Day 3 - Discovering Lower Silesia

We started the day up in the Orlickie mountains, where we would be riding the first part of the day. The stage began on a back road, downhill, heading towards Zieleniec. You could breathe proper mountain air, really clean, we were surrounded by vegetation and farmland and kept passing isolated houses, running parallel to the Czech border the whole time with only the Dzika Orlica river between us and it.

After a gentle climb we reached Zieleniec, one of the biggest ski resorts in Poland and the highest point of the stage (921 m). In summer most places were closed, so we stopped to buy some food in a very small supermarket. We carried on, left the road and started dropping down beautiful forest tracks through giant trees, so dense that in some spots it even went really dark, a feeling we had already had the day before. I suppose it is just what the woodland is like around here.

The track spat us out onto a narrow road with no white lines and the tarmac blurring into the plants at the edges, my favourite kind of road. We had it to ourselves and we just kept ticking off kilometres. It was one of the best parts of the day.

Fifteen kilometres later we got to Duszniki-Zdrój and stopped to buy some food, we still had 50 km to go before lunch. We rode a few kilometres on a back road that climbed steadily until we entered Stołowe Mountains National Park, known for its rock formations. We did a loop inside the park and there are a couple of moments where you ride right between giant blocks of stone that are seriously impressive. The detour through the park is worth it.

We carried on with 10 km of very pleasant road descent, which was great for resting our hands and our backside, and for seeing more rock columns with the road winding between them. We got to Radków and found the place packed with people waiting for the Polski Rajd Legend to come through, a historic car rally that was taking over half the Kłodzko region that weekend with more than 130 entries: Audi Sport Quattro S1, Lancia Delta Integrale, Ford Escorts and Sierras, Subaru Imprezas. The Radków stage started from the market square. Luckily we got through and carried on with our day.

We arrived at Zamek Sarny and had lunch there, a stop that ran on a bit longer than planned but did us good, both for enjoying the food and for resting, because our bodies were already feeling everything we had done. The place started life as a manor house in the 15th century and the von Götzen family gave it its Baroque shape between 1661 and 1738. They added a chapel dedicated to St John of Nepomuk, because every firstborn son in the family was christened John, with illusionistic painted ceilings from 1738 that are still there. After the war it ended up as a state farm and fell to pieces. In 2010 the then Prince Charles, now Charles III, read an article titled "Lower Silesia, the land of dying palaces", decided to rescue one and picked this one: he came to see it in March that year. He could not take it on, because privatisation meant it had to go to public tender. A foundation bought it in 2014 and today it is a hotel. We ate in the old 18th century stables, restored over two years and reopened in 2022.

We pressed on along back roads, rode through Nowa Ruda and started on the last climb of the day, up towards the Ostoja Nietoperzy Gór Sowich, which roughly means the bat sanctuary of the Owl Mountains. It is a protected area in the European Natura 2000 network, and what it protects is three species of bat that spend the winter here. They hibernate inside the tunnels of the Riese complex, the ones the Nazis started digging under these mountains in 1943 and never finished. Eighty years on, the unfinished works are protected by the European Union because they have filled up with bats.

The first climb had two sections of almost 3 km that were seriously hard: the first part with loose stones, a tighter and rougher track, and the second one "only" had the gradient, a smooth wide track that every now and then let you glimpse the landscape below. Once we got to the top we followed the ridge line, looking out over the plains on one side or the other depending on where we were. We stopped a couple of times for photos and started to descend, first on a fast stretch of track in very good condition, and then the track turned into trail and it got complicated: a mountain bike would have been perfect.

We got to the bottom of the descent and climbed up to the Kompleks Wyciągów Narciarskich Górnik ski station. We had a lemon juice there, plus some food we were carrying, to face the last 24 km, half of which were downhill. The final 3 km climb finished me off and I had to stop and eat sweets to get some sugar into a body that had nothing left. Luckily it only took 5 minutes, and once over the top we could already see the movement of the city we were riding towards: Wałbrzych, the end of the stage. All we had to do was cross the city and get to the hotel, and the traffic lights gave us a bit of respite to pull ourselves together.

You could tell we were leaving the mountains behind, both from the landscape and from the temperature. It was not "a bit fresh" like the other days. We arrived before sunset, so we managed half an hour of stretching after showering and before going out for dinner. Refill the energy tanks and off to bed.