The Top of Poland (By Way of Slovakia)

We clear the treeline and have no words. The valley looks as if God's boat had sailed through, the keel carving the rock and leaving fecundity in its wake. Below are the trees we spent an hour hiking through, above are green grasses dotted with purple and yellow flowers, their petals high enough to brush my biceps. This mountainside meadow spreads up until it merges with the grey rock and white snow that mark the peaks of the Tatras mountains.
Up there, facing each other across a saddle are the highest points in Slovakia and Poland, for this range marks the border between the two countries. The Slovakian peak, barely 150 feet higher than its Polish partner, is inaccesible without a guide. But Rysy, the Polish peak, has a trail right to the top and is frequently climbed from both sides of the border. At 8,199 feet, this should be a cakewalk.

Carrie and I are hiking extremely light on this trip: tennis shoes and day packs. We're walking past those who took this trail a little more seriously, who are heavy with their hiking boots and refrigerator backpacks.  I suppose we could have weighed ourselves down more: at the bottom of the trail were bags of coal and a sign that promised a free drink at a hut on top of the mountain if you brought one up. Beside the coal were two wooden frames with shoulder straps, each ladden with 70 pounds of firewood.  For shlepping that to the top, you would get a free night's stay.  Someone had taken that offer, and as we were climbing down, we saw someone, bent nearly double with the wood frame on their back, their own backpack strapped to the frame. When we got closer, we saw that it was a woman.

Bags of coal, to be taken to the top


The way up was beautiful, walking through those angled mountain meadows fed by cold mountain streams that we crossed via woode bridges. These gave way to glacial lakes as the weather briefly broke. As it lightly rained we walked past a stream running over and waterfalling down the mountain side.

Glacial lakes

The terrain seemed to change every 20 minutes: after the rain stopped, we had to use ropes and chains to get up the slick, steep rock, and then we hit the snowpack. I slipped and fell a couple times, my cheap, Ukrainian sneakers finding no purchase on the icy snow.

Using the ropes and chains to climb up.                       Carrie on the snowpack, me slipping below her.

We passed the mountain hut and kept going, trudging up the snow until it gave way once again to rock and the saddle between the peaks. We were nearly blown off our feet by the gusts of wind that hit as as soon as we cleared the valley walls.

The red and white blazes marking the trail disappeared and we followed two people ahead of us. We found ourselves climbing, using hands and feet as the trail completely dissapeared. Looking up, my hood acting as a sail in the wind and tugging at me, I saw the top of the mountain. Rather than a peak, it ended in a straight, thin line, one you would have to straddle just to say you were on top, because there was no room to stand. With the gusting wind, I was genuinely worried that we would get blown off the top.

Then we looked back and saw other hikers, saw the path leading up the other peak. We were on the wrong mountain and were twenty minutes from scaling the highest peak in Slovakia, even though we weren't legally allowed to do so.

Despite my fear, I entertained the notion of finishing it, but Carrie firmly refused. We climbed back down and followed the path up to the other peak. The two people that had been ahead of us kept going, still climbing. Whether they were mistaken, one was a guide, or they were just doing it, we never found out.

The other peak was much easier to summit, requiring only a bit of scrambling at the end before we passed a sign saying we were now on Polish territory, and then we were at the flattened top of the point. The views were amazing, and we stopped to eat lunch there, chatting with an Australian who had come up from the Polish side, a Swiss would had come up from the Slovakian.



At the top!

Carrie and I had made it up in 3.5 hours. It was supposed to take us 6. Our lunch finished, we blew back down the mountain, passing the laden people who we had passed on the way up. When we hit the snow pack, we both simply sat down and slid, an exciting, slighlty out of control plummit down towards the rock. An elderly couple who were hiking came up in front of us. Carrie stopped short, and I ran into her. Rather than stopping, I sort of bounced around her, angling past the couple before the snow leveled out and I was able to stand up. A Slovakian family, who was just beginning to go up the snow pack and had watched me come down, congratulated me.





The snowpack we slid down.

In any case we made it to the bottom, and for less than four dollars, I celebrated our topographical victory with a fantastic steak dinner with a cold Pepsi.

Life was sweet.

Slovakia: Big Ass Castle

For 2,000 years, fortified settlements stood on a hill above the city now known as Spisske Podhradie.

A linguistic lesson: "Spisske" is the name for the region in Slovakia. "Pod", the same in Russian and Ukrainian, means "under". "Hrad", I learned quickly, is the Slovakian word for castle ("Zamok" in Ukranian and Russian; sometimes the langauges don't line up at all). So, shifting "Hrad" to the locative case, you have a town that means it's in Spisske reason and it's under a castle. A big ass castle. You couldn't possibly name this town in relation to anything else because every view from this town is dominated by that enormous castle on the hill.

Bury an aircraft carrier on the top of a hill 2/3rds up the keel. The width and height to the deck would be the perimeter of this castle's wall, the superstructure would be the size of the keep and the turret. That's how big this castle is.

Carrie and I had meant to be on the top of Poland, hiking through the Tatras from the Slovakian side, over the border and to the top of a mountain called Kysy. Dark clouds swirling around the mountains, obscuring the peaks sent us on a day trip south. And instead we found ourselves at the top of the turret of one of the largest in all of Europe and the largest in Central Europe, a UNESCO treasure that has never been militarily taken.

At the bottom of the hill was a beautiful cemetary. Slovakians have th tradition of marking graves not just with a headstone, but a slab of stone the length and width of the coffin. Many of these slabs were hollow in the middle, filled with earth and used as planters, many with beautiful flowers in bloom.


The castle, as seen from the town's cemetery (notice the planter in front of the grave behind the cross)




From the cemetery, we started our assault on the castle. I couldn't imagine charging up that steep hill in armor while arrows rained down from the hundreds of arrow slits carved into those beige walls. Any messenger carrying a declaration of war would probably stop halfway up, hands on his knees and panting, before going back down and telling the commander that it wasn't worth it.

Tourists and not archers now covered the walls, walking their immense length and soaking in the enormity of it. Built starting in the 13th century by the Hungarians, it had been steadily enlarged for the next four centuries until an accidental fire burned down everything but the mortared stone in 1780. We walked through the entrances of three separate walls in our constant uphill plunge to the oldest structures: the keep and the turret: the outer one had a courtyard so large you could put a mall into it (or a lot of livestock and frightened villagers), a wooden one being constructed by carpenters (probably to regulate tourist flow), and the inner one to the keep.



The castle keep

Once inside the inner one, Carrie and I both looked at an indentation in the wall and, with climber's instincts, both started walking towards it without saying anything to each other. Looking at it, there was probably once a ladder there, but we simply climbed the uneven stone to the top of the inner wall. There, we saw that there was a tiled area over the arch that admited us through the wall, and walking over to it, found a slit that ran over the arch, one we hadn't even noticed walking through it. It was proabably used to shoot arrows or drop oil onto attacking soldiers. Not only was it cool to be somewhere where most people didn't go (because most people don't climb UNESCO treasures), but the views were spectacular. Now, before anyone gets into a huff, it wasn't like these walls were crumbling. They had withstood 6 centuries. They easily withstood us.


A view from the keep

The only views more spectacular than on the inner wall were those from the top of the turret. The stone steps leading up the narrow, winding stair had been polished smooth by centuries of soles and were slippery.


Carrie, on the way up the turret

Using a chain to assist, we got to the top, where we had a clear, 360 degree view of the Slovakian countryside We could see farmland, the wheat sprouting in brown rectangles, villages, thin black roads with tiny cars racing down them, patches of forest on undulating hills. We could no doubt easily see an approaching army.


A view from the turret

Following the stairs back down, we went even lower, into a dungeon holding a smattering of torture items, including Spanish boots, stocks, a primitive rack and a "torture table", where metal bands held prisoners down while they were whipped or worse. Also on display were some of the weapons used to defend the castle: cannons, mortars, armor and very large stone balls. The stone balls were rolled down the hill at an attacking army.


Getting tortured on the torture table

Just walking the breadth of the castle defeated us, so we retired back to the quiet little town in the Tatras that we were staying at: Tantranska Lominice.


Me, being me (although the photo was Carrie's idea)