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| Bratislava Castle |
Having been left to my own
devices for 4 days whilst Hannah visited friends in Munich I planned to visit
two more famous capital cities situated along the banks of the Danube,
Bratislava and Vienna. As I only had 2
days in each, time was of a premium and the two hour walk in the driving rain
when I arrived in Bratislava was not part of the master plan. Refusing to take another taxi has no doubt
helped my wallet and anger management issues but it has led to longer walks
than planned from bus and train stations to our accommodation.
However, I am well known for my aversion to modern technology and posess an
ability to draw scrawled maps (rather than use GPS and googlemaps) that somehow lead to our destination is a forte. Up until Bratislava, navigating
our way around cities had thus far proved to be successful. In defence of my crudely drawn map my adventure
to my room in Bratislava was not helped by the accommodation being on a series of
streets in a re-developed Soviet housing complex that contained four roads all
with the same name. This was further exasperated
by my accommodation having no advertising and a phone number that when rang
went straight to an automated system that my fluent grasp of the Slovakian
language could not translate. By this
stage my crudely drawn paper map on the back of a bus ticket had disintegrated
in the deluge and coupled with carrying 30 kg for 2 hours I was beginning to
have a sense of humour failure. Getting
increasingly wet I began desperately asking anybody else stupid enough to be
out in the monsoon for directions. Eventually
a women was able to walk me 2 metres away from where I had started my quest in
the housing estate nearly an hour before to an unmarked building and a concealed intercom system to my accommodation. Brilliant.
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| The view from Devin Castle |
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The following day I was rewarded
with a beautiful winter’s day to explore and so I headed 10 kilometres out of
Bratislava to Devin Castle. Although the
ruins themselves do not take long to explore they are situated a few hundred
metres above the merging Danube and Morava rivers. From the highest buttress of the castle you
can look out across the forests towards Austria and I spent the rest of the
morning with my headphones in enjoying life with a walk along the blue
Danube. Bratislava is a relatively small
capital by European standards and sits under the watchful gaze of the restored
castle that dominates the surrounding area from its lofty position. It offers
an impressive panoramic of Bratislava and the beautiful countryside that surrounds
it although having visited enough museums recently I walked back down the hill
into the old town without going inside. The city’s Stary Mesto (old town) has been beautifully
restored after the Soviets built a motorway through the middle of it. St Martins Cathedral which crowned 11 Austro –
Hungarian monarchs is right next to the motorway but it was easy to imagine the
coronations of the Hapsburg dynasty despite the Soviet redevelopment of the area. The
old town itself is quite small although its maze of streets and road works seemed to thwart my every turn which meant I spent a lot of
time walking in circles which had seemed to define my time in Bratislava. By late afternoon I felt I had wandered enough and I
headed back to my accommodation surprisingly without incident to watch the football guilt free with Hannah still in Munich and not being forced to endure an afternoon of me shouting at a TV.
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| One of the numerous strange statues around Brastislava |
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