A dilemma facing anyone with a desire to travel and limited spare time is this: See as many new places as you can, in the knowledge that not every one of them will have that magic 'something' - or return to a place you know has got it. Risk vs. certainty.
With the long Independence Day weekend looming, I decided to revisit a place that Moni and I had been to with our friends Krzysztof and his daughter Zosia in
May 2007.
Zagroda Lepiarzówka is superbly located, right at the top of a twisty dirt track climbing a mountainside, a stone's throw from the Czech border. And with views like the one below, looking down on Szarotka, a village on the Polish side.
Now that we're in Schengen, as long as we have ID with us, we can wander across into the Czech Republic and back again at will, and not just at the border crossing points.
Below: Looking down towards the town of Jablunkov across the border.
Zagroda Lepiarzówka itself is a wonderful place (
external view below). The restaurant and bar, heated and lit by a large log fire in a stone fireplace that dominates the room which is entirely made from wooden beams, carved in the local style. The menu is heavy on fatty pork, pickled cabbage and potato dumplings (a must-try here are
kluski soszowskie, a local delicacy - potato flour dough encasing tiny cuts of finely chopped bacon with onion, rolled in breadcrumbs and deep fried. Just the thing to set you up for long walks in the mountains. With hot sauerkraut, pork shoulder or black pudding (
kaszok).
Because of limited daylight (its dark at half past four), we would not go as far into the Czech Republic as we would have liked. Below: Quarter to four and the sun is sinking fast, casting an unearthly red glow on the soil. We have half an hour's walking to make it back into Poland before darkness falls.
What we did see was reminiscent of the old days; a gone-to-seed Pioneers' Hotel (below) that would make a superb location for a low-budget remake of The Shining, a beer-and-dumplings restaurant with adjacent poorly-stocked grocery store ('Closed Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays'). A place in this condition in Poland would be unthinkable; if left empty it would be vandalised and stripped bare in days - but in any case it would be sold off and put (with the help of EU money) to good use, like Jodłowy Dwór in the Świętokrzyskie hills that Eddie and I visited in July, another old communist-era tourist asset.
But the Czechs we met along our way were friendly, genuinely helpful, good-humoured, though slightly comical to the cosmopolitan eye. Certainly a nicer lot of people than the few Slovaks Eddie and I encountered in August. And what struck me was that the Czechs we met all understood and spoke some Polish, and accepted Polish currency, which made life in Schengen all the more comfortable. Below. The fellow on the left was very helpful in talking us through our options of getting to our destination. The chap on the right was on his way back from picking mushrooms (note full basket and rucksack with empty beer bottles).
We were blessed with four days of remarkably beautiful weather for mid-November, clear skies much of the time and temperature up to +17C. We made two ascents of Wielki Stożek (954m), the last half kilometer of climb being quite gruelling, even for our teenage daughters who had to rest every few minutes. Below: The hard climb starts here; even harder to descend. Note the border marker; I'm on the Polish side, the signs on the other side are in Czech.
At the top of Wielki Stożek (Velky Stoźek in Czech), there is a mountain shelter and restaurant, dating back to the 1920s. In the inner hall, there's a wall map (below) from communist days, notable for its depiction of our southern neighbours (CSSR - Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic) as a terra incognita - no towns, villages, roads, tourist tracks - nothing. Simple message: do not stray across the border. The shelter restaurant is good on mountain food - cabbage soup, pierogi, fried liver, mulled beer, hot chocolate with rum.
This time last year:
My father's house
Across the fields to Falenty
Sowing with as many oxen as he shall have yoked in the plough
It's Independence Day
Another new house for Jeziorki
Rooting around the hard disk of my laptop, I found something I'd suspected had been deleted long ago - photos of the rampa in action, taken on 9 September 2006 on my old Nokia 6300 with its rather poor 1.3 megapixel camera. Above: An SM48 diesel loco first pulls the train from the sidings in the direction of Mysiadło, then reverses up the ramp, pushing a rake of 12 aggregate wagons ahead of it.
Above: The train standing on the ramp. Here, the wagons are emptied, the aggregate falls in heaps on the ground some 12 metres below. Below: The loco on the ramp - picture taken by holding the mobile phone camera onto 20x magnification binoculars with elastic bands for some extreme telephoto effects (extremely bad optics too!). Still, the ironwork is clearly visible.
Below: We were lucky to catch the train, having disgorged its load, making its way back down the ramp. It heads the empty rake of wagons towards the buffers by Mysiadło, stops, then reverses to the sidings near W-wa Jeziorki station. Here, it runs around the train to take it back onto the main line.
Below: The last photo I'd ever get to take of the rampa na kruszywa in action. It would be used (rarely) into the spring of 2007, then traffic would cease for ever. Now the rampa and the sidings are gone.
Right: The points leading from the sidings where wagons would wait to be taken up the ramp. All gone. There'll be a road here soon.
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