After catching 2 trains, mike and I arrived in Bratislava. Another old walled city with a castle on the hill. This place rests on the Danube river on its way to Budapest and from Vienna. The town is small and we easily covered it in a few hours. The rest of the day we watched the euro-cup. This is a big stag party destination and the hostel was over-run with drunk and obnoxious Brits but still quite funny. The hostel had a bar in the basement which was decorated like the set of the movie Hostel. Mike and I met Liam, an irish guy down in the bar and decided to see some of the town at night. After buying stupidly over-priced beers we met a Slovakian guy who then took us out to the student housing (a short bus ride away). Under each building there were 2 or 3 bars/nightclubs. Drinks were ridiculously cheap here and once again I think I saw another European sunrise.
I took a few day trips from Bratislava, the first being out to the ruins of an old castle called Devlin castle which was on the Danube bend. This is one of my favourite castles that I have seen so far. A little restored but mostly in ruins.
The next day I went to Wein (Vienna) in Austria which is just one hour from Bratislava (they are the 2 closes capitals to each other in the world). This is one beautiful city which was completely leveled during World War 2. The highlights for me were a visit to the Museum plais which was a cool complex of galleries including modern art and a temporary exhibition on Punk in NYC, London and Berlin. The centre of this was a meeting place for lots of locals, cool cafes and lots of chilling out.
During the night I went to the fan-zone of the euro-cup which was being held in Austria and Switzerland. This night the Austrians were playing Germany so the whole down was abuzz with singing and some niggling from both sides. Unfortunately the Austrians lost but being in the fan-zone was a really amazing experience.
After Bratislava I took 3 trains to arrive in this amazing town called Banksa Stiavnisca. This was an old gold and silver mining town and at its peak was extremely wealthy. These days it is a sleepy picturesque town surrounded by mountains with castles on each peak. I stayed in a really nice hostel here and turns out that I was had a whole room to myself and in the other room was a Slovakian guy just having a holiday. He was also the soloist horn player for the Slovakian philharmonic orchestra. After exploring the town, we hit the local café for a bit of euro-cup action and then proceeded to have multiple shots of the local spirit – Reijka. We finished the night at a local tea-house run by some hippies. This place looked like it could have been from some asian country and was very out of place. The next day we hiked up to one of the run-off lakes from the mines and went swimming and then out for some more football!
My next stop in Slovakia was the high Tatra’s which lie on the border between Slovakia and Poland. The hostel I stayed in was called Ginger Monkey and was on a plateau at a bit over 1000m above sea level. The hostel was in a tiny town called Zdiar and had an amazing deck with a hammock, a beautiful dog named Wally and overlooked towering snow-capped mountains. The highlight of my time here was definitely the hike that we did with Mike, Nick an Irish guy an American girl. This took us over a mountain peak where I got to play in some snow and even throw a few snow-balls. The hike was extremely scenic and took in alpine lakes, rivers and even a glacier!
After a few days here I caught a train to Budapest……
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