Best of Poland

At Kraków airport (KRK) your private chauffeur meets you and drives you inside the green Planty ring to the Hotel Copernicus, the oldest house on Kanonicza street below Wawel Hill. In the late afternoon your guide leads you out onto the Main Market Square, the largest medieval square in Europe, as the light turns golden. From there you climb Wawel Hill for a private visit to the royal castle and cathedral, the seat of Polish kings for half a millennium, ahead of the usual queues. The evening closes with a welcome dinner under the vaults of a 14th-century cellar below the Old Town, and it is a short walk back to the hotel from there.

After breakfast at the Hotel Copernicus your guide walks you through the Old Town to the Czartoryski Museum, where the morning is given over to Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, one of only a handful of his paintings in existence. From there you cross into Kazimierz, Kraków's historic Jewish quarter, moving on foot through its seven surviving synagogues, quiet courtyards and lived-in cafés while your guide traces the stories of the neighbourhood. The route brings you to Plac Nowy, the food courtyard at the heart of the district, around midday. From here the time is yours: a zapiekanka, an espresso, or simply the square itself. You find your own way back to the hotel through the lanes.

The morning is free in Kraków, time to revisit the market square or walk the Planty at your own pace. In the late afternoon your chauffeur drives you southeast from the city to Wieliczka, where one of the oldest salt mines in the world runs deep underground. With your guide you make a private descent a hundred metres into the workings, passing timbered chambers and statues hewn from the rock by generations of miners. The route leads to the Chapel of St Kinga, an entire cathedral carved from salt, where chandeliers, altars and reliefs are cut from the same translucent stone. A candlelit dinner is laid for you here beneath the salt chandeliers, a still hour underground; this is arranged directly with the mine authority, subject to availability and booked well ahead, with a private dinner back in Kraków as the fallback if the chapel is not free. Afterward you ride the lift back to the surface and your driver returns you to the Hotel Copernicus for the night.

After breakfast you leave the Hotel Copernicus and travel north to Warsaw by private car or, where it suits your schedule, by fast train, your guide alongside. On arrival you check in to the Hotel Bristol, the belle-époque grande dame on the Royal Route, then set out into the reconstructed old town. Your guide explains how the entire quarter, Castle Square and the Royal Castle among it, was rebuilt brick by brick from rubble after the war, much of it from the cityscapes of Canaletto. There is time to walk the Market Square and wander the surrounding lanes before the light fades. The day closes with a private Chopin recital, the composer's mazurkas and nocturnes played in an intimate setting, after which you return to the Bristol.

After breakfast your guide leads you into the Royal Łazienki, Warsaw's great landscape park, to the Palace on the Water, set on its lake among peacocks and pavilions. The day then turns to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which documents the 1944 rising and the systematic destruction of the city that followed: the necessary context for the rebuilt old town you walked yesterday. The museum is sober and thorough, and the afternoon is left free for you to absorb it at your own pace. In the evening you join a city chef for a hands-on session, folding pierogi by hand and tasting Poland's vodkas the way locals do. You sit down to eat what you have made, then walk back to the Bristol.

Early in the morning you leave Warsaw with your guide-driver and head north to the Baltic coast, reaching the Hanseatic port of Gdańsk after the long drive. Your guide walks you along the Long Market, where the tall merchant facades recall centuries of trading wealth, and down Mariacka street, the historic heart of the local amber trade. From there you visit the European Solidarity Centre at the old shipyard gates, where the movement that helped end communism in Poland began. In the afternoon your driver continues to the neighbouring resort town of Sopot, where you have free time to walk out along the long wooden pier and take in the seafront at your own pace. The evening brings check-in at the Grano Hotel on Granary Island, facing the medieval waterfront across the Motława.

After breakfast on Granary Island your driver takes you inland to Malbork, the largest brick castle on earth, once the seat of the Teutonic Knights. With your guide you cross the moats and gatehouses into a fortress that grew over centuries, working through its high vaulted halls to the great refectory where the knights once dined beneath fan-vaulted ceilings. You have time to take in the full scale of the place and see it from the river bank, where the mass of the castle reads across the water. As the light softens, a private lantern-lit walk takes you back through the silent courtyards, the old brick warm in the glow. Your driver then returns you to Gdańsk for a second night at the Grano Hotel.

This is the longest day of driving: your guide-driver crosses the country southeast from the Baltic coast to Białowieża, the last primeval lowland forest in Europe, hard against the Belarus border, breaking the journey with stops along the way. On arrival you settle into the Hotel Białowieski, a timber lodge at the forest edge with a wood-fired spa and a kitchen built around local game and mushrooms. In the afternoon a guided walk takes you into the strict reserve, among ancient oaks left untouched for centuries, the forest as it stood before farming reached it. As dusk arrives, the park ranger leads you out to track the wild European bison, the heaviest land animal on the continent and the emblem of this forest, quietly working the meadows and woodland margins where the herds graze at this hour. Dinner is at the lodge.

After a last breakfast at the lodge you take a final quiet morning in the forest, a walk among the oaks of Białowieża before the journey turns toward home. Your chauffeur then drives you back across the country to Warsaw, where the tour comes to its end. Depending on your flight, there may be time to pause briefly in the capital before your transfer to Warsaw airport (WAW) for departure. Your guide-driver sees you to the terminal, closing the route that began in Kraków and runs out here, at the edge of the primeval wild.