Opening the Eastern Gate
Opening the Eastern Gate
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
“DID YOU SEE MANY MOTORCYCLES IN Poland?” a friend of mine asked.
“No,” I said. “Too cold. It’s winter there now. But I saw lots of bike dealerships in Krakow and Warsaw. I’d like to go back in the summer.”
And indeed I would.
As you might have guessed, I just returned from Poland. It was a whirlwind six-day trip for travel writers, sponsored by LOT, the official Polish airline, in an effort to drum up more tourism.
Poland, you say?
Yes.
Most people, when they plan any kind of European travel, automatically think of flying into Paris or Rome and don’t even consider a central European city. LOT and the Polish tourist industry, of course, would like to change that.
Their hope, I believe, was that we might realize it’s just as easy to fly into the beautiful old medieval city of Krakow as it is to fly into any other European hub of tourism.
And-I must admit-they are right. A direct 10-hour Boeing 767 evening flight out of Chicago had us in Krakow the next morning. No visa needed-only a passport-and there we were, standing in the land of Chopin and Copernicus. Not to mention your more inflammable brands of vodka.
I had no idea what to expect of modem Poland. I guess I pictured it as a somewhat gray zone full of grim Soviet worker housing built on the plains of central Europe. But of course, I was wrong.
Krakow is a lovely, unspoiled architectural wonder (unbombed in WWII) of almost Viennese elegance, set in the picturesque foothills of the nearby Tatra Mountains. Furthermore, when the Soviets finally pulled out 10 years ago and freedom returned, the Poles dropped Communism and its attendant mediocrities like a hot brick, rebuilding their infrastructure and entering the service economy with unconcealed pleasure.
As a result, everything’s up-to-date in Krakow. Hotels and restaurants are superb, and you could just as easily be in Munich or Milan as behind the old Iron Curtain. Even the traffic is modern: Audis, Mercedes, VWs, Peugeots, Fiats and lots of new Korean cars.
Never has a nation undone so many bad ideas and returned to normal life so quickly. We have finally met the Poles on equal footing, and they are us.
Except they are not exactly us, and that is their charm. They have their own Slavic traditions in food and music and hospitality, and while the countryside may look kind of like the Alpine foothills of southern Germany, it is not exactly like southern Germany. And the great cathedrals and museums, externally similar to others in Europe, have a slightly Byzantine touch of mysticism to them, an exotic blend of East and West. The Poles themselves exude a great sense of dignity and soul, mixed with a disarming, ironic sense of humor. Poland is its own special place.
All of which is a long way of saying I would like to go back. Once, as Jacqueline Susann famously said, is not enough. We took a tour bus up into the mountains on beautiful curved roads to the ski resort of Zakopane-which was chosen as alternate for the upcoming Winter Olympic games-took a bus back to Krakow and then went by train to Warsaw, from which we flew home.
It was a great way to sample the country, but its main effect was to make me wish, as usual, for three things: 1) Summer; 2) several weeks of vacation; and 3) a motorcycle.
Like most people reading this magazine (I suspect), I am not a tour bus kind of guy. I tend to imagine every landscape, every mountain range and curving road as it might be viewed through protective eyewear rather than a window.
Restaurants, as we well know, are best enjoyed as a reward for a hard day
of riding, and science has now proven that a glass of Zywiec beer or a shot of Starka vodka in an inviting old bar are more comfortably sampled in a leather jacket than in wrinkle-free leisurewear.
. Wherever you go by more “civilized” means, you always want to come back on a motorcycle. It somehow makes the place more real, snaps it into focus. The difference between a tour bus and a motorcycle is the difference between a flight simulator and flying.
But there is also another appeal to returning to Poland (and the rest of the former Eastern Bloc) on a motorcycle, and it has nothing to do with the shortcomings of a tour bus. It’s the appeal of going somewhere new, in every sense of the word.
If you look at the globe, it sometimes seems the world available to us for unrestricted travel gets smaller and smaller. Ethnic violence, tribal warfare, chaos and religious hatred have wiped many once-fascinating foreign lands off the radar screen of all but the most adventurous traveler. These lands themselves may remain beautiful, but the citizens have poisoned their own wells.
It’s a huge relief, then, to suddenly find a whole new part of the globe has unpoisoned itself, so to speak.
Think of it: After all these years, millions of people can finally live without secret police, fear, religious persecution, censorship and stultifying economic lunacy.
I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. I grew up with the Cold War, and hardly anyone in my generation thought it would ever end. It was as permanent a part of life as the inexplicable persistence of Evil itself.
We never saw ourselves touring (much less freely motorcycling) behind the former Iron Curtain, except, perhaps, as a sort of somber visit to a strange and alien place, as one might tour the old Roman catacombs with a lighted torch. You could go there-and people did-but there was a cold and forbidding sadness to it.
That’s over now. And I’d like to see it all-Budapest, Prague, unified Berlin, Vilnius... I’ve seen the Swiss Alps; maybe it’s time to ride through the Transylvanian Alps and the Carpathian Mountains.
Kind of exciting. It’s almost as if some latter-day Columbus had re-crossed the ocean for us and discovered a whole new unexplored continent. With roads. E3
