Slovakia

I'm reaching the tail end of my trip and seem to be spending more time in each place. Budapest - 5 days. Slovakia - 4. For a while there I decided to settle down. Not in the marriage sense of the word but in the backpacking sense, meaning you stay in one place for more than a week. I was offered a job for a few days at a hostel in Zdair, on the border of Slovakia and Poland. A quick look at these photos and you can understand why staying here seemed like a very good idea.
It’s a great place for hiking and covering my Dunlop volleys in mud and a great place for making stew and seeing your breath in the air.

Lots of people come here in the summer and lots in the winter but only a select few in the in-between-periods so it’s nice and relaxed. There’s a dog called Wally who sleeps on my bed at night but won’t talk to me during the day which makes me feel a bit second rate. There’s also a great bunch of people who run it - Jim, an English guy who set the hostel up with a mate and Lisa and Chris, an Aussie couple working here for the winter.

In the end there was another Aussie guy here, Pat who wanted to stay in the area for much longer so it made more sense to pass the job to him. So tomorrow I continue onto Krakow and I'll never have the experience of making hundreds of beds and cleaning up after other filthy backpackers. Shame.