Mountain Brew

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How to quickly choose a place to visit with a couple of spare weeks and all of central Europe to pick from? Lying in Asia’s apartment with a couple of beers and a map laid out in front of us we faced just this dilemma. Fortuntely, the boys at the brewery made our decision a whole lot easier by naming their town after the beer (or perhaps vice versa). We were after somewhere between southern Poland and Suisse with mountains, a lake, and some good food and drink… Zywiec already fulfilled 3 ½ out of 4 of the criteria, we’d have to go there to sample the food.

And that’s how we ended up wandering the empty streets at 10pm looking for a bed in the tiny 3 hotel town of Zywiec. The town is full of contrasts. A semi-tourist town, it’s desperately short of accommodation, and if it weren’t for Asia’s clever detective work we would’ve for sure been camping out somewhere for the night. The lady running the small four room noclevi we stayed in was well confused with my Kiwi passport, me being the first foreigner to stay there. But the real highlights were the huge continental electrical storm that went past in the night, and the very vocal couple in the room next to ours who seemingly did very little sleeping over the 2 nights!

The streets in the town were intricate, quite pretty, clean, and showed a lot of town pride. However, the lady in the stark little tourist information office completely failed to mention the huge lake just 2km from the town centre. Mindue, the sewerage treatment plant and overgrown walking tracks we discovered when we did make it to the water may have played some part in her forgetfulness.

Anyway, this became insignificant when we discovered a windsurfing lodge on the shores of the lake that hired out boards for just a few dollars an hour. The opportunity to windsurf on a lake in the Tatra mountains was WAY too good to miss, and I could’ve stayed a good few days longer if it weren’t for the lady filling her water bottles from the heavily adorned spring on the waters edge. The sewage treatment plant we passed was constructed to service the town and was apparently the only one on the lake, and as she waved idly to the scatter of villages around the lake shore I looked at the dubiously brown water in the lake and figured once was enough.

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