Greeted by the stars and turned away by the mountains

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I love travelling by train right, but trying to sit on a 4 hour train journey having just got up at 5:30 and being as excited as I was was not something I would recommend for anyone who is prone to fits or fainting. After crawling out of Holešovice station under a newly risen sun, Style of Eye's essential mix gave me sustenance through Kolín, Pardubice and Třebova while Laidback Luke's threw me through Brno and Břeclav and across the Slovak border to Kúty, bringing my total number of countries visited up another one. Then, we finally pulled into Bratislava and I was on my way to the airport to meet Charlie.

After finally soaking up the reality that we were both now with each other again and on holiday, we made our way back to the hlavná stanica (which is the slovak version of hlavní nádrazí) and decided that since it was monday, we were better doing all the remote stuff we planned to do first and leave Bratislava until party time. So, having picked up my companion we just continued going east. Our first destination was Liptovský Mikuláš, a town about 3 or 4 hours away from Bratislava by train in between the high and low tatra mountains, and the local convenient centre to the summit of the low tatras, which could allegedly be reached by chairlift from a ski resort called Demänovská Dolina 12km south.

The train journey here was really quite something - as we cleared Trnava it stopped being ugly, after Trenčin it stopped being flat, and after Zilina it stopped being not absolutely stunning. It was late afternoon when we arrived, and neither of us had eaten anything all day, so we luckily managed to find a cheap guesthouse more or less straight away as we found the town centre and then headed to a ridiculously cheap pizzeria to eat bears' worth. The town had a really nice vibe to it, as we discovered that night, as there was a film screening happening in the square and it seemed as if a simple event like that would simply bring out everyone who lived there, as well as perhaps a few from close by. The film was obviously in slovak, but the intro short was fun to watch, slightly surrealist and David Firth-like and had us standing there wtfing for a while, before we realised the sky was darkening and decided what we really wanted to take advantage of while we were here.

We only needed to walk a little bit out of the town, eventually stopped by a river with the motorway on the other side, to be able to experience that natural beauty basically unheard of to people from large cities, the ability to look up at the midheaven and for it to be so overcrowded with space junk you couldn't even decipher a single constellation. At the hilt of the horizon facing us sat Scorpius, then Ophiuchus, and throughout the course of our timeless chillaxing on the riverbank, Sagittarius eventually came into view, signalling that the Earth had rotated far too much while we were there and that we were probably being ripped to shreds by mosquitos.

On tuesday morning we set off for Demänovská Dolina on foot, thus beginning our adventures. Our basic plan was to hike there on tuesday stopping off at some caves, then on wednesday to take a chairlift up to Chopok mountain (2024m and the third highest peak in the range) and then walk across the ridge to Ďumbier (2042m and the highest peak in the range). A trail from a town 1km outside Liptovský Mikuláš was clearly marked on my map of the region, however Mikuláš itself was just off the map, therefore we had to find our own way there which basically proved impossible without what in the UK would have been considered trespassing, as the marked road connecting these 2 towns traversed the motorway! So looking like a couple of gypsies we scaled the spaces made available to us on the other side of the barriers on the slip roads and eventually, found that one of them was actually a path forming a bridge over the thing, putting us back on safe ground and on the trail. Not something I'd recommend, but it worked!

The hike to the Demänovská valley proved very tiring and, until the very end, not particularly scenic. It followed the road that went down to the ski resort, which left us exposed most of the way to the burning sun and had us hopping off into the forest for some shade and shelter every now and again. It was relieving when we reached the caves at last, by which time they were just about to close, but we managed to get in on the last tour. It was so refreshing and cool and not too cramped inside at all - they were cavernous enough for us to be able to explore them without them needing to supply hard hats. The ice sculptures really were huge and breathtaking (literally when we went deep enough for the temperature to drop below freezing), and there was a hilarious moment where, after introducing the room we were in, the guide went on to switch on a hifi which played us some of Karl Jenkins's Adiemus as we were left to explore it, which made Charlie laugh with nostalgia.

The rest of the walk from the caves onwards was slightly more sane - we were now immersed in those mountains we could see towering over us from back in the river basin and thus the sun began to hide behind the trees a bit more. Finally, our cue to get off the road arrived, and we were properly trekking, following thin little paths going through the woods, wondering what our chances of meeting a bear or a wolf really were, and laughing hysterically at the well timed thought of "how weird it would be if we ran into some London gangstas here". One of our paths appeared to have been remarked or the shaping of the landscape altered since the map we had was made, which resulted in us following a path full of obviously "out of date" markers which didn't exist on the map and took us head first into the river!

At the last marker with a crossroad we exhausted every wrong possibility before finally getting it right, and after some strenuous climbing which took us higher than any land in our home country, we had arrived at the reservoir symbolising our arrival in Jasná, the southernmost quarter of Demänovská Dolina, an empty ski resort overshadowed by the slightly peculiar sight of Chopok and its weather station. We arrived at some pretty deserted (as luckily for us it was miles off season for these parts) hotel which we checked into, then went straight down for something to eat as the restaurant was closing at 8pm (!) having not taken a much needed shower and thus apparently offending the staff so much that they refused to actually speak to us, claiming not to understand english or czech. Afterwards we spent another night looking at the stars until we expired.

The next morning we were both sporting blisters, aching legs, a few mosquito bites and just a general lack of energy or affection for the burning sun which had reappeared to pollute the mountain air with a horrific humidity. Whereas we may have attempted to hike up the ridge had conditions been better, we decided we would only do it on the chairlift, which involved finding one of the many which existed in the region, and most of which seemed not to be in operation off season. After searching and retracking on the map for quite long enough, we went into a hotel and asked at reception, whose attendant was rather amused at me telling him we were "completely lost" in czech and brandishing a compass map, and bemused at why we were asking for the chairlift (which he said was not in operation) when "it was perfectly easy to walk up Chopok - just go out of the hotel, turn left and walk up the mountain!" Perfectly easy, perhaps, if you were built as he was and somewhat resemblant to a bear, but sporting our injuries we decided that a 750m ascent over 2 and a half kilometers really was not to our liking. So we found a bus stop which took us the easy way back to Liptovský Mikuláš and onwards we went. To be continued...

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Photos

Anyone else think...
...that electricity pylons in Slovakia look like really pissed off owls?

Picture unrelated
Slovak advertising strategies = women; beer and lesbianism optional. Works for everything from internet cafés to computer servicing places.

Random graveyard
Next to the motorway junction whose slip roads defeated us not.

Bastard crossroads!
We came back through here no less than 4 times.

Demänovská Dolina
and Chopok in the background