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Published: August 9th 2007
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Arrival at Medzilaborce Mesto
Particularly observant trainspotters will have noticed this is a single railcar, not the two-car set that I referred to in the text. Ah-ha! That's because the powered railcar (pictured) detached at Medzilaborce then goes on alone to Medzilaborce Mesto, then to reverse, and presumably run round to the front at Medzilaborce main station. So just as
Stuart has managed to find a interesting/tenuous link with
Andy Wharhol in Beyond the Clouds to the Kingdom of Women, here's one with the eastern corner of Slovakia! We have been to Slovakia several times over the years, it's a fab country, though this time we were travelling through because it offered the nearest rail route to our destination in Poland. Last time we were in Hummené, (1995), the Hotel Karpaty had the dubious attraction of the
Erotic Disco. It was in the basement guarded by a big bloke with a moustache. That's all I know, honest. I wonder if that's still going? Maybe not, as Hummené has a smart new town centre, as our fellow travellers proudly told us.
Just for a whim, and a chance for Kasia to get in touch with native Polish before her Translator’s Exam later in June we decided to head off for a few days to the Bieszczady Mountains again. I was quite interested in seeing what it would take to actually move out there and find some means of living. There’s some unfinished business with the railway on the western edge: in 1996 we were involved in a project to revitalise services along the line through to Slovakia. But since those days, regional government picks up the tab for local passenger services and with massive underfunding in the Podkarpackie Region, the Sanok/Zagórz - Łupków railway has had passenger services removed, except for summer weekends.
I have put a rough guide to getting there on the
Countrygoer website. So, with rail services poor from Kraków, I reckoned it would save day time if we flew to Bratislava and then got an overnight train to Hummené and Medzilaborce.
Unfortunately, our plane had its usual load of British binge drinkers over to Eastern Europe to be obnoxious, loud and pissed up. I detest them. Our plane crossed over Germany and Austria, and we flew low over the Little Carpathians (wine country), a line of hills that stretch up north from Bratislava, before landing in the flat lands just north east of the city. We touched down in 31C heat, a bit of a change from cool northern England!
Useful tip: We bought bus tickets (including luggage) for about a quid to the main railway station at the Bratislava Tourist Information kiosk at the airport. After dumping the rucksacks at left luggage, we hit the old town, and got an evening feed. Then we had a cool beer at an open air café and surveyed the streets that became crowded after sundown. A stroll through to the Danube, through very pleasant streets - it’s weird to think that Austria is only a couple of miles away from the city centre.
Our train left at 23:30, we could only get couchettes as the train was very busy. We were allocated top bunks for some reason, even though the middle bunks were never claimed. The top bunks are the best way of simulating sauna like conditions on a train that has been carefully conditioned in the sunshine. Our co-passengers were very pleasant, but the daughter felt somewhat chilly in the 32.7C*, and felt it necessary to curtail the annoying draught from the window (she shut it at 1am) and wrapped herself up in the blanket, already sporting some warm leggings!
*nearly 91F in the old money, measured by my watch dangling in the air.
Fortunately, the route east goes over the heights by Poprad and by the early hours the carriage had cooled down a bit. It got me acclimatised to the unseasonably warm May temperatures. With 20 minutes in Hummené, we hadn’t long (and not enough to check out the new town centre) for the last stretch in a little two-car train that headed into the hills and Medzilaborce, close to the Polish border. The train was well patronised by Slovaks, even though the roads are good, better than the pot holed death traps in Poland. We ambled through very beautiful scenery as the hills rose up to the edge of the Bieszczady range.
Medzilaborce is famous for its Andy Wharhol connection, which is a bit tenuous. Just his parents came from there, he never set foot in Medzilaborce, but that didn’t stop the town opening an Andy Wharhol Museum dedicated to his art. I’ll get there some day. We didn’t get chance to check out the town this time as we got picked up by our friend Roman, to take us over the border. Roman stopped off a Palota, a hamlet on the border checkpoint, to pick up some Slovak beer, and after an extremely brief passport check we were up the hill on our way to Poland and Komańcza, 12 miles away.
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