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And so we went onwards to Banská Bystrica (that's pronounced "bun-scar bis-trit-sa"), which along with nearby Zvolen make the two main cities in central Slovakia. We found some creepy little guesthouse which satisfied both of our goth sides quite well, very small and nostalgic, but also very noisy as the walls were probably made from a sheet of cardboard, so you could properly hear everything bumping around. We went for more amazing cheap pizza on the town square on wednesday night and were entertained by a cool little band playing some covers and some songs in slovak (including some translated cover versions!) There was something incredibly eerie about the clocktower, at five to every hour it would chime a new tune on a huge music box, giving the whole place a bit of a fairy tale like aura.

Like Liptovský Mikuláš, Banská Bystrica also had a huge sense of happening to it, there were always things going on and people were always getting into it. However Banská Bystrica is a lot bigger, so our night took us to a few different places ending in a "jazz art café" which unfortunately wasn't playing much jazz, but it did have some pretty cool pictures on the walls, reminiscent of the coffee houses in York. We made it back to this creaky little room for a nights sleep - or lack thereof in my case as I was kept awake for most of the night by an epic rendition of the slovak national pride (lightning over the tatras) which Charlie slept through like a baby.

So we woke up on thursday morning to a far cleaner and less humid day, but with me only on two hours sleep. Despite this I was still feeling mostly up for what we had planned - a far easier looking walk from another dead ski resort called Donovaly to a ghost village called Kalište, which had been burned down during World War 2 and is now kept as a cultural monument, and then to one of a few villages for a bus back to Banská Bystrica. We arrived in Donovaly and got straight out, having experienced enough of dead ski resorts in summer already, and had a really weird experience as we were on top of a hill overlooking it, and could hear no less than the same kind of eerie music box chiming from somewhere back in the rubble of weird shaped hotels - it was five to the hour again. Perhaps, we thought, this is a characteristic of this entire region as for whatever reason, even dead ski resorts seem to do it!

This walk was far more pleasant than scaling that road down through Demänovská Dolina. It was all off road and took us through lovely shady forests, some of which were still soaking up the wrath of the previous night's storm, fields buzzing with hordes of suicidal crickets that kept trying to jump under our feet, and it was mostly downhill and an overall loss of a few hundred metres, therefore not too tiring. We eventually reached Kalište which had a strange energy about it, obviously considering its history, burned down during the second world war and all that remained of most of it now were the stony foundations. We sat down and for a long time pondered why this had happened.. there was no literature either of us could really understand around the place. Aside from the remains of the houses there were a few buildings, such as a chapel, which seem to have been built their afterwards, as they certainly don't follow the architectural style that seemed to have been dominant in the village (hence the low stone walls)

We left after exploring all around the remains of the village and finding one preserved artifact, a well with some of the cleanest water we'd ever tasted, which we filled all our bottles with us before heading off on a long trek through the forest to the nearest actual village, Balaze. On the way we met some poor lost folk going the other way up the hill with some baskets, who I spoke to in my rubbish broken czech and who practically broke down when they realised how far they had to walk uphill in the heat! We traced what were presumably their steps back to Balaze and had some much needed Kofola in the village pub before taking the bus back to Banská Bystrica, feeling a bit tired but ready to go and explore somewhere else this evening.

We decided as it would be cool to stay somewhere new every night, to try and go to Zvolen this evening, which we knew absolutely nothing about, but my map of Slovakia made it to seem slightly larger and more important than Banská Bystrica. We arrived by train and the heavens opened on us, so we took refuge in this rather cool café with buddhas and interesting craftwork covering the walls, who sold interesting milkshakes which we slurped one of each before going to explore the rest of Zvolen. That café was, by our estimation, the only cool thing in the entire city. The rest of it was just nothing, no matter which way you walked off the town square, you were just buried in paneláks after a minute, and there was no accomodation cheap enough for us there at all, everything being at the kind of price you'd expect to pay in Paris! We decided, therefore, to retrace our 20km on the iron road back to Banská Bystrica.

Neither of us were feeling up to eating that evening, so we found a cheaper and less creaky guesthouse this time and spent the evening sampling the slovak drinking culture at ridiculously cheap cocktail bars on the square drinking malinovice (like slivovice, but with raspberries) on the side of really tasty cocktails for the same price as beer in western europe! Halfway through our shenanigans, the holiday started trying to test us and it turned out that it was very lucky we were back in Banská Bystrica. I got a phonecall from Charlie's mum, informing me that Charlie's passport had been found at the creaky place we were at the previous night by the chambermaid! We couldn't help laugh, she had had to trace my number through a long line and must have been going crazy, whereas we, when we found out, simply swaggered back around the corner to the creaky place uttering due words of thanks to Charlie's mum, Charlie's friend Amelia, facebook, and the fact that Zvolen is shit.

We managed to have an awesome time out until about 1am, when we were chucked out of the last place we were in and decided we should probably go to sleep. However, we were having horrific trouble getting our keys to the place to work in the door on the outside, and for a while it looked as if we had been locked out! Attempting to phone the number on the sign was hopeless, as I was flat out of credit after receiving 2 calls from the UK that evening. Therefore we eventually found ourself at the one place on the square which was still open, who helpfully fired off a couple of phonecalls to the number and, after they tried to instruct us how to open the door and our keys still didn't work, someone had to actually come out and open the door for us! We still aren't sure whether that was because we didn't actually have the key or not, but either way, we both collapsed and, luckily for us as we had no walking to do the next day, just slept until we were woken up by a music box rendition of Mozart's "Rondo Alla Turca" - the first chime we had heard, 10:55am. To be completed...

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