A side trip to have dinner with friends. We found that we could fly to Warsaw Poland via Riga on leaving Uzbekistan for next to nothing. We emailed our friends Wotjec and Justyna that we were comming to Warsaw. They responded with an offer to pick us up from the airport and dinner at their unit. What a great offer, we readily accepted. The last time we visited it was just the two of them, but nature has since added two lovely kids Adam and Lena.Our friends totall...

 And now it was time to travel to a place synonymous with death and persecution. A place that the world knows the name of and wishes it didn't - Auschwitz. The concentration camps are about a 2 hour drive from the beautiful city of Krakow. You won't find Auschwitz on a Polish map but rather Oswiecim which is the town name. Auschwitz is the German name for the actual camps. We took a guided tour of both Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau) which covers...

A daytime journey in a very old uncomfortable train took us to Krakow station where a sign with our name on it. was being held up. Yes! We had pre-booked a room for 2 nights in an old apartment which served us well as it was centrally located for seeing Krakow sights on foot. We explored a beautiful castle surrounded by historic buildings but also took a sobering walk around the old Jewish Quarter. Rain set in so we used our time to catch up on our blog, send em...

After a special time in Torun, on the Sunday afternoon we travelled the 3 hours to Warsaw in Justyna and Wojtek's car and they invited us to be their guests for the 2 nights we had planned to be in Warsaw. Warsaw is quite a beautiful city and we enjoyed walking many kilometres seeing the sights and catching the underground as well. At one time we just happened to be in a park where we were able to watch a special ceremony, to mark one of the uprisings in Pol...

Making travel friends along the way is part of the charm and joy of travel.We met Polish couple Justyna and Wotek in Guatemala in early March. At the time we had no firm plans to include Poland in our travels but it seemed a good idea now we knew someone there.While in Berlin we had arranged by e-mail to meet up in the historic city of Torun in the Polish countryside for the weekend with a plan for us to come back to Warsaw with them in their car.With much troubl...