Bratislava :: Slovakia
A whole lot of mountains.
Places: Zakopane, Kosice & Bratislava.
Coolest thing I did: Stood on the border of Poland and Slovakia at 2000m above sea level.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Slovakia is the world's biggest exporter of Semtex, the explosive most favoured by the IRA.
Zakopane in the Tatras (an arm of the Carpathian mountains that stretch across Eastern Europe) is one of the more favoured domestic destinations for Poles to visit on their holidays. Being in the middle of summer, the place was jammed with other tourists (though, I was pretty much the exception as a native English speaker). In winter, it's a large ski resort, but in summer, people come from miles around to do things like mountain climbing, bushwalking and rafting. I came as a rest from cities.
The scenery is nothing short of breath-taking. My first day was an easy-ish walk up the face of a rocky bluff looking over the town. From this vantage point You can seen the large cuts of ski runs through the giant pine forests, with chair lifts and funiculars making their way slowly up the mountains. I can only make comparisons with the only other ski resort I've ever been to (Borovets in Bulgaria....man, what a week!), but this looked far more set up for business. I think it may be worth anyone in London looking for a cheap ski resort this winter to keep it in mind.
I had originally decided to take the two cable cars up to the highest peaks in the range, but on arriving (foolishly) at 10am I found a 3 hour queue waiting for me. I instead decided to wake up at 6am the next morning (which is a first for this entire trip) and get on the first car up at 7. I'm very glad I did. The Tatras form a natural border between Slovakia and Poland and it's not easy to see why no-one would bother enforcing them. After two cable cars high over the pines you end up 1900ish metres above sea level. You are then able to walk to the ridge and have your picture taken with the border marker, one foot in each country. From either side of this you are faced with a sheer drop of no more than 100m on either side. I took the 1 and a half hour gradual climb up along the ridge following the border. The view on either sides (even with the morning mist restricting some visibility) includes rows of craggy peaks dropping off into glacial lakes and surrounded by dark pine forrests. Like Norway and Southern Germany, these are the kinds of landscapes you just don't get to see in Australia. Add to that the whole jumping back and forth saying "now I'm in Poland, now I'm in Slovakia" and it's a morning well spent. It was also the first sunrise after sleeping I've seen in probably a year or more.
I also walked, officially, across my first ever land border. I took the bus to the border with Slovakia (this time at a mere 1200m) and walked into Slovakia. I could have waited 2 hours for the next bus, or pooled in for a mini van with some Poles and Czechs waiting at the bus stop. This was enlightening because a) the bus driver was mad and b) people mostly drive on horses and carts around the mountain tracks. The sheer white knuckled terror of having this lunatic weaving around the mountains past donkeys in the wet was better than any amusement park ride. I was just waiting for the bar to come down over my lap first.
So, what about Slovakia? It's a hard one to define. It's surrounded by countries everyone wants to visit, yet it's hard to work out where it fits. This has benefits. It's by far less touristed than Poland (though I'm finding more English speakers in Bratislava than I did in the East) which seems to make the people more willing to talk to you. I think I've spoken to more Slovakians than any other native peoples of the countries I've visited thus far. They are quite often still at the stage where just practising their English is good enough reason to strike up a conversation. Those days are gone in Poland. However, I don't think the locals have a real strong grasp on their own nationalism. Most slip up and say they were born in Czechoslovakia (I guess technically true) and when asked what makes them Slovakian, they mostly reel off events and dates with a bit of bordem (as opposed to the fire you get in the Balkans at the same question). I think it has alot to do with the fact not many people really cared whether they were independent from Prague or not. Like most things in the world, the politicians were the only people that really cared about an indepentent Slovakia, most of the younger people I've met don't seem to care either way.
The other seems to be the history. I went to Devin castle near Bratislava to look at one of the last strongholds of the Great Moravian empire. In the 800s and 900s, the Slovaks were the centre of a Slavonic state covering most of central Europe. That was the last Czech-Slovak political entity for 1000 odd years. The Hungarians took that over in about 1000AD, themselves being taken over by the Austrians and the Slovaks remained in this state until 1918. After WW1, the Czech and Slovak nationalists decided to unite together now they had been freed from the Austro-Hungarian empire and to form Czechoslovakia. In WW2 the Nazis took over the Czech bit and set up a puppet facist state in Slovakia. This was the first Slovakia for about 1000 years and the only one to bear that name. After WW2, communist Czechoslovakia came about and there was again, no Slovakia until the divorce in 1993. This must make it hard to point at some contribution, hero or event and say "that's Slovakian". Then again, many of the Balkan states make claims to land that are far more tenuous than this, with far more passion. They do, however, seem quite proud of their part in the Prague Spring uprisings.
The Prague Spring is what happens when you were in the Warsaw Pact and didn't want to be. The Czechoslovakian government decided to make things better for it's people and introduced democratic reforms in 1968 that would make people's life better. This wasn't seen as good in Moscow and the Red Army drove tanks over people and stopped these reforms. That's cutting it short, but you get the drift.
Bratislava looks like the Hungarian capital is was built up to be. After the Turks took over Budapest and besieged Vienna, the leaders of AustroHungary decided it was a good idea to move the capital inland. The good thing about there being less tourists is I've been able to walk around palaces and castles pretty much by myself sometimes. It's also the most cosmo part of the country, but even that is relative. You can sit in a cafe as nice as any in Prague and get a coffee or beer for about 20p. And the wine is something else. Whilst most of the beer is Czech, the local wine is both cheap and good. Not as thick on the reds as Bulgaria was, but none the less, an experience.
The east shows the scars of communism a bit more. There was a big move to industrialise East Slovakia and very little of it made good sense. Now the rusting factories of steel mills line the skyline, and the cities in the East are just that, ugly cities. Kosice has one restored old street, but most of it is a grey, post-communist wasteland.
However, the surroundings are dotted with fortresses and old towns. In the 1200s, the mongols decided to take their ravaging and pillaging on the road, but realised that after doing a number on Central Asia, needed more manpower. So they subcontracted much of their raping and looting out to the turkic tribes they'd just conquered, which the Russians called the Tartars. After carving up Persia and Russia, the hordes of Mr Kahn (you should always refer to anyone who feasts on the remains of his enemies as Mr) turned their attention on Eastern Europe. The Hungaian invited some Saxon knights to set up shop in the east of their empire (much in Eastern Slovakia) to build castles and slow the barbarians down. To some degree, this worked, and there are still many castles left from this period. Most are in ruins, however, as a few hundred years later, Napoleon's troops decided blowing up AustroHungarian castles was good fun and did alot of it.
I have to say, I've been suprised by Slovakia. People are quite willing to talk to you at very little pretense. Whilst the number of English speakers in the east is limited, those that do are still excited to have a chance to practise. I've got this feeling Prague won't be like that.
So, I get my Hungarian visa today, then I'm off to Prague tomorrow (yes, I know it's not in Hungary...I'm planning ahead!). Prague is the first place I've visited before on this trip (I went there for New Years Eve in 2000) so it will be interesting to see how much it's changed. It was still quite cheap then, and you still saw lots of 1970s Skodas driving about. The fact I've seen none of these in the poorer Slovakia makes me think I'm about to walk into the new Vienna or Munich by entering Prague. Three years is a long time in post-communist Eastern Europe.