The Unicycle Diaries 7: The Bison That Time Forgot

After my first Lonely Planet assignment in Poland in winter 2006, I pitched this bison-related story idea to a number of publications. Nothing came of it, but I thought it'd make a good backbone for a picture story here...

I’ve never felt much like Little Red Riding Hood... until this very moment.

Having left the minibus at the turn-off from the road to Białowieża, a small village near Poland’s border with Belarus, I’m trudging along a road caked with thick snow. My footsteps are the only thing audible, though even they are muffled by the crunchy white layer beneath my feet.

It’s the middle of the day, but the sky is a strange muted grey and the bare spindly trees look like extras from The Blair Witch Project. And I know there are wolves in these woods. And I know the European Bison Reserve must be just a kilometre or so ahead. But my hindbrain isn’t so sure this is a good idea...

On my first Lonely Planet assignment in Poland in the midst of winter in 2006, I journeyed through the snowy forest to see the last wild European bison in a reserve near a tiny eastern town. What I discovered was snow, bison, wolves, tarpans and the village that time forgot.

The Unicycle Diaries is an occasional series wherein I use excerpts from diary entries or story pitches to create a snapshot of a past journey. For previous instalments, click on the Unicycle Diaries topic tag below, then scroll down.

Companions on the Polish Road 2: Toruń to Lublin

“A good companion shortens the longest road.”

This sentence is an old Turkish proverb, and it proved very applicable to my recent research trip through Poland for Lonely Planet.

(Though I won't mention the three wars the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fought with the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the 17th century - for that would be tactless)

Last week I described the Poles I met while travelling from Kraków to Gdańsk. This week, let's hear about the fellow foreigners I met up with on the way...

Toruń: From the train station serving this beautiful Gothic city in southern Pomerania, I had to catch a bus across the broad Vistula River to reach the Old Town. As I walked through the station underpass to the bus stop, a cafe advertisement caught my eye, as it was largely in English.

When I dropped into the Kona Coast Cafe the next day I discovered a genial American, Jon Greene, behind the espresso machine. He and his Polish wife had decided to live in Poland for a while, and he'd refused to consider anywhere but Toruń (a fair call, in my opinion). We sat a table and chatted for a while, and I gave my approval to the coffee. It's worth dropping by if you're in town - the cafe's at ul Piekary 22.

Giżycko: For some reason on this particular trip, I had to catch a lot of buses and trains around 6:30am - for some reason the next choice would always depart too late in the morning. So on a chilly weekday morning I found myself sitting on a bench in front of the humble train station in this attractive lakeside holiday town in Masuria, in Poland's northeast.

Another early train had just left so there was just me on the platform, eating my packed breakfast from the hotel I'd just checked out of (Polish hotels will always pack you a breakfast if you have to check out too early for the in-house breakfast, which is much appreciated).

Then a young guy walked up to me and asked something. I explained that my Polish wasn't fluent, then found out he spoke reasonably good English and was on holiday from nearby Belarus.

Aleksandr and I were both heading to the city of Białystok, which required a change of trains at Ełk. Now I love Ełk, because it looks like the English word 'elk' but in fact has a letter 'Ł', which sounds like the English 'W'. So the name of the place is pronounced 'e-w-k'... which sounds adorable, for some reason.

(You can learn a lot of utterly unreliable but amusing nonsense about 'Ł' at its Uncyclopedia page, which describes the letter as "The evil twin brother of L. He is an ally of ∩ and controls the Unicode Villain Organization of Eastern Europe, or UVOEE for short.")

Anyway, we got out at Ełk, marched into the station building to discover which platform our connection was on, then trooped off to Platform 3 to board the next train.

We had a good talk along the way; I was intrigued to learn that Aleks, a keen sailor, had been due to join the Soviet navy just before the USSR dissolved and the career opportunity disappeared. Now he works in an automotive business in Minsk and sails as often as he can. Poland's northeastern lake country is perfect for that, of course. And not far from Minsk.

Białystok-Warsaw: A few days later I was leaving Białowieża, a small town in the eastern Podlasie region, which is famous for the wild European bison which still live in the surrounding forest.

I was waiting for a bus at about - of course - 6.30am, when I got into limited conversation with an elderly couple in Polish, who were impressed that I hailed from so far away. Then a waiter from the hotel restaurant showed up, on his day off, and we had a more fluent conversation in English.

When I left the bus at Białystok, I had the vague impression I heard some people speaking English. But at that stage in the Polish journey I do sometimes imagine hear English - my brain seems keen to twist what it hears into something I can recognises. Odd, but true.

Anyway, I shook my head, walked across the pedestrian bridge that led to the train station, and bought my ticket for Warsaw and onward to Lublin.

Then I realised there really were people speaking English - two middle-aged American women being helped by a young Polish woman who, I discovered later, had walked them all the way over from the bus station to assist them, even though she was due to catch a bus herself. Nice to see the Good Samaritan spirit at work.

After she'd left, I introduced myself to the ladies, and also introduced them to the dubious delights of Polish train station coffee (a choice of instant coffee or percolator granules served in boiling water, which you allow to sink to the bottom).

We shared a compartment on the train to Warsaw. Pam and Margie (I think those were their names, from memory) both had Polish ancestry and had been travelling to various parts of the country; they would be transferring at Warsaw to a train to Kraków. So we chatted, then I waved them goodbye at the grim Warszawa Wschodnia Station, where I was catching a connection to Lublin.

Lublin: My final meeting came courtesy of microblogging tool Twitter. I'd exchanged a few comments about my Polish adventures with Polish-born Twitter user @rusticbynature, then realised she was tweeting from my next stop Lublin, so suggested meeting up. So myself, Ania and her American husband Jaime, a keen photographer, got together at the Złoty Osioł in Lublin.

It's a hidden-away pub-restaurant in the centre of town, dimly lit and full of rustic atmosphere, and I wouldn't have found it easily by myself. If ever in Lublin, see if you can locate it, starting with this address: ul Grodzka 5a. Its name, by the way, means Golden Donkey...

Companions on the Polish Road 1: Kraków to Gdańsk

When I travelled around Poland in 2008, I made a point of talking with people I encountered along the way.

As I was researching a possible travelogue book about Poland, I wanted to get the most out of encounters with locals on my journeys.

Two years later on my next round-Poland Lonely Planet trip, however, being interactive was its own reward.

Some of my best travel memories, I realised, have arisen from chance encounters with people, both on transport and on the streets.

Although most Polish trains are divided into compartments and are thus conducive to chat, I find that Poles have something similar to the British reserve. The polite procedure when entering a compartment is to say "dzień dobry" ("Good day") to your fellow passengers, but not intrude further.

But if you do fancy a chat and you both speak enough common language to communicate, it's possible to end up in a warm and interesting conversation.

And there are other ways to meet both locals and other international travellers. Here's a few of my experiences in May-June 2010...

Kraków: In 2008 I discovered the English Language Club by accident, when I noticed its small sign hanging above a street in the Old Town. This time I made a return appearance in the company of Narrelle. The club has met weekly since before the end of communism in the 1980s.

It's run on a pretty simple concept - a mixed bunch of locals, tourists and expats meet in a big room up a tatty staircase to chat informally, helped along by tea and biscuits. If you're ever in Kraków on a Wednesday, get along to a meeting from 6pm to 8pm at ul Sienna 5, near St Mary's Church; it's a fun way to meet the locals.

Kraków-Łódź: On this meandering train journey to Poland's second-largest city, I realised that a couple down the corridor were lightly bickering in English. Passing by their compartment, I introduced myself and discovered the male half of the sketch was a UK academic who was heading to Łódź to consult with colleagues there about a possible joint project.

We had a pleasant chat, and speculated whether onboard catering might materialise once they added an additional complement of carriages to the train at Częstochowa. It did - in the form of a lady with a trolley - and I scored the last kanapka (sandwich).

Warsaw: Visiting funkily-decorated hostel Oki Doki to check its details for the LP book, I bumped into its owner, Ernest. That's not as obvious as it seems, as he spends a lot of his working days at other locations; but somehow we always happen to be there at the same time when I drop in every two years.

We sat in the hostel's bar and shared a beer or two as I heard about his latest travels. Ernest is the most well-travelled Pole I know, having been to just about every continent with his wife and daughter. But not Australia... yet.

Wrocław: In this attractive southwestern city I had arranged a meeting with artist Tomasz Moczek, creator of the famous dwarf/gnome statues which are scattered through its Old Town's streets. First I scored Poland's chattiest taxi driver, who was determined to have a lively conversation about Australia no matter how limited my command of the Polish language.

He deposited me at a crumbling old industrial complex which turned out to be a former brewery full of artistic offices and studios, and I sat outside in the sunshine with Tom and two of his friends who helped translate, as we all drank beer and talked art. That was fun.

Gdańsk: In the Baltic port city, I met up one evening with my friend Andrzej Gierszewski, as I have since Narrelle and I met him in 2007. On that occasion I was looking for someone to interview about the amber trade for a 'vox pop' box in Lonely Planet's Poland country guide, and Andrzej was perfect - he related a great set of tests you could do to discover if a piece of amber was fake.

Every time I return we've met up at cafe-bar Kamienica on ul Mariacka, a beautiful small street of terraced shopfronts featuring gargoyle-head drain pipes. We drank a bit too much beer (Polish beer is becoming a theme, I see), and talked history, culture and politics as the sun set.

Next week: Enter the internationals - an expat cafe-owner in Toruń, a Belarusian fellow-traveller, two American ladies on a bus, and the Polish-American couple at the Golden Donkey...

Poland 4: Beauty and the Beast

I've just made my latest visit to Białowieża, in Poland's east, and came away with the same confusion I always feel about how the place is marketed to the visitor.

Its famous herds of wild European bison are the focus of tourism to this remote village - but should they presented as a miracle of nature or as the traditional target of the hunter?

To me, the answer seems obvious. To understand why, you need to know a little of the story of this part of Poland.

The Puszcza Białowieska (Białowieża Forest) is the last remnant of the great primeval forest which once covered most of Europe. Nowadays it's split between Poland and Belarus, but for centuries it lay entirely within the Kingdom of Poland.

It was also packed with wildlife, including bison, the cousins of the buffalos we all know from Hollywood Westerns. So Polish kings built hunting lodges here for a bit of sport, and they were followed by the Russian tsars after eastern Poland was swallowed up by the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century.

These monarchs made some some effort to protect the dwindling bison population even as they hunted them, but in World War I the German army occupied the forest and hunted down nearly all of of the remnant population. By 1919, they were extinct outside zoos.

A sad end for these mighty beasts in their native environment. Impressively though, a conservation program started reintroducing the creatures to the wild in the 1950s, and there are now several hundred bison in the forest. Visitors can enter the Strict Nature Reserve accompanied by a guide, with the chance of spotting bison in their natural state. As a result, Białowieża is a popular destination for tourists year-round.

You would assume, therefore, that the theme of the place would be animal conservation and the harm that hunting and other human activity has done to the natural environment over the centuries.

To some extent it is, and visitors marvel at the forest and the life within it. However, the hotels and restaurants of the village are generally themed in quite a different way. Decked out as mock hunting lodges, decorated with fake bison heads, animal skulls and other hunting memorabila, they seem to glorify the hunting that caused so much harm to the local fauna in the first place.

In one way they're just drawing on history, referencing the Tsar's hunting lodge which was burned down by German troops retreating from the Soviet army in the next world war.

However, it does seem a jarring choice of decor in a 21st century world that's far more sensitive to the harm that humans have done to the environment around them. Also considering that many people are less tolerant of hunting nowadays, seeing it as unnecessarily cruel (while, perhaps hypocritically, remaining tolerant of the breeding and killing of animals in controlled conditions for use as food).

Maybe I'm missing something here; but either way, I always cringe a little when I see the antlers, skulls and heads hanging on the walls of Białowieża venues, right above the animal skin rugs on the wall.

Am I too sensitive? Hypocritical? Misinterpreting some important aspect of the local cultural heritage? Or is the happy juxtaposition of hunting and conservation in Bialowieza just a little bit odd?

Signs and Portents: Poland 1

Looking through my photos, I've noticed that I love taking shots of strange and quirky signs. They're often quite irrelevant to a story I'm pursuing, and therefore won't get published, but they are a lot of fun and tell you much about the local culture. And make you scratch your head in puzzlememnt. Or at least give you a good chuckle.

So without further ado, here's the first in an irregular series of quirky signs I've encountered along the way. First up, that champion of bizarre posters and curious signs, Poland! This set of images was taken in February 2006, during my first Lonely Planet assignment in Polska.

Pedro was so going to sue his travel agent when he'd saved enough to return to Acapulco.

This pic was taken in the middle of a very cold winter in Kraków. This poor guy was charged with advertising the charms of a Mexican restaurant by standing outside in minus-5 degree weather. Yes, that is a pile of snow behind the bin. And no, I don't know why there were swings in the garden or who would use them in winter. Or why you would use them in summer, for that matter.

The management couldn't understand the drop-off in trade since they'd erected the new sign - had they chosen the wrong type of cola?

A somewhat unfortunate sign outside a cafe within Kraków's main train station. You might expect the food provided by Gastro Wars to set off an unpleasant sequence of intestinal events once eaten, but it's all just a horrible misunderstanding. The company that runs the place has simply added the "gastro" from gastronomy to its own company name, Wars (pronounced "vars"). Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Tomasz couldn't help thinking he'd created a better-shaped heart than Pawel.

It may not have been celebrated in Poland until after the fall of communism, but Valentine's Day now seems as popular there as anywhere else. Before its arrival, male Poles marked International Women's Day on 8 March by giving romantic gifts to the ladies, making it both an officially serious and unofficially whimsical occasion. This was taken on the main street of Łódź on 14 February.

For some reason, Władysław was dying for some fries.

You can't escape the big M! This gigantic drink cup was placed next to one of the statues commemorating famous locals along Łódź's main drag, ulica Piotrkowska. The gentleman depicted here is Władysław Reymont (1867-1925), writer and Nobel prize winner. Look carefully at the straw on the cup - it's shaped like an ice hockey stick in reference to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin.

Roman wondered if it was finally time to launch his celebrity dumpling chain restaurant concept.

And finally, one of the stars on the Walk of Fame along ulica Piotrkowska in Łódź. Poland's second-largest city is also its film-making hub, as the National Film School was established here after WWII when Warsaw lay in ruins. These stars commemorate numerous stars and production people, though the only three likely to be known to people outside Poland are Roman Polański (Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Three Colours trilogy), and Andrzej Wajda (whose 1981 Man of Iron won the Palme d’Or at Cannes).

Stay tuned for more curious pics! And if you have any odd or amusing signs you've encountered on your travel, feel free to email them to me at tim@iwriter.com.au, to be featured in a future posting.

Poland 2: Hooray for Hollywoodge!

I'm typing this in the breakfast room of the Hotel Savoy in Łódź, Poland. But don't get too excited - it's a far cry from the Savoy in London (this place is two-star).

Łódź is a bit off the tourist trail but is actually a good looking town, and very different in appearance from all the other Polish cities I've visited. That's because it's essentially an early 19th century city, bulked up by a profusion of factories as the local authorities welcomed in the Industrial Revolution.

So instead of an Old Town around the core of a medieval market square, Łódź's hub is ul Piotrkowska, a long street lined by attractive Art Nouveau buildings (interrupted by the odd concrete monstrosity for contrast).

But what's really interesting here is the National Film School, established in 1948 in Łódź (Poland's second-largest city) when Warsaw was still lying in ruins from WWII. As a result, Łódź became Poland's film centre. And as Łódź is pronounced 'woodge', there's been no end of puns about Holly-woodge.

The school is a famous institution that's turned out numerous successful actors and directors. Some have gone on to international fame, notably directors Roman Polański and Krzysztof Kieślowski.

They like the film connection here; there's a 'walk of stars' in the pavement on the main street, with famous Polish directors and actors. Also, extending beyond the cinematic, other famous Łódź creative types are immortalised along ul Piotrkowska in the form of life-size statues.

The most prominent is that of Artur Rubenstein, the famous 20th century pianist. His statue is accompanied by a full-size grand piano! (though the image above is actually from my 2006 visit to Łódź during winter; I haven't had a chance to load my latest photos to my laptop yet).

Łódź is a fine example of how a city can reinvent itself. Once only known as a manufacturing centre, it's embraced the creative, and given itself a new lease of life.

Gastro-tourism: Make Mine a Large One

The India Times published a piece last week looking at the unexploited potential of gastro-tourism - food tourism to you and me - in the subcontinent.

Which made me think what a large part food and drink plays in my own travel. One doesn't like to sound greedy by admitting that one has an overt interest in gourmet treats overseas.

But I must admit there's been more than a few foodie highlights in my travels. Off the top of my head:

1. Sipping incredibly potent grappa, an Italian alcoholic drink created from the skins of grapes left over after winemaking. It wasn't the grappa per se, but the fact we were drinking it in San Gimignano, a beautiful hilltop town in Tuscany.

Narrelle and I had wandered away from the tourist haunts, admiring the medieval towers and picture-perfect green countryside below the city walls, when we'd stumbled across a little place that had grappa on the menu.

Wandering around the narrow quiet streets afterward,admiring the architecture while unexpectedly intoxicated from a single glass each, was loads of fun.

2. Drinking żubrówka vodka where the żubry hang out. In the far east of Poland, along the border with Belarus, sits the little village of Białowieża. Once the home of the Russian Tsar's hunting lodge, it's now the gateway to the UNESCO-listed reserve nearby, in which you'll find the only wild herd of European bison.

A bison in Polish is żubr, plural żubry, and they gave their name to the famous żubrówka vodka, which contains a blade of bison grass favoured by the animals. Drinking this in the area associated with it, after eating a traditional dish containing egg, bacon, game meat and mushrooms served up in a frying pan, gave it an extra savour.

3. Sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant on Easter Island on a Sunday, eating a tuna carpaccio containing fresh raw deep sea tuna. It's about the only dish you can eat fresh on the island, as most other foodstuffs are shipped in from Chile. But again, it was the surroundings that added the extra flavour.

As it was most people's day off on Rapa Nui, there was a soccer game going on in the park opposite, motorbikes zipping around, and young guys galloping their horses up and down the street. And just over to the right, there was one of the island's famous enigmatic statues, perched on a plinth above the fishing port.

In the end, it's not just about eating and drinking, is it? It's about being more deeply embedded in the culture, by enjoying the food and drink the locals do; and maybe understanding their culture a little better beceause of it.