Dan dropped me off at the bus station in Kezmarok, and I took off in the rain through the Low Tatras en route to Banska Stiavnica. A beautiful drive along tight winding roads through remote mountain villages. Again, I wish I could have just jumped off of the train and spent a night or two in these villages. I seem to be following an endless autumn as I move south, and I continue to travel through landscapes full of oranges, yellows and reds.

I arrived into Banska Stiavnica after the sun went down, earlier and earlier lately, now around 5:00. I walked the twenty five minutes up to the center of town, got some dinner and found my hostel. I had the place to myself... it was quite nice. Paying the hostel prices but having my own room.

Banska Stiavnica had no real specific sites. Perhaps I’m getting numb to all of the beauty, but there is your standard fare of castles, churches and plazas, but the former mining town does not possess that single attraction that draw people to the place. It is more a remote town, kind of tough to get to, made for wandering up and down the hillsides. It is an amazingly photogenic place... I wandered around town, over to the calvary up on the hill outside of town, around the ‘old’ castle, then over to the ‘new’ castle, built 5 years later, and up and over and through the hillsides that rise up around the town center. It was a great time of year to be there, crisp cool colorful mornings, the place warming up as the day went on.

It was a strange place as well. One minute I felt like I was back in the bucolic blue ridge mountains of Virginia, and then quickly reminded that I was in a former communist country filled with austere high rise apartment blocks. Other times I felt like I was in a pristine Swiss or Austrian mountain village, and then reminded that it is a country facing a difficult problem with the Gypsy population. Most of these beautiful houses have large fences and mean dogs surrounding their properties to ward off the threat of theft. While wandering around the surrounding hills, I set course for an old mining tower on the outskirts. As I arrived near dusk, I realized I had wandered into a Gypsy encampment. It was strange scene, the women and children milling around in front of the ruined apartments, boys breaking glasses in the street, and the men sitting around fires along the side of the road, drinking and playing cards. While I didn’t encounter any problems, I didn’t stick around too long.

The morning I was leaving, I did one last stroll around, doing some research and setting up some drawings to do a sectional sketch of the main plaza (still being developed George...). I really enjoyed Slovakia. While I didn’t see any of the big cities, Bratislava and Kosice, and while I unfortunately didn’t see any hockey games, I had a great time enjoying the small towns and rural areas. The Tatras mountains are really stunning.

As I left I was reminded of a conversation I had with Dan the hostel manager in Zdiar. I was asking him about the reasons behind the Czechoslovakia split, as it was something I did not quite understand. It was such a dramatic time with the fall of the iron curtain, and I seem to have lumped that split in with the fall of communism, but it was a quite different situation. The Czech’s and the Slovak’s have very different personalities. If I interpret Dan correctly (he is a Czech living in Slovakia), the Slovaks were always more independent, and wanted to see that independence grow, while still remaining under the Czech umbrella, meaning they wanted their freedom but have the Czech government assume all responsibility for that freedom... the two territories could not reach an agreement on how this new relationship should be structured and they eventually parted ways. It was a very difficult time, emotionally, for the people. It was difficult for them to have to produce a passport that identified them as one or the other... but today I was leaving that behind, and heading into a whole new culture... one that would be the most foreign to date... I was off to Hungary and Budapest.

(I realize that I am falling far behind, with posts upcoming for Budapest, Pecs and Eger... and with nine hours of trains ahead of me today ((Happy Thanksgiving!)) I am hoping i can get myself up to date.)