After a long, hard Saturday night, it's time for a quick lie down, to bask in the steadily brightening early morning sun. Shirt off, bare feet nestled in the soft, white sand, I stare out at the birds circling over the dark blue sea that stretches for miles, a tranquil scene dissected only by the long, weatherbeaten wooden pier. Aaaah ... you gotta love Poland.
Beach? Sun? Poland? Yes. Gdansk, actually. Or to be more precise, its little-known gem of a neighbour 10 minutes down the road, Sopot, the former spa and summer playground of the Prussian aristocracy and now Poland's party capital.
Asking a travel agent for a beach holiday in Poland is akin to requesting a hiking trip in the Seychelles or golf in the Gobi. But beach holidays in Poland do exist. Good ones too. By day, Sopot offers kilometres of white sandy beach sprinkled with cafes and bars, fringed by cycle paths and promenades, landscaped parks and woodland tracks. An elegant 19th-century town dotted with health spas, Prussian villas and regal summer houses, it also boasts a pier said to be the longest in mainland Europe.
By night, Sopot is a mecca for hedonists. Its wealth of restaurants serves a world of cuisine, from French to sushi, Russian to Vietnamese, and its bars attract revellers from all over Poland (and increasingly Germany and Sweden). Its clubs - also a major attraction, being perhaps the best in Poland and drawing top European DJs - bump and grind until dawn. With some clubs on the beach, the now-defunct style magazine The Face drew parallels with Ibiza.
As with most things Polish, Sopot is also ridiculously cheap. Zywiec, the best Polish beer, costs HK$10 a pint, while a three-course meal of pancake noodles, rabbit thigh stewed in Dijon sauce and cold sweet plum soup costs about $114 at the starched white tablecloths and varnished oak floors of the 100-year-old, three-star boutique hotel Villa Sedan. Room rates also surprise. The Hotel Maryla, the amply gardened former summer house of Kaiser Wilhelm II perched on the hinterland hills, costs $356 a night.
Cheap, cheerful and chic. So what's the catch? Well, the sea is cold (OK, it's absolutely Baltic) and perhaps too much for thin Southeast Asian blood, and you may need an umbrella and Gortex jacket to protect against the unpredictable elements. However, if it does pour, as it did repeatedly on this trip, visitors simply up sticks to the other two cities in what the Poles call the Trojmiasto (the Tri-City). Gdynia, a short drive north, is a boomtown port built in the 1930s but fast earning a name for its good food, affordable modern hotels and lively pier area full of food stalls and floating museums.