Night in Hel Peninsula

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Hel Peninsula, 09-07-2001.

Hel Peninsula, what a fitting name consider that over 80.000 German troops were trapped here on this 34 km. long and at its most 2 km. broad peninsula covered in dense pine forest, for months in the cold of the Polish winter at the end of the Second World War, being pounded into the sand dunes by Russian atillary, young German soldiers traumatised by long gruelling years of bloody war against a ruthless adversary. Fighting and dying in the name of a Führer who was becoming more irrational by the day....yeah, I am pretty sure for these poor Germans Hel peninsula must have been a real Hell!!

I am trying hard to ignore the persistent and obnoxious presence of countless German ghoulds calling to me from the darkness surrounding me while I slowly manoeuver through the forest, the wind deformed branches of pine trees looking like something out of Magic Land in the bleak shine of the opaque moon. Slowly finding my way through dune thistle and sedge to the lights in the distance.

Not that I need the lights to locate the place, a small camping near the main road and about 200 meter away from my wild camping place on the beach, populated by numerous Polish young males, many of them in worn-out dirty jeans and bare chested, drunk as the proverbial skunk, probably having come over form nearby Gdansk in beat up cars for a drinking binge in the forest, their raucous male drunk boasting would guide me even blind folded, even deavening the cacaphony of barking by the countless forest frogs calling for mates and probably having frog s*x on their reptilian heads.

Not that it is Reptilian S*x I am having on my Dutch head, nor Human S*x for that matter...no, what I am after is the use of the camping bathroom...maybe a hot shower with the luxury of a cheap polish shampoo left behind by one of the camping guests and a real toilet bowl to sit on comfortably after nearly a week of squatting the Thai way in dense Polish pine forests while being surrounded by the chilly early morning forest fog making my *ss feel like it is sitting on a ice-box.

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Photos

Storches
near Lake Dolgie

My trip...
so far