Poland / Czechia / Slovakia
- caravanhalen
- Sep 16
- 8 min read
Poland
As well as saving us a couple of days of Swedish driving, I was quite taken by the notion of visiting Poland, and adding in an eastern leg to the road trip with Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. I liked the idea of going somewhere slightly more under the radar, and they didn’t seem like places we might otherwise ever visit. From my googling and Lonely Planeting there seemed like some beautiful sights, and a few slightly cheaper stops on the trip were welcome to balance out Scandinavia and Switzerland!
Our ferry arrived too early to check in, so we drove up the coast from Gdansk to Sopot, which along with Gdynia makes up what is known as the Tri-City. Sopot is a popular Polish seaside holiday destination, and was absolutely heaving when we visited, but rather underwhelmed as a beach hotspot. Once you’ve made your past all the kiosks selling keyrings, you can’t actually even see the sea without buying a ticket and going through turnstiles onto the old wooden pier. Luckily, walking a few minutes takes you past the turnstiles and down onto the beach. The Baltic is known for its chilliness, and there were only a few hardy souls in the water. The locals had much more enthusiasm for having a few drinks ahead of the Gdansk vs Gdynia derby that night, a bottom of the table clash in the Polish Ekstraklasa
Gdansk is known for a charming and atmospheric old town, and we were staying right in the middle of it (cue complicated driving directions down some narrow and busy cobbled streets, made worse by football-related road closures). Many buildings are lit up at night, including the massive brick gothic St Mary’s Church, and the ornate Great Armoury. St Mary’s is lovely inside, an includes an intricate astronomical clock. Other notable old town sights include a huge wooden crane, originally operated by men in giant hamster wheels
Like so many European towns, Gdansk took a hammering in WW2, and a huge proportion of the old town was destroyed, with many of the buildings painstakingly rebuilt in their original manner. It’s a strange feeling as you’re walking on old cobbled streets lined with buildings that look many hundreds of years old – a few of them truly are, others are reconstructions from the last 50 or 60 years, and others are a complicated mix, like St Mary’s which combines original elements from the early 1500s with parts rebuilt after massive war damage
One of Poland’s best known foods is pierogi, sometimes referred to as a dumpling, but more like a Cornish pastie. Lots of meat in pastry is almost always a winner, but these are particularly tasty, especially when paired with a Baltic Porter
For some reason, Gdansk has not one but two unofficial Harry Potter cafes. So we obviously had to have an ice-cream sundae and a copyright-infringing cocktail, served with a cauldron of dry ice
Being in the small and poky old town, our hotel had found an ingenious solution to providing carparking with a small footprint – a car lift, which was a first for us
There seemed to be an exceptionally large number of small dogs in Gdansk. We started calling it “Tiny Dog Town”, and now for the rest of the holiday, anytime an undersized pooch is spotted, the cry of “Tiny Dog Town!” goes up
Malbork Castle holds the title for “world’s largest castle by land area”, which is a slightly odd descriptor, but it’s certainly a beast of a place. Built in the 13th and 14th centuries by the Teutonic Order, a German Catholic organisation, it’s really three separate castles, with multiple layers of moats and defensive walls. A well-produced family audio guide made for a fun couple of hours wandering around
Next stop was Poznan – arguably best known for its football team, Lech Poznan, and their supporters’ ‘face away from the pitch and jump up and down’ dance, famously adopted by fans of Manchester City. Other than football fan silliness, it’s got a nice old town and square filled with brightly coloured shops selling the St Martin’s croissant (filled with poppy seeds, marzipan, dates and raisins), and according to Mo and Kitty it’s finest feature is a little stand selling pear ice cream
We spent a couple of days in Wroclaw, whose name is a good example of why I’m never going to be fluent in Polish – it’s pronounced ‘vrotswarf’. There’s another charming old town, with a particularly nice rathaus (town hall). Directly in front is a tall post called a pillory, which was used for public punishment and humiliation (and the occasional execution) of lawbreakers and troublemakers
Our favourite Wroclaw feature is the dwarves – there are several hundred miniature dwarf statues scattered around the city, mainly concentrated in the old town. Their origin harks back to the communist regime of the 1980s, and the Orange Alternative resistance movement, who liked to paint dwarves to distract and annoy the police as a light-hearted and non-violent protest. In the mid-2000s the first dwarf statue was placed, partly to commemorate the Orange Alternative movement, and since then businesses and individuals keep putting up new ones – more than 250 at last count. Our girls loved the scavenger hunt,and managed to find close to 70. While it started organically, it’s become a genius bit of tourism marketing, and we saw many other families chasing round town looking for the little guys
BEERWATCH 1: Wroclaw is known as a good craft beer town, and we had a nice meal and some good pints at Pinta. I’m a bit nerdy about esoteric beer styles, and had been hoping to find one I’d read about but never tried – grodsiskie (or graetzer in German), a low-alcohol smoked wheat beer. Pinta delivered in spades, with three different versions, two of their own, including a ‘modern’ remix with much less smoke and much more Citra, and one from German Rauchbier legends Schlenkerla. I am fully aware that a) this does not sound interesting or exciting to normal people, and b) the beer style I’m geeking out does not sound tasty to normal people. But I was as happy as a pig in muck
BEERWATCH 2: As well as finding my grodsiskie, I enjoyed a few Baltic porters, a rich boozy dark beer that’s actually a lager. It’s a tasty style than NZ craft breweries make from time to time, but I’d never really thought about where the style came from, so it was great to have a few genuine Polish examples
Czechia
Next stop was Czechia, via a quick detour into Germany for lunch (we will eclipse the three countries in one day record in an upcoming episode)
I’m still getting used to saying Czechia rather than the Czech Republic, which I only caught wind of during the Olympics last year. Turns out when Czechoslovakia dissolved in the early 1990s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the new republic Cesko (as it is informally known in Czech) recommended Czechia as the preferred name to be used in English. Obedient types that we are, it seems that almost every English-speaking country just didn’t really fancy following instructions, and went with the Czech Republic instead. In 2016 the Czech government reiterated their name preference slightly less politely, and we’re just about catching up
Czechia has loads to offer as a holiday destination, but we only had time for a couple of days in Prague. I’d visited Prague as a backpacker 25 years ago, and absolutely loved it, so was excited about returning
When we visited Yosemite National Park on the caravan trip, there was almost too much amazing scenery. You got a little blasé about seeing another amazing vista round every corner. Prague is a little like that for architecture. There are fabulous buildings everywhere you turn – surely as many photographable sights per square metre as any other city in the world. This is despite Prague suffering quite a bit of damage in WW2, most famously by mistake when an American crew got their directions horribly wrong mistook it for the German city of Dresden, 120km away (as part of the same campaign that did destroy Dresden, as remembered in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five)
Prague Castle is one of the most iconic sights. As all good castles should be, it’s right on top of a hill, and on a hot day it needed a lot of water breaks and parental persuasion to get everyone up to the top. The guards weren’t changing, but the girls got a good pose in next to the natty blue uniforms
The castle is a sprawl of different buildings, with a wildly varying range of architectural styles. By far the most impressive is the old gothic church, with some top notch gargoyles. I think modern construction would be improved immeasurably with the inclusion of some gargoyles
We wandered down from the castle towards Charles Bridge, and stopped by the riverside. The kids saw what they thought was a beaver or an otter swimming along by the bank. When it hopped out of the water we saw it’s big webbed feet, long ratty tail, and giant orange teeth. What the heck was this thing? A bit of googling told us it was a nutria, a South American rodent and invasive species in parts of Europe. Not something I had on my wildlife bingo card for this trip!
Charles Bridge is ace, but teeming with tourists all day long. The bridge dates back to the 14th century, and its sides are lined with a range of about 30 sculptures of various saints, and about 60 people offering to draw your caricature
We’re quite into our astronomical clocks now, and there’s another great one in Prague’s old town square of early 1400s vintage. Legend has it that the city’s founding fathers blinded the clockmaker to ensure he couldn’t replicate his masterpiece anywhere else – another salutary lesson in why you don’t want to strive too hard for workplace success
Prague has some fantastic narrow streets in the old town, including one so skinny it has its own traffic light to regulate walkers in one direction at a time
There’s also some great public art, a lot of time by David Cerny, who seems like a chap with an off-kilter sense of humour. The kids liked these giant babies with barcode faces by the riverside. A set of these babies is also attached to the side of the ugly (but distinctively so) Zizkov TV Tower elsewhere in the city
We were happy to find a great English language bookshop to top up the girls reading stocks with some second hand goodies
BEERWATCH: Czech beer is known for its great pilseners, particularly Urquell and Staropramen. Even better still are their dark lagers – the best was a pint of Snajdr Cerna Svine (https://www.pintplease.com/en/beer/395348/cerna_svine_13) at The Beer Spot (no relation). I was also interested to find a couple of local craft breweries making NZ Pale Ales, the only place on the trip where I’ve seen this as a named style
Slovakia
We were only in Slovakia for a short time, but we enjoyed our brief stop in Bratislavia. You may have noticed that I’m partial to an old town, and there’s another good example here, with a little more air and room to breathe than in other cities, and a first rate castle appropriately situated above the town. Textbook
Slightly less common is the giant UFO-shaped observation tower placed on the opposite bank of the Danube
The best spot of all was the gorgeous blue church (Catholic, natch) with art nouveau vibes on the edge of the old town
We bought ice coffees from a woman with better English than mine who was very knowledgable and interested in New Zealand. She was a fan of Hundterwasser, and was happy to learn of the Kawakawa public toilets
Another of Slovakia’s claims to fame is the High Tatras, a mountain range on its northern border with Poland that’s a bucket list hiking destination. Next time
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