Another country, another overnight train…
We arrived in Propad at about 545am. So early. There’s a whole group of little villages around the base of these particular mountains that we were visiting, the High Tatras Mountains, and there’s an electric train system that runs between all the different villages, so we had about 20 minutes or so on that to get to our village, Novy Smokovec. It really only consisted of a bunch of hotels and houses, there’s nothing else there. Ten minutes walk down the road was Stary Smokovec, which had a supermarket and a bunch of cafes and sports shops. Very Alpine village stuff. The area seems to be huge for snow sports in winter and then for hiking in summer.
It’s a funny place, in some ways it’s so well set up for tourists, but in other ways it’s not at all. The electric train system is great, the trains are new and clean and comfortable and there’s plenty of room for baggage, and they stop at every little village (there are about 18 villages); but they only come once an hour, the timetables are all in Slovakian, and we only knew of one village where we could buy tickets, which you have to have when you board the train. And some people speak English, but a lot don’t.
When we got there, the hotel had organised breakfast for us, with cooked eggs on toast which were AMAZING. Cameron and Adrian had single rooms which were ready straight after breakfast, and Amanda was so tired that she went and pushed Cam out of his room and took over his bed. Marsha, who’d had almost no sleep on the train, decided to go for a hike straight away. We were all a bit concerned because she was very tired, when we saw her go she had no map, very few warmer clothes, no food, and only half a bottle of water. She met up with Cam after she left us, and he went with her. We (particularly Kat and I) spent most of the day lying around reading magazines on the grass, and wandering in and out of Stary Smokovec. It was good. Cam and Marsha were hiking for five hours, up to a waterfall and back.
Our room was on the top floor of the hotel. When I say hotel, it was really more like a b&b, it really wasn’t that big. I think we were the only people staying there, and we filled most, if not all, of the rooms. Our room was great, there were four of us in there – me and Kat, and Marsha, and Pat (the oldest member of the group at about 73, and the fourth single girl) – but it was really big and I got the double bed while the others all got singles. I'm the tallest, small single beds are not my friend. Above my bed was a big skylight. When we went to bed that night I lay the wrong way across the bed so I could look at the stars. There were so many, it was such a nice change from cities.
For dinner that night, Kat and I went with Cam and Marsha to a pizza place in Stary, where we hardly said a word to each other for the entire meal. It’s so nice to have friends who you can have comfortable silences with.
The next day I didn’t even wake up until 10am, and neither did Marsha. Steve was up at 530am to go for a hike, which ended up meaning a total bush bash up the side of the mountain because he missed the start of the path. He got back at about 1130am. The others had sorted out a plan for the day, to catch the electric train to the far end station, go up on the cable cars, walk across the mountain, and come back down the chairlift, then catch the electric train home again.
Things didn’t go quite according to plan.
We left the hotel at about 1215pm, by the time we started to leave at midday and told Cam that we were going just as we were walking out the door. So he went and got ready and came back out to meet us, and then we yelled at Adrian from outside the hotel. Who walked out onto his balcony with no shirt on. What a highlight…. So anyway, then we waited for him to get ready. As I said earlier, the train only comes once an hour, which turned out to be at 1255pm, so we had quite a long wait after we walked into Stary and found tickets. Three trains came at once, so Amanda asked an official whether we were getting on the right train, and the official said yes. The train left the station and we were looking between our tickets and the display showing where we were going and the map, and figured out we were on the wrong train. Then the ticket check lady came, the same person who’d told us we were on the right train, and laughed at us for being on the wrong train. So we got off at the next stop, and decided that instead of waiting another hour for the train to come back so that we could go three minutes back along the track to change trains, we’d walk to another village and catch the correct train from there. We could see the village we wanted from where we were standing. The village we got off in was so weird, there were lots of buildings and a playground but there were no people, and there was no evidence of people. Between there and the village we walked to (15 min away) we saw one group of three people. The next village was called Horny Smokovec, which of course we enjoyed greatly, and spent 45min waiting for the train to come past and turn around and come back again.
When we finally managed to get on the right train and get to the station we’d intended, we walked from there up to the cable car station, only to find that to get to the top of the mountain and back costs €25 (we’d abandoned the idea of a hike by then), and not only that, but it’s actually three cable cars which you have to change between, and the highest one had completely sold out for the rest of the day. This was about 230pm. Apparently if you have any sense you book at least one day in advance. To get to the top of the second cable car was still €15 return, which Cam, Marsha and I decided was too expensive, considering we could easily walk to the same height, but the others went up. The three of us went for something to eat instead, then we all met up again on the 430pm train. Talk about a comedy of errors.
I went for a walk when we got back to the hotel. I left at about 6pm and followed the same path that Marsh and Cam had taken the day before. I was on my own so I was walking very slowly and taking ages setting up my photos and all that trash. To start with, there were plenty of people going towards the village, but the last time I saw anybody was about 620pm. The rules of the area are that you must tell someone where you’re going, and if you’re not back by 8pm, the search and rescue helicopter gets sent out, at your expense, whether you want it or not and irrespective of when you’ve said you’ll be back. So at about 645pm the sun went behind the hill and I hadn’t seen anyone in a while, so I decided to start making my way back. I was doing the same thing, wandering along taking photos, and I was standing on a bridge trying to get a photo that showed the water in the stream moving, when someone appeared beside the bridge, heading back up the mountain. It gave me a hell of a surprise actually, I just about fell off the bridge. It was this slightly creepy looking guy who I’d already seen walking in the other direction at least half an hour earlier. That was more than weird enough for me, so as soon as he’d gone past me I decided it was well time to get out. The path had a lot of loose stones and water running down it and that sort of thing, so I was moving as fast as I could while bearing in mind that now would be an extremely bad time to slip and break my leg. I got home without seeing that guy or anyone else again, which was quite a relief.
This one was a doozey. We got on at something like 1030pm, and the train left at 11pm, and from the moment it pulled out of the station it was doing very weird things. I don’t know about the rest of the train, but our carriage was shaking, like a really full on vibration, and everything in the carriage was rattling. The door. The walls. The window. Our bags. The tap in the hand basin. Everything. And not only that, but the train was going really fast, and whenever it went around a corner you kind of got thrown against the corresponding wall. And when it stopped we seemed to get hit with the combined weight of all the carriages behind us at once, so you’d be lying in bed hanging onto the bunk above you every time it started to slow down, to try and combat this big crash from behind. It was not normal. To be honest, it was quite frightening. After an hour or so we still hadn’t come off the tracks, so I slowly started to assume we weren’t going to. I didn’t get to sleep until the train stopped somewhere at about 230am, and even then I woke up an hour or so later thinking I was having an epileptic fit, even though I’m not epileptic. Not a very restful night.
It’s a funny place, in some ways it’s so well set up for tourists, but in other ways it’s not at all. The electric train system is great, the trains are new and clean and comfortable and there’s plenty of room for baggage, and they stop at every little village (there are about 18 villages); but they only come once an hour, the timetables are all in Slovakian, and we only knew of one village where we could buy tickets, which you have to have when you board the train. And some people speak English, but a lot don’t.
When we got there, the hotel had organised breakfast for us, with cooked eggs on toast which were AMAZING. Cameron and Adrian had single rooms which were ready straight after breakfast, and Amanda was so tired that she went and pushed Cam out of his room and took over his bed. Marsha, who’d had almost no sleep on the train, decided to go for a hike straight away. We were all a bit concerned because she was very tired, when we saw her go she had no map, very few warmer clothes, no food, and only half a bottle of water. She met up with Cam after she left us, and he went with her. We (particularly Kat and I) spent most of the day lying around reading magazines on the grass, and wandering in and out of Stary Smokovec. It was good. Cam and Marsha were hiking for five hours, up to a waterfall and back.
Our room was on the top floor of the hotel. When I say hotel, it was really more like a b&b, it really wasn’t that big. I think we were the only people staying there, and we filled most, if not all, of the rooms. Our room was great, there were four of us in there – me and Kat, and Marsha, and Pat (the oldest member of the group at about 73, and the fourth single girl) – but it was really big and I got the double bed while the others all got singles. I'm the tallest, small single beds are not my friend. Above my bed was a big skylight. When we went to bed that night I lay the wrong way across the bed so I could look at the stars. There were so many, it was such a nice change from cities.
For dinner that night, Kat and I went with Cam and Marsha to a pizza place in Stary, where we hardly said a word to each other for the entire meal. It’s so nice to have friends who you can have comfortable silences with.
The next day I didn’t even wake up until 10am, and neither did Marsha. Steve was up at 530am to go for a hike, which ended up meaning a total bush bash up the side of the mountain because he missed the start of the path. He got back at about 1130am. The others had sorted out a plan for the day, to catch the electric train to the far end station, go up on the cable cars, walk across the mountain, and come back down the chairlift, then catch the electric train home again.
Things didn’t go quite according to plan.
We left the hotel at about 1215pm, by the time we started to leave at midday and told Cam that we were going just as we were walking out the door. So he went and got ready and came back out to meet us, and then we yelled at Adrian from outside the hotel. Who walked out onto his balcony with no shirt on. What a highlight…. So anyway, then we waited for him to get ready. As I said earlier, the train only comes once an hour, which turned out to be at 1255pm, so we had quite a long wait after we walked into Stary and found tickets. Three trains came at once, so Amanda asked an official whether we were getting on the right train, and the official said yes. The train left the station and we were looking between our tickets and the display showing where we were going and the map, and figured out we were on the wrong train. Then the ticket check lady came, the same person who’d told us we were on the right train, and laughed at us for being on the wrong train. So we got off at the next stop, and decided that instead of waiting another hour for the train to come back so that we could go three minutes back along the track to change trains, we’d walk to another village and catch the correct train from there. We could see the village we wanted from where we were standing. The village we got off in was so weird, there were lots of buildings and a playground but there were no people, and there was no evidence of people. Between there and the village we walked to (15 min away) we saw one group of three people. The next village was called Horny Smokovec, which of course we enjoyed greatly, and spent 45min waiting for the train to come past and turn around and come back again.
When we finally managed to get on the right train and get to the station we’d intended, we walked from there up to the cable car station, only to find that to get to the top of the mountain and back costs €25 (we’d abandoned the idea of a hike by then), and not only that, but it’s actually three cable cars which you have to change between, and the highest one had completely sold out for the rest of the day. This was about 230pm. Apparently if you have any sense you book at least one day in advance. To get to the top of the second cable car was still €15 return, which Cam, Marsha and I decided was too expensive, considering we could easily walk to the same height, but the others went up. The three of us went for something to eat instead, then we all met up again on the 430pm train. Talk about a comedy of errors.
I went for a walk when we got back to the hotel. I left at about 6pm and followed the same path that Marsh and Cam had taken the day before. I was on my own so I was walking very slowly and taking ages setting up my photos and all that trash. To start with, there were plenty of people going towards the village, but the last time I saw anybody was about 620pm. The rules of the area are that you must tell someone where you’re going, and if you’re not back by 8pm, the search and rescue helicopter gets sent out, at your expense, whether you want it or not and irrespective of when you’ve said you’ll be back. So at about 645pm the sun went behind the hill and I hadn’t seen anyone in a while, so I decided to start making my way back. I was doing the same thing, wandering along taking photos, and I was standing on a bridge trying to get a photo that showed the water in the stream moving, when someone appeared beside the bridge, heading back up the mountain. It gave me a hell of a surprise actually, I just about fell off the bridge. It was this slightly creepy looking guy who I’d already seen walking in the other direction at least half an hour earlier. That was more than weird enough for me, so as soon as he’d gone past me I decided it was well time to get out. The path had a lot of loose stones and water running down it and that sort of thing, so I was moving as fast as I could while bearing in mind that now would be an extremely bad time to slip and break my leg. I got home without seeing that guy or anyone else again, which was quite a relief.
There was a pizza place across the road from the hotel, so that night we just had takeaway pizzas and went to bed. It was off da chain.
Then we got up for an 8am bus trip to Budapest… See next post…!!
Then we got up for an 8am bus trip to Budapest… See next post…!!
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