Two Sides of the Same Mountain Range
August 8-14, 2024
With lots of family coming to visit us in Europe in 2024, most of our summer trips were planned out months in advance. But we still love an impromptu vacation when we get the opportunity, and after several weeks of work grind in late July and early August, we decided we needed to get to the mountains ASAP. We’d already driven from Berlin to the alps in Austria and Switzerland (twice), so this time we decided to check out a completely new set of mountains: the High Tatras. Located 9 hours due east of Berlin, the Tatras sit on the border between Poland and Slovakia, two countries we’d been meaning to return to after brief visits years ago. With no real planning, we rented a car and hit the road.
We’d heard good things about the Polish town of Zakopane from our friend Jesus, who spent a significant amount of time working in a hostel there the year before. Zakopane is the tourist hub for the entire Polish side of the High Tatras, centrally located for easy access to a variety of trails in the mountains. It takes about two hours to reach the Polish border from Berlin, and you certainly feel like you are in another country as soon as you cross over. Several times we saw large groups of police vans on the side of the highway with lights blaring, but no officers were inside the vehicles or anywhere in sight. Outside of Krakow there was a full-sized billboard for a shovel. There were many billboards further on featuring a woman named Tania in a pink leopard print spandex bodysuit, which was apparently for sale in a town called Nowy Targ. There were surprisingly few restaurants along the highway, and when you did find one it was difficult to tell exactly what you were going to get; the “Wild Bean Café” was, in actuality, a hot dog restaurant.
Though it was located significantly farther away on the edge of town, Camping Villa Jumper was a much better fit for our tastes in a campsite. The tents were still crammed in right next to each other in a confined lawn, but these grounds at least had a semblance of rural charm and solitude that we were never going to get in the town center. The amenities at Villa Jumper were also definitely a big improvement, with several shared outdoor shacks designed for campers to cook, eat, and wash dishes. Kirb was ecstatic to find that one of the shacks had a television playing the Polish broadcast of the Olympic Games. There were three hikers already eating and drinking inside when we arrived, and it didn’t take long before we became friends and the men shared their Polish moonshine and homemade wild boar sausage with us. We definitely made the right choice in deciding not to camp in town at the base of a ferris wheel.
The next morning, we found parking in Zakopane to be equally disorganized and expensive. It was cloudy and we wouldn’t be able to see much from up high in the mountains, so we asked the woman at the information center for a low-intensity valley hike. Maybe our request was lost in translation, because she sent us on a trail directly uphill for several hours. To reach the trailhead, we first had to walk two kilometers from town in a continuous line of other tourists. The line didn’t thin out much once we hit the trail, trudging up and up with dozens of people in view at all times, multiple hikers mere feet in front of and behind us with each step. The original plan was to hike out to some lakes at the base of the higher peaks, but once we reached the top of a ridge after two hours of stair climbing, we decided that the slog-to-joy ratio of this hike was too high. As we stopped for a lunch of grocery store Polish sausage, cheese, and veggies under a thick cloud cover that obscured much of the view, we bemoaned expending so much energy for such a lackluster payoff. Surely, the scenery would be more fantastic up by the lakes, but with two hours straight downhill now ahead of us, two additional hours getting up to the lakes and back felt like more than we should take on. Neither of us had our trail legs yet, and we’ve been hiking enough to know not to blow our muscles out on the first day of a weeklong hiking trip.
In the end, we made the right decision, as we were properly tired when we strolled back to the entrance of the national park. An outdoor grill station caught our eye, selling all sorts of exotic and delicious-looking meats and meat-adjacent goops. The enormous roasted chicken and pepper skewer we ordered was good, but the fried dollops of mountain cheese served with a berry compote were incredible, as were the local ciders they served on tap. The first hike might not have been anything to write home about, but the refreshments at the end of the trail certainly were. As it had been that morning, the walkway between the park entrance and the town was a steady stream of tourists. Once we finally got into our car to drive back to the campsite, there was so much traffic that we didn’t move any faster than the pedestrians. We made a note to not bother brining the car into town again when we returned the following day.
It was good that the sun finally came out the next morning, as it allowed us to properly dry out our sleeping gear, which had been soaking in standing stormwater inside of the tent for two nights. There was a bus stop just down the street from our campsite and a bus fortuitously passed by right as we showed up. There were already several other people waiting at the stop, and by the time we all got on, the bus was full. There were five or six other bus stops between ours and the park entrance, and we watched in relief and dismay as our bus proceeded to drive past all of them without stopping, leaving sizable crowds of hikers shaking their fists and yelling in the rear-view mirror. For no discernible reason, these busses only ran every 30 minutes, so you could very easily waste a lot of time waiting for another bus that is likely already full. We were certainly thankful to be whisked along the several-kilometer drag between the town and the park entrance, which was once again absolutely packed with people. We bumped fists in triumph as the bus deposited us at the park entrance a mere 15 minutes after departing our campsite. Then we stood in line for over an hour to get tickets for the gondola.
We are big proponents of paying for the “up” so we can enjoy our day hiking around the top of the mountain without wasting all our energy on climbing and descending. Lots and lots of other people in Zakopane were also interested in paying for the “up,” but few of them looked outfitted for a proper day of ridge walking, so we were hopeful that the trails wouldn’t be quite so packed up there. This was certainly wishful thinking, but in the end there were a lot less people on the trail than there were milling around the gondola station. Still, it’s much easier to deal with crowds when the payoff is stunning mountain panoramas in all directions. While we were still often hiking in a line, there were fleeting moments when we would have the trail to ourselves and could soak in the scenery. Then, six people would be walking impatiently on our heels, unable to pass on a thin, mountainside track, and we’d be reminded of how other people can really get in the way of appreciating nature. That said, shout out to all the middle-aged Polish women doing a legit mountain hike in floppy canvas flats and denim. Always a fun reminder that sturdy boots and sweat-wicking fabrics are merely optional for high-mountain activities (though certainly recommended). If a Polish housewife can ridge walk in Keds and mom jeans, you can too.
Taking the bus from the park entrance back to our campsite was not nearly as straightforward as the outward journey, as the bus we needed simply never showed up. There were lots of other private busses going back into town though, so we hopped on one and showed the driver a map of where we were trying to go. He assured us that he knew the stop and would call it out when we got there. The stop he had us disembark was in the middle of Zakopane, nowhere near our campsite. However annoying this was, we saw it as a good opportunity to actually check out the main tourist center, which we otherwise likely wouldn’t have done. One interesting element of Zakopane is the large number of tourists from the Middle East; in the town center, you’re likely to see a burka just about anywhere you look. The Polish hikers we met at our campsite the first night had mentioned that there were a surprising number of Middle Eastern tourists in Zakopane, and at first, we wondered if the statement was vaguely racist. It very well might have been, but it wasn’t incorrect: There were more Middle Eastern families in Zakopane than anywhere else we have visited in Europe by a significant margin. We’re not entirely sure why that demographic chose Poland over every other European mountain destination, but for whatever reason, a trend has certainly developed.
We found a great bar called Na Końcu Świata and spent the afternoon trying to name all of the mid-2000s alt-rock bands on their Spotify playlist, then got some surprisingly good gluten-free pizza at an Italian restaurant called Cristina for dinner. We tried to figure out how to take the bus home again and found that like before, they only arrived in 30-minute intervals. There were loads of horse and buggy drivers lining the streets though, so we asked how much a ride to our campsite would run us. A buggy driver with some truly potent body odor quoted us €50, just a tad more than €1.50 each to take the bus, so we politely declined. Of course, by the time the our bus showed up it was already nearly full and over 20 people at our stop wanted to get on. We deftly jockeyed for position and crammed our bodies into the available space on board, not seeing exactly how many other people at the stop weren’t able to get on, but it was certainly a lot. Once again, the packed bus blew past stop after stop, leaving would-be passengers cursing on the sidewalks. For some reason, the driver was not responding to the press-button “Stop” signal to actually stop the bus, so passengers had to verbally instruct him. Though we loudly said “Stop” when it was our turn, he did not slow down at all. We then had to yell for him to “PLEASE STOP,” which caused many people on the bus to laugh, and he slammed on the breaks and let us off a bit down the road from our actual bus stop.
Poland certainly had its charms: Watching Steph Curry single-handedly win gold for the US Men’s Basketball Team that night in a Polish campground shack with a stoic, towering Latvian man was a real treat. But there were enough aspects of Zakopane that felt unreasonably shitty that it was hard to want to stick around for more than a few days. The infrastructure was woefully unequipped to handle the sheer number of tourists, yet the town was happy to keep funneling people in and charging them blatantly inflated prices. How could a tourist hub with so many visitors make parking such an expensive hassle and then refuse to offer adequate public transit, regularly stranding huge numbers of people at bus stops all over town? In the little bit of planning we’d done before the trip, we’d read that people who were genuinely interested in hiking and camping in the Tatras bypassed the Polish side altogether. After a few days in Zakopane, we understood why.
There was a distinct vibe shift within minutes of entering into Slovakia. The traffic dissipated; there were cute lodges with filigreed roofs and meticulously-stacked wood piles; the bus stops were adorned with hanging flower baskets. It very much felt like we had escaped a tourist trap and entered into a much more genuine tourist destination. Perhaps it’s just a matter taste; we also don’t vibe with the German idea of “camping,” in which families transport entire living room setups in their RVs to a communal grass field with an in-house bakery and children’s water park. Zakopane seemed to expand that particular brand of European “outdoorsiness” into an entire mountain village.
We could tell right away that Slovakia avoided these trappings. There were still plenty of tourists milling around the lakeside town of Štrba, but because there wasn’t one single, central mountain hub like Zakopane where everyone in Slovakia had to go, the crowds were much more manageable. After two strenuous days of hiking, we appreciated a leisurely walk around the picturesque lake, made even more enjoyable by a bizarre UFO-shaped building right off the trail selling local hooch. As we enjoyed a drink on their tiny waterfront patio, the plastic windows inside groaned and shuddered relentlessly in the soft breeze, giving the impression that the whole rickety structure could collapse at any moment.
Unsurprisingly, our campground on the Slovakian side was significantly nicer, cheaper, and less crowded than in Zakopane. We befriended a Czech hiker while we made dinner in the outdoor seating area and he graciously gave Mazz a piece of onion to help mitigate a wasp sting she got in the middle of her palm. The pitches at (the hilariously-named) Autocamping Camping were flat with fresh green grass and the front desk sold cold beers and ciders for €1.50. A beer just about anywhere in Zakopane cost at least €4. We were happy we made the choice to move on.
The main draw of Autocamping Camping was the location, which was close to the mountains but also next to Slovak Paradise National Park. It was a little hard to figure out online where exactly the entrance to the park was located, as the place is huge, but thankfully we stumbled onto it just a few minutes down the road from where we were camping. There were several different routes you could choose through the park, so we went with the advice of the girl at the entrance and chose the Suchá Belá trek. This hike goes through the middle of a slot canyon, walking along a river bed along wooden stair platforms. As the slot canyon narrows, the wooden platforms are replaced by steel stairs that are drilled into the sides of the canyon walls. There are several sections where tall metal ladders have been bolted into the cliffsides and you have to climb up vertically to get to the next section. Here, the crowds would naturally bottleneck as both adults and children climbed precariously up and up, but between the ladder sections, we often had sections with the trail to ourselves. On the Polish side, three seconds was about the most time you would go without seeing another hiker; in Slovak Paradise you could get a few minutes to yourself. One thing that was consistent on both sides of the mountain range was the surprisingly large number of children on the trail. We’ve never seen more kids on our hiking vacations than we did in the High Tatras. As a result, the air on these trails was thick with complaints. Whether in Polish, Slovakian, or English, it is impossible to mistake the sound of a child complaining about having to walk around one of the most beautiful places on earth.
At the top of the canyon, you can rent bikes to coast down a gravel road back down the bottom, and in hindsight we probably should have done that. The foot path down was steep and decidedly not very fun for Kirbs with bad knees, and we watched several small children have absolute meltdowns along the way. At the bottom of the trail, there was an adorable kiosk shaped like a wooden barrel selling €1.50 beers and it was lovely drinking and relaxing there until a swarm of yellowjackets made us flee in terror. We stopped for dinner in a nearby town and they made Mazz a gluten free schnitzel, served somewhat perplexingly with a carrot and pineapple slaw. Kirb opted for pork and beer, which was common fare everywhere in Poland and Slovakia. Like a real genius, he hiked all day and didn’t properly hydrate, then regularly consumed foods that he knows he can’t eat in excess without negative repercussions. Thankfully, he didn’t get gout foot until after we returned to Berlin, but he certainly got it, because he loves pork and beer and is seemingly incapable of learning from his past mistakes.
We decided to head back up into the High Tatras for our final hike, parking the car in a picturesque tourist village called Stary Smokovec and then riding the cable car up to Hrebienok for some higher-elevation trails. There were certainly plenty of people on the Slovakian side of the mountain, but we never felt like we were hiking in a line like we were on the Polish side. We also didn’t see anyone smoking cigarettes on the trail, as opposed to the many smokers on our first two hikes. Imagine more people smoking cigs on one trail in Poland than every other trail in our entire lives combined.
After hiking along a river and up the side of the mountain, we eventually reached Zamkovského Chata, a cute mountain lodge with food and refreshment. We had packed a lunch, but Kirb loves hut food so he ordered what he considered the most unique item on the menu - Šmalcburger: bread with lard and onions. Mazz simply asked to borrow an ice pack, as the wasp sting on her hand had caused it to swell up and become so painful she couldn’t grip her hiking pole. Bugs sure love Mazz, and her body certainly hates their stings.
With most of the day still ahead of us, we decided to break off a chunk of the drive back to Berlin instead of one marathon drive the following day. After talking with the nice Czech guy at our campsite, we had decided not to return home through Poland, opting instead to go west through Slovakia and then through the Czech Republic. But once we put that route in the in GPS, we saw that it was going to add several hours to an already long drive. Was it that much more time in the car not to have to deal with Poland anymore? We decided it was not. Back into Poland we would go.
We loaded up with bevvies and car snacks and hit the road with plenty of daylight still ahead of us. Looking at the map, we decided the town of Wrocław was ideally located as a stopping point for the night. We found this particularly funny, as on the drive in, we had attempted to learn how to properly pronounce the word and found it so difficult that we had dubbed Wrocław “the town that shall not be named.” Several hours into the drive, the traffic came to a complete stop and google maps informed us there was an accident not far up ahead. We sat there on the highway for nearly two hours waiting for the accident to clear, bemoaning our choice to drive back through Poland to “save time.”
It was fully dark and past 9pm when we finally pulled in Wrocław, parking the rental on the street and lugging our gear into our “apartment hotel” near the city center. Thankfully, there were still a few restaurants in the area serving food, including Retauracja Konspira, which looked particularly cool. The menu at Konspira was a stylishly-designed magazine that laid out the dishes next to small articles about the history of Wrocław and how the restaurant had long served as a hub for locals fighting against the Soviet regime during the Cold War. We learned that Wrocław had actually been a part of Germany until World War II and then was annexed into Poland when the Soviets took power. Nowadays, Wrocław is a cute, modern, and lively city that we easily could have spent more in if it had been more than a spur-of-the-moment pit stop on our long way home.
We’ve been telling ourselves that we need to start heading east more often, as there is so much in that direction that we still haven’t explored. Eastern Europe is certainly a vibe; the jury is still out on how much it resonates with us, though. After visiting Wrocław, it feels unfair to judge Poland on the failings of Zakopane. While the town serves a definite purpose as a hub for the Polish side of the Tatras, it is through-and-through a “tourist trap,” built solely to profit off the area’s natural beauty. Slovakia by contrast was a lovely surprise, reminding us often of rural Austria with its rustic architecture, wide open spaces, and laid-back atmosphere. We went into this trip willfully blind and unprepared, excited to figure things out as we went along. In the end, we found a lot to enjoy in both Poland and Slovakia. That said, if we ever return to the High Tatras, it certainly won’t be in high season.