Day 64 Slovakia Stary Smokvec

Our accommodation was only 500m to the furnicular that took us to Hrebienok this morning. We bought a return ticket thinking we'll do a fair bit of hiking and would need the assistance of the furnicular to take us down the mountain.

We chose a 11 km hike from Hrebienok to the Zamkovskeho chalet loop. The hike to the chalet was graded incline the whole way but we took our time and enjoyed the scenery. After a hearty lunch, we decided to extend the hike by 3km to find the Alpine Lake Skalnate pleso. Ruby found that she was getting light headed maybe because of the altitude and constant climb on difficult lumpy rock trails.
I continued on my own to the Alpine Lake. It was a good thing Ruby did not come along because the incline at the end were very steep and it was above the snow line. The views from the top of the karst were expansive and scenic, with both views of the valley, towns, pastures and icecapped mountains.

Ruby found flat rocks to sit on to look at the mountains whilst waiting for me. She also wandered off to a secluded spot away from the main track to answer a nature's call.

We have stayed in villages with less in the entire population than people on the trail today. No chance of a bear sighting and no need to clap or shout. We were lucky to see a deer on the trail after lunch though.

Towards the end of the hike, 600m away from the funicular station, we found a high fence across our path. We couldn't find another path except to retrace our steps for two kilometres to take another route back to the funicular station. This would have meant that we would miss our last funicular down.
We decided to climb 30m of the steep embankment to get around the fence. We don't know why the path was fenced off because we were able to walk the entire 600 metres without any obstruction. Looked like the landslide had been cleared. Besides dirty hiking pants from the scrambling, it's saved us the extra 2 kilometres of incline.
We got to the station with half hour to spare and were so relieved to see it because we were completely exhausted.

At the terminal, the gift shop lady said the funicular was broken and she didn't know when it would be fixed. Her only suggestion for this problem was for us to walk a further three kilometres down to the village. Imagine my horror while she nonchalantly pointed out to us the track down. We could not understand why they did not just put a bus on to take the passengers down.

We were supposed to walk to dinner which was a further one kilometre from the village but we were not going to walk another step more. We settled for a Vietnamese restaurant literally in front of the station.

Hike on track was 15.73km. Total distance walked today was 18.5kmRead more