Weather: 🌤️🌤️☀️🌤️⛅🌬️
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪🥪 (4 out 5, cake and crackers on the top of Prasiva, after a 700m climb)
Track: 🇸🇰🇸🇰🇸🇰🇸🇰🇸🇰 (5 out of 5, first 7 km steep but pretty track up to the ridgeline. From there it was a top 10 hiking day ever! great views and relatively easy hiking. What a joy!)
Track intensity: 😯😯😯😯(4 out of 5 tough but SO cool!)
Campsite: ⛺⛺⛺⛺ (4 out of 5, windy spot, next to hut with great food and good company, plenty of water and a bathtub with a view!)
Name of followed trail: SNP trail
After a restless hot night with little oxygen, we are happy to leave this hut behind.
We decide to boil part of the water from the hut and bring the rest to filter later.
First we go uphill and then steep down again. In the saddle we meet a Belgian couple who are hiking here with their kids. They tell us the spring down here is really slow. We decide to take our chances with the one a bit further up the next mountain. We first start our steep ascend and a little under halfway, we find a spring with running water! So happy that it works. Water is life! We take for granted that it comes out of the tap in our homes, but here it’s so precious. We plan everything around the possibility of finding water at a place to sleep by now.
From the spring we continue our tough walk up through the forest. When we reach the top of Prasiva, we’ve had the tough part of the day. We celebrate this with our lunch of cake and crackers 😁. We share our cake with Mia and David, our fellow hikers from Germany. From here, hiker heaven begins.
A beautiful trail across the ridgeline of the mountains for the rest of the day. What a joy to hike! The weather is beautiful, the views amazing and the ridgeline walk is mostly easy going. All the trouble we had last week with finding the energy to continue are forgotten with a hiking day like this 😍. Grateful that we continued, we enjoy the views and the landscape.
In this hiker heaven we meet Martin, a Polish hiker who is doing the peace walk. He walks with a wooden stick that has the route from Berlin to Jerusalem on it. He will bring the stick to Budapest. Good to meet the Peace Walk again this way. Good luck Martin!
At the end of the day, we see the hut below and walking towards it, I see a familiar looking Black tipi tent. German scouts! A group of about 10 scouts are hiking here as part of their summercamp. There is also a group of Czech scouts. It’s a great but with a friendly warden and good food. The company of scouts and hikers is a good combination for a welcoming International atmosphere. The German scouts have a guitar with them and they sing songs on the terrace. unfortunately it is cold and windy, so before we’re done with pitching, bathing and eating, they finished their singing. I enjoyed listening never the less 🙂.
We secure our tent to the ground with guy lines because it’s quite windy. After that it’s time for a bath. Literally this time, because there is a bathtub that fills itself with spring water. Icy cold but really good🥶!
Dinner in the hut is also good, a nice plate of pasta and sweet dumplings for dessert.
After dinner, we have a short chat with the German scouts and go to bed in our windy tent.