Journey through Mirkwood 2.

In the morning we had some free time, supposed to work on the yet not cancelled team projects and the still not ready flags. It wasn't raining contstantly, we dried random bits of clothes and baked random bits of food around the campfire, and expected to start the daily march in dry weather.

We were wrong in this, but later on that day the weather became definitely sunny and was quite hot when we stopped for spiderweb hunt. The area for this programme was really beautiful, especially with the sun shining through the leaves, small mushrooms, tangled branches and a lot of moss everywhere—still not everybody felt really motivated to run (in the middle of the tiring daily hike) all around a little bit of forest bordered with a little river with swampy banks. The drunken mirkwooder spiders left around webs in different shapes and colours, with small bags on them, and pieces of paper in the bags. On the papers we could find directions for the next spiderweb and also some words with tengwar—if we could find the webs in the first place, of course.

The tengwar things turned out to be lines of the Ring-verse in Quenya, and if you collected all of them, you could tell which one is missing, and that was the task. But in the end, I think, we were more interested in the arriving watermelons and the opportunity to ask beer for the night. Half of the daily walk was still waiting for us. In the end, being the very last ones in the scattered group of tired hikers, we became unsure of the directions, but fortunately the lake was downwards, as you could expect. It is the deepest lake in Lithuania, called Tauragnas, beautiful and fast deepening, and the sun still shone when we arrived, so finally we could go for a real swim in the icy cold water. After that, at the same time with the very spectacular sunset, a beautiful rainbow arrived, triple and fully mirrored, and not much later also the heavy rain which it predicted. The rain (which officially never existed) held on for quite a long time, cancelling any planned programme, making almost everybody coming together under the big common tent, where the food was prepared, beer and cider were drank, and Hungarian folk songs taught. In the shallow water leeches danced over the shells.

On the day of the last camp-moving hike the rain finally decided to leave us alone, and we went to visit Beorn through long forest roads. The house of Beorn was actually a museum of bee-keeping, which, as we were informed, is a really important thing in Lithuania, even has its own god. The place was really nice, but the same could not be told about the guide, who apparently also said false things with bad grammar—of course we would have no idea about this without the complaints of the Lithuanians, because the guide spoke in Lithuanian, and we got the information corrected by the translation by Laiqualasse.

After some rest in the park which was actually the museum, there was only a surprisingly short and comfortable walk left until we arrived to our last campsite amongst tall pine trees on the shore of Lake Almajas. With a nice and cold welcome-swim and some archery training in the darkening forest there came the night, and we read parts of Tolkien's books in English, Lithuanian and Hungaria (helped and slowed in this by modern technique, because the Hungarian and most of the English texts were only available on e-readers—but then, not everybody needs a book for reciting the Ring verse, the poem about Aragorn or Gil-galad). Later on, when half of the camp already went to sleep, we still tried to read in each others languages, Laiqua spelling the Hungarian translation of the song-fight of Felagund and Sauron almost perfectly, then modestly smiling on us trying to read aloud the same in Lithuanian.

Our last comfortably whole day started with swordsmanhip and archery tournament—the later was quite popular, but only eight competitors  appeared for the first, exactly half of them from each nation, and I have to confess, all Hungarians had a bit more practice (and still some of us were beaten, not only by each other)—but to be equal, the archery was won by Lithuania (hmm, you know, we need horse, and shoot backwards, with shorter bow, and things like that).

For the afternoon programme, each of us had to pick a stone, and we went for a last, easy hike to Ladakalnis, and seen height differences really not expected in Lithuania. This "mountainhill", as we all called it after the copyright of Tomas, is 176 metres high, and from the top you are supposed to be able to see six different lakes. There is also a big oak tree, and below that you could place your stone with your sincere wish, in the hope it will be fulfilled. The sun was at last shining in its full, we sat in a circle near the big tree and listened to Kostas and Tomas about local paganism and had a drink together with the gods.

On our way back we got some ice-cream in Ginučiai, and again some wild berries in the forest and still got back to the camp before sunset. Laiqua and Éogil gave a lecture about castles of Arda and Europe, while Felagund and Tibor competed in gulyás-cooking. They being also the experts for the given tasks in their groups, the group members gathered around the cauldrons for their advice. We also got the opportunity at last to learn the "filksingas" about Beren not being a shepherd, miruvor not being water and poor Necromancer having lame nazgûl apprentices. And chat and sing in different groups until late night, when only five or six of us remained awake, and of course those who listened to our chat while trying to sleep in their tents.

We still had Dol Guldur to besiege for the last day, which was some kind of capture the flag wargame, where a group had to defend their own flag and that of another group in Dol Guldur for half a minute to gain a point. Everybody had a piece of paper as life attached to their forearms, and each team had four soldiers for the quest. Some groups held together near Dol Guldur waiting for others to approach, others sent their flag far away with only one protector. Agreements were made and broken between the different groups, and sometimes we just waited eating wild raspberries from the bushes we were hiding in. In the end three teams out of four gained a point and we ran to the lake to "have a bath" and swim in real sunshine at last.

After this refreshing programme the heroic deeds of the war and other interesting parts of the week were praised in bard songs in the style of The Fall of Arthur by each group, folk dances were taught, learned and performed and, instead of the cancelled group plays, we hurriedly put together mostly improvised scenes based on The Silmarillion. The sun of our last day in Mirkwood was already very low and the official closing could not compete with the sight of the sunset, so we made it on the pier, together with the group photo from which we have to miss three people who already left us in the morning.

After the last words we still had some silent moments to say goodbye to the sun across the water, then the night of our departure came, and we went. For a long midnight walk beneath the moon, surrounded by mist, to the bus which took the Hungarians back to Warsaw. End of the event, but not the end of our story... or at least we really hope so.