Paradise found

I am in Paradise. Nothing more, nothing less. After talking for over a year about my project to visit Zaježová ecovillage, now I am finally here. There is no way I can describe what I feel now with words, only that I feel I have been here for ages, because I have known this place in my mind. Although it is not so terribly isolated (we even have internet), it is like living a dream, and therefore almost unreal. The sun is shining (in fact I am quite heavily sunburnt, in spite of the litres of suncream), the birds are singing, we make hey for the winter. We milk the goats, we make yoghurt and cheese, we water and harvest in the garden. We make a fire and spend an evening around it. It's like I've been waiting all my life to be here, and I can't picture the moment I'll have to leave, return to the "real world" out there. I am wondering whether I'll be a different person after one month, and whether I'll spend the next months longing for this amazing time here.

Getting here was the first part of the adventure. I left Berlin on Monday, May 31st, a bit too late for the 500km I wanted to cover. I spent some time looking for a decent spot toward Cottbus and Poland, and eventually stood next to the airport Schönefeld. It didn't go too well: I waited for over 3 hours and then decided to take a bus to a place called Bestensee, and then walk to the highway service station nearby. It took me 1h bus transfer to go there, plus 1 extra hour walking, of which 1/2h in the woods. At around 5 p.m. I got to the service station, somewhat wet because of the bushes I had to go through. No luck there either; no Polish cars, very few truck drivers, mostly already asleep. I saw there were some covered benches where I could have spent the night, and wondered whether I should stay there or try my luck at the next Rastplatz. Eventually, I decided to go and asked for a ride to Cottbus. I reached the gas station and found indeed a lot of trucks, but no covered benches, and the weather was not too promising. I asked around, until one Rumanian truck driver replied he was indeed going to Krakow, but of course the next morning. He spoke good English, probably Italian too and looked nice enough (he had a big sign in English with a golden cross saying "God is my co-pilot"), so I decided to go back to him the next morning. Nobody else was around, and I prepared to spend the night at the gas station. In fact, it was the first time that I ever did something like this, since I always camped or stayed at some couchsurfers while hitchhiking; it was cold and I didn't have a tent, so as early as 8:30 pm, I took out my sleeping bag and life saving alluminium blanket, wore all my clothes and lied down on one of the benches. During the night, I had to get up 2 times because of the pouring rain, and eventually, at 3 am, I gave up my plan to sleep, wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and started reading a book waiting for the first trucks to start the engine.

At around 5 am, after 2 long hours, the first drivers woke up. Since they were already sleeping at 7-8 pm, I thought they would wake up even earlier, but none of them did. I approached some Polish trucks, without success, until one called to me in Polish. Without knowing what he asked, I replied "Krakow", and with his hands, he showed me to the passenger seat. I jumped in smiling profusely. He was indeed a great driver. He spoke nothing but Polish, and I knew some 15 Polish words, but he was clever enough to speak in a way we could understand each other pretty well. I soon learned new words, and at some point, we crossed the border. At that point, he pulled up his seat belt, lifted his hands from the wheel and grabbed the handles over the doors, and cried Polska, kurvaaaa!! while the truck started bouncing up and down on the badly kept Polish motorway. All sort of stuff started falling down from the shelves of the truck, and the driver's eyes were lid up in a kind of ecstasy. At 9 am, he dropped me at a gas station in the commercial area of Wrocław.

At the gas station, I started looking out for cars. I soon realized that the biggest difference with Germany and Western Europe was not the quality of the roads, but who is inside the cars: a great number of cars that I intended to ask were stuffed with people and all sorts of stuff. I was considering to give up and go to the city to meet my Polish friend Piotr, with whom I had originally planned to travel to Krakow from Wrocław, when I heard a voice calling. Of course I couldn't understand what it said, so I ignored it. But at some point, it got closer, until I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and met the gaze of a reddish-bearded man, around 30 years of age, with an old-style backpack with metal bars in it, smiling to me and holding two big plastic bottles. Nie rozumię po polsku, I replied to his gasping smile. Luckily, he replied in English that he was calling to me from the other gas station on the other side of the highway, because he had seen me and as a sign of comradery, he wanted to give me half a liter of mineral water. I understood that he had found it somewhere, and thought I had no money. He also said I'm sorry, but I don't have any money to give you, and then asked me where I was going and started asking people in Polish and Ukrainian on my behalf. That random encounter was pretty impressive. After half an hour of asking without success, I looked into my pockets and gave him 5€, because he was going to Germany and obviously had no money (he said he had been sleeping on the concrete in the tent expo in Decathlon for days). Besides, he had done all that asking for me, and I am sure that if he had had any money, he would have given it to me. He stared at the tiny banknote, speechless. You're gonna need it in Germany, buddy, I said, and he just couldn't believe that I had just given him the equivalent of 20 złoty.

Eventually I met my friend Piotr and we decided to take a train to Krakow in the afternoon. The train was just 35 złoty and the journey quite pleasant. We couchsurfed there together, and the following day he flew to Iceland, I stayed a bit longer in Krakow, and then took a cheap bus to Zakopane, a very popular resort in the Tatras. I wanted to cross the border into Slovakia from there, heading for Rysy, crossing Poland's highest peak, 2500m. The most ridiculous thing that I encountered in Poland was indeed Zakopane. There, you have to pay for everything. I paid for using the hiking trails, for using toilets (rare in the rest of Poland), and as soon as I got there, everyone started trying to sell me some kind of accommodation, using all sort of signs that could be seen from the bus. I was looking for a cheap hostel and the tourist information office was already closed, so asking these people was no use. With the help of some English-speaking locals and a taxi driver I didn't buy a ride from, I walked one hour into the national park and to the beautiful hostel, which was hidden in the forest. The next day I packed my stuff and set off into the mountains. The weather was threatening, but it was not raining much. After a while I started worrying though, because I hadn't check the weather, I was alone and nobody knew I was going there, and almost nobody I saw was going in the same direction as me. I finally reached mount Zawrat, and there I found 3 hikers who told me they couldn't find the path from there because of the snow. They also told me that a tourist had died along my route a few days earlier. The weather was then very bad, and a lot of water was coming down from the mountains. Reluctantly, I headed back to the refuge, where I met a guy that was half Polish-half Venezuelan and his Polish girlfriend. They spoke Spanish to me and decided to offer me their company for the rest of the evening, until they had drunk a fair bit. Eventually there was a fight over a lost jacket, at the end of which my jacket was gone, because as I found out the next morning, they had taken it by mistake. They also left their camera in the hut, so the next day after a long search, I managed to find them again and swapped the lost goods. Everybody at the hut was telling me they were crazy.

I finally spent another night at the Goodbye Lenin hostel, and decided to hitch to Trstená and then down to Zvolen again. I was afraid hitchhiking in Slovakia was as bad or even illegal as reported on hitchwiki, but I found it to be actually very easy and fun. My other fear was the language but I managed quite well. I got six rides from Zakopane to my final destination, and in two of them the drivers spoke very good English, one German, and with the other ones I had to be creative. After my first ride, I was dropped in front of the bus station, where the lady pointed to the bus to Chochołów. I said thanks, but then hitched further, because I had no złoty left, and I wasn't sure where the bus would have taken me. It was a bit harder than I thought, because Zakopane was full of tourists that obviously didn't know where the tiny border village of Chochołów was, and in Slovakia I had the impression people looked down at me from their cars. My idea of the country was very different. I expected a developing, post-communist rural country not far from Poland in appearance, while what I saw was much better roads than in Poland, beautiful and well-kept villages, huge supermarkets and malls, nice cars, lots of people going shopping.

It got me fairly long to get all my rides, but they all came within a couple of hours. My main concern was the last bus from Zvolen to Kralová, that I needed to take to get to Zaježová, was at 3:50 pm, and of course I got there too late. But I started walking those 10km to Kralová showing my thumb and my big backpack at every car, until finally someone who was not going there (nobody was in fact going there, because I saw no cars) took me. From Kralová, I walked until the end of the road, until a dog came running at me.

I cuddled the dog and greeted a bunch of people sitting at something I later found out was the bus stop I intended to reach. I asked them if they spoke English, and if they knew where Zaježová was. One of them said: you're almost there. You must be Diego. We've been waiting for you. Now we can go. And they led me to the path through the meadows, to paradise Sekier.