Poland a week of two extremes

Now in these parts of the world they eat a lot of sauerkraut and the shops are full of the stuff and you can buy it in different flavours. Not sure we’ve eat sauerkraut before so I buy a packet for us to try and dish up a nice plate full to go with our chicken. 2 hours later both our bellies are making horrendous noises and during the night Keith and I play musical toilets in our very small bathroom. I swear we’ve lost 2 stone overnight and Eugene stinks of cabbage farts. Anyway I look on the internet about sauerkraut, a bit late now but anyway it says you should only eat a couple of spoons full at a time to get your stomach used to the fermentation, we must of eaten 400 grams each, no wonder we’re farting for the next 3 days, lesson learnt lol.

Saturday 28 July

We decide to leave the National Park.  We wanted to do a bit of cycling but the cycle paths are more for mountain bikes and we have town bikes which makes it twice as much work.

We drive a couple of hours east of Krakow to Tarnow.  The drive is nice and easy and we use the motorway all the way.

We find a campsite 1 km outside of the city and its lovely.  Its a hotel with small chalets in the grounds and areas for motorhomes and tents.

We take the 20 minute walk into the city which is split into the new town and the old town.   The place is dead for a Saturday afternoon there’s hardly anyone around and all the shops are shut apart from a few cafes and restaurants.

Sunday 29 July

We decide to stay another day and head back into town on our bikes.  We have a lovely couple of hours exploring the town, it doesn’t really have much to offer us apart from the cafes and bars.

There are a few memorials here like the remains of the Jewish Synagogue.

There is a solar clock which is pretty impressive you can roll huge granite spheres on  water.

They love a bronze statue here the place is full of them.  We wanted to visit the cathedral but being Sunday the place was packed with worshipers they were even standing outside in the road.

For a small town we’ve seen more drunks lying around here then any other place we’ve been too, one was even pissing against a fence were people were sat eating on the other side.

Its boiling hot but the rumble of thunder is not far away and it hammers it down for 20 minutes or so before the sun reappears.

Monday 30 July

We leave Tarnow and head to the Bochnia Salt Mines.  The Salt Mines are the oldest working salt mine in Poland.  We opted for the Polish guided tour, English was double the price.

This mine was completely different to the one we visited in Romania.  This smell and looked like a working mine.  It was great we got to go on a little train down to the bottom of the mine.

Next we headed to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of one of the biggest mass murders in history.  It isn’t somewhere you ‘want’ to visit but its somewhere you should.  We’ve got tickets for a guided tour tomorrow and want to get there today so we can get parked up without being squashed into a carpark that we can’t get out of.

We find a paid carpark for £2 for the night right opposite the gates to Birkenau or Auschwitz II as its known.  We arrive about 5pm and the visitors are starting to leave.  By 6pm there’s hardly anyone here so we head across the road into the site.

Entry into Birkenau is free and you don’t need a guide to go round.  We’ve studied the Second World War at school and seen countless films about Auschwitz, and we both felt we had a good understanding about what happened, how every wrong were we both.  As soon as we passed through the gates we were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the place, it is massive 425 acres of bleak, barren landscape, with lines of barbed-wire fences and watchtowers stretching off into the distance in all directions.  In the middle of the site is a railway track where prisoners would arrive by train from all over Europe.

After 2 hours we went back to Eugene and talked about what we had seen.

Tuesday 31 July

This morning it was our intention to be up really early and have another look around Birkenau before the crowds arrive.  The gates open at 7am, we finally make it across at 10am along with the first coach load of visitors.

This time we walked around the edge of the site and down to where the gas chambers had been, now a pile of rubble.

We entered the ‘sauna’ where the prisoners stripped off, herded into the corridor and had their heads shaved and then their clothes where ‘disinfected’.  For me I found the way this building and the ‘story’ had been portrayed made it very real.  At the end of the building is a photograph board showing the prisoners with their families before they were murdered.

For Keith it was the gas chambers, how the Germans had put so much thought into the the layout of the building to be able to gas thousands of people.

3 hours later we left the site and walked the 3km to Auschwitz I.

We meet our English speaking guide along with about 20 other people and took the 2 hour tour around the site.

Auschwitz I is much smaller than Birkenau and the building are better preserved.  Walking though the entrance gate ‘Arbeit macht frei’ is carved into the wrought iron.  ‘Work will set you free’ a horrendous irony in a place so may came to die.

The tour goes in a route and we are following and being followed by numerous other tours all going the same way and the same allotted time at each building.  Its orderly and as respectful as they can make it for the amount of people there.

Our guide was really good at explaining the history of what had happened and what each of the buildings were used for.

What we both felt most unsettling for us were the rooms full of human hair that had been cut from thousand of prisoners, the rooms full of shoes and possessions that people bought with them when they thought they were just being sent away to work and would be going home.

The photograph of the mother and her 6 very young children walking along the road not knowing she was walking them to their deaths.

The wall of death where prisoners were shot including the youngest a 7 month old child.

The second part of the tour was to Birkenau, although we’ve been twice already we thought we’d still go with the guide and we’re glad we did.  The guide was able to tell us more about what happened then was available to read on the information boards.

She told us about Dr Mengele who used prisoners as guinea pigs as he experimented with different ways of killing them, how he would use twins, experiment on one and see how it affected the other.  Absolute terrible and terrifying things to subject another human being.

We are so glad we came to Auschwitz and taking the tour was the best way to do this, it filled in the gaps for us so we had a better idea and now a better understanding of what happened. I don’t have the writing skills to give this place justice but I hope it’s gives you an insight.

We got back to Eugene about 7pm and decided we would move on to Zator so we could spend the day at an amusement park tomorrow after the last 2 days of sullen mood.

We get to Engerylandia in Zator and can park in the carpark for 5zl a day which is £1 including electricity.

Wednesday 1st August

We’re up to beat the crowds at the ticket desk which opens at 9am, after the past couple of days we need a bit of fun.  A full days ticket cost us £50 for the both of us.  We take in a packed lunch and our bathers for swim at sometime during the day.

The last time we went to a park such as this was about 6 years ago in Los Angeles when we went to Universal Studios and we loved it.

From the car park we could see the ride that everyone wants to go on Hypertron which is new this year.  We joined the 20 minute queue for a 60 second thrill.  It was awesome.

During the day we went on all the big rides in and out of queues all day, but they were all worth it.

We head over to the waterpark, we didn’t fancy the water rides and instead opted to float around the river on a rubber-ring to cool off.

We watched a speed car and motorbike show which showed some amazing driving skills and nearly killed us with the tyre burning stunts.

In all we had a really good day and after 10 hours in the park headed back to the carpark to relax and unwind with a few beers.

Tomorrow we’re leaving the country and heading into the Czech Republic.  We’ve loved Poland and only seen a very tiny part but what we have seen we’ve loved.  This is a country we are definitely coming back to.

We’ve had 10 days here and our spending was on track until we decided to have a big shop and finally found a Dometic dealer who was able to supply us with a new burner for the fridge, so this is now sorted.

We spent 6 nights in paid carparks, 3 nights in a campsite and 1 night wild camping.  Our spending is £52 per day.

Thanks for coming along, don’t forget we are on Polarsteps so you can see exactly where we are in the world, like our facebook page and read this blog!!!

a la perchoine

Shirena & Keith

xxxxx