Below Belief

We wake feeling slightly less on top of things than yesterday morning. Breakfast – dry sausage again but this time with plenty of coffee – cuts through the beer fog and we face the task of packing up and moving from this comfortable place. Our threshold for hotel bills has already been exceeded. We head off to our convent where once again we have to convince the guard nun that we are pure as the driven snow before she will let us pass.
After dumping our rucksacks in a cage in the attic we catch the tram to an out of town station – Krakow Plazow – where we intend to take a train to Auschwitz. No trip to Poland would be quite complete without visiting the death camp but I am more than a little cautious about going to a place where so much human suffering has occurred. As we wait for the train to move we hear panting English female voices and just have to investigate. We meet Nicki and Sue, both at Newcastle Uni and interrailing like us. We are soon in fits of laughter over our shared experiences. It seems rather arrogant to be heading to such a morbid place without a sombre attitude but as we near the camp our jokes subside and our mood is subdued. In the town of Oswiecim the locals resent the tourists and their interest in a place which signifies for them, and particularly for the Jewish amongst them, only sorrow and grief. Our taxi-driver shows no such respect as he flings us around the corners with Robert Miles’ Children blasting out of the stereo.
Inside, the camp has been left as it was as a monument to what happened here. The steps in the original buildings are worn and smoothed by the tramping feet of the 1.5 million people who once existed, but never really lived, here. It seems disrespectful to walk these once crowded buildings in search of gruesome images. The exhibitions show things as they were. No propaganda, no frills, just the truth. What horrifies me most is that an evil mind actually planned all of this. We see the death wall, guillotines, standing cells and punishment areas for prisoners who misbehaved or represented a risk to the Nazis. We see piles of human hair, shoes, spectacles, combs, gold teeth and clothes, all removed from the prisoner’s bodies before they were killed. I feel a chill down my spine as we walk through the chambers where prisoners were told they were going for a shower but were then exterminated with Cyclon-B, a deadly nerve gas. We walk numbly past furnaces where the bodies were burnt. There is no trace now of the people who perished here. We walk with no real understanding of what it must have been like, but only the knowledge that 1.5 million people died where we walk. It is truly gruesome. We leave, glad we came, but not having enjoyed it. Chris confesses that the image his mind conjured up when he first heard ‘Death Wall’ was some Eddie Kidd motorcycle centrifuge. Laughter is the only way we can cope with the experience. We all complain of indigestion and nausea but that could just as easily have been the microwaved sausages we ate at lunchtime from a greasy spoon cafe.
We cheer ourselves up by going out for meal with Nicki and Sue and taking them for a drink at the Galleria. Unfortunately we can’t stop long enough since we are now under the chains of a curfew at our convent. Our taxi driver on the way back there wears no seat belt and drives at 40mph around the corners.
The convent is a lot more liberal than we expected. Perhaps the nuns don’t know what goes on there, but we do. We are in one mixed dormitory with 35 bunkbeds pushed together as doubles and no segregation. Couples everywhere! Chris gets a double top bunk with no sign of who is next to him except for some rumpled sheets and a copy of Le Monde newspaper. Clearly thinking that he will be bedding down with some foxy French girl, imagine his dismay when from between the bunks pops a smiling round face exclaiming loudly in a thick French accent, “Hello! I am Pierre – your sleeping partner for tonight!”. I laugh quietly from the safety of the single bunk I have been given next to the wall.

Rise to a showering and the prospect of the dirty washing. Hotels mean drying potential and that means chores. Doing something effective about the festering clothes slowly fossilising at the bottom of my rucksack cannot be put off any longer. We go down to breakfast and notice, quite strikingly, that the decor of the hotel increases with proximity to the entrance. Not stupid these Poles. On the menu is ‘Cheese and Dry Sausage’. Before it arrives I imagine this is just a literal translation but when it arrives my sausage is indeed lacking moisture. Our breakfast vouchers seem to work well but the top up of strong coffee we thought we’d get for free costs us dearly. The waiter pockets our money and shows clear potential for admission into the John Bull school of Western tourist treatment.
We head into the centre and the Old Town where we find the Castle of the Lost Wawal. We never really understand what the wawal is, but clearly the Japanese and American tourists milling around aimlessly think it’s their mission to find it again. We walk around the museum and quickly bump into two English lads who turn out to be at Cambridge and know half the people we do. They can’t be all that clever though because they chose to come out here by the 28-hour bus route and are not looking forward to their return trip. We leave them for our date with Sam at 3pm but invite them to the ‘do’ we are planning tonight at the Galleria. We head for another pizza at Renesans before heading to the station. The roses we buy for Sam and her friend go down well – except Sam has two friends. Kathryn gets the stem and Becky the head. Chris and I make a decision to buy roses more often because as we carry them around we get apparently romantic glances from every girl we pass.
Tired of fantasising, we head for a cafe and drink coffee to warm us up. It is not long before we have attracted our first nutter – an elderly gentlemen with no teeth and a tongue which seems to stick out all together too much. He sits down and assures us that Englishmen are the finest gentlemen and tries to sing ‘Everybody loves somebody, sometime’. We laugh and accommodate him at our table. Katheryn and Becky look on horrified as Chris and I play along to his patter. He calls us ‘Masters’ and ‘Ladies’ and we confuse him instantly by pretending to be of different and constantly changing nationalities. He becomes totally confused when Chris and I tell him we are both ‘Finnish here’. We move on to entertaining him with ‘New York. New York’ and ‘Are you going to San Francisco’ much to everyone else’s amusement. He sits with his hand on Sam’s knee and makes the now infamous comment ‘Young lady. Your face. I’m sorry’, which is quickly followed up with ‘Master. For our friendship, I agree, one beer’. Clearly here is the reason for his visit and the catch I guess we all expected. We try to explain happily that if he feels our friendship is worth a beer, then we’ll gladly accept one but otherwise we turn him down repeatedly and pretend to misunderstand his questions. When he finally gets his meths bottle out we know it’s time to go and we lose him in the square.
Chris and I head off to book our rooms at the Convent Youth Hostel for tomorrow night while the girls go home to sleep. At the gate to the convent we find a sentry nun. Convincing her that we want to book a room for tomorrow night is nigh on impossible in Polish but it turns out she has nothing to do with the youth hostel and all we have to do is convince her we haven’t sinned for a week so she can allow us in. Upstairs we find things a lot simpler and book a room easily. We return on the tram and meet an Australian, Chris, who seems to have had a shocker with a fine young Czech girl. Last time he was here she swore her undying love for him and made him quit his job in London to come to live with her. When he arrived here, she stole £180 from him and told him she was in love with her other boyfriend.
We tell him he needs to come to our gathering tonight and unwind. We are all set to go out to the Galleria when we both realise we have run out of money. A dry night, like the breakfast sausage, is not particularly appealing and so we rush around trying to find a hotel offering a good rate. In fact the rate is very bad and so we are forced to make do with expensive money tonight. We can only hope the Galleria is serving large pints. As our table of invited guests grows – five Cambridge undergraduates at the last count – the night gets better and better. Later the crowds thin and we become aware of a rowdy table of lads in the corner. It quickly transpires that they are five Oxford undergraduates. What follows is only friendly rivalry but we do manage to get many photos taken with the Girton flag predominating over everything.

Arrive at 9am in Krakow after a not unreasonable but generally cold night’s sleep. Any thoughts we had of leaving the Scarborough weather behind are quashed by a quick look out of the train window to see rainy fields flashing by under a grey sky. Undeterred, but quite possibly influenced by this weather we decide to book into the first hotel we find – The Hotel Polonia. LP claims $25 per night for a triple room. In reality it turns out to be £30 but this is after we’ve handed our passports over and by this time we’re too tired to argue. Rain and the desire to be in bed, we have decided, hold a greater power over us than doggedly trying keep to a student budget. We take a wander around the main square – apparently the largest of its kind in Europe. However, we know all about the LP’s use of the words ‘of its kind’ and take this with a pinch of salt. Perhaps if you were to imagine the square without the huge central building which seems to fill it totally then it really is the largest of its kind. Whatever, the central building does hold the best pizza restaurant – Renesans – I’ve been to for ages and £2.50 each gives us two hours of gastronomic delight.
We speak to a group of three English girls working here. One has just quit her year out job teaching English in Warsaw after two weeks. We are at first surprised, but then find out she was given a class of 22 six year olds most of whom could speak only Polish. Their only recommendation to us when we ask what is good to do in Krakow is to find an underground bar and sit the rain out. This sounds like an excellent idea and so we locate one – the Galleria Krystophski. We are not disappointed. It is a student jazz bar with high vaulted brick ceilings and a cult atmosphere. It is of particularly stark contrast to the John Bull Pub which we managed to stop at on the way here. We were charged £2 per pint and it certainly wasn’t English beer as claimed. The soft brick curves of the Galleria are just what I’m looking for to soothe away the pain of my injured wallet and Chris offers, quite rightly, to buy the next five rounds to make up the difference in price. So we sit back, sip our beers and enjoy the music and the atmosphere.
Later, we’re not so much enjoying the atmosphere as creating it – our attempts at writing stern letters of complaint to Katie Woods and LP cause only riotous laughter. After my sides have split we are forced by hunger pangs to visit McDonalds and enjoy there two McFillet menus each. Chris is clearly still suffering from the beers as he spills coke all over the floor in a rather clumsy moment and then blames the resulting sticky mess on two shocked oriental tourists. Our plan to return to the hotel, shower, sober up and then go back to the Galleria for an evening of jazz is quickly formulated but no sooner have we got back to our room than I have crashed out on the bed and the next time we both wake up it is 12.30am and plan B – sleep – becomes infinitely more alluring. In fact fourteen hours later we still have not had enough of plan B but breakfast and a new day are calling and it’s time to get up.

We enjoy a reasonable night’s sleep but wake at 5.30am to a cool sunrise over the industrial port of Gdynia. It is unfortunately not a particularly attractive sight even with the sun doing pretty things to the sky. I feel even less attracted to the place as we leap onto the concrete platform and a torrential rain storm begins. We are forced to run for the limited shelter which the station can provide. Inside, we change some money and use descriptive mime games to gain access to the toilets and a drippy shower which a man brandishing a screwdriver fiddles with for ten minutes before we are allowed in. Evidently even the toilet employees in Poland have to work for their money. There is only one shower so I try to blend insignificantly into the urinals while Chris seems to take forever. I can’t blame him though because the shower is very refreshing and we come out feeling alive again.
We have to play mime games again to reserve some tickets to Krakow for tonight and deposit our luggage. No-one seems to speak any English, German or French except for the confused crowd of tourists all trying, like us, to mime ‘two sleepers to Krakow please’. We catch the train to Gdansk which leaves seconds after we clamber in. Unfortunately our arrival at Gdansk is nowhere near as slick as our departure from Gdynia. At the penultimate stop Chris decides we have arrived and we are left standing in the pouring rain on a small grey station which seems to be constructed largely from rusting girders, with an unexpected and unwelcome mile walk to the centre. Chris has clearly spent too much time colouring in his maps and too little time consulting them.
We head straight for what seems to be the main town but find it deserted and bleak. A last ditch attempt to locate something of interest here sees us taking a brisk climb up the tower of the church of St Mary. The tower is straight out of the Gotham city film set but it soon sorts out our problem. The other side of town is where it’s happening and we go there to enjoy a ridiculously cheap pizza in a smart-looking restaurant while the rain clears and the sun comes out. The Lonely Planet reckons the boat excursion to ‘Westerplatte’ is “one of the best of its kind in Poland”. Afterwards this leaves us wondering just how many boat trips of its kind there are in Poland and just how dull the ones that rank lower are.
What we get is a two hour trip through the industrial ship-building yards to an isolated peninsula on the Baltic coast where apparently the Polish fought the Germans for control during the war. What is worse is that the boat dumps us unceremoniously on the peninsula with nothing but the bleak Baltic coast to stare at and a small bar full of rowdy shipbuilders to avoid. We amuse ourselves and the group of travellers with us in the same predicament, first by incredulation that the boat operators could leave us here in such a desolate place without explanation and second by wandering around the peninsula and a tiny museum dedicated to the war. It is sad and strangely moving to see the graves of those who fought here and lost their lives fighting over such a small and insignificant patch of ground. However, there can be no morbid thoughts on our minds now. Here starts our southbound journey to the Greek islands for real. We take a moment to touch, metaphorically, the Baltic in all its icy isolation and wonder what the next four weeks might have in store for us. I realise, in a moment of slightly less profound thinking, that we are now just about level with Scarborough and can expect all the associated weather.

Aboard the train to Lichtenberg, our East bound exit station, we meet an interesting Australian girl, Heather, who is travelling alone through Europe inbetween working as a nurse in London. She laughs at stories of our campsite shocker and we save her life by showing her to her platform just minutes before her train leaves. After she has gone we congratulate each other on managing to navigate through the obstacles of this evening so well. We can only hope that in our time of need someone will guide us, just as we guided a seemingly endless number of people today.
We sit on the platform for an hour in the cold until our Russian-marked train arrives. The guard is intent on giving us the wrong directions to our couchettes and we spend a confused few moments wandering up and down, knowing he’s told us to go to the wrong carriage. It soon transpires that he is drunk but we can’t complain – we’re hardly sober. We discover we are sharing with two Polish girls and a Russian chap who doesn’t, or can’t, say much. Renata, who speaks pigeon English and some German proves to be our most friendly companion. She is a trained chemist who can’t find a career in Poland and instead works in a furniture store in Saarbrucken. She returns for a week to Gdansk to see her sick mother.
She asks us why we are travelling to Poland and seems surprised anyone would want to come on holiday there. She suggests instead that we are looking for ‘beautiful madchen’ and neither of us can deny that this thought has been lingering at the backs of our minds. She says that if a Westerner comes to Poland with a nice car then he will be flocked by beautiful Polish girls. We have to agree, rather reluctantly, that a small tent and two rather sweaty rucksacks probably don’t have quite the same appeal.
Later the guard takes the other Polish girl into his compartment for ‘vodka drinking’. These Poles are certainly friendly. We have our passports checked twice and then turn into our top bunks for the night. As I undress there are calls of ‘striptease’ from down below and I look down to see the beaming face of Renata. Despite the obvious contradiction, she says she will not look. Everyone else seems happy to sleep in their clothes. I discover later that the railway rules are ‘passengers should at all times sleep in their travelling clothes’. And there’s me thinking I was being all continental about this sleeping lark.

We rise early and I spend a few minutes by myself wandering along the shore of the lake, humming contentedly and just happy that we will leave this place today. We travel once more into Berlin, this time the East and pay an extortionate price to climb the Fernsehenturm (TV Tower). But the view is worthy of a look. We make an agreement that in each place we visit we will endeavour to climb the tallest tower so we can see the view. Feel sure this is Chris’s natural geographer’s instinct and can imagine ourselves, at some late stage in the holiday, and denied entry to a large church with spire, shinning up the walls in our search for the big picture.
We take a walk around the Gendarmen Square and find nothing but old buildings and embassies. With six hours to kill before collecting our rucksacks and hitting the rails we decide to find a bar. A donor satisfies the hunger and then we find a bier-stube where three old people – two of them the owners – watch us nosily as we consume our beers awkwardly in front of them. We quickly make our plans to move on. Katie Woods claims Friedrich Straße is the place to go so we head there on the U-Bahn. It rains. Hard. We find the British Embassy but what good is that when they’re shut and we need help finding a bar? A surly looking security officer looks on as we take photographs.
We get completely lost but this does not stop us being asked on four separate occasions by German speaking natives if we can give them directions to somewhere else. The most memorable of these is the blind man we find helpless in the middle of the road stuck between lines of traffic and trams. Being of a kindly nature we try to help him find the ‘Dancing club’ he says he is looking for. Quite how a 50-year old blind man fairs on a dance floor we can’t imagine but considering we are already lost, what we proceed to do really is the blind leading the blind. The man seems quite content to be helped along and busily practising our German on him we unknowingly walk him ten minutes in the completely the wrong direction. When we finally pass him off to some other unsuspecting couple, he is indignant that we led him astray. The only sane person we meet on Friedrich Straße is a Geordie who recommends nearby Orangienburger Straße as being a good place to drink.
We start in ‘Obst & Gemuse’ where the clientele is Eastern and hip and the walls are splashed violent orange. Then we move to the even hipper ‘Cafe’ across the street which, hidden as it is inside a derelict warehouse, really is Utopia for us. In the graffitied toilets we pick out a single entry from the wall. It simply says M.O.R.E. Ministry Of Random Events. This, we decide, will be the recurring theme to our holiday and things are never really the same again.

Cafe
A rose-seller works his way between the crowds
They show no interest
Each absorbed by his own task
The light is soft, the rain is hard
Each to his own, no-one alone
The walls here have no boundaries
Only freedom and inspiration
The dating couple and the bag-lady
The drunk in the corner and the two tourists
The busker and the hairless barmaid
Here you can find solitude and peace with the world.

We rise early after a reasonable night determined to make today a success. To this end we have planned our every move so that nothing can possibly go wrong. We decide to stay in Berlin for two nights – one for the east, one for the west and then to head for Gdansk in Poland on the sleeper train. A breakfast of Fruit ‘n’ Fibre keeps us regular but I vow personally never to even enter the toilet block, let alone sit above a pile of turds that have, judging by the smell, been festering since 1939. The German camper who looks at me incredulously as I shave by the cold tap outside the wash block clearly has no sense of smell, taste or hygiene.
We arrive Berlin at 11.30am and make for the Creperie and the Blue Church. I sit for a moment at peace inside the bright blue-lit iridescent interior and wonder if there is, after all, some divine being who could possibly make the rain of yesterday vanish and the sun reappear. In the main square, I buy a waffle ice-cream as a nostalgic return to the last time I sat here in 1986. As we eat we see Natasha and Stuart and invite them over. They seem to be having an altogether better time of it – in particular they have found a Youth Hostel about 2 minutes from the centre. We talk for a while and then decide we should take a city bus tour. On the way to use some toilets in an Irish pub we find a camping shop selling the correct type of gas. So happy are we that we purchase two. The sun really is shining and clearly Mr Divine Being, whoever he is, has received my call.
The bus tour turns out to be the best thing we’ve done all day. We see the east and west divide and remark at the stark contrast. The scar, left behind by the wall and no-mans land is no longer a wasteland but a fertile building site where huge companies are rapidly closing the gap on the east. Later we check out KaDeWe but it’s just like Harvey Nichols and we really aren’t dressed for pretending to be rich material Westerners. Much later we head for a suitably seedy suburban cinema and watch Trainspotting. A fantastic film. Dark. Deep. Depressing. It leads on to much drug-related philosophising and the resultant mood can only be lifted by a pizza, a few beers and the warming self-gratification brought on by the Army of Light Christian One-Man-Band and his manager, Jesus. After much merriment we retire to the Irish Pub and later the luxury of the night bus from Spandau in our shirts and shorts. I write this entry sitting in the warmth of Spandau U-Bahn station waiting for the bus which will carry us the hour home to our ridiculous campsite at 12.31am.