Spis Castle and the High Tatras

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Spis Castle is a very big very old ruin of a castle and very famous. It is on quite a little hill but the site is very well chosen as it’s visible in any direction and obviously good at guarding all around. On the road we went thru a very long tunnel— 5 kilometres of very high tech roading—as we came out there was the castle a few km away framed in the opening of the tunnel -guarding the high tech road as well and a great example of the high tech many centuries ago compared with high tech now. You climb up and pay to go in and get a free audio guide—they have these at all the places now. This one gave stories and legends about the castle as well which was very interesting. Eventually after many stairs you are very high up—Ken finally went up the round guard tower on a very narrow spiral stair case which was enclosed in the wall thickness so was only shoulder width. All these castles have a chapel and this one was well preserved. It had many wooden statues in it by Master Pavel—a very famous sculptor of the 1500 but amazingly modern sculptures true to life and excellent facial expressions.
We were so impressed by the Pavel statues that we went to Levoca again to see a museum devoted to his work which was very interesting, he obviously was a very good observer of how people really look.
We drove on through the region of the High Tatras—tall snow covered mountains that just rise up out of the plains with no foot hills. We drove through a string of ski resort villages, stopped and took a funicular rail way to get a bit higher. When we came back Ken informed me that our camping ground was 450 km away—shock, horror but we drove steadily on motor ways at 120 km/hr and amazingly did this in about 5 hrs—the longest time was trying to find the camping ground—first missed a turn, then followed the instructions by the computer which told us to cross a river where there was no bridge but instead a very old broken down looking ferry which was closed and dark. Finally found the camping ground wand drove round looking for a park—it was chock a block full—not good after driving 450 km and a really busy day. While we were driving round it, they put the bars across the entrance and we couldn’t get out! Finally parked over a gateway and had an exhausted sleep—found out the next morning that the gate was the fire escape -luckily there were no fires that night. Finally in Vienna!!

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Photos

Spis Castle
Coming from the East

Last Supper
Part of an altar piece by Pavel - in Levoca