We were disappointed, however, to find that Pan Tadeusz (http://www.agroturystyka.pl/index.php?inc=kwatera&id=714) didn't have any animals. He keeps a few ducks in the summer, he said, but there was no sign of them in the yard and we didn't check his freezer. The farm across the road (where a 4x4 from Chapelhouse Suzuki in St Helens sat in the yard) had cows but, out for a stroll one evening in the chilly dusk, we heard one in distress. A young bullock, it was yarking fit to bust, and seemed to have a bloated stomach. The woman from the farm came out to see to it but apart from stroking its flank, didn't seem to do much else. Then, as we walked by, there was a thump and down it went. We think it must have died and was chopped up there and then as there was a lot of activity in the yard that night. In the end we didn't buy any twaróg from them, just in case whatever the cow had was transmittable...
We stayed in an apartemencik here, with views across to Smołdzino Las (the forest) and not too far from a little shop. The view from the window is obscured slightly by the fly netting, but gives an idea of how far from Farnworth this place was, and I don't just mean the mileage.
Obviously, with the forest so close, we had to go for a mushroom hunt. All along the A6 from the German border we'd seen gangs of spindly old men in threadbare coats and cloth caps, smoking like Russian factories, standing over buckets of freshly-picked mushrooms, waiting for customers. We had to have a go and, during a lull in the torrential rain, we wandered off for a couple of hours to see what there was. It felt so nice to be wandering in a 'proper' forest, as opposed to the bits of woods we have in England. I know that might sound a bit snobby, but you haven't been in a forest until you've walked for an hour, completely surrounded by trees, silent except for the wind sighing in the treetops, the occasional birdsong and the hacking cough of a bloke pushing a bike through the undergrowth, also looking for grzyby.
So this was our haul. We had them checked by Pan Tadeusz, who threw out a couple and advised us to peel one or two more. Then they were washed and chopped, with half going on some newspaper by the radiatoor to dry and the rest going in the frying pan with an onion and some garlic. Mniam mniam, picked and fried in under two hours. Can you get fresher than that?Close to Smołdzino is the seaside town of Łeba, a place I have wanted to visit for some time as I heard it is very pretty, with a winter population of around 4000 people and a summer one of ten times that. It was windy and damp the day we visited, all the shops closed or closing after the hordes of summer. It is a pretty town, one main drag lined with shops selling shells, amber, smoked fish, shells, postcards, amber and shells. At the harbour, a flotilla of boats-cum-restaurants / bars were moored, creaking gently in the gale and empty of punters. The whole town was empty in fact. I don't think we saw more than half a dozen people while we were there.
On one of the postcards, this part of the beach is crammed full of people in bikinis, but in October we had the place pretty much to ourselves apart from a couple of brave souls wind-surfing. Back in town, we asked in the post office how to get to the national park and the woman was very helpful, breaking off from reading her magazine for just long enough to direct us to the nearest car park. The lives of celebrities obviously more interesting than two damp out of season tourists.The reason for coming here was to see the shifting sand dunes that 'walk' between two and ten metres a year. It's an eerie place. For three or four miles you walk through leafy forest, passing halfway the former V2 rocket launching site, now a museum, before coming out into a wider picnic area. From there the dunes rise up above, white against a (for once) bright blue sky. The dunes are slowly encoaching on the forest and quite a few trees were dead or dying after being enveloped in sand. We plodded to the summit of the largest dune, no mean feat in the soft sand, and it was incredible. On one side: trees and the start of a lake; on the other, dunes as far as you could see and then, twinkling in the distance, the Baltic.
A truly amazing place. I think we would have explored more if the wind hadn't been so strong. Every time you tuned into it you got your face sand blasted, like an eco-scrub. The pair of us looked like we'd just come out of a sauna and we were only up there half an hour. After hiking the few miles back to the car park we headed back to Smołdzino and the warmth of our little apartment, where the smells of wet walking boots and drying mushrooms accompanied our evening.
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