Thursday, 9 August 2012

 

Start: Pieštany 09:30

Arrival: Levoča 19:00

Total: 340 km

 

 

 

 

In the morning, we awoke with a start: the alarm clock was blaring out loud radio music right into our ears! We hadn't even known there was one. It took us a minute to figure out what was happening, then it took Sonia two more minutes of fumbling to figure out how to silence the darn thing. It was, quite sillily, built into the head of the bedframe, so we couldn't just throw it into the bathroom. When all was quiet, we looked at our watch: six o'clock. What an ungodly hour to set an alarm-clock to! We slumped down onto our pillows and fell asleep again. Fifteen minutes later, the radio was back on. We had only put it on snooze! "This time, turn it off for good," I mumbled. "I thought I had done just that," my sister pointed out. "Why are there no letters next to these buttons and switches?" I had already half fallen back asleep again. But Sonia couldn't leave well enough alone. Interested as she is in all things technical, she started to analyse the buttons, trying to turn the volume down, changing radio channels and just generally making way too much noise. "I want to sleep," I groaned and hammered on all the buttons at once. Quiet. Good.

 

Ten minutes later, Radio Slovakia was back in the picture. Sonia jerked around, a fiercely determined grin on her face. She was gonna get to the bottom of this. Literally. With the radio still blaring out pop music, she began to move the bed. "Are you nuts?" I buried my face in the pillow. "I need to see where the cable goes," she explained. "Then we can simply unplug it." Unfortunately, the bed wouldn't budge, at least not with me in it. "Get up," she ordered. Grumbling, I retreated to the sofa. She pushed and shoved, but the bedframe wouldn't move. "Help me," she commandeered. I'm not a huge fan of imperatives at half past six in the morning, but realizing that something had to be done about this, I obliged. Still, the bed didn't move. Sonia inspected the bedframe from up close. "It's screwed to the wall," she stated matter-of-factly. They can't be serious! I pushed the button again, and then again for good measure. Maybe that would delay the next wake-up call. It didn't. At a quarter to seven, we declared defeat and got up. We had a long trip ahead of us anyway, and we might as well get a headstart.

 

We were the first guests to arrive at breakfast. We debated whether we should tell our hosts about the incident, but decided against it. While sipping our coffee, we wondered whether the alarm clock had meanwhile set off once more. Strangely enough, when we got back to our room, it was quiet, and it didn't go off anymore for the remainder of the time that we stayed in the room. A lesser person would have taken this personal.

 

 

 

But the day was too sunny and bright to be in a bad mood, and we set out for the first highlight on today's agenda: Castle Čachtice. There are many well-known restored castles in Western Slovakia, but we had to see this one. A while ago, we had watched a movie with a Czech actor that we quite like, Petr Jákl, about the Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory. She was known as the "female Dracula" because she supposedly murdered a lot of her female subjects and bathed in their blood to keep herself young. Castle Čachtice had been her residence in Slovakia, and so, naturally, we had to visit it. It was only a small detour from the main route, so we figured that we could visit it quickly and, an hour later, be on our way again.

 

Unfortunately, Čachtice is not a major tourist hotspot. In fact, it was not pointed out at all on the road. After driving around the countryside for a good hour, strategically but painfully slowly homing in on it, we finally found a tiny signpost indicating a hiking trail toward the castle. Perfect! We would park right there, at the beginning of the trail, and hike through the forest. The sign said "350 m / 30 min". Hm, half an hour for not even half a kilometer? We can easily do four kilometers an hour without breaking a sweat. Confident of our lung power, we set out up the hill at a brisk speed. The first five minutes were a piece of cake. We enjoyed the overgrown meadows and warm, fresh morning air. We even got a glimpse of the castle, high up on the hill, from time to time. After five more minutes we started to wonder whether the "350 m" referred to metric metres. Maybe Slovakia had a different kind of metric system? Apparently, in Sweden 1 mile denotes 10,000 m, not 1,600 as in the rest of the world. So maybe 350 m really meant 3,5 kilometers? Had Slowakia ever been colonized by Swedes?

 

Now the path wound up into the forest. Soon we were too busy scrambling over tree roots and boulders to worry about Vikings and SI units. The trail became ever more adventurous and steep, and also quite slippery with sand, branches and gravel. I hadn't prepared for hiking through the woods, and my thin summer shoes were not really adapted to this. The last bit was really steep. Sonia went ahead, and I half pulled myself up by branches, half climbed on my knees up the almost vertical sandy slope. How on Earth would I make it back down?

 

But we were amply rewarded for our efforts. After 20 minutes (yay, faster than the signpost had said!) we emerged from the forest, right onto an asphalted road leading to the castle. We strongly suspected that the road we had been driving on would have led us to the castle in another minute or two, if we hadn't seen that treacherous signpost and set off on foot. But no matter. This way, we'd had a refreshing workout.

 

Now for the castle. We followed the road for two more minutes and came to the castle gates. To the side lay plenty of huge stones and a van was busy driving building equipment back and forth. A sign at the front of the gate said "Closed". Oh no! The castle was closed for restoration. Slightly disappointed, we nevertheless ventured inside the gate, but there was so much debris lying around that we beat a fast retreat. The workmen hadn't looked too thrilled to have us around, either.

 

Still, we had enjoyed the walk very much. Unfortunately, we had to get back to the car somehow. We didn't dare try the main road, in case it didn't lead to our car after all. With lots of scrambling and gliding and a helping hand from my sister, I made it back down the forest path to the meadow and, finally, to our car. We hadn't been inside Countess Bathory's castle, but we sure had had a lot of fun!

 

 

 

By the time we were back on the road to the second destination for the day, our headstart from this morning had evaporated.

 

It was mid afternoon when we arrived in Trenčín, a tourist town which often hosts music and culture festivals. But we were interested in Trenčín for another reason: during the Middle Ages, the town had shortly been an independent kingdom, ruled, I suspect, by some fiercely proud rebels who didn't want to submit to anyone else's rule. A bit like Transnistria today, maybe? But seeing as this was centuries ago, everyone approves and Trenčín markets this heritage quite heavily. Apparently, one can become a "Citizen of the Kingdom of Trenčín" for a day, for a small fee, and I had planned on getting that stamp.

 

Unfortunately, Trenčín is a very busy city and traffic was heavy. By the time we had found a parking spot and stood in the central square looking up at the castle, my desire to become a Trenčínian had all but evaporated. Neither of us felt like climbing up to another castle. "Are you sure that they sell you this stamp at the castle?" my sister asked. No, I wasn't sure. The travel guide had hinted at it, if I remembered correctly. The sun was beating down mercilessly and we both decided, that a "hint" was not enough to make us climb up another hill. Instead we had a kebab, and then we were on the road again.

 

 

 

Now we were driving through the beautiful landscape of the small Fatra which, further east, becomes the more famous Tatra. There were mountains all around us, but luckily, the highway went through the valleys.

 

Unfortunately, we got stuck in several big traffic jams due to road construction works along the way, which was most annoying, as we had hoped to make a detour into the lands of the famous Jánošík. Jánošík, the "hero of the mountains", is a sort of Robin Hood from Slovakia. He lived and died in the mountains of the Fatra, and I had hoped to visit Terchova, a far-off little town where there seemed to be a museum in his honour. Now it looked like we wouldn't have time for any out-of-the-way museums. "Do you think you can live with not seing this museum?" Sonia asked, while we waited for yet another makeshift traffic light to let us past the roadworks. "Of course. Anyway, we're in the middle of Jánošík country right here," I said and manouvered the car around an excavator. Well, strictly speaking, we were in a major traffic jam outside the town of Martin, but when you looked out the window, you could see the dark mountains where Jánošík used to hide from his persecutors. They were right there, right behind the XXL-sized Soviet-style monument and the noisy excavator. I am blessed with an excellent imagination.

 

Later on, we made a stop at the shore of Lake Liptovska Mara. After walking around the beach for a while, enjoying the sun, we felt ready to do some more exploring. The opportunity for this soon appeared in the shape of a signpost, announcing the Museum of Liptov Village in Pribylina. Curious what this might be, we followed the sign. Turned out that it was a large outdoor reconstruction of an old Slovak village. How quaint! And we had made it just in time, they would be open for another hour and a half.

 

The museum grounds were easily as vast as a small village. There were original houses, barns, a smithy, bakery, school, church and many more buildings, taken from villages in the area and rebuilt there to give an accurate impression of life in a 19th century Slovak village. There was even a fire department with an old fire engine. Farm animals were strolling around and the visitors were allowed to enter each building and inspect the furniture, drapes, crockery, utensils and tools of the former inhabitants. It was quite a trip into old history, and we enjoyed it immensely. Gives you plenty of ideas for gothic stories.

 

Now that we had left Western Slovakia behind us, there was a lot less traffic on the road. The streets were in pristine condition, and we would have made good speed if there had not been a quite annoying speed limit of 80 km/h. Still, it gave us the opportunity to admire the landscape at leisure.

 

Finally we arrived in Levoča, where we had our hotel for the night. Levoča is a fortified town inside old city walls. There was still time for a walk through the old town, which again looked rather Austrian to us. Anyway, by the end of this trip, we were convinced that the countries of Central Europe all look pretty much the same. It's all Hansa to the north and Austro-Hungarian Empire style to the south. There are different languages, and surely there are different customs and national quirks too, but they definitely share a common architectural history. German/Austrian in the 18th and 19th centuries, and drab functionalism to the East and West in the 20th century. And the 21th-century glass and steel is global anyway. :)

 

Be that as it may, we liked the historic feel of the little old town and admired the beautifully restored façades and quiet squares. Oddly, the town looked geared towards tourism, with many restaurants and hotels, but there weren't any tourists around. When, if not in August? But we enjoyed the calm and quiet and only retreated to our hotel after nightfall. It had been an eventful day.