Splitsville

It was the smoothest drive yet from Budapest to Zagreb, Croatia where we spent the night as somewhat of a half-time in the 8 or 900 km to split. Zagreb’s bloody cheap so we thought wed splash out A$100 on a room at the Sheraton. Zagreb obviously isn’t banking on the tourist dollar to get them by so it was pretty quiet when we rolled into town. It was pretty drizzly weather too so we thought wed stay close to the hotel to eat and try and get a beer, trying out our newly learned Croatian that we were practising in the car on the way.

I tried it first and got told pretty sternly by the big croat kebab maker to tell him in English so we did and we eventually got our kebabs and had a few beers, but once again it seems the phrase book publishers might be having a good old chuckle at the likes of the clueless travellers like us. Ive since learned that the phrase book gives you the most formal way to say things that would never be said in such a way so theres been quite a few times when we would of looked like downright knobs, asking ‘may we please order and aquire a beer big please?’ to the always puzzled bartender/shopkeep. Overall wed have been stuffed without the book though!

Ok now, the Croatian roads were beautiful at this stage because wed been on the A1 national highway for the whole trip. 3 lanes and minimal trucks. And what seemed to be no speed limit. There is, apparently, but after looking on the net, you don’t get fined until you hit about 175km/h because of some crazy equation that they have. The speed limit is 130km/h but no fine until 175. Go figure. And that’s if you have the misfortune of coming across one of the non-existant highway cops. We never saw one. And on top of that, if you did luck out and get fined, the damage was only about 30 aussie bucks. A fair bit by Croatian standards, but still well worth getting to split half an hour earlier for some that flashed past.

Split looked beautiful as we cruised down the side of one of the cliffs that surround It. It sort of reminded me of looking at byron as your going over st Helena hill, only with a thousand slum-quality high rise buildings all over the shop….. That example works! don’t shake you head! The good old gps had done pretty well that day to that stage so it was due to send us on the daily wild goose chase it loves to provide us with every time we turn it on. I reckon that gps lady has a laugh at us as soon as weget out of the car too, just like those language book publishers.

For some reason, the gps thought the most appropriate route to get us to our apartment would be to take us up and down some alleys in old town that were barely wide enough for david boon to walk through. Although some other cars had tried. This made it even harder to negotiate. All the while im cursing at the non-human gps and getting honked at by tossers on scooters and in tiny smart cars. Its such a stressful situation because you get to a point sometimes where you can barely move forward or backwards, and it looks very much like Klaus will be stuck there forever and become an ancient tourist attraction for the tourist of the year 2200. honestly I dont know how some transit vans got to where they were and I wish i could have been there to witness them get out of there! I eventually found a park in some apartment complex and could breathe a short sigh of relief. Only short coz I knew id have to get in soon enough and negotiateour way out of there.

The guy who owned the apartment that we were staying at said for us to give him a call when we got there. But weve never had a phone that could call a European numberso we thought wed just show up and surprise him. Not a great idea, as it turns out. We got there before 2pm so we thought wed be sweet and hed be at his shop downstairs. 2pm being a fairly universally accepted time of day for someone who works in a store in a tourist area to be at work. Not so for mario. He opens up at 9am, then knocks off at midday for 5 hours then comes back for a few hours at night. Not a bad life! Not that he did any more then coffee, a smoke or two with his mates and a bit of net surfing. Me thinks renting the apartment out above his shop is his primary income source and the shop is the hobby. Good on him i say because he seems to not have a care in the world.

Anyway, our options were few. Wait around for 3 hours till he shows up for the night shift, or try and contact him by finding a phone booth and doing our best. By this stage though, I was so pissed off and dirty on the world and especially the gps lady so I wasn’t much help in the situation. Lucky lauren had her shit together because she got s calm and organised us a phone card and had me on a payphone to Mario in no time. He was 5 mins away so all worked out in the end but I hated split at this stage and I had a lot of redeeming to do!

The room was nice. Just like a beach apartment. Kitchen and all that. A nice big fridge for a heap of beers too which was a bonus. We stocked that then went for a walk to check out split. Once id finally calmed down and wasn’t seeing split through the redness of my rage I realised that split was one of the most beautiful places wed been. Completely different to the other places up north. Split is situated on a harbour with crystal clear turquoise water with a few islands a few kms out. A marina with boats of all shapes and sizes bobbing upand down. There was massive car ferries out further and little shitty tinnies that stink like rotten fish right up next to the esplanade. We happened to sit down to our first 3 dollar beer just at the sun was setting. This was the first time that id ever seen the sun set over the water so it was so nice aand relaxing after the earlier trials and ordeals. That sight was nearly as good as the ridiculously cheap bill for the 6 half litre beers that we had while sitting there soaking it all up.

Split looks like a bit of haven for the rich. But it probably isn’t really. If people like us could live it up there too.

The next day we had a cruise around and checked out the beaches. Which were quite weird, in that they were knee deep for about a hundred metres out. At this one beach, there was all these old blokes in theyre speedo’s playing some weird handball game with a small ball that they had to keep in the air. There would have been a dozen games going on, each with about 4 blokes playing. Quite a scene. They were all nearly black, they were that tanned so its obvious that they enjoy this game. Mario toldus later that it’s a traditional croation game that has a ‘world championships’ in split every year. That would be a dead set classic. It just resembled a game of Frisbee with a tennis ball to me.

Walked around the old town that afternoon and were impressed again with how nice it was. So relaxed and easy going although it would probly be a nightmare in summer. Heaps of interesting restaurants and shops and nothing was expensive, although it always looked like It should be.

Had an amazing seafood platter for two thaat night right on the water with seafood that was swimming a few hours before. It almost got me romantic! We had a couple of beers and a few caraffs of wine on top of that and paid about 60 bucks. ridiculous.

Split was all about relaxation and we continued this the next day. Just strolling around, checking out the crazy markets where the stall holders always yell at us in Croatian to by a bunch/bag/string/handful/pocketful/whatever of whatever unusual shaped fruit or vegetable, sometimes nut they were flogging for generally about 20c a kilo. Bit of ahead spin really. But funny. You just need to get used to either ignoring the old crazies or busting out a ‘Hvala Ne!’ (no thanks) and you’ll be right.

We would always try a bit of our newly learnt Croatian on Mario when we’d catch him in the shop and was always impressed. Well, he acted impressed. But hed correct us when we stuffed up which was important, considering how long we were gonna be in Hrvatska. he owes us a free night in his apartment too because on the last night we were there the alarm to his shop kept going off. we thought it was kids tryingto break in so it keptus up all night. i couldnt call him so i went out and checked and there were some dodgy looking kids around which made me think it was definitely them. he later said that it was probably a fly flying past the sensor so he said when we go back, he will give us a free night...

Split was not without its crazies and we saw a few crazy things at times. Apart from all the kittens that just roamed the streets and in the restaurants, we saw:

A bloke sprint through a bar we were at waving his arms and just screaming at the top of his lungs.

A well dressed ladt in high heels and a leather handbag bin diving and collecting cans.

A lady walking around apparently trying to sell a random childrens wooden chair. Just going up to anyone and hitting them up to buy it. Later that day we saw a guy walking down the street with said chair so she obviously had a win!

A bloke flop it out and have a leak on a tree in the beer garden of the restaurant we were at. He wasn’t a patron and he was about 80 in the shade. I caught It in my periphery and could not believe it.

Yet people don’t even blink at this stuff over here!

Another feast fit for a king later (I think it was a 2 person mixed grill this night) and we were ready to move onto Dubrovnik. We wish we could of stayed longer, in hindsight. But at the same time pretty keen to check out Dubrovnik, considering the pictures we were looking at on the net. We jumped in the car and punched the address of our next place into the gps. It said we were only about 200km away so we were happy with that and expected to be in Dubrovnik ina few hours. Ha! So naïve we were….

The direct route would oftaken us through bosnia and our rental agreement didn’t allow that so we had to take the coast road the get a ferry over to another peninsula then drive down that. The coast roadworthy mainland started off nicely, meandering around the bottom of the hills with the blue water of the Adriatic a few metres to lauren’s right, as we were driving south and on the water side of the road. It sort of snuck up on us, but all of a sudden we were a few hundred metres up and practically dangling over the water on the edge of the cliffs. Im not great with heights, but Lauren has an almost debilitating fear and this was causing her to actually scream at times. I wanted to slow down sometimes but I couldn’t because it was probably less safe to crawl along there and have a bunch of crazy croats road raging me the whole way. So we pushed on with Lauren almost physically sick at times. It was bad. But we made it to the ferry and thought the worst was behind us. The ferry was so relaxing and it was such a nice day that all our nerves were calmed and everything was good again. But then we get off the ferry….

We got off and it was a tiny little village with no easily recognisable way out of town. It too was surrounded by massive steeping hills and we couldn’t find the highway out. Because there wasn’t one. It was a tiny little road that for once the gps was right on, but we wish it wasn’t. a tiny half laned road wound its way up the side of the hills and we started to get this sense of ‘here we go agaaaiiinnn!’. we tossed up whether ornot to just cut our losses and turn around and risk breaking avis’s laws in bosnia, but I was the one who said that we should soldier on because wed come so far.

We needed petrol so we pulled into what seemed like the only servo on the peninsula. We pulled up to the onlybowser at the place and I filled up while lauren went in to tryand see whether the roads further on would be drivable or whether they would be cliffhangers, therefore making up turn around and got the other way. The bloke manning the servo spoke a bit of English but not much so when lauren asked if the roads were scary, he was replying with ‘no, you shouldn’t be scared of getting lost. Theres only one road’. so we didn’t know what to make of that and the map we had showed the road as running down the centre of the peninsula so we thought wed do it….. They ended up being even scarier than the ones on the mainland and made lauren go grey with fear. Shaking and sweating. It was even worse when a local bus would fly by in theother direction and cause me to take the car to what lauren say was about inches from a 200m plunge into to water. Crazy stuff! And something I never want to do again. But im becoming an even better driver than I ever was. As hard as it is to believe….

Klaus. expertly parked.

The lane out the front. one of the many that the car gpshas tried todrag us through.

crazy fish market.

crazy busker who comes complete with birds perched on his hat and instruments.

old guys playing handball.

nice beach.

frolicking.

part of Diocletian's Palace. the heart of oldtown and is about 2000 years old. they use it as a market to flog cheap crap these days. The pic up the top is also a remaining wall from the palace, it's really cool how there's just bits of wall/palace still standing through Old Town, and often utilised later to form walls of buildings that are now... churches/shops/hotels/people's flats.

more lanes in old town

trying to figure out how we were going to get into our apartment. we had to go in through the shop.

the place.

3 aussie dollars. Bargain.

the view whilst enjoying our seafood platter.

atms are really just a hole 'hole in the wall' here.

laurens breakfast on one morning. a banana split in split.

the view from our window.

lazy croatians, lazing.

the coast roads to dubrovnik. i wasnt kidding.

i got a quick smile out.

klaus on the ferry.

nice day for a cruise.

more niceness.

Magyar Part 2 (pictures)

NB: This is the picture section of the hungary post. check out the words first in the first section to make sense of all this.

us at heroes square.

crazy markets.

hows this for achunk of meat? argentinian aparently. "cook it yourself!" they say. i miss bbqs....

The dreaded tunnel. 800m of the feeling of smoking 1000 durries at once. it wasnt even worth running or power walking through, or holding your breath for periods, because youd only have to take a deeper breath and itd hurt more.

The beautiful buda castle by night. we had to walk home with this view every night.

view from the top. a beautiful day so it was pretty cool. the next day was rainy so that was pretty satisfying.

more view.

Lauren, strolling the the castle grounds. the eagle in the background. theres eagles bloody everywhere around town.

having a crack at archery.

check out the freak over my left shoulder.

we were ten-thousandaires in hungary. i think the exchange was something 17.8 hungarian forints to a buck.

craziest markets ever.

relative luxury. out the window was a view of the back of the castle.

just another building we had to walk past every night. it was worth the tunnel walk sometimes.

statue of boy pissing. couldnt see any dirty old men around, luckily.

heroes sqaure. the picture doesnt do it justice. check it out on google images.

the tunnel again. on a quiet arvo.

driving in we saw all this business.

Budapest, Magyar Part 1 (words)

NB: The pictures are in the next blog.

After Krakow we were keen for some relative luxury.ive since forgiven poland and krakow for anything i was dirty on them for. the roads are shit but theres reasons for it and they havent had a good run of late (at least the last 65 years) so im cutting them some slack. and the drive out of the place wasnt so bad. as lauren has described.

so rolling into budapest was quite crazy. it was pretty unusual to be taking klaus through streets with any more then 1 lane between 2 directions so it was a breath of fresh air and things were looking up. of course there was the obiquitous detour because of either roadworks or the council workers forgetting to bring in the barriers and witches hats. most delays/detours could be confused for either.

the inner city ofbudapest was pretty nice and quite easy to negotiate when the gps agreed with the signs. polite drivers and whatnot. we managed to pass some of the most recognisable sights in budapest and we hadnt even reached our hotel yet.

but after the long drive, all iwas looking forward to was getting out of the car and having a beer. so rolling up to the mercure after the hovel we were in for the past 3 days was like swinging into the hilton and having the penthouse suite. we ended up getting an upgrade to a 'mercure privilege' room or something so we thought that

wed be living like queens in Magyar (hungary).

the roomwas luxury but the bar downstairs seemed like better luxury so we showered, went downstairs,and charged a few 7 euro-buck beers back to the room. just because we could. went to an all you can eat/drink mongolian bbq that night and it was honestly one of the best value meals ever. not just because of the 6 half litre beers each we included.

Budapest is divided into 2 parts really. Buda, the hilly, residential part on the west bank of the river... and Pest, the more aesthetically pleasing and touristic part on the east bank. we were in Buda. itwas good because we could get out of the hustle and bustle when we wanted to and we also had a bed for klaus. he slept in the bus bay with the big boys and it seems they didnt hassle hassle him too much. the only issue was that we had to walk through this tunnel which went through Castle Hill, right under Buda castle which is the dominant feature of the budapest skyline from anywhere within the city boundaries. this tunnel was about 800m long with no ventilation, yet bumper to bumper traffic all damn day long. we didnt realise how bad it was at first. it was a bit of a novelty. but as time wore on and as we were doing it 3 times a day, we started to feel it in our throats by the end. to the point where we actually had sore when we swallowed for about half an hour after wed been through the thing. we noticed a sign on the last day that said that walking through was not recommended. our throats agree and havent forgiven us.

wewalked through the centre of pest for a look and got assailed by another bloke trying to flog those open topped doubledecker bus tours. we fobbed him off at first, but walked a few hundred metres and decided that we couldnt be bothered walking that morningso we turned round and succumbed to the hawker with our tail between our legs. well, my tail was between my legs because i take pleasure in telling these people well and truly piss off these days. and those of you who know me would of probly expected nothing less.

so we got on the bus and of course there was a bunch of women that sat behind and would not shut up the whole trip so we couldnt hear alot of the interesting facts about a city with such a cool history. we thought wed get the bus up to heroes square up the other end of town and walk back. heroes square was amazing. hungarians are so proud of their history, as well they should be, and in this monument that pride definitely shines through.
we walked around the attached park then decided to go a different way back to town. we mainly walk to pplaces that are within about 5km because you get a bit of time to soak it up. checking things out and getting a genuine vibe for the place. the only problem is that most hotel maps arent to scale. probly because they want to make it seem like theyre closer to stuff then they actually are. we always fall for it. but its good for the waist to combat all this brilliant food were eating. sometimes i think i should be walking to the next country and leaving klaus behind because my shirts are definitely getting tighter and i dont remember doing many reps of benchpresses in the past 2 months....

had another good feed that night. a massive steak that you practically cook yourself on a hot stone. you pay for it but what the hell,were on holidays!

thenext day we went up the buda castle on the hill. every time weare heading to a castle im thinking 'not another bloody castle, im castled out!', but iget blown away. they are always so opulent and massive. and theyre all so different. we got some cool pics and walked around for a few hours taking in the view of all the spires on the pest skyline. its pretty funny, these guys seem to put spires on their spires. i think the size of your spire on your house or building is meant to be a representation of the size of something else. its hungary's version of getting a v8 car im thinking.

we spent the morning up the but i had to race home to watch the roosters smash the titans (well, live score updates on the laptop) from the comfort and non-heat of the hotel bar. had a heap of beers during and after in celebration so the rest of the arvo was a write off. actually we went on a night river cruise that night but it was meh.

woke up good again the next day, which was a surprise coz we seemed to get pretty drunk of about 2 Dreher, Hungarian beers. we went on another bus tour and got off at Market Hall, where the guide suggested was good for lunch. what he didnt say was that it was saturday and you needed to plough through hundreds of drunk hungarians who were having lunch beers after buying their week's supply of horse livers or whatever that crazy black/brown meat was in the butchers displays. this place was crazy but we managed to score ssome lunch and some more dreher then bailed coz it was getting too much. it was to get out into the fresh air of the 6 lanes of honking traffic after being in that market for a few hours.

because we were sick of having our throats burnt to death every time we went through the tunnel, we decided to stay in buda on our side ofthe hill..... mistake! we picked this place on the net that seemed nice, cheap and close. it wasnt any of the above. itwasnt too far away but we had to walk past this that had deffacated on the footpath probly about 5 mins before we happened by. i say it was probly about 5 mins prior because he had only moved about 10 metres since and was still cleaning out his pants in the bus shelter right there. thats correct, sitting there with nothing covering downstairs, not washing his pants per se, but just scraping them out. i probly shouldnt of told you this story but it paints the nights picture. so we walked past this horror show and were already in asour mood about hungary by the time we got to the restaurant. as soon as they heard english come out of our mouths, the eyes rolled and the crap service began. first of all they said they couldnt understand up when they clearly could. then they waited aabout half an hour to come over and take our orders. then they decided to charge us for large beers when they were giving us smalls. then they gave us pizzas that more resembled grilled cheese on toast. then they tacked on an extra 25% on to the bottom of the bill that was for something in indecipherable handwriting. it was written on underneath the items printed onto the bill. i thought id noticed them snickering and checking to see if we would ark up but by this stage we couldnt be bothered and just paid the bill and left. n hindsight i should of told them to stick the bill but they only would of replied with hands out to the side saying 'i know understand'. so we left and raced home to the comfort of our hotel room. ready for a fresh start in a new country tomorrow.

what the hell would croatia have in store??!!

Krakow (and Poland, by necessity) plus Auschwitz

We were sad to leave Prague… but we were a bit over how the staff (newsagents/bar staff/waiters/ticket sellers) were mostly over tourists. Especially ’English’ tourists (which we are doomed to be mistaken for everywhere. Nick and I have said how crap it is that the two main English speaking lots of tourists are the English (bad rep for rudeness) and the americans (ditto, but for loudness AND rudeness). Anyway, trip east through Czech was a dream. Of course. Until I noticed in the lonely planet shoestring guide (thanks Kyle and Mossy) that there were only a few specific crossings into Poland that would accept foreigners. And we BOTH noticed that the turn off that the GPS had taken was essentially a dirt track through farmland in the middle of nowhere… towards mountain range. I.e. not going to be one of the sweet border crossings. After a bit of fiddling about (I.e. making executive decisions against the GPS’ instructions) we made it to the Czech-Polish border at Csesky-Tesin… and whizzed right through, past abandoned border booths. So we have no idea if we did the right thing, or if it was much ado about nothing, but we both knew that the pitted, gravel road through completely non-English speaking areas was a bad idea.

As was Poland altogether. According to Nick, anyway, but we’ll get to that.

Immediately upon crossing into Poland we found out why the GPS was giving us such an (apparently, to us) erroneous-looking estimated arrival time. Poland’s roads are crap. What is marked as a ’motorway’ in our map book, is a one lane road with no overtaking areas, doglegging through every dilapidated and miserable village heading east. And it was not scenic. Just flat, dilapidated and depressing. Poor Poland. Because the country is too poor to have… footpaths, people just walk along the side of the road (on ‘motorway’, further slowing traffic) and we discovered a phenomenon we saw reflected everywhere in Poland, but which stopped abruptly at the Polish-Slovak border on the way out… noone has anywhere to be, and so cyclists just lazily pedal on the motorway… further slowing traffic. It ended up being around an 8 hour day to travel a 540km journey. There are also shrines to Mary sporadically on the side of the road (sometimes only 100m apart, but always decked out with fresh flowers and usually on what would be a really dangerous blind corner, if you weren’t going at 40km/hr behind an impassive Pole on a bike with nowhere to be. One crazy thing we saw was an old man (70+) standing in the middle (proper middle, and STANDING) waving his walking stick angrily at every car that went past. We thought maybe it was us (German number plate, and he held a grudge) but it really was EVERY car.

In that trip we also learnt a phrase that we would soon become familiar with, heard immediately after programming your next destination into the GPS - ‘warning: your destination is located in a restricted access area’. So we arrived in Krakow. To be led to a dead end street. Or rather, we thought it was a dead end for us because of all of the crazy polish parking on both sides of the road. We never got a good pic of the streets (and we certainly were not in the mood at that point to) but they park… diagonally, nose in, and reverse parallel wherever they can find a spare both of side walk. Welcome to the real eastern Europe. Subsequently parking (in paid parking that costs more than a dinner for two with drinks in Krakow) we looked at the lonely planet guide to discover that the street the GPS directed us to, had indeed been a dead end. And the restricted access area that we were warned about… was a pedestrian area.

So we walked in to the main hostel. Got served by the most sour polish (or any type of) girl I have ever met. Got told to get passports. Went back, got packs, got passports… Surrendering my passport at that dark hell hole to that harridan was the second scariest thing I have ever done (but more on that for the Croatia blog). Then we were instructed (with a smirk) to walk back, past our car carrying our packs to the accommodation.

What a scam. Musty, 3 HUGE flights of stairs in the freezing dank hallway to get to a room without a phone, with a sofabed futon as the ’luxurious’ double they provided, hot water that ran out in the morning (but refreshed at night),with broken wifi (which I believe was just a wifi modem plugged into a wall with no paid internet connection) and with the 60 channels of satellite tv they skited about being… in Polish. Minus a news channel (which we had watched on 24 hour Pope-visit-to-England broadcast for 3 days in Prague) and a sports channel. That was it. It was cemented. Nick hated Poland, Krakow, Flamingo Doubles and the Poles. We honestly considered leaving right then. Just wiping Poland. But we agreed to sleep on it…

The stairwell to our place... Doesn’t capture the dankness. Can’t blog smells, unfortunately.

We did a spin around Market Square that night (yawn, charming, but couldn’t hold a candle to Old Town Square in Prague) but agreed that we were only going to hate on… the food, the service, the sights and Poland in totality, so beered and fooded at a café and got the heck back to our miserable little dive for fitful sofabed sleeps.

Krakow street in the early morning. It was very chilly - gave the jumpers a work out most days, and DEFINITELY in the night. Brrr. Was crisp and nice, I guess, although I dread to think of their bitterly cold winters.
By day....
Market Square...

The next morning was beautiful and we went and saw Krakow’s only other sight, Wawel Hill (which is their castle, but it was allowed to fall down a couple of hundred years ago and then they rebuilt it to its former glory (well, charming standard. It was pretty cool but hardly glorious). Here’s the obligatory pics…

Looking up at Wawel Hill as we stroll in.
Wawell Hill from the outside.
Nick walking under the portcullis thing.
Building in the castle grounds. It was SUCH a nice day for it. And we really just wandered around enjoying the sunshine and the views - and the substantially smaller crowds, when compared to Prague.
Above is the ‘palace’ part of the castle

We also scored free tickets to the Treasury and Armoury, which were both pretty interesting, being smattered with the occasional English translation, but mostly just falling into the category of ’cool stuff’.

Coronation sword of polish kings. For a bit.
Axe-gun. For when ’just killing them’ isn’t enough. And yes, I know those old guns took 40min to load, so it probably got some use.
Armour.

Back to regaling the crap facilities of the hostel… after castle time we thought we’d attend to our desperate need for some clothes washing. So we went back to sour puss (sigh). The hostel had said it had washing facilities… should be sweet, yeah? Which is technically correct. Having carted our stuff to the other building (in our baby backpacks, of course) we discovered that yes, it does have a washing machine. And no, it does not have drying facilities. So helpful. Needless to say, the first words out of Nick’s mouth more than adequately expressed the dismay we both felt - but then quickly turned to cursing Poland/Krakow/Polish people once more. Thank god for… (der ner ner nehhh ner nehhhhh) PUB LAUNDRY! That’s not it’s name, but it should be. It’s a place that has more washing machines and dryers than you can poke a stick at, a bar, and a café-kind-of (no food) atmosphere. And friendly staff. Which really matters when you’re trying your excruciating Polish on them (well, how else will we learn!), and they do speak English. It was bliss. And we got a bit day-time-pisshkey waiting for the clothes to wash and dry, and we were sooooo much happier. We also met a couple of aussie chicks (who had met the day before at the hostel and were also getting their stuff cleaned), who we went out with that night to a couple of places in the ’Old Jewish Quarter’ with a guy they’d met who’d escaped the Brethren cult (interesting stories there) and was doing 28 European countries in an incredibly (so I think) short time. The next day,the wryly coolest of the bunch Candyce, a lovely Melbourne chick with whom Nick and I had a lot in common in music taste and general attitudes, came with us to Auschwitz, when we drove.
Walking through Market Square after Pub Laundry. Nick’s first smile after we entered Poland, I think. I was worrying he might turn into a Pole (they’re quite impassively faced people who look like they’ve had a hard life - but they probably have).

Afternoon snack to make sure we made it to our dinner meet that night (after pub laundry). LOVE cart food. And since Nick and I only really understood 1/3 of what the lady said… and there was a queue, Nick said yes to extra sausage (unwittingly - but it was yum as).

Auschwitz - serious bit of blog. Please don't read if you don't want to

The reason we’d actually chosen Krakow was that it was the closest major town to Auschwitz. So that was the destination the next day, with our cool new friend Candyce, plus Klaus (a positive obviously), Polish roads (negative), and a GPS that thinks you can drive through pedestrian areas (a little bit of column a,and a little bit of column b) . We had it on ’fastest route’… As we drove, we passed a roundabout with a sign to Oswiecim (Polish village, Germans took the name for the infamous camp)… and took a different turn, on the GPS’ instructions. Not a great sign of things to come. Neither was the roads getting progressively smaller and smaller, and windier and windier. ’Surely Auschwitz would be signed!’ Yeah, the way without the tiny ferry on the dirt road WAS signed. What’s that you say? Yup, the GPS took us down a dirt road to a queue of a dozen smiley locals waiting for a one-car ferry (DODGEY-looking one-car ferry) to take them across the creek/river thing over to the other bit of pitted dirt road. It was a boat thing, attached to an elevated cable positioned upstream. We weren’t sure Avis (or our Mums) would approve, so it was backkkktrackkkk to the nearest tiny village and ask for directions in broken polish. Some things are beyond words and the lady managed to convey that if we went back and turned left, we’d pretty much go straight there. We also reprogrammed the GPS to avoid ferries (who knew that wouldn’t be a default? Although there‘s ferries,and then there‘s Polish ferries, clearly, just like ‘roads‘ and ‘polish roads‘) and were stoked when it agreed with the lady.

Auschwitz…

Words can’t describe the horrors of those camps. We had the best guide, who spoke fantastic English, had done it for 12 years and you can tell took his job - conveying that horror as much as possible, but affording those poor people the dignity and respect they were denied in life - so seriously. It would be disrespectful to linger on every macabre detail here (and you can look the facts/figures up yourself), so I’ll give a summary of the things that really struck/moved all 3 of us.

1) It was a beautiful sunny day when we visited, and that seemed really wrong to us, in the face of what we heard and saw that day.

2) The disgusting calculated-ness of:

I) the positioning of the camp (pretty much the middle of Europe, very convenient for transporting people from all of the German occupied areas);

II) Making the decision that children were no use, most women were no use (especially if you took their children), the sick or disabled and old men were also no use and therefore all of those people were led directly to the gas chambers upon arrival (after the Auschwitz and Birkenau started being death cams as well as ’concentration’ camps’;

III) shaving the killed women’s hair to take it to make cloth/stockings etc (taken from their dead bodies), taking gold teeth and jewellery from the dead;

3) The inhuman and deliberate sanctioned/ordered acts of the guards to strip the poor people living in the camps of their dignity, and then inevitably kill them in one way or another, through the impossibly hard work on no rations, disease, beatings, horrible punishments - and random selections just to torture the people, shootings and gas chambers.

4) That through underground information sources the allied forces knew of the concentration camp/s almost as soon as they began, and then they knew (almost directly after) that they had begun killing people (mostly Jews) in the gas chambers from September 1942. It was a long time to the end of the war.

More people were interned and more were killed at Birkenau than Auschwitz. The Nazis blew up the several gas chambers there when it appeared the war was lost for them, to attempt to hide the evidence, as well as dismantling the death walls (walls against which people were shot) at both camps. Auschwitz is the more complete camp, and I would very much recommend a visit to both. Auschwitz is the museumy bit which humanises for you the poor people who were brought there and mostly died there, and Birkenau emphasises the scale upon which it was done.

Auschwitz camp...

Stockpiled glasses of the victims of the gas chambers.
Suitcases - they made the people being taken to the camp write their names on them, even when most of those who arrived would be murdered immediately. All part of the ruse to keep them compliant.
Immense piles of shoes of the victims. Lots were shipped back to Germany and doled out to German citizens, but there were huge stockpiles still remaining when the allies took the camp.
There were rows of photos like this, showing date of arrival and date of death (Nazis recorded this info and took pictures of those they made do work - I.e. healthy men - lots of old men, the sick, and pretty much all women and children went straight to the gas chambers). We noticed of the pictures, that the later you arrived, the shorter you survived.

Birkenau - each of those chimneys was for a different building with people cramped in terrible conditions - they housed up to 1,000.

The ‘nicer’ quarters of Auschwitz. The Birkenau buildings were wooden (colder), and the bunks thinner - but the people were made to sleep 3 on one bunk - and without mattresses.
Recreation of ‘death wall’ at Auschwitz. The Nazis destroyed the original when they left.

Where, after the war crimes tribunal convicted him, they hung the head of the Auschwitz camps. He lived with his family in a house, not more than 50m from the gas chambers and cremation ovens at Auschwitz. That's where these gallows are - within sight.

The gas chamber at Auchwitz. The real deal. The guide said sometimes they killed so many in the one group, that the bodies had nowhere to fall after they died and so they were still standing when the ’criminals’ (also captives in the concentration camp, often Jews, who did the guards' dirty work in exchange for better conditions - including convincing the gas chamber victims that after their shower they'd get food, so to be quick to strip off and in getting into the 'shower') came to get the bodies, strip them of anything useful and take them to the cremation ovens.

Sorry if it seemed as if DID linger over details, when I said I wouldn’t. There’s a lot more to it, and the figures they give for people killed at the group of camps there is around 1.5 million, and I just think it’s important to remember/learn about so that nothing like that can ever be allowed to happen again.

OK, so, the next day, feeling very lucky to live in a safe country in a safe time for us we drove to Budapest. This involved 3 countries (I still count Poland), and 2 vignette (prepaid motorway passes) purchases. These being a lot harder transactions than you would expect, OK? We found this section of Poland’s roads… a bit better. And a bit newer. Though still… not great, and still dotted with slow cyclists (slow to the extent that the front wheel wobbles from lack of propulsion) and the inevitable shrines to Mary. Poor Poland (as I had come to say to interrupt Nick’s periodic rants on Poland/the Poles/Krakow/Flamingo Doubles). As we approached the border, we came to a strange roadside market/fair. It was just a random Tuesday morning, but there were thousands of people and hundreds of stalls, all selling… well, what we could call, ’weird’ things. Their version of garden gnomes, next to hats (on the same stall), animal pelts, unfamiliar foods… it was fantastic, and would have been great to explore and score some cheap mementos, but we faced the Slovakian roads with some trepidation (having learnt the hard way, from Poland) and so we scooted on.

Slovakia was a pleasant surprise. Roads were heaps better, although still quite slow (80km/hr for a lot of the way) because of trucks and because the roads were winding along valleys between huge, green mountains. Which are awesome snow fields (complete with chair lifts directly from town filled with chalets and hotels - MUST go back, it’s beautiful and would be cheap as) in winter. And check out what we saw when we turned a corner into a fresh valley in Slovakia…

Now THAT’S a castle. Or rather, a Hvar.

Next time = Hungary/Budapest, and Nick’s turn. As even I am sick of the sound of my own voice. Arghh! Why can’t I be brief? At least you can just look at the piccies if they look to daunting I guess.

Hugs,

L.