Prague to Warsaw

Tuesday 1am, Warsaw

Mad scramble this morning to catch the train. I was told that the Warsaw train would leave from Holesovice Station where I had arrived, but it turned out that it was leaving from Central Station. I got there with 3 minutes to spare and then couldn’t find the platform. Nightmare! As it happened, the train left 10 minutes late anyway, so I would have had time to arrive in less of a fluster.

One bonus was that at Holesovice, I saw the bastard who’d conned me over the taxi fare on arrival, so I discreetly took photographs of both him and his car, which I will pass to Prague Town Hall and the newspapers there. Might not achieve anything, but it sure makes me feel better! (He´s the one in the blue t shirt).

The train journey was scheduled to be 9 hours, but it was an hour and a half late, so it was a long old haul. Mind you, by the time you have had coffee, lunch and an afternoon tea, the journey does pass quite painlessly.

My reserved seat was in a corridor carriage which wasn’t all that busy. But four female American teachers talked incessantly. Four hours without drawing breath. God it was a pain. But, on reaching the Polish border, a new compartment carriage was shunted onto the front by the new locomotive and I relocated there, like Lord Muck, in glorious isolation.

The route took us past the site, near the Polish border, where there’d been an awful train crash a few days ago. A motorway bridge collapsed on to the line and the express train smashed into it. What a mess. But the delay, at that stage, was only half an hour or so.

The Polish countryside struck me as fertile and flat, with a lot of trees and dense woodland. From the train, you could see lots of folk on bikes pottering about the countryside. Interesting to see a fair few freight trains as well. There are lots of buildings in poor states of repair; clearly there’s still a lot of work to do on the Polish economy.

Joanna from Warsaw Tourism had very kindly arranged to meet me at the station, but Warsaw Central is a maze of escalators and we didn’t manage to meet up. The Harenda is pretty naff, by far the worst hotel I have stayed in a long time. No lift, which is no fun with three weeks worth of luggage to cart up several flights of stairs. The room is poky, has no air conditioning and it´s about 26 degrees Celsius. There is one of those loos with a device that chops up the unmentionables that suddenly starts churning and making you jump. Out the back there’s a bar and a skip for bottles. You get the idea. Probably why it´s 1am and I am still up writing this.

I did pop out round the corner for something to eat. Warsaw has got a lovely feel to it and the little restaurant was very nice. I am very much looking forward to seeing the place in the morning.