Forgive me, dear readers, for my absence last month – the Major and your travel correspondent were trotting around the Polish lakes enjoying the natural wonders of the countryside. It was quite a feat getting metropolitan Harold to imbibe a little oxygen with his Zywiec, but once he’d realized the piwo was half the price of the Big Pierogi, and the panis just as lissom, only browner, he took to it like a duck to water.
On our first visit to Mazury we stayed in the Gołębiewski Hotel at Mikołajki (Tel: 087-429 0747, Fax: 087-429 0744, e-mail mikolajki@golebiewski.pl) This is perfect for a wet weekend when the kids are playing up. Harold did enjoy playing on the water slides, although his cigar got frightfully soggy. The place is huge, flashy and packed with busloads of old-age pensioners from Germany on package tours. In high summer you could be in Tenerife – no need to go out of the hotel at all, there is tennis, horseriding, the pool, towels on sunbeds. It has an excellent à la carte restaurant, as well as an all-inclusive buffet, and the rooms are spacious with all mod cons. The discotheque downstairs is a 1970’s dream – huge underlit dance floor, glitter ball and a continuous barrage of Abba, the Bee Gees and Sir Mick Jagger. Dancing enthusiastically around my handbag, I imagined I saw John Travolta striding towards me with his index finger pointing to the sky. Sadly, it was only Harold in his cricket whites, ordering another pint from a passing waiter. But for a brief moment, I was young again.
The combination of appalling weather, screaming kids and elderly Hanoverians slurping their zwiebelsuppe became too much for us, and we set off in the jalopy to find the Wolf’s Lair at Gierłoz. This was where the secret bunkers of Hitler and his top brass were hidden, and where the failed assassination attempt on the Fűhrer took place. It certainly was secret – so secret that we got lost three times attempting to find it. Eventually we tagged on behind a German tour bus which took us straight there. It’s a very eery place, hidden away in a dense forest, but hugely interesting. I was filled with trepidation as to whether some phantom from the Reich would find its way into Harold’s subconscious and watched him carefully for anything resembling goose-stepping or a levitating right arm. But luckily he was too engrossed crawling round the bunkers trying to work out the cabling.
Mikołajki is one of the best-known holiday resorts on the lakes, but it is also worth visiting some of the others, such as Giżycko and Ruciane-Nida. All these resorts are popular with the yachting fraternity, but there is a refreshing absence of the type of hooray Henry that one often sees in more chichi yachting centres such as Cannes or St Tropez. Most people charter a small sailboat for a week or two (at affordable prices) and pootle from one end of the lakes to the other, overnighting on the boat at lakeside yacht clubs. If you know the difference between a reef knot and a spinnaker, this is a wonderfully peaceful way to spend a week. However, I don’t think I’d want to be in such a confined space with Harold for seven nights. Not without an oxygen mask. Another way of visiting the area on the water is to hire a kayak and paddle from one lake to another, through the canals. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a kayak with room for the suitcases, so decided to stay in a hotel and tour the region by car.
On our second visit we sought somewhere quieter and more exclusive to stay, and happened upon the Hotel Nidzki at Ruciane-Nida, at the southern end of the lake district (Tel: 087-423 6401, Fax: 087-423 6403). This beautiful manorhouse hotel is situated in splendid isolation at the end of lake Nidzkie, and the lake view is quite spectacular – not another building in sight, simply lake, forest and sky. A double room costs 190 zl per night (quite a bit cheaper than the Gołębiewski), including breakfast.
I have to say the Nidzkie is the cleanest hotel I have come across anywhere, it positively gleams. Ask for a room overlooking the lake, and make sure you confirm your booking by fax – they claimed we had only booked for one night not two, and we almost had to seek alternative accommodation. All very odd, as they obviously weren’t full anyway. Perhaps they mistook us for rock stars and thought we might trash the room ! I told Harold not to wear that Ozzy Eastbourne T-shirt. On arrival, the receptionist proudly handed us a remote control for the non-existent TV, but frankly, with a view like that, who needs TV? This is the perfect spot to chill out after a frantic Jubilee (you never know who might be reading this!), sitting on the terrace with a beer, a pair of swans paddling lazily across the lake, an immobile man fishing in a rowing boat, the sun setting gently over the forest. You could feel all your wrinkles smoothing out. It was a bit like taking your girdle off. Harold’s comment, not mine.
There are some good, simple restaurants down by the lake, which is a 10 minute walk down an unlit cinder path over an unprotected railway line, unless you drive there. The local speciality is freshwater fish: “okon”, or perch, and “sandacz” or pike-perch, are the best, served decorously with oven chips. The Kormoran restaurant is situated on the lake, luckily just upwind of where the yachties tie up to empty their vessels of smelly socks and a week’s accumulated methane. On the main street in Ruciane are a number of open-air restaurants serving simple fare – grilled fish and meat, chips and salad - and packed with weekenders. We didn’t see another English-speaking person during the whole weekend and only one quiet German couple who ate their soup very nicely.
If you’re a tad nautically challenged you can do what we did and board a rustbucket of a motor launch skippered by an inebriated old sea-dog who managed to reduce the wooden jetty to splinters before chugging out into the lake. Once on lake Nidzkie, however, it was blissful. The lake opens out to a huge expanse of water dotted with tiny wooded islands. All very Swallows and Amazons. The captain dropped anchor at one point and disappeared downstairs (“below” - Harold), leaving us to bask in the sun. Over an hour later he still hadn’t appeared, and Harold was fishing in his safari jacket for his screwdriver, convinced that the engines had failed and we were about to experience Titanic in miniature. However, I had noticed that the ice-cream lady was also missing, which was scandalous, as we were being fried to a crisp with no chance of a cornetto to cool us off. We waited so long that one group of people flagged down a passing launch and hitched a lift back to terra firma. Finally the skipper reappeared, whistling, and revved up the engine. We were all a bit pink from the sun, but the ice-cream lady was positively crimson lake. Puts the phrase Going Down with the Ship into a whole new light.
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