A lot of this ride was pretty tough going. The poor condition of the roads, the confusing signage (where it existed), the hilly terrain (4,300 m climbed), the cold, wet and windy conditions and the surly natives, as well as my ongoing recovery from a hard fall, all conspired to make it quite a hard slog for most of those 532 km over 4 days (except for the last 50 km or so, which were absolutely glorious).
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Monday 6 May 2019. Bratislava | No travelling|
At €98 per night for 2 nights I considered it expensive staying at the Avance Hotel in downtown Bratislava (recommended in Steven Herrick’s book, Bratwurst and Bicycles).
Oh yes, they did promise wall heaters in the room when I checked-in, but of course they’d just been turned off for the season. The tiny replacement electric blower-heater they gave me – after vociferous protest, both on my part and theirs – only had a 1-metre extension cord. I had to set it up on top of the bar fridge to get near a power outlet, and my clothes never did dry properly. The TV remote’s battery was dead and they had to scrounge up another one and then use a table knife from the kitchen to open up the battery compartment – what, it’s never happened before! – and they forgot to program my door-lock for the second day so I had to contend with their idiosyncratic elevator one extra time. Still, what can one expect in a country where tattooed-on eyebrows and false eyelashes are de rigueur for receptionists, waitresses, shop assistants and mistresses (and plenty of lip filler, too, in the case of the last-mentioned).
Again at Mr. Herrick’s recommendation, I had dinner at Mestiansky Pivovar, an ersatz (as in “not real” folks) pretend-brewery restaurant on the edge of the old city, that had nice-enough food but that I thought was highly pretentious and condescending, unlike Mr. Herrick who swooned over it and lamented on the idiocy of the tourist hordes who prefer to stay in the tourist area and eat standard tourist fare (unlike himself, the true connoisseur of world travel, and I quote: “If there’s one indisputable rule on how to find good food in popular tourist towns, it’s to go where the tourists don’t. That usually means just stepping outside the old town”). Yeah, right.
Bratislava is supposedly the third-richest region in terms of GDP per capita in Europe (after Hamburg and Luxembourg) – a claim I find very hard to believe, but it’s nice and quaint in a touristy kind of way nonetheless – an interesting merger of daunting soviet-era grandeur with an overlay of cheeky newfound artistic expression, if I may be so lyrical.
Tuesday 7 May 2019. Bratislava · Lednice |121 km|
It really beat the hell out of me (and the bike) over the rough and rutted pot-holed roads tracks I rode over today. In places, tree roots have destroyed the asphalt, and in others there is no asphalt, just deeply pot-holed dirt – the dirt was easier to ride on.
Heading out of Bratislava:
I was following part of the so-called Iron Curtain Trail (Eurovelo 13) that goes along the old border between Soviet Eastern and Democratic Western Europe. But I was only in Slovakia for 80km – the whole time eagerly anticipating getting back into Austria after crossing the March (or Morava) River at the town of Hohenau – and then hopefully on to some decent roads again.
But Hohenau is a bit of a hell-hole and so, after lunch and a charge-up there, I pushed straight on – right back out of Austria and into Czechia after only 30 km or so.
My introduction to Czechia was not auspicious. It was late and I was bone-shattered and tired from the bumpy ride, and due to the lateness of the hour, pretty much committed to staying, when I hove into ‘Autokemp Apollo’ campground near the town of Lednice. It looked OK – a bit unkempt, but there was a sit-down outdoor restaurant area, plenty of power outlets for the bike and hardly anyone else in residence.
The old bag standing on the verandah just waved her ciggy in my general direction and then in the direction of the nearest camping spot, so I parked there and came back to the reception hatch to pay up. She’d retired to her dark inner sanctum behind the hatch by then and demanded my passport. I tried to explain it was at the bottom of one of my panniers – I didn’t know which one – and I’d bring it over later. But no way, I had to go get it right now, so I went and pulled everything out, found it and brought it over and, after a pantomime performance of one-fingered typing that went on for a good 10 minutes, she registered me in.
Now, on to payment: she first tried to do the mental arithmetic of (300 + 300 + 75) using a pencil and paper and a lot of muttering, and then, having failed to manage that, got out a calculator and after several laborious minutes of one-fingered number-punching, triumphantly waved the calculator at me showing I owed 675. I presumed she was showing me the euro price without the decimal point – €6.75 – which I thought was reasonable”, and tried to hand over €7. But she then proceeded to get very cranky with me – it had completely escaped me that Czechia is not in the euro zone (Slovakia is, after all) and I had not a dime in their currency (Koruna) on me, and she wanted 675 koruna. Finally, OK, she was prepared to consider euro: and after some more laborious number-crunching she came up with the figure of €27. Well, in the meantime my iPhone told me she had the conversion right at least – it is roughly 25 Koruna to the Euro – so then I quibbled about the exorbitant price and eventually haggled her down to €4. Looking back at it, maybe, just maybe she thought I had said I was staying for a week, even though I had pantomimed ‘one sleep’ quite proficiently, I thought.
Then I got a mouthful of abuse from her intoxicated man Friday who kept shouting ‘electrika’ in my ear, before I was banished to the far end of the (virtually empty) campground. [But I think it was all just a misunderstanding, and it was just that I was trying to put my tent up in the area reserved for vans (even though there were only 2 or 3 vans there and at least 20 empty slots) – at one stage throughout my setting up, they even started haranguing me to take back my money and just bugger off].
All was well after I meekly complied and shifted the tent. No food, though, and no money to buy any anyway, even if there had been a shop or café, or whatever. Good thing I had that huge ‘spare ribs’ lunch at Riviera café in Hohenau for €9 while charging up for an hour. The toilets were not so clean, there was no toilet paper and only cold water, but I did end up in a nice spot reasonably close to power for Ziggy, and fortunately well-enough away from the common area, where a bunch of high school adolescents kept up a rousing party with crappy 80s music and childish revelry. Their noise woke me at 1am, and I went and retrieved my batteries off the power outlet.
Wednesday 8 May 2019. Lednice · Trebic |121 km|
I know the temperature got to below zero last night – when I went to look for my woolly black hat at 6 am in the morning, that I’d lost at 1am when I went to retrieve my batteries from the power board, I found it lying in the grass as a white lump of frost.
I waited until the tent dried out and got away late – 9.30. It was pleasant-enough riding at first, on a succession of cycling routes – EV13, EV9, Iron Curtain Trail and Moravia Wine Route – none of which went in my direction for long – but again quite pot-holed and rutted for a lot of it.
This part of Czechia is a very popular cycling area, and because it was a national holiday too (to celebrate Czechoslovakia’s end to WWII on May 8, 1945) the lycra-clad brigade was out in force tearing around the countryside. But Ziggy surpassed all previous off-piste expeditions, handing me a very steep 3km granny-gear climb out of a valley along a lumber trail in a forest. Luckily, just when I was on the verge of turning back in despair I bumped into (almost literally) an MTBer (that’s Mountain Trail Biker) hurtling downhill, who said I should persevere since there was ‘only’ another kilometre of hard yakka to go before I’d be out of it.
Needless to say, I drained the batteries, but luckily a guy working on a house renovation in the village of Hluboke kindly let me use his power board for an hour or so to put some juice back in. It was a sunny and mild day, ideal for cycling, and with a mostly tail wind to boot, but unfortunately very hilly and I couldn’t take maximum advantage.
But by late afternoon it was raining again, and as I still had no cash due to the public holiday, I decided to call it a day and checked into the Atom Hotel in the town of Trebic, where I could pay by credit card. Ziggy got to stay in the foyer under the watchful gaze of the overnight porter, and I had a big modern room on the 7th floor for a quite reasonable €36. No ‘real’ food though, due to the holiday, and I had to content myself with crisps, beer and an ersatz chocolate bar from the reception desk.
Thursday 9 May 2019. Trebic · Benešov |130 km|
I departed Trebic at 8.15 am, which was quite early considering it was so rainy and miserable outside – the wondrous recuperative effects of a sound night’s sleep, I guess. [It stopped raining at 2.30pm, and ended up being a lovely sunny afternoon/ evening].
It was quite hilly, mainly on a good road (Route 523, with no verge but not a lot of traffic). It was hard on the battery (and me!): TURBO up the hill, then OFF going down, TURBO up the hill again, then OFF going down again etc etc., and I used up all the charge after 70 km, so I stopped at the town of Humpolec at 11.45 for 2 hours in a really delightful restaurant called U Juriho, where I had a nice country dish of a pork, bean and vegetable stew (plus beers, coffee, desert etc. to use up the waiting time, all for K290 (about €12). The owner/ chef/ head waiter was very hospitable, and let me lounge about and dry out no problem.
And so now on to my contender for the ugliest town in Europe competition. Yes, it’s you, Benešov. I guess in their egalitarian way, the communists thought it a bit unfair to give some inhabitants the privilege of living in the “Centre”, so they built Benešov without one – there’s just a hotchpotch cluster of soviet-era high rise apartment buildings and that’s it.
I let Ziggy GPS me to a hotel some way out near the edge of town (in the wrong direction to where I was heading). That particular one no longer existed, but another one nearby did – Hotel Benica. The young lad who checked me in thought he spoke English. I was too polite to disabuse him of that notion, and we had a comical discussion about breakfast or no breakfast. I was by this time fast becoming disillusioned with the value of paying extra for the standard hotel cold buffet breakfast and so kept saying no thank you, and he kept on returning to the point. In the end, he said it’s included in the price anyway, so I should take it. And so I did. But I suspect the real subplot here was that I was the only guest and if I said no, the breakfast workers wouldn’t be getting paid, so it was actually all about getting them the gig. Too bad about all the wasted breakfast buffet food, but I suppose the workers get all the leftovers too.
Friday 10 May 2019. Benešov · Litomerice |150 km|
This was a long and eventful day. It was raining as I left Benica Hotel and I had a wet and very hilly ride for 40 km into Prague. Coming in from my direction, the Prague suburbs are quite unappealing, but I guess that could apply to many or even most big cities if you come in from a certain direction.
The centre of Prague looked really nice, but after a good look around and then decided to push on anyway, it being still early in the day, and I could make maybe another 100 km or so.
Coming out of Prague, the bike route north follows the Vitava River, which becomes a left-bank tributary of the Elbe River at the Czech town of Melnik. But first there is a massive hill to climb, right on the edge of Prague (from where the above 3 photos were taken). There are two sets of 3 steps about 3m apart, with a cycle slide over each set. I didn’t think I’d be able to get going again if I had to dismount and push the bike up the slides because of the steepness, so I just gunned it at the bottom and roared up those slides, and didn’t stop peddling until I reached the top of the hill. One slight mistake going up those slides could have been very painful.
Actually, the Vitava River path is a lovely ride and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a small winding river in a steep valley and the path is never too far from the river’s edge.
That first ferry was quite cute. I shared it with a lady and her two grand kids, all cycling, and she even took a photo of me (and as you can see from all my wet-weather gear it had been raining). The second ferry crossing though, just before the town of Melnik and near the end of the Vitava, was a bit of a worry. I don’t even know how it is legal – and I’m not sure how I managed to get on and off again in one piece, it was such a struggle. With no help or encouragement from the ferryman, I might add.
The tiny green skiff, above, is the bike ferry and it comes in sideways to the gangplank in the foreground, with just a gate at it’s nose covering the walkway. You then have to walk the loaded bike down the steep and slippery gangplank and give it an almighty shove to get it up and over a pipe on the skiff that stands about 100mm proud of the deck, and then immediately slam on the brakes to stop from pushing it off the other side, then manoeuvre it backwards and down into a kind of hold for the journey, before repeating the process in reverse on the other side – up the steep walkway from the hold, over a pipe bump, quickly on with the brake to stop from plunging over the front, drag the rear end around, then a powerful shove to get it over another pipe and then up the slippery gangplank again. Phew! I was too traumatized to remember to get any more photos, but I’m sure this ferry must be a cause celebre among the bike trekking fraternity somewhere.
I blew the photo up a little to show it more clearly: where the ferryman guy is standing is where you have to put the bike first, then reverse it down a ramp into the hold. Quite scary with my 60kg+ of loaded bike.
Just when I was thinking of revising my poor opinion about Czechia and the Czechs after my run-in with the crabby lady on that first day (but then countered by the kindness of the builder with the power-board and the chef in Humpolec), those pesky Czechs had one last go at me on my way out. I was entirely reliant on the bike path signs, but the path was closed off on entering the town of Melnik. This was because there was some kind of rock festival about to start down by the waterfront. So I had not a single clue as to where to go next. Some other people had the same difficulty and were all vigorously consulting their various map apps. (Not me, I don’t have one). I tried three different approaches into town, but got rebuffed by cops guarding the other gates each time. But it’s OK, I did figure it out eventually after toing-and-froing for half an hour.
So I was now officially following the Elbe River, and very pleasant it was too – some of the nicest scenery on my bike trip so far.
For my final night in Czech territory, I camped at the Litomerice campground, right in town and right on the cycle trail. The young lady who runs it is super-friendly: “sure, just find a spot – anywhere – set up and make yourself comfortable and come back here to the restaurant and we’ll feed you”. Camping cost €13, including schnitzel dinner and a beer.
Czechia is a great country after all!
-ends-
Europe 2019. Bratislava to Litomerice 532 km.
Europe 2019. The trip so far: Maastricht to Litomerice |2,232 km|
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