27 October, Old Town, Warsaw
What a difference a nice day can make! Early fog cleared late morning today to a crisp, clear, sunny day with some great late Autumn light. We caught local bus 116 to the outer suburb of Wilanow to visit the Royal Palace.
Transport tickets in greater Warsaw work on the metro, trams and buses, but the ticketing system is somewhat complex. We always use ticket machines in large cities, because they are universally easier to deal with than purchasing tickets over the counter, or from a driver. Warsaw has several day passes, long-term passes, time-limited tickets and transfer tickets. It was all too difficult for us so we just went for the cheapest option, a 20 minute time-limited ticket for 3.40 zlt, about $1.50. The way these tickets work is that you validate them in a machine as you get on a bus or tram, or use them at the turnstiles on the metro. The clock starts ticking once the ticket is validated. Apparently ticket inspectors frequently check tickets on buses and trams. We were lucky not to meet up with one on our trip today, because we had no idea how long the journey was. We dutifully validated our ticket as soon as we got on the bus. Fifty minutes later we finally reached our destination, a 30 minute over-run of our ticket validity. Coming home, we carefully delayed our validation!
The palace was packed with historic art works and period furniture, interesting, but, as we said before, after seven weeks we are suffering a bit from "castle overload". "Church overload" has also taken hold, but we did manage to get into the Church of the Holy Cross, hoping to see the heart of Chopin. The great composer is buried in Paris, but his heart was removed and we had read that it was mounted in a pillar in the church. We are big fans of holy relics, having made the point of hunting out saints' fingers, hands and other body parts all over the world. Imagine our disappointment when we discovered that the heart was sealed in the pillar and so not visible.
It has been some weeks since we did a price update for those readers who like to know the cost of travel. As we have already said, Finland and the bigger cities in Russia can be rather expensive, equating fairly closely to travel costs in Australia. The Baltic States are more reasonable. Expect to pay $70-$120, at this time of the year, for reasonable quality hotel accommodation, generally including a good breakfast. Food is cheap by Australian standards, $8-$15 for a dinner main course in a restaurant. A cafe meal can be as cheap as $5 for a lunch main. A packet of sandwiches, a common lunch for us, costs around $3.5. Beer is extremely cheap throughout most of western Europe. Wine gets cheaper the further west and south you travel.
We found public transport very reasonable throughout all areas we have travelled so far, even Finland is reasonable by our standards. The greatest bargain, however, is the Beijing Metro, $0.40 for any trip on the whole system.
Here in Poland the pattern is much the same. Local transport is cheap, but we found the longer rail journeys a bit more expensive than we have experienced to date. For example, the train from Warsaw to Krakow translates to around $40 each for a three and a half hour trip. Even around the tourist areas in Warsaw, it is possible to have a main course and a beer for $20 each. Entry fees are something that can nibble away at the budget. Mostly we have paid $2-$5.
We chose to rent apartments in Warsaw and Krakow at approximately $90 per day. This allows us to self-cater for some meals. The weakness of the Euro has allowed us to book good quality hotels in Germany for $75-$90 per night, generally including breakfast.
29 October, Apartment Basil, Krakow
PKP, ICC train 5350 from Warsaw to Krakow wasn't the fastest trip we have had. There is major renovation being done on the line, so for most of our journey we seemed to be moving at jogging speed! Despite all the hold-ups, we arrived just 10 minutes late into Krakow. Mind you, such a timetable deviation would have resulted in mass resignations of staff on the Japanese, German or Dutch railways.
Krakow has an amazing station/Shopping Mall to welcome new arrivals. These combinations are an increasingly common phenomon in big cities around the world. Great for shoppers. A nightmare for travellers who need to find their way out of the station to a known point, from which they can find their digs. We managed yet again, although the trek was a bit longer than we had calculated. Lumping 20 kg packs a few kms every few days is doing wonders for our fitness!
The apartment we are renting allows self-check-in, which means they send you the address details and a number of codes to open doors, key safes and the like. Our experience in Warsaw made us a little shy of the whole process. All seemed well as, when we arrived, a couple of fellow renters let us in the front door. We unlocked the key safe, got the keys and were relieved to be inside the apartment hassle-free.
But wait... there is always a twist for us!
Conveniently situated at the corner of our little street was a small convenience store. It had beer and some other essential food items, so, as it wasn't more than 30m away, one of us elected not to take a coat. Shopping done, we approached the outer door of the apartment block and entered the codes we had been sent.. Yep! No go. We had got in before, but only by following others through the door. Now, in below zero temperatures and one of us without a coat, we couldn't get into the block. As usual, shouting obscenities at the door and yelling at each other seemed to have no effect. Another phone call to the agent solved the problem. "Oh yes, the codes were changed two momths ago".
Fog in the morning is mostly not a terribly bad omen this time of the year in these parts. Our experience is that the day will generally end up clear by late morning. Today fitted that pattern so, while the fog lingered, we wandered the Square, checked out the bus station for our planned future journeys, did a bit of shopping and by then the sun was shining, so we climed the Old Town Hall Tower for a city view. (We like to climb things.) Had the best hot dog we have ever had anywhere in the world at a street stall; almost a foot long, with an enormous Polish sausage and all the trimmings, $3.50, then headed off to Krakow Castle.
You just have to do it, yes, both the hot dog and the Castle and later we are sure we will look back and remember both fondly, but now we are very seriously over palaces and churches. Nevertheless, we soldiered on and took the full tour of the Castle and the Cathedral, even climbing the tower, (remember we like climbing things) to see Zigismund's Bell. There was a reason for this. We had noticed a painting in the National Gallery in Warsaw, painted in the mid-16th century, of the raising of this bell in Krakow Cathedral and there it was, 500 years later, hanging in the bell tower, just as we saw in the painting. Later, in the crypt, we also found King Zigismund's tomb. Circle complete.
Krakow has an amazing station/Shopping Mall to welcome new arrivals. These combinations are an increasingly common phenomon in big cities around the world. Great for shoppers. A nightmare for travellers who need to find their way out of the station to a known point, from which they can find their digs. We managed yet again, although the trek was a bit longer than we had calculated. Lumping 20 kg packs a few kms every few days is doing wonders for our fitness!
The apartment we are renting allows self-check-in, which means they send you the address details and a number of codes to open doors, key safes and the like. Our experience in Warsaw made us a little shy of the whole process. All seemed well as, when we arrived, a couple of fellow renters let us in the front door. We unlocked the key safe, got the keys and were relieved to be inside the apartment hassle-free.
But wait... there is always a twist for us!
Conveniently situated at the corner of our little street was a small convenience store. It had beer and some other essential food items, so, as it wasn't more than 30m away, one of us elected not to take a coat. Shopping done, we approached the outer door of the apartment block and entered the codes we had been sent.. Yep! No go. We had got in before, but only by following others through the door. Now, in below zero temperatures and one of us without a coat, we couldn't get into the block. As usual, shouting obscenities at the door and yelling at each other seemed to have no effect. Another phone call to the agent solved the problem. "Oh yes, the codes were changed two momths ago".
Fog in the morning is mostly not a terribly bad omen this time of the year in these parts. Our experience is that the day will generally end up clear by late morning. Today fitted that pattern so, while the fog lingered, we wandered the Square, checked out the bus station for our planned future journeys, did a bit of shopping and by then the sun was shining, so we climed the Old Town Hall Tower for a city view. (We like to climb things.) Had the best hot dog we have ever had anywhere in the world at a street stall; almost a foot long, with an enormous Polish sausage and all the trimmings, $3.50, then headed off to Krakow Castle.
You just have to do it, yes, both the hot dog and the Castle and later we are sure we will look back and remember both fondly, but now we are very seriously over palaces and churches. Nevertheless, we soldiered on and took the full tour of the Castle and the Cathedral, even climbing the tower, (remember we like climbing things) to see Zigismund's Bell. There was a reason for this. We had noticed a painting in the National Gallery in Warsaw, painted in the mid-16th century, of the raising of this bell in Krakow Cathedral and there it was, 500 years later, hanging in the bell tower, just as we saw in the painting. Later, in the crypt, we also found King Zigismund's tomb. Circle complete.
30 October, Old Town, Krakow
Oswiecim is a town about an hour and a half by bus from Krakow. In 1939, when Poland fell to the Germans, Oswiecim was a minor military base with a modern camp and newly-constructed brick barracks. It was a fairly unremarkable place, except for a few, key, locational advantages. Oswiecim had good railway connections to the cities further west and it was fairly well in the geographical centre of Europe. But Oswiecim was to have a place in history to which it most likely would never have aspired.
The Germans called it Auschwitz.
The Germans called it Auschwitz.
More than a million people were murdered here, mostly Jews, but also large numbers of Poles, Russians and other men, women and children from a score of other European countries.
Auschwitz was in fact three camps, with camp two, Auschwitz-Birkenau being the largest. Last time we were here, in 2000, we were almost the only visitors and so we wandered at our leisure. Now so many people visit the camps that guided tours are mandatory to control the flow of people. Today there were thousands of visitors, including many Jewish groups making pilgrimages to the place where many of the greatest atrocities of the Holocaust were committed.
The industrial scale of the exterminations in Birkenau comes into clear focus when you realise that the gas chambers could kill up to 2000 people at a time and the furnaces could incinerate 1400 a day, with the excess being burnt on open pyres. Now multiply this by five, because there were five of these industrial killing factories in Birkenau.
Perhaps the most horrific events here occurred towards the end of 1945 as the Red Army advanced and the certainty of Germany's defeat became obvious. Tens of thousands were moved out of the camps on forced "death marches" to the west. In Birkenau, thousands of elderly and infirm prisoners were simply left to starve or freeze to death in a part of the camp that had never been completed. Wooden huts with no roofs and no water or sanitation became the grave yard for thousands of the sick and elderly, their groans and pleas heard by those in neighbouring sections of the camp, who would amost certainly, eventually meet the same fate.
Of the more than 1.3 million people who entered the Auschwitz camps, there were only 7000 known survivors. And not only the Jews suffered at these rates. Of 15,000 Russian prisoners of war who entered Auschwitz, only 96 survived.
31 October, Old Town, Krakow
Lipowa, 4, is the address of a factory in a run-down inner suburb of Krakow. We took a tram over the Vistula River and walked through the dingy back streets to Lipowa Ul (Sreet). The factory is now renovated and recently painted, but in 1940, it was part of the German war machine, producing kitchen pots and pans and, more importantly for the Nazis, bomb fuses and parts for fighter aircraft.
The factory was owned by Oskar Schindler, an unlikely hero, little known until the publication of Thomas Kenneally's best seller, "Schindler's Ark" and the subsequent movie, by Steven Speilberg, renamed "Schindler's List."
As one might expect, the Hollywood version of the story is somewhat dramatised, but the basic facts are true. Schindler did treat his workers much more reasonably than most other industralists and when Poland fell to the Soviets, he arranged for over a thousand of his Jewish workers to move, with the factory, into Germany, as the Front advanced. Almost all of these workers survived the war and it is estimated that today, their descendants number over 20,000.
Market Square in Krakow is dominated by the Cloth Hall. Today the market is a boring alley of souvenir shops, but below the current building is a museum that includes extensive archeological remnants of the markets that have existed on this site since the 12th Century. Displays include graves from the middle ages, the foundations of several of the previous markets and artifacts from all periods of human habitation on this site.
Early start tomorrow for our long trip to Hamburg. Trains no longer run from Krakow to Berlin, so that leg of the trip is by bus. Leaving at the uncivilized time of 7:05am, the bus trip will take about 8 hours. An hour or so transit in Berlin, then on to Hamburg on the high-speed ICE train.
The factory was owned by Oskar Schindler, an unlikely hero, little known until the publication of Thomas Kenneally's best seller, "Schindler's Ark" and the subsequent movie, by Steven Speilberg, renamed "Schindler's List."
As one might expect, the Hollywood version of the story is somewhat dramatised, but the basic facts are true. Schindler did treat his workers much more reasonably than most other industralists and when Poland fell to the Soviets, he arranged for over a thousand of his Jewish workers to move, with the factory, into Germany, as the Front advanced. Almost all of these workers survived the war and it is estimated that today, their descendants number over 20,000.
Early start tomorrow for our long trip to Hamburg. Trains no longer run from Krakow to Berlin, so that leg of the trip is by bus. Leaving at the uncivilized time of 7:05am, the bus trip will take about 8 hours. An hour or so transit in Berlin, then on to Hamburg on the high-speed ICE train.
1 November, DB BAHN bus
We had calculated thirty minutes to get to the station for our 7:05 bus, but as usual, we made it in half that time and had plenty of time to cool our heels.
Express buses run regularly throughout most of Europe and so far we have found them comfortable and, barring major traffic snarls, punctual. Today we have mostly motorway to Berlin, so the ride is extra smooth.
Express buses run regularly throughout most of Europe and so far we have found them comfortable and, barring major traffic snarls, punctual. Today we have mostly motorway to Berlin, so the ride is extra smooth.
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