Zakopane, High Tatras, Poland
Organising a walking holiday in Poland and Slovakia
Getting to Zakopane
Gazdowka Chalets
Walking around Zakopane
More about walking and hiking in the High Tatras
Organising a walking holiday in Poland and Slovakia
We had booked up 3 nights in a "rustic chalet" (Gazdowka Chalets) at Zakopane, as part of a 12-night visit to Poland and Slovakia in July 2008. We were hoping to do some easy walking in the countryside and maybe find a high-level trekking route in the High Tatras, known in Poland as the Tatry Zachodnie. However with 3 adults and 2 children there would be different ideas of what "easy walking" involved!
This holiday was a bit of an adventure - somewhere different to go in the summer, when the Mediterranean resorts tend to be too hot to enjoy. It was all researched and booked on the internet, and we had found our main accommodation at AquaCity in Poprad, on the south side of the High Tatras, because of its environmental credentials. But we wanted to combine this with somewhere in Poland, particularly since the best way for us to get there seemed to be via Krakow airport. Zakopane emerged as the place to go, with plenty of accommodation to choose from. Then we could finish our holiday with a few nights in Krakow.
The Polish accommodation and hire car were arranged through StayPoland, which was very efficient and helpful with customers' comments and ratings to help us select suitable places to stay. We were very satisfied with both the chalet in Zakopane and the hotel in Krakow. The hire car deal seemed pretty reasonable as well, with an efficient handover service and help loading the luggage into the car.
So, there we were at Krakow Airport ready to set out in our Mitsubishi Lancer Station Wagon, heavily loaded up with our luggage and the five of us. It was about midday, warm and sunny. We did a bit of touring around the western fringes of Krakow before we realised we had missed the turning onto the A4/E40 motorway, and drove back to find the junction close to the exit from the airport.
Once on the motorway there were signs for Zakopane so it was easy to follow the route onto the E77 heading due south. However we hadn't bargained for the amount of roadworks, nor for the fact that half the population of Krakow seemed to be driving south on a sunny Sunday! So it was a long, slow journey to cover the 106 km (about 65 miles) to Zakopane. We pulled into a service station for a loo stop and to get some snacks to keep us going, then returned to the column of slow-moving traffic.
Once the reconstruction of the E77 is finished it will presumably be a fast dual carriageway all the way to Zakopane, and the journey should take barely an hour. It took us about 2 hrs 30 minutes. In places the road surface was quite bumpy, and there were stretches where the wheels of vehicles seemed to have created shallow furrows either side of a raised bit in the middle of each lane. However it was safe enough.
We were driving through, and past, small towns set in green rolling countryside with plenty of woodland. Once we reached the larger town of Nowy Targ we were getting views of the mountains in the distance - almost like a mirage rising out of the low-lying landscape shimmering in the heat. The High Tatras are a small but dramatic mountain range, much higher than anything else around.
Approaching Zakopane we were a bit unsure where the town began, as there were various signs appearing for holiday accommodation, but we stuck to the main road. I thought it would be quite straightforward to find our accommodation, taking a road to the left and heading due south through the town. However, it wasn't as simple as that.
The centre of Zakopane has recently been pedestrianised and this wasn't clear from the map I took off the internet. We ended up going past the turning into the town centre and having to turn round, then we stopped near to the street market area and got directions. That wasn't easy either, as the guy we spoke to said his son had learnt English at school, but it turned out he hadn't learnt very much!
I always feel a bit hopeless if I go somewhere and don't even speak a few words of the language - it's not reasonable to expect the locals to be able to speak English, although in many countries lots of people can do so. Not so in Zakopane!
Eventually we got the message that we couldn't go down the road through the centre of the town, and had to take a lengthy route around 3 sides of a square to get there. And then we managed to find the way, helped by some signs which must have meant "diversion". We turned left onto Kasprusle, heading south, and this became Strazyska which was the street we wanted. There on the left was the sign for Gazdowka Chalets.
(An alternative to all this would have been to get a bus into Krakow and then take one of the frequent train or bus services to Zakopane, and really once we were in Zakopane we didn't really need a car.)
We were very satisfied with the accommodation, in modern timber chalets built in the traditional style, equipped to sleep up to 6 (with one on a sofa bed downstairs). Fridge, cooker, wood-burning stove, modern shower room & toilet upstairs and additional washroom & toilet downstairs. Wooden balcony with space alongside to park the car.
It was just a small development of about 5 chalets and a main reception building which included other rooms and a bar/restaurant. We felt a bit guilty about not trying out the restaurant but we were only there for a short time and wanted to soak up the atmosphere in the town centre. Notes from previous guests suggested the food was pretty good.
The 3 nights cost about £300, self catering, which didn't seem bad in high season.
The Chalets were well situated roughly halfway between the centre of town and the entrance to the Tatrzanski National Park, so once we'd found our way there it turned out to be a good location.
Unfortunately however, we didn't manage to get up into the National Park. On our first afternoon we had a walk in the sunshine into town with views back over our shoulders of the mountain tops - the distinctive profile of Giewont (1894m) which is associated with Zakopane. We found a little shop 5 minutes' walk from the chalet and stocked up on some wine and things for breakfast. There were a couple of other shops nearby and a stall selling fruit and veg.
Kasprusle is an attractive street, gently winding its way into town, in places close to a stream on the right flowing fast down from the mountains. There was a bridge across it which we would take later when returning from the main shopping street, the Krupowki.
One of the large traditional old houses of the town could be seen here, the Willa Atma. A sign by the road indicated it was built in 1893 in the Zakopane style, and is now a museum dedicated to the composer Karol Szymanowski who lived here from 1930-35. This and other less noteworthy timber houses gave the street a lot of character.
The following afternoon, after hours of rain, the skies cleared and we turned left from this street along Stolarkyzka, past green pastures on the left and on to Koscieliska which runs into the town from the south-west. This has the best known collection of these old timber houses and we stopped to look at Willa Koliba, which was the first to have been built in the Zakopane style by Stanslaw Witkiewicz.
We walked on into town past more timber houses and reached the parish church of St Clement, built entirely out of wood, largely the work of local mountaineers in the mid-19th century. The churchyard was intriguing, set out among fir trees with individually designed carvings on many of the graves, some of them clearly intended to be humorous.
Then we found a little craft shop where Ailsa took a liking to the painted wooden horses and so we bought her one to take home.
Koscieliska and Kasprusle meet each other in the centre of the town where there was a lot of construction work going on and the flow of people had to squeeze between wooden hoardings.
Just beyond there at the corner of the street, on our first afternoon, we found a relaxing bar-restaurant where we could sit outside and enjoy a meal, once we had worked out how to order it! Fortunately there were pictures of the main choices above the bar. As we sat outside in the sunshine a horse and trap went past taking tourists on a trot through the streets.
After the meal we walked round to the left, into the street market area which continues under the overpass of the main road. This was fortunate as we were caught by a sudden thundery shower of rain. The stall were selling all sorts of souvenir items and lots of packs of what looked like soap. Strangely people were being offered small bits to try, so we did, and found out it was smoked cheese. It tasted OK so we bought a pack. (Later we found in a brochure that this is characteristic of the region. We had it with bread and a glass of wine, but after a while it tasted rather dry.)
A couple of evenings later we came back to the street market and Frances bought some presents for her friends back home.
Returning from the market towards the restaurant, we turned left across a bridge over a narrow but fast-flowing river. This led to the start of Krupowki, the main shopping street. But first we paused at a stall next to the bridge selling photo-guidebooks and maps. I'd already got my regional walking map, but needed a more detailed streetmap of the town. I ended up with a guidebook for the town in Polish, which wasn't much use to us, but it did have a good detailed streetmap in it which was invaluable for the rest of our stay. Now we could work out where we were and how to get back to where we started from!
We started making our way slowly up Krupowki, which is closed to vehicles and has been fitted out with fancy street lights and other street furniture. It must soak up money from the thousands of tourists who flock there, with its collection of up-market shops and choice of restaurants, as well as cheaper fast food stalls and souvenir stands. There must be lots of places like this around Europe's cities, but certainly Krupowki had its own character due to the style of the buildings, the section with a stream running through it next to a large open-air restaurant, and the glimpses of Giewont between the rooftops.
Halfway up Krupowki there's a cross-roads. We turned right there on our first evening to go back down across the bridge near Willa Atma and then on to our chalet. Next morning Catriona and I went through the crossroads in the opposite direction, in the rain, along T. Kosciuszki, to find the Tourist Office. It should have been easy but we ended up at the bus/taxi/train station and had to retrace our steps to the previous junction. Even then we had difficulty spotting the tourist office, which turned out to be the little wooden building on the corner. As it turned out they weren't particularly interested in helping us but we did leave with a Visitor booklet containing some useful information in English, and a free map with advertising.
On our second evening, we stopped at the large open-air restaurant for a meal but decided to settle for drinks, sitting at a table next to the stream. We went a bit further up the street where we were drawn into a restaurant by the sound of folk music from inside. There was a table free and we enjoyed a meal with periodic bursts of song from the four guys in traditional costume. It was pretty similar on our final evening in a different restaurant with a different folk group. So if you like that sort of thing it's a good place to be.
Krupowki finally finishes where it meets one of the main roads (the Al. 3 Maja) coming down from the E77 - the second side of the square of roads which we had followed to find our chalet.
This main road continues for another kilometre until it meets another main road heading south-east which becomes the Przewodnikow Tatrzanskich, leading on to the cable car station at Kuznice.
At the end of the second evening, after a mostly wet day, the sun appeared on the mountain tops as we were looking for a the restaurant. Next morning was bright and sunny and we decided to head for the cable car and get up there. But we left it too late, the queues were impossible, we couldn't park the car anywhere near and we ended up settling for a walk up the hill on the north-west side of town (Gubalowka). But that's another story.
At 1894m Giewont seems quite an impressive height, but it's just 1000m higher than the gate at the entrance to the National Park so it's really only like climbing a Scottish munro! According to one of our neighbours at home, who went there a few years ago, the top can get very crowded and they began to get a bit concerned as they were pushed back towards the near-vertical edge of the summit!
Giewont rises just to the north of the line of the High Tatras marking the border with Slovakia, which reach heights around 2100m (Krzesanica is 2122m). From the map it looks like you could walk along a ridge to these from the cable car station on Kasprowy Wierch (1986m) about 5km (3 miles) to the east and then walk down one of the trails to Zakopane. The photo-guidebooks which we saw on sale showed pictures of high grassy ridges leading to stony summits. East of Kasprowy Wierch the mountains are a bit higher and trickier to climb, with fixed ladders in places (see the story of Slavkovsky Stit - the highest of the High Tatras which you can walk up).
You have to pay an admission fee to enter the national park on the Polish side (unlike in Slovakia). I found this out when I went for a run in the rain on the first morning and aimed to try out one or two of the hiking trails through the foothills. Our road led directly to the gate, about a kilometre away, and there were small carparks next to cafes nearby. The gateway stood at the start of the dense forest and I went through but was brought to a halt by a voice from the little sentry box. It was a ticket office and I think the fee was about £5. I decided it was too much for a short run, and turned back.
However, there is a good cycle track which runs outside the boundary of the national park, roughly east-west, along the southern edge of Zakopane. It goes as far as the ski lifts and stadium near the road leading to Kuznice. I went eastwards along the track past some soggy hikers and turned into the next track leading into the park. This was a cul-de-sac, leading to a small hilltop, Jaskinia Dziura. I didn't get that far because of the rain, but at least I set foot in the park! Going back down I continued onto a narrow road (Droga do Daniela) which led back towards the town, past a restaurant and then a collection of little wooden houses. There was a group of tourists walking along with a guide, getting wet. This road merged with Strazyska which led back to our chalet.
One day, I hope to go back and get up onto those high mountain ridges in the sunshine!
It would be good to get some stories from others who have walked and climbed in the High Tatras.
Contributed by Andrew Llanwarne - September 2008
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