It was a long drive with a groggy post-festival cold (as normal) and not very much sleep (also, as normal) through traditional Hungarian villages and then rolling green Slovakian hills. The Slovak villages were often lined with people and their buckets of either red berries or mushrooms (presumably forraged from nearby), I imagine not making much of a living.
Eventually I arrived at Tatranec Camping in Tatranska-Lomnica. The campsite is just out of town at the base of the range's highest peak Lomnicky Stit and pretty cheap at €7.30 a night with my discount card. It's hardly a bad view either on a clear day!
The first day, I took the train along the bottom of the mountains to Stary Smokovec and began hiking up the wonderful slopes through the mist. There are numerous hiking trails in summer and ski slopes in winter and the trails are lined with regular resting spots made from old tree trunks.
After reaching Hrebienok without being able to see out of the mist, I continued up through the coniferous forests and fast-flowing crystal-clear rivers until the paths became steeper and rocky. Finally, after passing the Obrov Waterfall, the trail spits you out at Skalnate Pleso.
At Skalnate there is a cable car which takes you to the 2634m peak Lomnicky Stit. Having paid just €0.64 for a reasonable train journey, my jaw dropped slightly at the €24 charge to take you up to the peak (where you are not allowed to hike without a proper guide). Still, I had come this far so up I went.
Once you leave the cable car station, there is no indication that you are actually moving in the grey mist as you can't even see the cable and the ride is very smooth. The only thing to tell me we were going in the right direction was my ears popping before eventually the rocky peak lumes out of the clouds.
At the top is a little station and a small series of walkways where, on a clear day, the view must be spectacular. Above the mist clouds, it was actually quite warm until the shrill wind chills your bones. The wind was playing havok with the views too as it blew the clouds around below, giving snippets of the staggering view below before covering it up again like some sort of geographical strip-tease.
Down in the valleys are dark blue lakes and grey rock interspersed with purple and yellow flowers. On the northern side is Poland but that side of the peak was just a grey abyss when I was up there and it feels like you are hanging on the edge of the Earth.
On the way down the mountain again I started to think that on a clear day €24 might not be quite such a rip-off.
The next day I took a long and hilly bike ride out east to the Belianska Cave in the mountain side. It is a great little limestone cave in the same mould as the Punkva Cave in Czech Republic (only not quite as marvellous).
It seems that a standard requirement of any cave is giving the parts of it cool names, with this one beginning at "Devil's Throat" and finishing at "The Dome Of Ruins". In between is the "Musical Chamber", among others, which has such good accoustics that musical concerts used to be held there. There are loads of mineral deposits of numerous shapes and sizes while clear pools of water cover areas of the floor and the occational bat circles the ceiling.
In the afternoon I did some more hiking up from Tatranska-Lomnica to appropriately named mid-station "Start". From here, you can travel back down the hillside in style with either a modified 4-wheel mountainboard, 3-wheel buggy, or 2-wheel scooter. I took the buggy, which absolutely flew down the hillside bends (it seems a much shorter distance on the way down) and almost threw me out at every corner that I thought I could get away without the brakes - so much fun.
Afterwards, I took a ride on the Tatrabob at the bottom of the hill, a cart which runs down the hill on some nervously high and rickety track. Again, a lot of fun though.
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