Nobody marries the wit of Monty Python with travel writing better than Michael Palin. In his “ New Europe” book he did a great tour around the countries which had once fallen behind the Iron Curtain.

With his travel spirits in mind I set off to the High Tatras in 2017 with one of my best friends who was living at that time in Polish Cracow. We watched a great sunset sending unbelievable colors, a mix of orange and green, to the rolling mountains and dark forests near Zakopane. Later, in our cozy mountain retreat, we feasted on great Polish food and drank heavily on Polish. Enough reason to celebrate Europe.

The next day, we went higher into the Tatras, passed beautiful meadows full of wild flowers. We went on, met a shepard sitting calmly in the grass, guarding his huge herd with gentle attention. I loved this image since shepards and sheep were a common sight in my youth near our house at the end of the village road. We went further, past some shepards’ modest dwellings, before the small road winding down into a cute valley where a church tower was announcing a remote village. When we reached the village we suddenly noticed that its houses were adorned with blue shutters and white ornaments looking completely different than the Polish villages before, maybe more Austrian than Eastern European. Without noticing, without anyone asking us for any documents, we had crossed the border between Poland and Slowakia.

A few years before I had crossed the border between Bratislava and Vienna, just by riding the metro. Europe and Schengen are great, the world is nowhere else so close together and, at the same time, so diverse. Crossing a border nowhere else is so hassle-free.  Let’s hope that we don’t spoil It.