Poland 7 - Couverture souple

Mark Baker first visited Poland in the mid-1980s. At the time he was a grad student in Eastern European studies at Columbia University in New York, and he was smitten by the friendliness of the people, the bizarre politics, the history and the vodka. Now permanently based in Prague and working as a freelance travel writer, he remains enchanted with the country and has the chance to visit and write about Poland frequently. In addition to Lonely Planet Poland, Mark is co-author of the Lonely Planet's Prague and Romania guides. When he's not on the road writing, he teaches Central European History at Anglo-American University in Prague. Marc Di Duca has spent nigh on 20 years criss-crossing the former communist world, the last seven of them as a travel guide author. A respected writer on Central and Eastern Europe, Marc has penned two guides to Poland for major UK publishers and a pocket guide to Gdansk, a city that remains one of his favourite European stop-offs. Research for this edition of Lonely Planet's Poland involved munching through perilous amounts of zapiekanki ('Polish pizza') in dodgy milk bars, stalking Copernicus 500km along the Baltic coast and successfully buying a train ticket to Szczecin. Poland is Marc's 16th Lonely Planet guide. Tim Richards taught English in Krakow in the 1990s and was fascinated by the massive post-communism transition affecting every aspect of Polish life, and by remnants of the communist era. He's returned to Poland repeatedly for Lonely Planet, deepening his relationship with this beautiful complex country. When he's not on the road for Lonely Planet, Tim is a freelance journalist in Melbourne, Australia, writing mostly about travel and the arts. In 2011 he released an e-book collection of his newspaper and magazine articles about Poland, titled We Have Here the Homicide.