"Wear Proper Shoes" in the Tatra Mountains (also, some useful traveltips)

After spending a lot of time in cities (Budapest and Vienna... I will eventually get around to writing about Vienna) I was craving something breathtakingly outdoorsy. Some friends had recommended the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia, so without further ado (other) friends and I planned a spontaneous trip up north to Poprad, the so-called "gateway" of the Tatras and a (slightly dinky) town in Northern Slovakia.

What you will hopefully be seeing if you follow the instructions below...

Figuring out how to get there was no easy feat. There aren't great directions online about how to get from Budapest to Poprad and then from Poprad to the actual mountains-- thank you obscure TripAdvisor forums-- so to save any future Budapestians some of the stress I (as an intensive planner) had, I'm going to remedy this Internet gap immediately:

HOW TO GET TO POPRAD/ TATRA MOUNTAINS FROM BUDAPEST:

1. Buy tickets from Keleti Palyaudvar in person to Kosice (big destination in Slovakia) at the international ticket desk. It should cost about 20 euros round trip, and there's a train that runs daily at 5:55 am and another at 5:55 pm (check the MAV website just to be sure).


2. Don't worry about booking trains to Poprad in advance. It's very easy to buy these at the Kosice train station, and all you have to do is check the timetable in advance to see how much of a rush you have to be in to buy the tickets. You want to go from Kosice to Poprad-Tatry, and there are lots of trains that go fairly regularly.


3. Once in Poprad, we were able to walk everywhere (including our absolutely amazing and immaculate Airbnb).


4. When you decide you want to go to the mountains, everything you need is in Poprad station. Take advantage of the excellent information desk and get at least two brochures: the mountain railway timetable brochure and the trail map brochure (this one is quite commercial and not a comprehensive trail map but it'll be enough for you to get an idea of where the trails go). On the information lady's recommendation for winter hikes, we paid 1.50 euros each way to get to Stary Smokovec and began both our hikes there. There were also day passes for 4 euros and options for longer passes as well.

Since by the time we were situated on Saturday it was already 3 pm, we opted for a quick hike beginning in Hrebienok (it was easy to walk there from Stary Smokovec) and looping to Bilikova chata and back. The mountains are breathtaking in the sunset and we definitely got some Mac-desktop worthy shots. I'm pretty sure I shot the exact same photo with three different kinds of lighting.

I might be talking to an imaginary friend here...

Slightly blurry (adds character!) photo of the gang!

@Apple if you're looking for new backgrounds...

The next day, we hopped on the 7:30 am train and planned to do a long hike to Teryho chata, which the information lady told me we needed "proper shoes" for. She might have been looking at my Nikes when she said that. We definitely weren't in any sort of proper gear (I was wearing as "layers" every piece of running clothing I own and three of our party were sporting jeans).

We began the long hike optimistically, though, buoyed by Carpathian landscapes and absolutely quiet trails (save some early-morning cross-country skiers, who are really brave about skiing right next to those intense snowy drop-offs). The paths were a little slippery, but nothing we couldn't handle ("proper shoes" HA!).

Wow! She's a stunner.

After a certain point, though, the wind picked up and the mist rolled in, and we were walking in a ridge between two peaks and staring up at the steel-grey rocks, wondering when it got so steep. The scant few hikers in front of us stopped and reached into their bags to strap on their spikes. We, of course, started bear-crawling our way up the some 70-80 degree incline. So... this is what info lady had meant by "proper shoes"!

While hiking up, this was the view from behind...

...and to the front...

...and what we had to climb up!

I'm pretty sure the Europeans thought that we were insane. Multiple people gave our tennis shoes and jeans pointed looks. One even told us straight up, "even you Americans know how to play with fire in the middle of all this ice and snow" (not exactly like that, but almost).

Unluckily (or luckily?) for us, at a certain point it was too steep for us to continue and we kind of slid our way back down the ice and snow to more level mountain.

The hike down was, unexpectedly, even more fun than the way up. Tempted by the enormous, marshmallow-like snowdrifts, we may or may not have gone off-trail a number of times. And when my entire leg fell into a dune of snow, we peered into the resulting hole that went down and down and realized that there was so much snow that in fact it was covering entire trees...

That's a tree.

And this is what it took for us to realize that there are buried trees here. The hole just kept going into the abyss...

Also important to mention: all along the more travelled paths we saw that people had left their marks on the mountain by writing their names (or other things) on the sturdy snow. Well, we left our marks, too. Near the end of the hike, we decided that a few iced-over hills of snow were essentially natural slides, and the guys who were wearing jeans left faint blue stripes on the slide down-- our mark on the Tatra Mountains!

At the bottom of the mountain, we decided to cough up the 6 euros to go sledding down the 1-2 km sled track from Hrebienok to Stary Smokovec with these old fashioned toboggans that literally bounced on little hills of snow on the way down. Avoiding all the innocent hikers while zooming down a mile-long slope-- exciting stuff!

We ended the day on a long, crowded train to Kosice (apparently, they overbooked the train so that every single seat was already reserved) before finally transferring to a blessedly empty train back to Budapest.

FYI the prettiest thing in Kosice that we saw was this cathedral.

Upon returning to Budapest, I realized that seeing the words "Keleti Palyaudvar" rings especially like home. Kind of funny how quickly that happens!