Episode 15
The extreme heat lasted a couple more days then overnight changed considerably. We were in the mountains of SE Poland by this. The summer hoards of young people and families had been replaced by the grey brigade. All the mountain resort towns seems to be full of the more senior members of society totting back packs from the sublime to the ridiculous and striding off into the hills for anything from a few hours to a few months judging by the size of some of those backpacks. Late one day it looked like a storm was buildings and we did get some rain but mostly we got a dramatic temperature drop. it was 6C in the morning and rose to about 16C by the middle the day. More rain came over and for most of the next week it continued in a similar vein. a couple of these days were very wet while the rest just showery. One or two days it didn’t get above 10C, that was in the Czeck Republic where we spent a few days. We stayed in Poland and drove north west along the southern border, firstly that border is with Ukraine. That part of Ukraine was actually part of Poland until WW2 when someone, possibly the Soviets redefined the Polish border with no regards to what anyone wanted, nothing unusual there it’s still happening in places.Then it was the Slovakian border that we were beside. With the impressive Tatra mountains in Slovakia my lot had been expecting bigger mountains this side the border but it seems the highest are well inside Slovakia. There are some ski resorts in Poland in this area that at this time of year are popular with hikers as mentioned above. Then it was the Czech border and we crossed into the Czech Repulic near the city of HHradec Kralove and drove towards Prague. D made a visit to the dentist in Prague and we spent a few days driving around the country, it was fairly chilly and raining much of the time. The warmer clothes had been brought out of hibernation and donned. Me, I’m just as naked as ever:In both Poland and the Czech Republic there are plenty of forest everywhere and these places are popular recreational areas on a weekend with walkers, joggers and cyclists heading along the leaf strewn paths in all weathers. It’s only Aussies like my lot who are put off by a bit of rain.What we have noticed is that there is some logging taking place, not heavily but in lots of places. The thing is that these forests that are being logged are all plantation forests you can see the trees are in lines. They were probably only young trees at the demise of the Soviet Untion back in 89/90. They have been thinned in some places but are very dark in others, L calls those very dark ones, ‘Hansel and Gretal’ forests. The thing is though that no-where have we seen any new forest being planted not even in the few places where the forest has been clear felled. Sooner or later, probably the latter, someone must surely realise that if you want to keep harvesting timber then at some point trees have to be planted to produce that timber. Then again perhaps it’s L who;s living in a fantasy world and those trees will just magically replace themselves.The Czechs too are getting into the alternative energy mode, not to the extent that Germany is but working on it. We have seen a great many ‘solar farms’ though not many buildings with solar panels and only a very few wind turbines. There are a vast number of castles and palaces in the Czech Republic, nearly every town of any size has one but we didn’t visit any on this trip. My lot didn’t fell inclined to do so having visited quite a few on their last visit here a couple of years ago. We did spend lots of time in forests enjoying their quietness and the lovely fragrant smell of the pine trees. any berries that might have been have been picked long ago though we did see quite a lot of fungi, some looked quite edible but we left well alone, the safest option.In these last two countries especially much of the road side is lined with wild apple trees. There are the small crab apples that aren’t very nice to eat and there are also horticultural industry cultivated apples that have gone wild. Some of these apples can be quite tasty. At present the ground in littered with the fruit that has dropped. In some countries in the past we have seen apples like these collected by the truck load, what they are used for we can’t be sure, perhaps to make cider or for stock food. However, in Poland and the Czech Republic we have only seen one place where people were bothering to collect them and that was on the last day before going into Germany.It was still chilly and damp when we headed into Germany along the Elbe valley near the town of Bad Schandau. My lot has spent a few days in this area back in 1998 and had been impressed with it them. This time they found that the Czech side of the border is equally pretty. Some nice hiking is available here and if either of both of them had been feeling more energetic then perhaps we would have done some walks. These walks involve quite a bit of climbing, not the flat terrain we had back in Estonia, and D really doesn’t fell up to it at present, nor L for that matter though she isn’t as keen to admit it.We went on to Dresden, another place they visited in 1998. In 1945 Dresden had been devastatingly bombed by allied forces and most of what had been a late 18th century Baroque city had been left in smouldering ruins. It seems the East German regime wasn’t big on rebuilding so it was still very much a heap of rubble when Germany reunited in the early 1990’s. Some reconstruction had begun when my lot were here in 1998 but the Frauen Kirche (Church of Our Lady) was still very much a heap of rubble with numbers painted on each piece. Now that giant jigsaw has been rebuilt and is open to one and all. We climbed to the top of the dome and got a great view over the city where the sun was shinning at the time. It wasn’t by the time we left. There is still some re-construction going on in the old city centre but for the most part it’s finished. What hasn’t been done yet, is the buildings haven’t been cleaned. Most of the original stone work is still black with soot from the heavily polluting industry of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. Perhaps it will be cleaned when all the other work is finished.Dresden is really quite a pleasant place to stroll around for a few hours and that’s what we did, then we went on to Miessen but it was raining and late in the day when we got there so we only saw the castle on the hill overlooking the town as we passed through. Now we are heading up to Berlin. L was last there in 1970 and D and I spent a very short time there in 2012 on our way back from Mongolia. We are hoping to catch up with a Greek friend now living here but so far we haven’t heard back from her. L has booked us a hotel room for a couple of nights, so we can’t linger anywhere else en route. © Lynette Regan 11th September 2015