Greetings from Krakow, Poland!

We arrived here late last night (9/10) with plans to spend about 
three days visiting Old Town, Auschwitz, and the Wieliczka salt mine.

While in Hungary, we visited Budapest, seeing the Buda Castle, the 
Labyrinth (interesting old warrens beneath the Buda Castle, with 
cheesy statues and funky music playing in the background. They give 
you an old oil lamp and you wander around in the semi-darkness), and 
went caving. The caving was really fun - we had to squeeze through 
many areas on our backs or bellies, squirming along like snakes. The 
caves are quite extensive and part of a National Park. Our guide was 
a professional spelunker who maps the caves when he isn't leading 
groups through the cave. We had joined 4 other travelers from our 
hostel for the caving expedition and we all managed to squeeze 
through the "sandwich" and were thereby allowed to sign the sandwich 
ledger. Our guide demonstrated how small a hole one can fit through 
by pushing himself through "Winnie the Pooh's hole" (looked more like 
a nostril to me), a small oval about 8x10 inches. Chris then stepped 
up and shoved himself through the same hole, to everyone's surprise.

After Budapest, we spent a day in Visegrad checking out the Citadel 
and riding a bobsled run. Next we went to Eger, which is wine country 
and had some Egri Bikevar ("Bull's Blood") wine which was quite good 
and saw yet another castle (ruins, mostly). At this point, we 
abandoned our plans to return to Prague and left Hungary for Slovakia 
where we spent a couple nights in Stary Smokovec, a small resort town 
in the Tatras Mountains (in the Carpathian range). We met some Polish 
people there at a pool hall and they were kind enough to help us 
finish off our Hungarian wine and listen to Chris abuse his guitar 
late into the night. Consequently, the next day we got up rather late 
and took a gondola and chair lift up the mountain (rather than hiking 
up), and then walked back down (~3.5 hrs). The Tatras are quite 
spectacular, a jagged range of peaks somewhat reminiscent of the 
Tetons.

We're looking forward to seeing a bit of Poland before heading into 
Germany and then working our way south through Switzerland, France, 
and Spain to the Mediterranean.

Than Putzig
Chris Tarr