Hiking in Jelenia Góra

Today I ended up going hiking with two Polish girls I met on Friday night.  The Lower Silesian railway were running a special promotion where you could travel on specific trains from Wroclaw to a town called Jelenia Góra, just over 100km away, for free to promote some brand new trains they have just added to the line.  

We went to the Sudetes mountain range which spans the Polish, Czech and German borders, starting our hike from a village called Janowice Wielkie.  We walked for about 4 or so hours, explored some castle ruins:

hiked up some quite difficult trails (for me):

and enjoyed some pretty amazing views at the top: 

When we descended and arrived into a small village we needed to get back to the train station for 17.50, which was quite a distance away.  To my surprise the girls said we were going hitchhike ('autostopy') and hopefully someone will pick us up so we could get there on time.  Hitchhiking is something I would never ever do in Britain because it is something I perceive to be far too dangerous to be worth the risk, at least for women.  But it seems completely normal in Poland and the girls had plenty of amusing stories to tell about their hitchhiking experiences.  It was nice not to treat every stranger as a potential murderer/rapist - I think this is perhaps symptomatic of living in a more trusting society with lower levels of violent crime!

I was also amazed at the friendliness of other people we met along the way on the trails, at the train station and on the train.  Everyone makes friendly conversation with everyone else and they seem to talk to each other like they all know each other perfectly well.  We spent the whole 2 hour train journey back to Wroclaw talking to two other hikers we found at the station waiting to leave.

All in all a great day out and lovely to leave the city and see some more of the Polish countryside!

And just because I find rural Polish train stations extremely quaint: