I Am A Polar Bear

Last weekend, I went to Poland. I was inspired by Laurie Alyce Adventures, who is my current favourite person on Instagram. She’s a history teacher – actually, head of department – in a school in Devon who spends her weekends adventuring, which means getting up at 4am on Saturday morning to fly to Edinburgh or Budapest, while also posting reels from her weekend on the Isle of Wight or Cornwall, which makes me feel dizzy. How she finds the time or energy for marking or planning, I just don’t know. But she makes me feel like I’m not making the most of my weekends (even though it’s the beginning of July right now and between April and June, I was away 9 out 10 weekends in a row and I’m trying to find time for swimming, kayaking and canoeing before the sun goes away), so I’ve got three weekends away booked before Christmas. It was just a really short trip, getting in at 9pm Friday (curse Ryanair for not doing Friday morning flights!) and out again by 8pm on Sunday, tiny local airport, carrying nothing but a tiny personal item. Well, that was the theory. See the reality later in the month!

I found this flight by using the “everywhere” option on Skyscanner. Girona looked appealing but the website was vague about transport options and there wasn’t really any cheap accommodation that was easy to get to. Anyway, even in September, Spain is hot and I am a polar bear. However, I went on booking.com to glance at Kraków and immediately found something amazing: The Boat Hostel&Chill, a hostel on a boat where I could have a private room with two sets of bunk beds and a bathroom of my own for £83 for the two nights. That alone is worth a Ryanair flight!

I admit, in my usual headlong way, I booked it before reading the reviews. It’s cheap! It’s a boat! What’s not to love?? It had an overall score of 8.7 (“Fabulous”) and that was good enough. Reading the reviews, the main comments were that it was really clean and had great wifi but the mattresses could be uncomfortable and the beds were too small for husbands. Well, if I had four beds in my room, I could surely find one mattress that was tolerable (and if the problem is that they’re too hard, that’s no problem for me – I’m far happier on a rock than on a marshmallow) and I’m below the apparently-accepted height limit of 175cm for fitting in the beds.

My flight was at quarter past five on Friday night and we were due in at quarter to nine. It took, as predicted, quite a while to get through passport control (“taking back control!” /s) and then I jumped on bus 300 from right outside the door which arrived a two-minute walk from my boat less than 25 minutes later. It has a 24-hour reception, which meant I could arrive at 10.30pm to an open door, an open reception and a key handed over with a smile. In the intervening months, I’d got nervous that I’d just booked the one bunk in a four-bunk room but that’s only in high season, which mid-September apparently is not.

The room was great. Four bunks, each with a fluffy blanket on it and one bed with a pillow, a couple of towels and a folded duvet cover. Now, I’m still not sure what I was actually meant to do. Should I have brought a sleeping bag? Should I have taken a duvet out of the storage lockers and put the cover on it? What I actually did was put the blanket on another bed and use the cover as a sheet. That was my one complaint with the room: it was really hot. However, it had an air conditioning unit plugged into the wall and although it made far too much noise to leave it on overnight, at least it was there and I could bring the temperature down to something reasonably tolerable before bed.

The beds themselves were fine. I didn’t notice them being either too hard or too short, although as the years go by, it gets just a bit more awkward folding yourself into a bunk. There was extra bedding in the cupboards, which function as lockers when the place is in hostel mode, although it’s one locker to two beds. For further storage, there are massive pull-out drawers under the bunks and you get a table and two chairs between the two sets of bunks. There’s also a private bathroom, with banana-scented soap – well, the fake banana smell of foam banana sweets – and not quite enough light in the shower. As a private room, it’s pretty comfortable. I’m not sure how much I’d appreciate sharing it with three strangers.

As for the boat itself… I was there three nights and for the first time, I felt so little motion that I concluded it wasn’t actually floating. I know it’s on a river, not the open sea and I wasn’t expecting to feel four-metre waves, I was expecting to feel something. But on Sunday night, I began to feel the boat moving. Now, for what it’s worth, that Sunday night was unplanned and when I rebooked that extra night, I opted for a riverside room rather than a land-side room. I don’t know if that’s what makes the difference – you’d think if a boat gently rocks, you’d feel it on the port side as well as the starboard side. Is it that I can see the water rather than the bank? No, because the curtains were closed.

In terms of noise, from the riverside room, I could hear the church bells ringing on the opposite bank. A bit muffled, certainly not disturbingly loud. But on the landside room, I could hear the beeping of the traffic lights telling pedestrians it’s time to cross, a slightly tenor beep-beep be-beep that goes on all night long. Again, not loud but loud enough to hear it. On Friday night, noise on the boat was quiet enough that I’m pretty sure I was the only guest. On Saturday night, I heard people coming in and slamming doors and talking long before bedtime and on Sunday night, the people in the room next to mine came home well after midnight, shouted for an hour and then had showers, on the other side of the paper-thin wall next to my bunk. Not appreciated at the best of times but especially when you’ve got an alarm set for 4am. But that was only one out of three nights and when I shouted rude words while banging on the wall, they went quiet.

That’s about it for facilities. There’s a bar upstairs but given it’s apparently not high season for them and that it rained all Saturday night and most of Sunday, I only saw one person sitting up there. It looks quite a good bar and with views over Wawel Hill, albeit slightly blocked out by the bridge, it’s probably not a bad place to spend an evening. It also seems to have an indoor/conservatory housing a coffee shop/cafe/lounge. I never saw anyone in there or any evidence that you were encouraged to go in. Both things that probably work better in high season and when it’s not rainy. Despite having this cafe, if you pay extra for breakfast, you get sent elsewhere to one of the two cafes it has an agreement with – one a couple of minutes’ walk, one a five-minute drive. Free parking is available but with the roundabout over the urban dual carriageway right above the boat, I can’t imagine where.

Location was great. That main road isn’t particularly noisy other than the beep of the pedestrian light from the landside room. The stop for the airport bus was right outside, as was a tiny Carrefour. Wawel Hill was right on the other side of the river and it’s walkable to the old town. The bridge was closed to traffic and I suspect that there’s a tram that runs right up to the old town when that’s not a building site, so that makes it even easier. Finally, if you want to go to the salt mines at Wieliczka, it’s less than a five minute walk to the bus stop for the direct bus. Maybe there are better places to stay if you’re arriving by train or taxi and you really want to be a five-minute walk from Stary Rynek but for getting out and about, I really liked where I was

Other than the heat, and there was air conditioning for that, my only real complaint is that staying on a boat turned out not to have the level of quirkiness and character I was expecting. “That’ll be fun and really different and make a great blog post,” thought I. Nope. It was a great base and I really appreciated the view of Wawel Hill from the riverside room but the hostel itself was otherwise pretty much like any small, boring, mostly empty hostel on a random back street. Useful, comfortable, cheap, convenient – more than good enough that I returned when I had an unscheduled extra night but zero on the quirky scale.