I’ve been reading the magazine Wanderlust for a few years now. It’s a great magazine with interesting stories about places that are often well off the beaten path — my kind of travelling! A couple of months ago I took the unusual step of writing a letter. It came in two parts, a comment about my time in Cuba (in response to someone who said he couldn’t find any night-life) and a second, longer piece about my time in Gdansk, Poland (as a counter-point to their piece on long-weekends for less than ?100).

Of course they published the Cuba story but edited out the rest. I thought the Polish story was the best part so I reprint it here:

The second is a short story from a couple of years ago when I went to Gdansk. Kind of. The friend I was visiting was working in Warsaw and one of her colleagues told her that if we were visiting Gdansk we had to see Sopot which was just a little bit further up the coast. Sopot was their home town and, reportedly, well worth a visit.

Gdansk was lovely, we wandered around, my friend dragging me to many amber jewellery stores and, long story short, we were quite late leaving and heading up the coast. We were expecting a lot and were disappointed. I didn’t miss a word out there. It was the Polish version of Ayia Napa with late-teens running around in an advanced state of inebriation. We weren’t impressed and time was getting on so we didn’t have very much choice other than to stay the night. Unfortunately pretty much everywhere was fully booked.

In the end we got the last room in the worst hotel I’ve stay in for quite some time. It was some distance from town (we were also hungry by this time) and there was a big party going on in a field next door. An all nighter it turned out. Come 6am, tired and miserable, we decide to leave. If breakfast was anything like the shower, we wouldn’t have eaten anything anyway!

Still, it would take more than that to stop me travelling to new places…