POLAND: MALBORK CASTLE AND WESTERPLATTE

June 20, 2019 

We had gotten to our Gdansk hotel in the wee hours of the morning, but we had plans already in place for our first day in Poland, so we got up after about four hours of sleep, grabbed a piece of toast from the breakfast buffet, and met our guide in the lobby.  Her name was Barbara (pronounced bar-BAR-uh), but she told us to call her Basha.  We hopped in her car and drove about 40 miles to Malbork Castle, where another guide specific to the castle was waiting for us.

Thank you, Google Maps

Located 20 miles from the Baltic Sea on the Nogat River, Malbork Castle was one of about twenty castle fortresses built by the Teutonic Knights in Northern Prussia:

Malbork Castle is one of those places that I can't believe I had never heard of or seen pictures of. 

•It is the largest castle in the world if measured by land area. 

•It is constructed of 10 million bricks. 

•It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

•It was built by the Teutonic Knights (German-Catholic knights--think Crusades), with the first phase begun in the 13th century. 

•It was the spiritual, military, and administrative center of the Teutonic Kingdom of Prussia. 

•It is the most heavily fortified castle of the Middle Ages. 

•About 500 monks lived here at any given time. 

•It was restored three times: in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, and after World War II.

Why was it restored twice in the 20th century? Because THIS is what it looked like at the end of World War II:

WELCOME TO POLAND: INTRODUCTION

June 20, 2019

Poland has been at the top of my travel list for more than a decade. Our son served an LDS mission there in 2004-2006. During and since that time I read book after book about Poland, some of which I will include in future posts. I was moved by the stories of modern Poles that our son shared with us, and I was captivated by the resilience and courage I read about.

On the other hand, my mother was not so big on Poland. She was German, and the Germans look down their noses at the Poles. She told me they used to have a saying in Germany, "If your car is missing, look for it in Poland," implying that all car thieves are Poles. However, she too was moved by our son's letters and stories from his mission, and I think her heart was softened somewhat during those two years. I wish she were still alive and that I could share some of our experiences with her now.

As it turns out, Poland is now one of my most favorite tourist destinations in the world. I would return in a heartbeat. There is so much history, anguish, and triumph there. Situated between two super powers, Germany on the west and Russia on the east, Poland has been subject to a constant game of tug-of-war, and yet the Poles have managed to retain a national identify separate from either country. 

World War II was especially hard on Poland, partly because of its location, partly because its large Jewish population was annihilated by the Nazis, and partly because no one came to its aid. Poland, of course, was the first country invaded by Hitler in September 1939 (more on that in later posts).

Of all the countries that fought in World War II, Poland lost the highest percentage of its population--almost 20%. Six million Poles died, half of whom were Jews. Less than 10% of the total fatalities were caused by combat. Rather, people died in concentration camps, at the hands of brutal invaders, and of starvation and disease. It took almost 30 years after the war for Poland to recover the population it had at the beginning of the war.

Graph from here

DENMARK: PASSING THROUGH COPENHAGEN

June 18, 2019

As noted earlier, there are only two ways to fly into or out of Greenland: via Iceland (Reykjavik) or Denmark (Copenhagen). As we had entered via Iceland, we decided to exit via Denmark. We had a direct, uneventful 4 1/2 hour flight that included a 4-hour time change:

When we arrived, everyone's bags came out but ours. We waited and waited, and finally sent the rest of the group to catch the shuttle to the hotel. Just as we started to head towards the missing baggage reporting station, our luggage rolled down the ramp. We grabbed our suitcases and were able to catch up with the group.

When we got to our hotel, the Marriott Bella Sky, we learned that the regular rooms were all gone, so they gave us upgraded rooms. We had a little more space, including a seating area, but everything still had very minimalist, monochromatic Danish design:

On our way to the hotel I got an IG message from a good friend from my home city who was also traveling. She said they were in the same hotel we were in.  What are the chances of that? We were 5,600 miles from home in a city with hundreds of hotels and yet found ourselves in the same city in the same hotel on the same night. It was a truly cosmic experience. We met up later in the hotel lobby for a photo:

After a good night's sleep, the ten of us walked to the metro station just a few blocks from our hotel. We got a good look at the architecture of the Marriott Bella Sky for the first time. It is pretty funky:

Somehow, someone in our group figured out how to buy ten metro tickets using only Danish instructions, and then someone figured out how to get to our stop. With just a single day in Copenhagen, we had decided to use a local tour guide to maximize our experience. We met up with her at a downtown bakery next to this American icon. (Why aren't our 7-Elevens in such gorgeous buildings?)

Our guide was a 51-year-old Israeli woman who had been living in Denmark for eleven years and had been guiding for two. She knew the city well and was full of good information, but she struggled a bit with the large size of our group and was often hard to hear.

GREENLAND: A TRIP ON THE ISLAND'S LONGEST ROAD AND A STROLL ON THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET

June 17, 2019

It had been a long day, starting with walking to the Ilulissat Icefjord, followed by eating lunch at Restaurant Mamartuk, catching a flight to Kangerlussuaq, and taking a bus to eat at Roklubben Restaurant. 

But Greenland is the land of the midnight sun, at least in June, and that means our day was far from over. We had one more adventure ahead, a trip down Greenland's longest road for an stroll on the Arctic ice sheet. 

We were picked up around 7:30 PM from Roklubben Restaurant by a long-haired, raspy-voiced Dane named Lars. The four-wheel drive vehicle we were expecting was a cargo truck front connected to a gigantic box with windows. The whole thing was perched so high off the ground that we had to use a ladder to get in and out.  It looked like it was part cattle car, part boxcar, and part prison transport vehicle.The only way to communicate between our "compartment" and the cab was with a walkie-talkie, and we learned later on that it was an unreliable form of communication. 

We set out on an 20-mile-long bumpy dirt and gravel road built by Volkswagen in the late 1990s to connect Kangerlussuaq with the inland edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which covers 81% of the island. Remember that no two towns or settlements in the country are connected by a road, and there are only about 100 miles of roads in the whole country, most of them unpaved. (A new airport is cheaper to build than a new road between settlements!) Volkswagen wanted a way to test their vehicles in extreme conditions, including driving on the ice sheet itself, so they decided to build their own road, the longest road in Greenland.

The road to the ice sheet was completed in 2001, but the road on the ice sheet was never built, and the whole project was abandoned in 2006. The government maintains the road--somewhat--and it is used for adventurous tourist trips inland, for hunting trips, and as an economical route to the ice sheet for environmental scientists. 

Luckily, I had enough Dramamine for myself and a few others in the vehicle, which looks quite nice inside, but no padding would be adequate for the bouncing and shifting and swaying. It was as good as any Disneyland ride except it didn't do any loop-de-loops. 

For some reason, I kept thinking of the old Disney movie The Gnome Mobile. 

The drive to the ice sheet took about an hour-and-a-half and included a couple of stops along the way. Our first stop was at the site of a US military plane crash that occurred in 1968. Three of eight planes flying in formation crashed after their pilots bailed out--all safely--during severe weather. This is what is left of one of the planes:

GREENLAND: KANGERLUSSUAQ

 June 17, 2019

We stayed less than 24 hours in Kangerlussuaq, arriving in late afternoon on a Monday and flying out mid-morning on a Tuesday. There isn't a ton of tourist activity drawing people to Kangerlussuaq, but there are only two ways to get out of Ilulissat: fly back to Iceland or fly to Kangerlussuaq, and then fly from there to Copenhagen. Since we had flown in from Iceland, we chose to fly out via Kangerlussuaq.

This may be the only airport in the world with a taxidermied musk ox in the lobby:

I had to look up "Tikilluarit." It's Greenlandic for "Welcome."  Duh.

GREENLAND: ILULISSAT TO KANGERLUSSUAQ

June 17, 2019

The last part of our Greenland adventure was in the tiny, tiny, tiny town of Kangerlussuaq, population 540.

As you can kind of see on the map below, Kangerlussauq is at the end of a very deep fjord. The fjord is named . . . you guessed it, Kangerlussauq Fjord. In fact, the word "Kangerlussuaq" means "big fjord" in Icelandic.

Ilulissat and Kangerlussuaq are only about 150 miles apart, but unless you have a dog sled, pretty much the only way to get to Kangerlussauq is by plane. There is no road that connects it to any other town. (There are no roads connecting ANY towns in Greenland. All roads are internal to the towns themselves.)

Which may account for the fact that Kangerlussuaq, with its 500+ inhabitants, is the site of Greenland's largest commercial airport. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me either.  

More about Kangerlussuaq later. First I have to tell the story of how we got there. 

We were transported from our hotel to the airport, which was just a few minutes away. Although we didn't realize it at the time, both Bob and Laura, another member of our group, had left things behind. Laura realized her purse was missing as soon as we got to the airport. She figured out that she had left it in the luggage storage room. She sent our taxi driver back to retrieve it, but he never re-materialized and we think he never actually went back to the hotel. (I can't remember how Laura got on the plane. She must have had some type of ID, or maybe they just trusted her.)

Later, while sitting in a restaurant in Kangerlussuaq, Bob realized that his camera was missing. He called Mamartuk Restaurant first, then the hotel. It turned out that he had set it down on the front desk counter while he paid for something. The hotel promised to send Bob's camera with Laura's the purse.

The plane looks fairly big, but it was a propeller plane with just 36 seats.

GREENLAND, ILULISSAT: OUR FINAL FAREWELL TO ILULISSAT

June 17, 2019

On our last morning in Ilulissat, the ten of us took three cabs to the head of a trail, where we met up with Lisa, our Danish guide from the first day, who took us on an eco-tour of the area:

She explained to us that under the thin green layer we could see, most of ground was perpetually frozen, or permafrost.

In the scanty topsoil layer, mosses, flowers, and other plants flourished: