite excited about.

We find the start of the area and slow our wandering down as we enter a square of cafes and restaurants that are all open with chairs outside in the sunshine. We don’t feel like stopping just yet, but find an information board which marks the different notable buildings in the district and a walking route through it. We try to memorize the first bit of the map and then set off on this walking tour; memorizing a few turns at a time in the hope that we’ll see the next board before we need to go any further.

It’s a nice area to explore, especially in the good weather and with quiet streets. The buildings are well preserved and we can definitely see that it is ‘up and coming’ with trendy looking bars, shops and cafes starting to appear. Our route takes us to what on the maps seems to be a market square but turns out to be almost a market octagon.

We circle the octagon which is in the square (if that is mathematically possible!). There are open air market stalls around a low central building. Only some of the stalls are open today; flowers, fresh veg and brick-a-brack.  We wander through them and gradually approach the main building in the centre. The outside wall of the building has a small window on each of the many sides, and through the open windows they are selling hot drinks and simple snack foods. In front of each window is a single pair of chairs for the customers to sit on, and it’s a really sweet sight. Only a few of these are open and at one a customer sits on one of the two chairs that is catching the sun as the owner leans out of the small window to talk to him. As we round the building we find a single door between the stall windows, and this takes us behind the first layer of activity and into a market hall that is set up for a meat market with white tiles and high windows to keep it cool. As it’s mid-morning all signs of fresh market activity here have gone. This would be a great place to visit on market day – inside and out – and it’s a shame that we won’t be here for it.

After further meanderings around the Jewish Quarter, we find ourselves on the river and so take a walk along the bank towards the castle. The river path is wide and flat and, other than the occasional bicycle thundering past, it’s nice to be out of (or at least on the edge of) a city.  The path is marked with kilometre intervals sprayed across it – we pass both 10km and 34km.  We assume that at some point in the recent past they’ve used it for a race of some kind – and that the race involved a loop of some kind as we haven’t quite walked 24km on this meander.  It’s perfect for that, to be honest – flat, wide and pretty.  As we walk along we also laugh about how this is the first day without any threat of rain, and so we’re finally able to walk around without waterproofs strapped to the bag!

Finding ourselves beneath the castle walls, we decide it’s time to head back into town.  We opt to follow the ‘university route’ – a series of paths through nice shady areas in the area once occupied by the city walls but which are now lined by the buildings of Krakow University.   One stretch has a large and detailed display of John Paul II’s time as Pope, from his election in the late 1970s through to his death.  There is, understandably, a focus on his visits to Poland.  Indeed, our time in Poland has often felt like we’re following his route as every place he visited has a plaque or statue to commemorate it and we’ve seen plenty of them.  Poland strikes us both as a place that is proud of its Catholic heritage, but also wants to celebrate its minorities.  I guess this may be a result of their history in the first half of the twentieth century; after all, the large Jewish minority was wiped from Poland by the Nazis alongside other religious and minority groups.  Compared to Egypt, where genocide has (thankfully) not taken place, religious minorities at least appear to be actively assimilated into Polish society whereas recent tensions in Egypt have suggested that claims of tolerance and acceptance are not played in the majority of communities.

Regarding the Pope, the thing that strikes us was his focus for people fighting against Communist rule.  Indeed, our tour guide in the salt mine the previous day said how many Poles see John Paul II as one of the most significant – if not the most significant – force in bringing about democracy.  It’s widely accepted by historians that the act of following the church in the years to 1989 was a form of dissent against the political system, but something doesn’t quite add up about this claim considering the continuing strength of the church over two decades on.  For the people of Poland, it must surely be something more than ‘just’ a form of rebellion.

Our walk finishes with us back in the main square, where we look up a restaurant for lunch.  The InYourPocket guides that we had previously used in Berlin and Warsaw comes in handy again in Krakow, suggesting a good places to eat on the main square with an unbeatable lunchtime menu.  We’ve found that – considering it’s the main square – all the restaurants and cafes are amazingly affordable.  Whereas you would normally expect to pay a significant premium to eat or drink in this location, here in Krakow it isn’t so different in price to places down the backstreets.  It’s nice to take advantage of it.

We begin to realise that – shock horror – we now appear to have the afternoon free without anything planned.  Our time-specific entry to the museum isn’t until much later this evening, and we enter an panic-like phase regarding how we’re going to fill our time!  We’ve also got a fair bit of Polish cash left as we bought everything on card in Warsaw, thinking that Krakow was going to be more expensive than it turned out.  We consider converting it to Forints to use in Hungary later in the trip, but instead decide to try to book an afternoon tour instead.

We’d read about the Crazy Guides in the InYourPocket guide, and they had also been mentioned in a couple of ‘insider’ tips in newspapers that we’d looked at in the UK.  Their flyer was in the hotel when we arrived, and we had been discussing the possibility of going on a tour with them.  Now that we found some spare time on our hands, and a bit of spare cash, we figured there would be no harm in going to their booking office to see if we could get on a tour with only an hour-or-so’s notice.

Finding the office, however, proved challenging.  Firstly, we find our way blocked by a string of large generator trucks, cabling and caravans.  We initially assume that the fair is coming to town, but turning a corner find ourselves being held back by security guards and police as an episode of a Polish police drama has chosen to film a scene in this street.

 

We hang around for the take to finish (we assume they won’t use this one as the main actor suddenly stops halfway through a speech, looks around, shrugs, and then laughs after which the director shouts an exasperated word that we assume means ‘cut’).  Despite Scott’s experience as an extra in the Inspector Linley Mysteries we determine that they are unlikely to want to include us in the scene, and so on we go to find the Crazy Guys.  Their flyer describes them as being based in the foyer of a hotel that we find without a problem.  Their office, however, does not exist.  It turns out that they have a simple deal with the hotel whereby the hotel receptionist phones the tour company on their mobile phone number, and hands the phone to you to arrange your trip.  Considering we have only a 4-hour window in which to fit their 2.5 hour tour, the guy on the end of the phone is amazingly accommodating – they’ll pick us up from the hotel we’re phoning from in an hour.  This leaves us just enough time to head back to our own hotel to pick up some of the aforementioned cash and drop off some of the various things we’ve been walking round with that we won’t need.

Back at the meeting point, we take a seat while we wait to be collected.  We’re really not sure what to expect.  The tour is ‘off the beaten track’ – a tour of the Socialist Realist town of Nowa Huta on the outskirts of Krakow where we’re due to be driven around in an original Trabant, by a native of Nowa Huta.

Before long, Kuba arrives.  He’s an energetic and articulate guy, born in 1985 but with a fascination for what lie was like before the fall of the Iron Curtain.  We walk the short distance to where he’s parked the ‘limousine’ as you can’t bring cars into the old town, and he cracks self-deprecating and sarcastic gags as we do so.  We can immediately tell that we’re going to like this guy, and that we’re going to get a fascinating look at life in Poland.

There in the midst of the car park, surrounded by shiny contemporary vehicles, is a lime green cult car.  Maintained in impeccable condition, this Trabant is one of a fleet of cars owned by the Crazy Guides who reckon that of all the Trabants in Poland they probably own the majority of them.  Although he treats it with considerable disrespect, it’s clear that Kuba loves the car.  He wrenches open the door (“you have to give it hard love, because otherwise the hinges buckle”) and winds down the window (“air conditioning – if you want it cooler I’ll just have to drive faster”).  He jams a couple of levers to tilt the passenger seat forward and we both opt to climb in the back.  He jumps in the driver’s seat and turns over the engine.  The familiar noise of a 2-stroke engine starts up, running at unbelievably high revs.  He stamps on the clutch and wrestles with the stick to get it in gear, and we’re off bouncing along in a plastic-bodied, lime green icon.  Heads turn – this really is a car that gets you noticed.  Kuba admits that his ‘normal’ car is a Fiat Punto, but that he much prefers to drive this around town because it gets people looking.

We turn away from the old town and merge onto a three-lane road similar to those we’ve previously seen in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Berlin.  Built in the 1950s, these road systems were designed not with traffic jams in mind, but rather to be able to bring in tanks in case of public disorder.  These roads have all seen such action at some point as the Warsaw Pact countries set out to crush dissent.

We park up.  “Don’t bother locking the doors – the locks are crap anyway”.  We’re taken into an original Socialist-era cafe for a drink and an explanation of the area we’re in.  It’s still got its original name, Cafe Stylish.  “That’s Socialist Realism.  If it’s a stylish cafe, you should say so.”  Inside we notice lights hanging from the ceiling almost identical to those that had been in photos of the Palace of Culture in Berlin.  A small statue of Lenin is fixed to a table the corner.  “I usually do something to disrespect him, but there’s a guy who sometimes comes in here who misses the old days and asks that I don’t do anything bad to Lenin if he’s around.”

We’re shown a well-thumbed booklet of photos of the Nowa Huta.  It’s the perfect model of urban planning.  Built from scratch from 1949 onwards the entire settlement was built as a semi-circular system of wedged segments emerging from a central square.  At the end of the main boulevard is the Nowa Huta steelworks factory itself (Nowa Huta translates as “New Steelworks” – another piece of classic Socialist Realist predictability).  Each part of the settlement was planned to the smallest detail from housing to shops, sports facilities, schools, hospitals and even artificial lakes.  It reminds me of Magnetogorsk, the famed planned city in Russia built – again – as a planned community to provide labour for a massive steelworks.  Nowa Huta was built by Poles for Poles; enormous urban migration occurred as people saw the opportunity not only for work, but also for the chance to ‘build your own house’.

Quite why it was built, or at least why it was built here, suggests a one-track-mind of the highest order.  According to Kuba, Stalin wanted a symbol of the ‘new’ world order to offset Krakow’s standing as a place for art, culture and higher education.  Indeed, Nowa Huta became such a jewel in the crown of the Soviet Bloc that even Che Guevara came to visit this symbol of the socialist future.  According to local legend he did indeed visit, but stayed in a hotel in Krakow: Nowa Huta didn’t have a 5 Star hotel.

Kuba speaks at length about what life was like under socialist rule.  Although he was only 4 or 5 years old when the system changed, he vividly remembers being bought his first Lego toys from the sole Western-import shop.  He confides that his parents are reluctant to talk about what life was like.  They, he says, prefer to think about the future.  His grandparents, however, talk to him a lot.  His grandfather worked as an engineer in North Vietnam but, despite earning enormous amounts of money, was unable to spend much of it – goods were simply not available to buy at home.  Our grounding in ‘day to day’ life gleaned from the DDR Museum in Berlin comes in helpful to understand the economics of such a situation.

From the cafe, where we pay a lady the equivalent of about 2 pence to go to the toilet, we walk down to the main plaza.  The architecture is truly stunning, and it is understandable why this area is becoming gentrified.  The central square, close to major amenities and transport links, would be a fantastic place to live and – thanks to the number of people wanting to get away from Nowa Huta and everything it used to represent – the price of property has been ludicrously low.  Capitalism is stamped on the square, having been named after Ronald Reagan whom the Poles apparently hold in high esteem as the man who forced the end of the Cold War and thus the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The area’s growing cult status among young trendies is regenerating the central areas, but it becomes obvious as we drive up one of the main boulevards towards the steelworks that the rest of Nowa Huta is still a hard place to live. Despite having to import raw materials the steelworks is still running, but mechanisation has decreased the number of jobs available and most people living in the area have to travel outside the area to work. We also learn about the increased emphasis on getting financial and hi-tech industries into the city to reduce the number of young people leaving for the likes of Warsaw. Outside the steelworks – the Huta of the town name – the Trabant poses for a few photographs.  The steelworks themselves are now owned by an Indian company.

 

To end the tour of Nowa Huta we are due to go and see the modern church that has been built in the suburb, but Kuba is in a good mood (and likes showing off his favourite car we think!) and so he gives us a choice; see the church or take the Trabbie for a test drive. Unable to refuse we find ourselves being driven up a single-track road into some dense trees. Kuba reassures us that this is nothing too dodgy, but simply that we have to get off the public road if we’re to get into the driving seat.

Kuba does a good job of reminding us where the pedals are – over the last three years Scotty’s only driven in the summer months and Alice has only driven a dozen times since getting her licence – and then introduces us to the gear shift. Like the old Citroen 4CV it’s a stick shift on the right-hand side of the wheel with neutral, first and second on one level and then a pull forward (or is it back?) to find third and fourth.

Scotty is up first and takes off well, easing her through the gears. Over the roar of the engine Kuba asks if he’s driven a Trabbie before and says that a job with the Crazy Guys is here for him if he wants one! Alice is up next and obviously a bit more cautious, but getting up to speed and pulling the wheel into full lock manages a tight turning circle at the top of the road.

Kuba drives us back into town and we keep chatting about the old and the new. It’s fascinating to see how the nostalgia and gentrification interact with the desire to move on and progress towards the future. It’s been a brilliant tour and Kuba has had just the right balance between being happy to talk without prompt and also answer our questions. We get out of the Trabant not far from the town centre on a real high and it’s amazing to think that earlier in the day we had decided we didn’t have time for this but now it’s been a real highlight. We could have learnt most of it from a book; the history of Nowa Huta and life in Eastern Europe during communism (as we’d read a lot about in the DDR Museum in Berlin), but the tour gave this along with the personal side and anecdotes that make it feel ‘real’ and engage you. Also, after the group tours of the salt mine and Auschwitz, it was really great to have just two of us with a guide and for it to still be someone so interested and passionate about what they are showing you.

We quick foot it from the edge of town into the main square and descend underneath the cloth market to the newest museum in Krakow. In 2006 they re-cobbled the main square, and used the opportunity to see if they could find the original buildings and street foundations that were assumed to be below. When they did indeed find them they decided it was too fragile to simply excavate but too interesting to simply cover back up.  They chose to install beams and create a concrete roof over the excavation site, giving complete access to the old levels. It is so cool to think that above the concrete roof is life continuing as normal on the street on top of you, while down here you can see the original buildings and foundations of the market square.

The digging took place at different levels and so as we walk around the museum we find old streets exposed and in some places these have been excavated further to show even older layers of streets below – the different surfaces and edging marking out the age. The displays are in English and Polish and the labels give basic information, but we find some touch screens to give us more depth. The most interesting area of the museum, though, is the final one where the walkway takes you along the original cloth market and you can see the walls and doorways marking out each storefront along the run. The visit ends with a series of screening rooms which we wish we had time to visit in turn, but watching a film about the original dig and formation of the museum, and then one on the building of Nowa Huta, is all we can find time for before our stomachs tell us it is time to find some dinner.

We’ve wandered down the ‘embassy street’ a couple of times in the last few days and it has always looked busy and lively there. We’ve resolved that even though we’d be very happy to go back to some of the restaurants we’ve already been to, we should try somewhere new and so make a bee-line towards it. We end up in a small place with a good few choices of beers and food and soon find ourselves tucking in to another delicious meal. Scott orders a ‘dark’ beer and ends up with half a litre of Okocim Porter at a whopping 8.3%!

 

The place seems family-run when we look around at the staff, and this is confirmed in our minds when at the end of the meal we find out they don’t accept cards. With all our talk earlier in the day about having so much cash to spend we’re suddenly scraping around in our wallets and are really lucky to have just enough money to pay the bill without having to go to a cash machine!

With the equivalent of just 3 pence left in our pocket we head to a small supermarket where we know we can use card to buy a few supplies for the epic train journey tomorrow that will take us from Poland, through the Czech Republic to Slovakia!  And, happy in the knowledge that we have completely exhausted our means in Poland, we head to bed.