Lake it till you make it

Yesterday’s hike through the mountains of Vysoké Tatry was both incredibly incredible and incredibly tiring, so today I took things a bit easier – by drinking a load of beers and walking around a lake. Don’t worry, it was still really pretty.

I woke up to a blizzard outside my window, and I immediately thought I’d be snowed in and have to end up eating my own leg or risk starving to death. Gimme a break, I’m Australian, I pretty much assume the apocalypse is upon us if the temperature drops below 15 degrees. When I realised I wasn’t going to freeze to death, I caught the train from my base in Stary Smokovec (or Snowy Starcevic, as I like to call it) to the nearby village of Štrbské pleso, which is about 45 minutes away on a very scenic train that moves as quickly as Clive Palmer in the Gold Coast Marathon.

Once I arrived in Pleso, I was as hungry as a fat girl who forgot her lunch, so I decided to spend the next hour or two in a traditional Slovak restaurant under the train station, drinking beers and eating good food. It was just after midday, but everyone was drinking beer – men, women, children… I think I even saw a dog with a pint glass. Oh, and I can recommend the goulash, it’s great!

With a belly full of meat and booze, I weedled my way off to explore the nearby lake, which turned out to be extraordinarily beautiful. The whole world was heavy with snow, with the lake a shimmering silver dollar among an endless carpet of white. Alright, I don’t need to fill this with wanky writing to let you know it was fucking awesome, and a sight I will remember for the rest of my life.

I walked around the lake surrounded by a silence I’ve known before. There was nothing but the soft patter of snow falling and my own footsteps, as all colour was stripped from life and the temperature dropped and dropped and dropped. I lost feeling in my fingers, but nothing could stop me from grinning like a druggo on dole day as I struggled to take in all the wonderful things to see.

The walk around the lake takes maybe 30 minutes if you’re not stopping too much, but with views like these, why rush? I took well over an hour, stopping to see little frozen miracles everywhere. And I managed to do it all with my camera in one hand and a beer in the other. It’s hard work walking around Štrbské pleso, and I had to keep my fluids up.

After drinking so many beers, I inevitably felt the need to create some yellow snow, so stopped by the side of the track to have a slash. As I was wiping the icicles from my doodle, I was shocked to realise that a young woman was jogging past. I quickly returned my penis to my pants and hoped she hadn’t seen anything, but she had!
“I hope for your sake that’s just because of the snow,” she said in perfect English, before jogging off. Bloody hell, can’t I even piss in public without some comedian having a go at me?

With the temperature below freezing and my fingers close to turning blue and falling off, I raced back to the station and made took the train back to home base where I smashed more beers and, for reasons that make sense to only me, crab danced around Vysoke Tatry while the locals cheered wildly for my exotic moves.

Umm, oh yeah, and I had sex with some sort of reindeer thing that was hanging out in the main street. I’m sorry.