Open'er festival and farewell Poland

From Warsaw we headed North to Gdynia where we had tickets for the opening day of the Heineken Open'er Festival. A horrific 7 hour slog along some of Poland's finest police, camera, action style driving saw us finding a makeshift campsite next to the festival site in someone front yard. After a late lunch we headed over and spent the rest of the evening enjoying waffles and pizzas, and a little musical entertainment courtesy of Laki Lan, Ben Harper and Pearl Jam. We got to enjoy a few other smaller Polish acts getting their first chance on the bigger stages too. A well orgainsed festival if not a little over policed and strict but well worth the travelling and reccomended to anyone who loves their music and wants a cheap 4 day weekend.

There comes a time in a long travelling trip where you have to make some choices. Limited by 90 day visa requirements we were faced with the really tough choice of going back into the Tatra Mountains (Poland/Slovakia) for an extra week and do the mountain peaks and some climbing which we had both been super keen to do or leave that for hopefully in the future and spend time in new countries and new mountain ranges. After lots of thought we both agreed, time to head to Romania and live like gypsy's for a month.

The following day we had planned on making it all the way south to Slovakia but a lazy morning, an hour on the beach at Sopot and some mild underestimating of the time required to travel on these hellish roads meant that we only made it halfway down the country. Saturday was another long driving day which saw us make it to Slovakia's Dunajec Gorge and hop onto the last traditional flossfarht raft of the evening which floated us downstream for just over an hour. Due to yet more language barriers issues and also forgetting to really ask the question of how to return to the start of the raft trip, we ended up getting a rollercoaster shuttle bus back to the van, avoiding the 9km walk back up the gorge in flip flops (aka-Thongs)

One last visit to be made whilst in Slovakia was the Slovenski Raj national park. We managed to work out a little mapless 4 hour route which included a gorge scramble up and then a forest trail back down. The heavy rains from earlier in the trip had taken their toll of the gorge and many new ladders and paths have had to be arranged but well done to the rangers, the trail is great fun.

Later that day we made it to within a few km's from the Romainian border ready for an early border crossing in morning. Another night spent at a trucky road side stop.