Zakopane

Wednesday 20^th of June



I arrived in Zakopane on Monday morning and found my hostel easily. My right ankle was hurting after the huge amount of walking in Warsaw in my sandals last day, so I decided to start easily and only have a small sightseeing the first day. I climbed to the top of the closeby Gubalowka Hill. You have an option to go there with a kind of skilift, but I decided to walk. On top I was surprised to find a road full of restaurants and small shops and Sigulda-like adventure possibilities. Too touristic for me, so I decided to go back down quite quickly. The view from top was beautiful, in a clear weather it's a very good place to see the Tatra Mountains.
Zakopane is often called ”the winter capital of Poland” because of the excellent skiing opprtunities. It's located right next to the High Tatras, an area of 25 peaks exceeding 2500 meters, which Poland shares with Slovakia.

On Tuesday I went hiking with an Aussie Ash, and we started from our hostel before 8 am to have a full day for hiking. We took a minibus to Kuznice, where from we first hiked to a beatiful lake where we had a lunch break. Our destination was the highest peak in the area called Swinica, which we reached after five hours of hiking. The view was amazing! The feeling after reaching the peak is just always as amazing. I want to go to some hihger mountains one day... Our plan was to hike to another peak where we'd take a cable car back down. Good plan in theory, only problem was that the cable car was not working. So two more hours of hiking back down. At some point we got bored of walking so decided to run down, which was maybe not the best desicion. After 10 minutes I sprained my ankle and we had to walk the rest of the way. It wasn't anything serious, but now (next morning) the ankle is a bit swollen and stiff, so I'm not sure if I'm able to hike anymore. Let's see. Anyways, in total we hiked for nine hours and the difference in altitude was 1300 meters (from 1000m to 2300m). When we were in the bus back to Zakopane it suddenly started raining huge hails and when we reached Zakopane it was raining like crazy and all the streets were flooding. Yes, we got totally wet, but still we were very lucky that it did's start raining when we were on the mountains... Although we didn't meet any bears on the mountains, at least we saw a marmot (murmeli) taking it easy on a rock. Tuesday was a very good day!

Now I'll just have to see if I'm still able to do some more hiking or if I should just move on towards Ukraine.