Advertisement
Hello everyone!
First up we just wanted to say thank you again to all our friends and family who made our wedding celebrations so special. Now we are off on our honeymoon trip to Eastern Europe and we hope you enjoy reading all the fun details!
Well it has been quite a first week of our eastern European adventure. As we board our train for Vienna let us share some highlights of our time in the Czech Republic. Firstly some initial impressions:
(1) Czechs love flowers. It is not a passing thing. Every cottage was a riot of spring colour and even the grimmest of soviet era concrete apartment blocks had window boxes of pansies and petunias and every village however tiny had a nursery. It was quite a powerful sign of optimism.
(2) Czechs love dogs. In every village at least every second garden had a dog and one house had about a dozen yapping Pomeranians!
(3) Czechs love beer. The tiniest roadside kiosk will have beer on tap! In Australia we like to think we are a beer drinking nation but we are amateurs compared to the Czechs.
(4) Czechs love Roxette. Seriously the band members could live
Skoda Holiday
Czech prole with assigned Skoda vehicle inspects street lighting marvel of Soviet engineering. Worker holiday approved under the "No leavski, no liveski" program of the Department of The Dignity of Labour, Tourism, Resources and Energy. very comfortably off the royalty payments from Czech radio stations! Come take a joyride.....
(5) Czechs love their Skoda vehicles, we have only seen one car that is not a Skoda. My (Evan) uncle bought a Skoda in 1973 to assist the soviet economy and progress communism. Today's modern skoda is just as efficient and sleek as the old Skoda that I remember so well.
Evś travel tip: Avoid older Czechs who lived through communism, their personalities have suffered from the effects of centralised planning which clearly determined that smiling did not advance the formation of the workers paradise. Grouchy buggers. Many of these impressions were gleaned on the journey from Prague to the village of Mala Skala the starting point for our week long walking tour. This tour was the main reason we chose to visit eastern Europe.
As the train cleaved it's way through the country side we marvelled at the intensity of the colours - bright yellow canola fields and vibrant almost neon green leaves - interspersed by villages straight from fairy tales. Truly incredible vistas.
We began our adventure in the gorgeous village of Mala Skala complete with cobblestone streets and centuries
old wooden houses. Over the next five days we would be walking 102kms through some of the most beautiful country side imaginable. Our walk began with a tour of the rock formations and pine forrests around Mala Skala. A short start to ease us into walking - only 19kms! A combination of exhaustion, jet lag, our first big carby Czech feast and getting a good start on sampling the local beers resulted in us crashing for ten hours!
The next day was our first proper destination walk. We left our packs in the lobby of our hotel (where they would be collected and be delivered to our next hotel room) and headed upwards towards the first of three castles that day and our eventual destination - Hruba Skala - a chateau which is now a hotel. Not too shabby hey? The 20+km walking took us past two large ruined castles which we clambered over to our hearts content.
Then the hard slog - a diabolical cross country zig zag to take in two significant castles - the spooky ruined Trosky with it's menacing twin towers which we had been seeing on our horizon since the start of our
tour - and Kost a much friendlier restored gothic castle by a wodland lake. Our hotel that night had a balcony overlooking Humprecht - a baroque hunting lodge in a delightful wooded setting which was our first stop of the next day.
As we headed out the following day the blue skies which had been constant, broke for a gentle drizzle which stayed with us for the rest of the day but we didn't mind because it just made the trails greener and more vibrant. After a night spent in a charming parkland hotel we psyched ourselves for our last day of walking. A gentle 15km stroll finishing up at the regional centre of Jicin. The highlight was a walk through the Prachovske Skaly - a park of rocky pinnacles. Very impressive.
It is funny how you get into a rhythm and after five days of long walks we had gotten into a great zone which will be sad to say goodbye to. But just as we began to feel a little wistful, a lovely surprise lifted our spirits. Knowing it was our honeymoon the tour company had a bottle of champers on ice waiting in our final
hotel room and a bowl of local strawberries. Bliss........
Well now we are heading south to Vienna where the pleasures of strudel, Mozart and palaces await us. But before we leave you here are our official counts:
Evś Counts:
sausages - 8 (a bit weak I know)
goulashes - 3 (so many dumplings, so little meat)
pivo (beer) - 11 varieties, 10.5 litres
Leahś Counts:
strudel - 2 (both apple)
castles - 9 (includes ruins, chateaux, palaces)
Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as we enjoyed walking it! Apologies for all the castle pictures below....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.374s; Tpl: 0.025s; cc: 13; qc: 61; dbt: 0.0699s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb