day twelve: fun with anomalies

So our bus did eventually pull out of the field, and after winding along some excruciatingly narrow streets through a series of excruciatingly cute villages, it deposited us at a decaying railway station about half-way to Jelenia Gora. We went the rest of the way on a super-modern Silesian* train. We then went off to find our accommodation, which you can see below.

Yep, that's right: with Scott's assent/ encouragement, I booked us a trailer outside of town. It was awesome – kinda fun for its novelty value, comfier than some of the hotels I'd stayed in, and at 35 złoty (a little less than nine Euros) each, a fabulous bargain.

I said right at the start of this journey that Poland is a country full of pleasant surprises, and today held two of them. The first was the city of Jelenia Gora itself. We certainly hadn't come here because of the city's reputation for being a great tourist destination – I mean, as far as I know it doesn't have one. We came solely because it's the closest regional centre to a place called Karpacz, which I've begun to fixate on over the past four or five days. That was our real destination, about which I'll say more later.

Having said all that, we obviously couldn't leave without having a look around – and besides, we needed coffee and breakfast! So we headed into the centre, where we found a very elegant stare miasto (old town). The main square was dotted with craft stalls, cafes radiated out in every direction, and in the centre was a sound stage where people were learning to folk dance. It was the whole nine yards, basically – and, of course, the kind of 'unexpected bonus' which Poland excels at.

Looking beyond breakfast and the joys of źurek (the soup I mentioned a while ago, made on a fermented rye flour base), the plan for the day was basically this:

1. Ride 20kms to Karpacz and back.
2. Get a train to Wrocław, to fulfil our last mission for the journey.

Actually point two was Scott's mission, and I was just meant to be the cameraman/wingman. He's been making a little documentary about his/our trip, and since the book he's reading now is called Emotional Intelligence, this has sort of become the theme. Somehow, he's taken these ingredients – cycling through Poland, Emotional Intelligence, making an amateur film – and concluded that the best way for his doco to end would be with a big romantic 'screen kiss'. So the mission: find a friendly and charming Polish woman (not difficult to do), explain the project to her, ask her if she would mind kissing Scott for the big finale, and film it – preferably on the rynek in Wrocław, since it's both quite a romantic place and an ideal 'symbolic end point' for the journey.

First, though, we had a mountain to climb ... which was the other surprise for the day. See, we'd been told in Zgorzelec that the road to Karpacz was "not so flat", but that was all. I don't know whether Polish people are considered to have a talent for understatement, but if the comment about not-so-flatness was at all typical, then they really ought to be famous for this.

And so, we went there. And it was hard, let me tell you. I mean, 20kms is not such a long way to cycle when you're on relatively flat territory, but when the last 8 or 9kms are up a mountain, it becomes quite a different undertaking. On the way up, we were passed by two groups of mountain bikers, fitted out with all the latest equipment and looking like this was no effort for them at all. For us ... well, put it this way: I didn't shoot any dirty looks at the mountain bikers, or make any obscene gestures at them, but only because it would've required more energy than I had at that point!

But why make all the effort to get to Karpacz? Why had I become so fixated on this place? Well, you'll be relieved to know that I can answer that using just two words – two Polish words, in fact. The answer is "Anomalia Grawitacji".

Turns out there are certain places on Earth where the force of gravity doesn't behave in quite the same way as it does everywhere else, and odd things happen as a result. At least, that's what some people believe. Others say it's bunk, and that the strange phenomena observed in these places can be explained as optical illusions.

In the case of Karpacz, the town (a lively ski / outdoor adventure resort, and also a surprisingly picturesque place to put a natural mystery) snakes most of the way up one side of the mountain, and just above it you reach a gentle peak. Slightly beyond that, going down the other side, there's a short stretch of road where the weirdness is concentrated. Here things appear to go into reverse: water flows upwards rather than downwards, and if you stop your car on the hillside (as many drivers do), it will roll up towards the top.

The real nature of what's going on in Karpacz is disputed; you've got your 'gravitational anomalists' on one side of the argument, and your 'optical illusionists' on the other. So obviously, as soon as I heard that such a place existed in southwestern Poland – towards which I was headed at the time – there was no question at all of not going there to check it out for myself. It simply had to be done.

We reached the top of the mountain cold, wet and exhausted, and found the location of the alleged anomaly. Visually, it was definitely one of the weirder places I've been. From the 'top end' of the road (nearest to the peak), it looks unquestionably like a downhill stretch, but as you go along, you notice that the gradient seems to change. If you go to the bottom end and look back, it looks as though you've just come up a hill, whereas before you started moving it seemed that you were at the top and going down. And in the middle, it looks downhill in both directions.

Is this just an optical illusion, though? Well, the visual oddities tend to support that theory, but they don't explain the other stuff that happens on this road. Rolling uphill on a bicycle is a bizarre feeling, and watching cars do the same is quite captivating. The cars always roll towards the peak, no matter what point they start from, forcing your brain to try and reconcile previously learned facts about the world with new information that doesn't 'fit'.

(Btw, the driver of this car says "pięć złoty" – five złoty, 

indicating that he wanted me to pay for filming. 

He was just kidding.)

And there's one more thing I should mention: the physiological effects that I experienced in this place were very unusual. Every time I crossed the road at the point where the 'anomaly' seems to be centred, my head would go a bit scrambled-eggs. Either it would start spinning, or it would tell my body to go right for no apparent reason, and I'd start turning and walking up the road before 'catching' myself. There was also an occasional sensation somewhere between 'lightness' and a feeling of disconnection from the world. And lastly, if I turned my head suddenly or bent down on the spot, I would immediately feel nauseous.

Scott had none of these effects – in fact, he had great fun filming me while I experienced them, and hamming it up for the documentary.

So, then ... what the Hell is happening up there on that mountain?

"D'know", is the short answer. After subjecting the theory to various carefully designed and rigorously scientific tests (see photo), we formed no conclusions either way. But in the end, it really didn't matter. The point was to savour being in a place like that and having the chance to 'investigate' such an oddity in person. If Fox Mulder had suddenly leapt out of the woods with an oversized torch (or "flashlight", as he would call it) and an alien abduction theory, I wouldn't have been overly surprised. At least, not much more than Poland already surprises me on a regular basis =)

Our encounter with the gravitational anomaly concluded, we rushed back to Jelenia Gora and boarded a train. We're now on our way to Wrocław, to see if we can find a young lady who will kiss Scott on camera. I'll let you know how that turns out.

Wish us luck!
Anthony.


* Silesia = the south and southwestern part of Poland.