Day #5 – The Malá Fatra – A foggy day in Terchová
Terchová
Streda (Wednesday), 23. augusta 2017-- (excerpts from
my journal The Pressburg Diaries,
vol. V and a separate travel diary)
It’s foggy. Again. But at least if it doesn’t rain, we should be OK. I think we’re going to tackle Malý Rozsutec. We’ll see how it goes…
I’m taking with me a solid metal walking stick. At least it’s telescopic and it has a strap for my wrist. The phone reception up here in the mountains isn’t great, but who really cares? I came here to get disconnected from civilization. I’m staying off Facebook except to post a few pictures. Other than that, I’m disconnected. It baffles me how many hikers I’ve seen who are connected to their phones and the outside world. You spend all week in the city in an office with people and then you bitch and moan about it. Finally you get a week off to go to some of the finest nature you could ask for and … you need a cell phone to stay connected with people?? Never mind…
The fog fairy foiled our plans for hiking Malý Rozsutec, so instead we took the bus to Terchová to see what that town and the surrounding area had to offer. We started at the rather German-looking, late 19th-century church near the center. From the side of it, we picked up the green hiking trail and headed up into the fog-coated hills. Mist shrouded everything like the Virgin Mary. When we looked across the valley, all we could see was the top of the church’s steeple poking through the fog.
Oh, dear! A deer!
We began the walk up across dewy meadows and orchards, past a timid deer, to Vyšní Berešovci and finally to Kýčera, then to Poľany until bending to the right, until, high up above Terchová, we started the descent back down. This, for me, was pure nature. In the almost three hours that we traipsed through soggy meadows and orchards, we encountered just one human being. One. Even the settlement of Kýčera seemed eerily abandoned. One house, #829, had caught fire and burned. Its charred remains stood lonely, vulnerable, and open to the power of nature. Other old traditional cottages just seemed deserted, as if the inhabitants had suddenly dropped whatever they were doing and fled a Martian invasion. The settlement was mysteriously empty. It was creepy. It was so unbelievably still that I was afraid to breathe or let the gravel crunch under my hiking boots. There were, however, signs of life emanating from inside one house; voices or a TV, and the aroma of something oniony cooking. A car with Bratislava number plates sat in the driveway. There had to be people coming to these parts regularly because all the gardens and yards surrounding these cottages were neatly trimmed and well-kept. We even saw a deer at one point, shy and timid. We froze and quietly, cautiously snapped a few pictures of it. Zuza and I had been chatting back and forth the whole way up, but now I just wanted for us to shut the hell up and enjoy the silence and otherwise the gentle tinkling of sheeps’ bells way down in the fog shrouded valley.
House #829 in Kýčera, burned
A house in Vyšní Berešovci. Is anybody home?
Passing through Vyšní Berešovci, we continued through the loneliness of Kýčera and its few houses (some with outdoor toilets) until we came to Poľany. Here, five lipa (linden) trees were planted in a circle around a simple wooden cross—a monument or spiritual protector, apparently, for the settlements nearby. And it was here that we passed the last of three information boards, which gave some of the local history of the area. It was here that we passed the one lone human, another fellow hiker, we encountered on the entire walk.
The linden (lipa) trees
The trail from now on was mostly grass or muddy road. Our hiking shoes quickly gathered chunks of rich, chocolaty, sticky mud. From time to time I would try to wipe my soles clean on wet grass but to little avail. We passed a few more houses where, to our delight, a playful tortoiseshell kitten came out of the shrubs to greet us. She let Zuza pick her up and pet her, and later, when Zuza put her back down, she decided to follow us half a kilometer or so down the road. Honestly, it was sorely tempting to just scoop her up and take her home with us. She wouldn't leave us and kept on following us! Eventually, a car rumbled by and startled the kitten into the bushes.
The village kitten who wouldn't leave us
Before long, we reached the bottom of the hike and the main road back to Terchová. We were now 3.5 kilometers from the center. It was chilly, and every 20 to 30 minutes we had to stop to relieve ourselves somewhere. We’d both left our mark over quite a bit of territory! I guess the chill has an effect on the kidneys. We also realized we were getting hungry, and we decided that lunch at the Vŕšky Pivovar (brewery) was in order. The unfiltered beer at Koliba pod Rozsuctom was so good that we decided to track down the brewery and try it from the source. Both of us quickly we needed to relieve ourselves again, and being along the main road, there were no places to do so. Being about 3 kilometers from Terchová proper, we decided to take a bus, as that would obviously be faster than walking.
Except that we waited and waited for the bus.
At last a bus arrived and Zuza asked the driver which stop was the closest to the brewery. Now we were starting to feel desperate. The driver was very kind and jovial. Mountain folk are like that, unlike the assholes who sometimes pilot the buses in Bratislava. He seemed pleased that we wanted to go to the brewery and recommended the dark beer there. I think we both would have loved to have chatted more with this fellow, but our bladders were threatening us to get a move on. However, he was nice enough to drop us off right across the street from the brewery, even though it wasn’t a designated bus stop. Unfortunately, we also had quite a steep (and thankfully short!) hike up to the pub because it was located on a hill next to a rather posh hotel. The whole area looked a bit out of place in the otherwise rustic “common folk” appearance of Terchová. There was a kind of obstacle course-amusement park in front, and when we finally arrived, a huge group of Slovak hikers—some kind of corporate team building event—was mulling about. The disappointing thing was that the restaurant side of the establishment was closed, thanks to the team building event, and only the pub was open to the public. So we both ordered beers, which was, of course, fabulous. (Zuza likes dark beer and so tried the dark beer per the bus driver’s recommendation.) But the lack of the restaurant and the somewhat posh atmosphere put us both off. We needed to eat and cursed ourselves for not bringing the sandwiches the pension staff had kindly made for us. We’d left them behind at the pension because we weren’t going to Malý Rozsutec after all, and we didn’t anticipate hiking as long as we did today.
We stayed for just one beer each and then decided to head down into town to find a restaurant where we could have some bona fide lunch. We ended up at a place called Haluškáreň, a local joint specializing in pretty much anything made with halušky, the national food which are sort of potato flour, gnocchi-like dumplings. Zuza ended up ordering lamb with halušky, while I went with chili con carne with halušky. I suppose it was more Tex-Mex than Slovak, but it was super delicious nonetheless. The restaurant staff gave all the patrons a shot of borovička (a strong, fiery liquor made from juniper berries) as a treat.
Lunch, at last!
After lunch, Zuza went to the local Co-op for snacks while I went souvenir hunting. The same jolly bus driver who’d taken us to the pub picked us up in the center and drove us back to our pension in Štefanová. A few hours later after resting and showering, we went down for a simple dinner and then came back up to the room to watch some gruesome episodes of an old 1980s Czechoslovak hospital serial called “Sanitka”. I was tired, a little sore, but I felt transformed by the day of peaceful walking.