My Polish is rubbish!
Trip Start
Mar 25, 2007
1
35
72
Trip End
Feb 16, 2008
Krakow, Poland
Monday, July 30, 2007
e noticed the drop in the quality of the roads straight away over the border to Poland, they were awful!! Very rough, with big patches on patches on patches on the road. Anyway we headed to Wroclaw, a really nice old town, where they had a reggae and dub festival on. We managed to listen to them do their warm up/ sound check, but just as soon as we bought a beer it was time to leave - the polish bouncers were clearing the area as seemingly you had to pay! Anyway we went and paid our massive parking bill (hadn't read the sign properly) and headed towards Krakow.
We spent the night just down the road from Aushwitz, then headed in first thing in the morning
Aushwitz
. The scope and scale of the whole thing is just mind blowing, and the sacks of human hair that they sold to the textile industry to make military uniforms was the most disturbing thing we saw. They also have a whole room full of pairs of shoes (approx 40,000) that the germans were stockpiling at the end of the war, and collections of pots, combs, clothes brushes and toothbrushes that they just had piled up in warehouses. We went into the first gas chamber that they used, which was very very scary. The thing that we found weird was that they had the capacity to gas about 2000 people in half an hour, but they could only cremate about 1400 a day! We saw the main gas chambers at Birkenau, which the germans bombed as they retreated, when they heard the soviets were in the area. Most of the barracks were looted for materials for local rebuilding at the end of the war, but the foundations were still there, and stretched as far as the eye could see. The whole place is amazing, in a scary scary way. At the end of the day, our guide said to us that we need to remember what we had seen, as there is nothing to stop it happening again, somewhere, to someone
Aushwitz Village
. We then headed to Krakow, which is an awesome town. We had an authentic polish meal in town, and Hamish and I were intending to go into town again in the morning, but we woke up and it was raining, so we headed to the salt mines out of town instead. We had heard that the mines were really worth seeing, but we paid a lot (about 20 euros each) and did the compulsory tour, unfortunately the whole thing was very touristy, and you spent the whole time waiting for the tour in front of you to move on so you could see the next salt sculpture. There is a chapel underground, which was cool, but the whole thing was just over priced. We also waited about 45 minutes just to get out of the place, as they could only fit a fraction of the number of people in the queue into the lift at a time. Overall not worth it!!!!
That night we headed to Zakopane, but had to give up when we couldn't see the road for the rain
BIrkenau
. We headed into town in the search of the cable car that took you to the top of the mountain range, where you can stand with one foot in Poland and one in Slovakia. After driving up a no entry road (different signs in Poland) and nearly getting a 125 euro fine, and then paying for parking and a taxi up to get to the bottom of it we discovered that the cable car was down for maintainence. Then we headed to the train that was supposed to take us for an awesome view, but instead delivered us to a super cheesy A and P show style tourist town. We headed to Slovakia with a seriously downgraded view of Poland. Krakow, Wroclaw and Aushwitz were worthwhile but everything else was a tourist rip off. Then we drove straight through Slovakia to Budapest!
