Eastern Trekker

Jumping on the Eastern Trekker Bus in the morning I got chatting to the people I’d be spending the next 9 days with, we even played a little game of musical chairs to meet everyone on the bus, although I must admit it’s pretty hard to remember 40 people’s names right away especially if you meet them for 3 minutes haha It’s kinda like speed dating I suppose.

After a few hours we arrived in Kutna Hora, a place where a legend states that holy soil was spilt on the ground here and thus it became a holy place to be buried. So during the years of the plague many people were wanting to be buried at this location and would travel all the way across Europe. The main attraction however isn’t so much the graveyard as the church which is packed with human bones, there were countless skulls and other bones lining the small church, they even had a human bone made chandelier, can you imagine that as a centre piece in your house? After checking out the bone church I quickly went down and had a look at the Cathedral that was supposedly built on the “holy soil”. It was said that all those people were dug up as the church was built on the holy land and hence the bone church was made in another location using their remains to honour them.

From there it was onwards to Olomouc [still in the Czech Republic] (pronounced Olomotts) where we were staying at the flora hotel which was quite nice compared to the hostels I’ve been bunking in. Ben, our trekker guide, took us for a quick walk through town and around visiting another town clock, although this one was more centralized around communism and the worker rather than religion as in Prague. We also saw a few cool churches, one of which pope John Paul had visited in addition to mother Teresa. Later on we got a bite to eat at a local café/restaurant located in the town centre, where I tried some Czech beef goulash which was tasty as. That night we had a scheduled “plane party” which at first I had no idea what it involved but we actually went to a “plane” or a bar which looked like a plane inside and out for a great night out before hitting the hay and waking up to a fantastic buffet breakfast in the morning.

After a feed we jumped on the bus and made our way north to Poland where we stopped at the largest and main concentration and death camp used by the Nazis in WWII, Auschwitcz. The camp is segregated into several main sections I, II, and III. We only visited I and II as the third was mainly destroyed by the Nazis when they fled hearing the news of the approaching soviet forces. We walked through buildings where prisoners were housed, some of the cells were beyond cruelty, the standing cells were probably no more than 1 meter x 1 meter and only a 2 meters tall, four people would be crammed in there at a time forced to stand in pitch black darkness for hours or days on end usually dying of suffocation. There were also stories told of people begging for mercy and priests asking to step in another’s place when groups were selected for the death wall (where prisoners were lined up along a wall in Camp II and shot), one person gives testimony that he survived the holocaust and the camp because an honorable priest stepped in his place.

The disgusting experiments that were conducted on living human beings by the Nazis were despicable, they would infect people by stitching hay or other things inside them and seeing how long people would live. Often experiments were conducted on small children; one baby didn’t even look one year old. A Nazi doctor was said to have effectively established a process which could sterilize 1000 Jewish women every 24 hours through injecting a serum directly into a woman’s fallopian tubes. This place was overwhelming, something like 3 to 4 million people died here, that’s the population of Queensland and I’ve never felt chills like I had when I was walking around this place, I don’t think I’d ever want to go back. But it is certainly something that people should experience to understand the gravity of the injustices of history; you don’t truly appreciate or understand the gravity and severity of these events or just how lucky we are today in the modern world, without having seen a haunting and confronting place like Auschwitchz.

After several hours at the camps I was more than ready to get out of there and onwards to Krakow to discover the beauty of Poland and possibly have a stiff drink while having a think about what I’d just seen and experienced. When we arrived in Krakow we prearranged a meeting at a happening club, The Diva Club, in the Krakow centre and had our own little VIP section for a few hours early in the night. I didn’t see her, but apparently Nikki Hilton was downstairs in another VIP area for some promotion she’d just done. Anyways during the night we danced away and I even got grabbed by a polish hen’s party to have a bit of a dance with them down on the dance floor, overall a fun night.

The next morning the weather again wasn’t so good so we opted to go for a bit of walk around Krakow with an umbrella (but not before I grabbed some new jeans for 50 euros or 240 zloty as they use in Poland). We had a guided walk around the city and saw several of the churches and markets squares and visited the city walls and lastly the Krakow Royal Palace, where all the kings and important historical figure were buried. Recently there was a bit of controversy as the last president was buried there, mainly because he died in unfortunate circumstances from a plane crash, but up until that point it had only been for royals or important religious figures as the people in Poland are very religious. At the end of the tour we grabbed an excellent baguette bake style food with melted cheese and mushrooms and all sorts of goodies depending on what you wanted, and it only cost the equivalent of 2 euros.

From there it was on to Zakopane a small mountain town in the south of Poland with beautiful views and fantastic food. When we arrived mid morning we made our way down to the market and main shopping strip to have a look about and grab a bite to eat. After lunch I caught the tram up to the top of the hill that overlooks the town and got some great photos before trying some local cheese, and grabbing a beer while elevated over the nice little town. For dinner that night we made our way over to a place dubbed “the meat palace” by the eastern trekker crew, we got a massive platter feast of meat and potato before we ended up heading back to our nice little hotel. The breakfast the next morning was pretty good, nearly as good as Olomoucs hotel, I can’t wait to get to Croatia, hopefully for some nice SUNNY weather!