I had been planning this for a long time. The problem was always that I couldn’t get fully prepared the day before, and when I get up in the morning, especially when my brother isn’t home, I sit down at the computer and start doing something, and even if it’s only 8 a.m., I tell myself that there’s no point today. Yesterday, though, I got everything ready – except for the list of caches I wanted to visit. I looked for it after waking up but couldn’t find it; luckily I dug out an already printed copy from somewhere, and at 7:30 I set off for the Ropice Zastavka platform.
On the way I stopped at the post office in Ropice, where a parcel with a CWG was supposed to arrive today, but all I learned there was that the post office is closed for a month and that they are looking for someone to provide postal services in their own home (a franchise). The post office windows and the door of the municipal office were tastelessly plastered with notices.
I got to the stop just in time; I didn’t have to sprint – in engineering terms you could almost say I was running at “idle“. On the train, the conductor charged me 35 CZK from my In Card. She smiled when I looked at her, but she probably smiles at everyone :). Anyway, she is already a lady of working age.
I got off after 11 km/5 stops in Bystrice and turned on my GPS, which took an insanely long time to get a fix. In the end I went for the cache Zeleznicni – Cislovani vozu, which I had already solved earlier, but the cache was 99% not there; I searched for it quite a long time on the footbridge over the railway line.
The Garmin was slowly catching the signal, it already had 2/5 and soon 4/5, but I found out that I probably hadn’t saved this cache at all, so I went back and bagged Bystrice – 2 kostely. Considering it was a 1/1 cache, i.e. the absolute easiest rating possible, I didn’t find it right away; it took me about 5 minutes. Of course I felt around everywhere the hint suggested, but the satisfaction only came at the very last possible spot – Murphy’s laws just work :D.
The search was made harder by quite a lot of muggles and especially cars, Tatra trucks and lorries – I had no idea where the last ones came from, this is the center of the village! The problem was still the GPS. It already had the maximum signal strength, but it showed my position with an inaccuracy of several meters. I asked myself – is it worth going to the mountains, where everything depends on how accurate the GPS is? I signed the log and was leaving when a mother with a stroller came along the side road. I thought about helping her get the stroller over the curbstone onto the sidewalk, but I just stared at how nicely she managed it and didn’t dare say anything. Then I passed a small black dog, which didn’t bark, and with frightened eyes just followed that mom onto the bridge – probably its owner.
I crossed the river Hluchova on a pedestrian and bike bridge, which the Garmin maps also had marked, and climbed up to the main road to Nydek. Road workers were doing something to the road surface here; I would guess they were breaking up the asphalt so they could put something underneath. Fairly long queues of cars formed in both directions; the breaking machine was in the middle of the road, but next to it was an empty parking lot running across, and the cars drove around it through there. I walked on, and a girl on a bike was delivering some letters, although I would rather say they were some Bystrice newsletters.
She only had a few left in her little basket and had beautiful long curly brown hair in a braid. Then she probably turned into one of the side streets, because I didn’t see her anymore. On the way several bikes overtook me, mostly squeaky ones, and I always naively thought I would see her again, but it was usually just some older man in good shape. At a restaurant and shop that were opening on August 4, 2015 (that is, today) I had my first drink of my own water – Korunni blackcurrant, supposedly sold exclusively at Lidl. That’s just my weakness for sweetened mineral water.
I walked on and passed a signpost to Prasiva. The thing is, I wanted to go there, but that cache was so far from the path that the GPS simply couldn’t calculate a route, which “happens” with about 1 cache in 100. So I told myself I’d skip this one, but since I was right at the mountain and there was a signpost, I wanted to give it a try. Same error again, so I gave up for good. I looked at the map and saw a “forest clearing” a few hundred meters away, but I don’t know what a clearing like that is; given that it went steeply downhill regardless of the contour lines, it’s probably just a part of the forest cut down for some reason.
In Nydek a dog barked at me for the first time – a big white one, but I really can’t tell you the breed, because I don’t know it. Of course it was behind a fence. I also got a bit confused in Nydek – the navigation led me across a bus turnaround, where nothing else is supposed to drive, let alone stop, so I walked a few extra steps. As the saying goes, what you lack in your head, you make up for with your feet :D. Shortly after that I started climbing higher; already at about 600 m above sea level there were cows, which I’m afraid of, because they probably think I’m some kind of toreador looking forward to “taking them on“, whereas in fact I’m always scared stiff.
Luckily there was a man there, so I stopped being afraid – in an emergency someone could step in. A bit further on I walked past the cache, because I was paying more attention to my phone and G+ than to the GPS and the map. Again it took me up to 5 minutes to find it. Next to it was a family house where, while a granny was swinging 2 little girls, they squealed “we want mommy“, and when mommy came, “we want granny“. The cache was by the electric fence wires for cows, so I had to be careful not to get a jolt.
I had to roll away a big rock, and the only place I could put it without looking like such a poser in front of that family was next to the wires. I have already gotten a jolt from a cow fence at least once and ended up flat on my back a few meters away. On my paper I had another cache, Tranoscius, but the GPS as usual calculated a route that was 10 times longer, and above all I would have had to go back down to the valley and climb up another way. Fortunately the GPS shows hiking trails by color, so I took the red one, which led straight to the next cache.
At just the right moment the path forked, which came in handy, because some little yappy dog was barking along the road. I had the feeling that it might be following me, so I kept walking across the meadow, and once I was past it and there was a chance to get back onto the red trail, I took it.
The cool shade did come in handy after all, although my T-shirt was so sweaty that I started to feel cold. On the way I passed the memorial to hiker Josef Valosek, who ended his last hike at this spot, and then I continued along the path again. Only once more did dogs scare me – there were 2 behind a fence, a wolfhound and another, slightly smaller dog, but I didn’t notice whether the fence continued on the other sides too. Luckily they paid no attention to me at all and didn’t even bark. EDIT: I’m writing this more than a week later and I don’t remember many things anymore, so from now on it won’t be as “awesome“.
I walked on, where there were only mountains. On Cantoryja I spotted a big house, which I didn’t take much interest in, but at that moment I went around it through the forest, in case there happened to be some dogs running loose. Now I write that it’s nonsense, but normally, if I didn’t know the place, you couldn’t get me there for a million. I was close to the cache anyway, so I found it; it was under a stone by the hiking trail, which led off somewhere into the hills to the right (I didn’t go there), and to the left was the tiny Chata Cantoryja hut, where probably nothing has changed in years.
Maybe not even the waitress (although she wasn’t a waitress in the true sense of the word, because she didn’t carry food and drinks around the restaurant, she just called the order into the kitchen, and in 3 minutes I had my sauerkraut soup. The selection was nothing special; outside on the grill a man was also cooking goulash soup, and his stall was covered with sheets of paper saying things like “grilled leg” or “grilled wing“, including prices, which weren’t even high, but I had already had more than enough sun, so I wanted to go into the shade for a while. Before the soup was ready, I went to buy some water. It was expensive, 1.5 l for 25 CZK, and what surprised me was that the label boasted about its low sodium and mineral content. I would say minerals are beneficial almost always, so I don’t see why anyone would extract them.
When I found that cache (my 4th today), I documented everything in detail with photos on Google+. Even here I still had Vodafone LTE, although there were already signs about the state border and a few border stones. So I went into the restaurant/hut and lost all mobile signal, not even EDGE. I ate the soup for 45 CZK (I was just a bit sorry there was no egg in it, but otherwise it was filling and nourishing) and went to ask the waitress again whether they had wifi for customers.
She said no, so I left and swapped SIM cards outside, because my Xperia was telling me that O2/T-Mobile had LTE here. After swapping the SIM cards, no change for the better. I couldn’t even make a call from either SIM card, and data was just a dream, so I went back to the hut again and asked whether they had a SIM card from a Polish operator, and got another negative answer. In the end I got through to the T-Mobile helpline, where a young woman told me that the smallest data package is 50 MB and costs 70 CZK: https://www.t-mobile.cz/roaming .
Next time I probably won’t buy it, it’s not worth the money, and for geocaching I mostly don’t need the internet anyway, I have everything in the GPS. I don’t know whether it was because I was in the mountains or because of generally poor mobile coverage in these densely populated parts of Poland, but I could barely hear her. The same when I then talked to my mom. On top of that, all the calls were terribly choppy and sounded almost creepy.
But otherwise it was absolutely beautiful and fantastic here. I walked to the last cache for quite a long time. It was “Cantoryja mala“, where a shocking sight of a dead animal awaited me, but more on that in due course. There was a man there with a woman who was taking detailed photos of the whole lowland surroundings. I thought they were geocachers too, so I asked the man whether he spoke Czech. All I got in reply was a grumpy “prosze”.
I no longer know who continued, him or me, but I realized he wasn’t a cacher, so I went off to find the cache. There were neatly arranged stones for a fireplace, walls, and so on. The cache was under the stones too, but its hint was “wood closest to the summit“, so it gave me a bit of trouble. Once I focused on the word “wood“, though, everything suddenly went much better. I tried 2 more caches, for which I descended a lot. The first was “Zrodlo na soloku” (which probably means something like “a feeding rack at a mountain hut“), but I checked the GPS in time and saw that the last several logs were DNF, so I didn’t even go there; I would have had to climb a steep hill again anyway.
Down below I also tried to find the cache “Izba regionalna“, which in Czech should probably be something like “local spring“, at least judging by what I found on the spot. But the cache wasn’t there in the meantime. I had a detailed hint; the only possibility would be that it was somewhere high up – it was supposed to be hanging. I wanted to go back via Vendryne, but I returned via Nydek; luckily I avoided dogs and other beasts.
Next time I would like to take this route again, it’s easygoing. I really don’t know how O2 covers this area with LTE, since one moment it’s there and the next it isn’t. I’d point out that just a bit from the border, in the Polish mountains, I caught LTE. Vodafone of course had LTE here too, but I still had the SIM cards swapped. I didn’t know where I would come out; I walked through forests for hours, but in the end a signpost showed the words graniczny and Nydek, so it was clear to me that that’s where I needed to go. I passed about 4 signposts, each showing the time to the next signpost at a leisurely walking pace, which is how I was walking too.
In the end I walked like this for 2 hours before I came out in Nydek. A bus was already “waiting for me” there, leaving for Bystrice in 4 minutes. Only the train didn’t connect, so I was stuck for about 45 minutes at the station in Bystrice nad Olsi. The train arrived on time and I was soon back in Ropice.