Week Twenty-Two

It's the Chinese (lunar) New Year today, and we're now in the Year of the Horse - my year. So it should be a good one, despite the start.
There's a 9.50 bus to Ceske Budejovice, but we decide that the 11.25 should give us enough time there (and be easier to catch). It costs 26 crowns and takes 40 minutes, which compares favourably with the train (which costs about 35 crowns and takes an hour). Actually, the journey isn't that comfortable for me - there's one really bad corner, and we cross train-tracks three times. We get off early, just outside the town centre. Initial impressions are of a quite well-to-do town: everything's clean, including the blocks, and everyone's fairly well-dressed - things are obviously good in the tourist and beer trades. The centre/old town of Ceske B (Budweis in German) is an irregular, artificial island formed by the little river Malse (south) and a canal/moat on the north, west and east sides. The Malse joins the Vltava just to the west of the old centre. With all this water around there are a lot of bridges, riverside walks and parks, water-related activities and river-based wildlife very close to the town centre.

At roughly the centre of the old town is a large square (it's even square) - namesti Premysla Otakara II (the chap who invited German traders here to found the city in 1265, as happened in Transylvania). At the centre of the square is a large fountain of Samson: from most angles, the design is such that Samson looks as if he's pissing into the air. Samson is something of a local theme - Ceske Budejovice's other beer is called Samson: we passed the brewery on the way in. Budvar brewery, incidentally, is quite far out - too far for us to realistically visit today: also, we hear it's just a big factory with not much worth seeing except the restaurant.

Our first stop, in the north-east corner of the square, is the solidly massive Black Tower (72m) from which we anticipate excellent views of the city - being winter, though, it's closed. The adjacent St. Nicholas cathedral is open, but pretty dull: it had several periods of construction, and is now a baroque-Victorian hybrid. We cross to the opposite corner of the square, and the baroque Town Hall - along the top are four statues (apparently Justice, Prudence, Wisdom and Courage - I'm not convinced that we successfully figured out which was which). Below the statues are four black drains in the shape of (drain-like) dragons. Below the gargoyles, more usefully, is Tourist Information and free toilets: we pick up more leaflets of Ceske B and the surrounding area, and admire the excessively dim neon-blue lights of the toilets.

Round the back of the Town Hall we come to the water (former moat), and walk along the shoe past the back of the large Dominican Monastery (Ceske Budejovice was big on Catholicism) and adjacent ex-Salt Warehouse/Monastery. Further along, we come to the unspellable Rabenstejnska Tower, a cosy three-storey affair which used to be part of the defences and now seems to be part of a restaurant/café. Over the road, incidentally, we find a little local pub (we're on a search for the wonderful Budvar Super Strong, on tap) selling Budvar 12 at 14.90 koruna for 500ml - that's about 50p.

We strike back into the centre, stopping for a couple of beers and some chips (with Tartare Sauce for Milla), and circle round by St. Anne's church, now a concert hall (at the back of the Grand Hotel Zvon, which sprawls all the way across the block to open onto nam PO2 - there's always a temptation to abbreviate Czech language names). Shopping items we've spotted so far are a Brad Pitt calendar (yes, I know it's February) and an overpriced Che Guevara Swatch (all Swatches are overpriced - they've managed to market "tacky" and "plastic" as fashion accessories): Milla is attracted by both, and spends much of the afternoon working out a plan to raid the jewellery shop whee we saw the watch. And yes, we do seem to be spending time nipping in and out of jewellery shops.

Most of the old town is baroque and renaissance residental houses, mostly in good repair, and mostly in a wide range of pastel colours. We meander along Hroznova west from the cathedral, past a whole bunch of such houses (and the old meat market, now an apparently touristy restaurant) back to the front of the Monastery and salt warehouse (the North-South salt trade, as well as silver, was the foundation of the city's wealth). The warehouse is dull (it's a warehouse, after all), but the Monastery includes a massive white church, nice-looking gardens (closed) and the White Tower (another tall tower). We turn along Ceska (another street of pretty, but smaller, houses) back to the river/moat/canal. There are parts of the town wall/defences along the southwest corner of the old town, but they turn out to be pretty uninspiring except for the Iron Maiden Tower which overlooks the junction of the Malse river with the moat, and which also has a good view of the Vltava.

The light's pretty much gone by now, and it's been a long day, so we head back towards the bus station (just under a kilometre from the old town). En route we pass the little Dum Kultury Slave and behind it the grand (and yellow) South Bohemia Museum. South Bohemia, incidentally, is Jihocesky in Czech which leaves me with the feeling that the entire country is named just after Bohemia (Cesky): this feeling is supported by the fact that there are towns called Moravske Krumlov and Budejovice further east. I don't know how the Moravians feel about this linguistic exclusion from the national identity.

The straight road to the railway station, a block from the bus station, takes us past the Prior shopping centre (and attached McDonalds and hence toilets). We look for ear-rings and trousers, and then move on to the bus station - the next bus is the 18.15 express from Prague to Cesky Krumlov. On the way out, we pass one of Ceske B's sites which we missed (deliberately): the Horse-Drawn Railway Museum - apparently Ceske Budejovice was one terminus of the world's first horse-drawn railway - nope, I don't understand the point, either.
Ceske Budejovice gets 3/10: the centre's scenic, the shopping's okay, and there's a few reasonably-interesting things to see.
The bus back takes a shorter, more direct route and therefore costs less (bus fares are calculated on distance travelled). We have the (to me) bizarre situation that the uncomfortable 1-hour train cost c. 35 crowns; the normal 40-minute bus cost 26 crowns; and the cosy express bus, which only takes 20-minutes, cost only 25 crowns. We get off at the Spicak stop, half-way into Cesky Krumlov, and pop into the castle internet place for a couple of happy-hour capuccinos (they've put up a big screen for the Olympics). Then back to the hostel (home) for rest and dinner.

A quiet recovery day in Cesky Krumlov, assisted by beer (our favourite Budvar Super Strong) and not assisted by a group of loud Belgian girls who've moved into the room next to the kitchen and, by extension, into the kitchen. We potter around Cesky K for a bit, but really do little else than watch TV. We watch the beginnings of the Milosovic trial (Mila argues vociferously with CNN - if I refer to Yugoslavia as "The Incredible Shrinking Country" one more time, she may kill me), and watch the best crashes in the Olympic skiing (Milla comments "You can do better than that").

Our intention is to catch an early breakfast and then the 09.50 bus to Ceske Budejovice today, in time for an early bus to Hluboka nad Vltavou. We're not using the alarm clock, because our single experiment with it revealed that I have a well-trained reflex to reach out and turn it off - I almost dislocated my entire arm on that occasion, and spent an hour and a half in severe pain. Instead we rely on the fact that I've been waking between 07.30 and 08.00 every day since leaving hospital: I don't let us down today. Unfortunately, Milla apparently needs more than an hour and a half to get up and out. I leave the hostel at 09.30 and Milla tells me she'll be right behind me - naturally it's raining outside. At 09.51 I watch the bus pull away, having stood beside it for four or five minues (in the rain - now I probably have a cold as well). Milla arrives a little later, in time to see the back of the bus pull out of the bus station.

She's surprised and angry at herself, though I've been expecting her to miss something since we left Bucharest (we almot missed the train there, I recall). We have a coffee and a beer and answer some emails while we wait for the next bus - in an hour and 35 minutes. We catch it from Spicak and (having reduced the distance into the previous fare band) it only costs 22 crowns each - at that price, by Monday's price-time formula, it should only take 5 minutes to get to Ceske Budejovice. Actually, it takes 45 minutes. Driving through the outskirts of Ceske B in the rain, it's lost some of its sharp prosperous feel and seems a little old, tired and dismal instead. Thankfully, considering the weather, there are plenty of buses to/from Hluboka since it lies just off one of the major roads north, so we wait hardly any time for a connection.

Actually, Hluboka isn't tat far beyond the grey northern suburbs of Ceske Budejovice: most of the twenty minute journey is spent getting out of the city, and by the time we hit the open road we can see the white castle in the distance, high ona hill overlooking the flood plain. There are a couple of stops in Hluboka, and the driver lets us off just down the hill from the centre. We walk up to the main street (Masarykova) which features a nightclub, the solid church (John of Nepomuk of Hluboka nad Vltavou, or JNvHnV) and the little one-room Infocentrum. We look at photographs and postcards, pick up a free map, use the free toilets, and head back out into the rain. The attendant locks up behind us and leaves.

The path and road up to the castle lead up from Masarykova past a couple of tourist-type shops and cafés. An easy five-minute climb takes us past the crenellated hotel, presumably originally and outbuilding of some sort, and then up into the gardens facing the castle. And what a castle! Like that in Segovia, it's totally out of place in this area, inasmuch as it's a glorious white neo-Tudor creation: a lot of the tourist literature describes it as "neo-Gothic" but hey - what do they know? The 1200s castle was given a serious makeover/reconstruction in the mid-1800s, under the direction of Eleanor of Liechtenstein, to look like Windsor Castle: like Cesky Krumlov, it was a Schwarzenberg seat right up to WWII. What, you have to wonder, happened to the Schwarzenbergs during the communist era? If the state took away all the possessions they'd built up over the centuries, then where are they now? Are they seeking massive compensation from the government? Or did they come down on the wrong side during WWII? Meanwhile, back to the castle - the rooms are closed for winter, of course, but the inner courtyard is open. Milla is impressed and would quite like a castle like this, please.

As well as the main castle (the door handles show a bird pecking through the skull of a Turk - the gruesome insignia of the Schwarzenbergs, in the same way that the Rozmberks used the 5-petalled red rose), there's an iron-and-glass hothouse passage leading to the former riding school. Half-Tudor and half-Gothic, this building now houses an odd art gallery. Mostly centuries-old Gothic church art (paintings, frescoes, sculptures), it also includes a wing of 16th-18th century Dutch (mainly landscape) paintings. There's a 20th century wing as well, in the central Tudor hall (which was some great woodwork), but that's closed. We spend ages in the gallery (under the watchful eyes of a paranoid attendant, after Milla casually grabs one of the 800-year old sculptures to see what it's made of), mainly being iconoclastic - there's a Christ statue which is definitely disco-dancing ("Staying Alive", presumably), and a strange Last Supper painting with 13 heads but only 12 bodies - presumably John the Baptist made it along after all. Outside, back in the light but persistant rain, we wander round the English-style gardens and gently rolling park before working our way round to the front of the castle. Complete with a perfect lawn for barbeques and garden parties, it also has a wonderful wrought-iron frontispiece of covered balconies and spiral staircases: it's like being at one of the large English country houses - Black Orchid meets The Go-Between.

After biscuits on the verandah, we return down the hill and, deciding that Hluboka's zoo is too far out to visit (although it's pretty small, Hluboka's quite spread out), we catch the next bus back to Ceske Budejovice and then straight back to Cesky Krumlov.
Hluboka nad Vltavou gets 2/10, since it's only got a castle (great castle though it is).

Valentine's Day, and a day for pottering: we decide to go into Ceske Budejovice to shop - repeated attempts in Cesky K have so far failed to come up with a suitable pair of trousers for me. Also, a pair of ear-rings seems appropriate for Milena today. We catch the leisurely 11.25 bus in, and within an hour of negotiating German-speaking sales assistants, we've knocked over the trousers issue - they're too long, but that should be overcomeable: we've seen Blanka using a sewing machines in the hostel.

After that we wander around Ceske Budejovice in the sun (the centre is very pleasant when it's warm and dry and, after yesterday's rain, the heatwave has resumed). We stop off for the obligatory beer (Samson this time - better than Eggenberg, but not in the same class as Budvar) and pick up supplies: film, cosmetics, and a pair of non-antique silver ear-rings from an antique shop. At this last stop, presumably overcome with excitement, Milla leaves my nice new trousers behind - the shop's closed by the time we realise but hey-ho: we leave them a note and resolve to come back to collect them tomorrow.

Back in Cesky K (yes - we think of it as home), we round off the day with a meal in the Gypsy Bar (that's Cikanska Jizba) and listen to the Belgian girls (and some Australians) partying into the morning.
Two Czech discoveries today: firstly we've observed that all Czech female surnames end "-ova", and they extend this convention to foreigners. The Olympic coverage here converts (for example) Betty Smith into Betty Smithova. In the bookshops, the Harry Potter books are written by J.K. Rowlingova which is quite amusing if her surname is homonymous (?) with "rolling".
Our second discovery is that Bob the Builder is Borek Stavitel.

Up and out and onto the 09.50 bus (damn, we're good), in time to collect the trousers and use the Town Hall toilets, before hitting the bus station and catching one of the myriad buses to Trebon. As with Hluboka, Trebon is on the road to lots of bigger places so there are lots of buses - the one we catch goes eventually to Jindrichuv Hradec (!).
The landscape en route is fairly typical of the area around Ceske Budejovice, predominantly flat with occasional low hills: even more than elsewhere, this area is covered in small manmade ponds. There are literally thousands of these pools across southern Bohemia (they're predominantly used for farming carp: the Czech Rep exports thousands of tons of fish a year(!)), and Trebon is an important centre of the industry. This area is marshier so better-suited than elsewhere for this practice. The industry was pretty much started by the Rozmberks and the largest such pond (called "Rozmberk", and covering over 1,000 acres) is only 4km to the north of Trebon.

We pull into Trebon bus-station after about 40 minutes - it's little more than a tarmacced strip of wasteland about 1km west of the old town. We passed quite a bit of Trebon coming in: sad, grey concrete blocks mostly - this, plus the bus station, plus the dusty and dirty streets (not helped by the wind and occasional passing trucks) give us a pretty bad initial impression. The walk downhill to the old town is past more concrete - a few shops and bars - before it suddenly becomes older (if dull) buildings. The road crosses a neck of parkland, with a large school on the left, and then takes us through the Budejovice Gate into the old town.

Roughly circular and ringed by streams, water and town walls Trebon has a similar age and general appearance to Ceske Budejovice, though is much smaller. The road goes past the Mary and St. Giles white gothic church (part of the monastery), and round to the eastern end of the main square - Masarykovo nam. More of a wide road than a square, running E-W parallel to the road we came in on, it's lined with baroque and renaissance coloured houses. There are both a column (presumably plague memorial) and fountain in the "square", and the renaissance Town Hall (with small tower) lies on the south side. Even better, the square is protected from the wind, there's a quiet bustle of people, and the sun's lighting up the whole north side.

Deciding that we might like Trebon after all, despite its unpromising start, we nip into the Infocentrum and then into the theatre café (through the Town Hall) to plan our assault and read up about the town. Although dating from the 1100s, Trebon came into the possession of the (you guessed it) Rozmberks and then (you guessed it again) the Schwarzenbergs. The renaissance palace was built after the old castle burnt down (1562), partly under the direction of Petr Vok (who later moved here from Cesky Krumlov, in 1602). Most of the rest of the town is baroque because of another big fire, in 1781. The sprawling palace (which takes up about 20% of the entire old town) lies at the west end of Massarykovo nam (the east gate is at the other end): large and fairly uninspired halls and courtyards mainly. There's a large raven-killing-Turks fountain in the main courtyard, and the Schwarzenberg coat-of-arms is prominent; the Rozmberk rose is everywhere, though. Apart from peppering the architecture, it's still the symbol of the local (Regent) beer and is used by the area's biggest fishery company. There are tours of the palace during the summer (pah!), and our attempts to gain access through the national archives (housed in the main palace building) meet with failure. Ah well.

Instead, we exit west into a large formal park, and follow the old wall/bastions south. Bizarrely, unlike most defensive walls, these lie at the bottom of a slope instead of at the top (?). Presumably if they were also designed by Petr Vok, then this was during one of his pissed-out-of-his-skull days (Petr Vok, incidentally, also had a passion for alchemy and apparently hosted Edward Kelly and John Dee here after mad Rudolf II kicked them out of Prague). The slope which overlooks the wall is actually a protective dyke, separating the town from the huge Svet pond to the south. From the road at the top, looking south, you could almost be in Finland: water stretches into the distance, flanked by flat land covered in trees. Except that it's all on a much smaller scale than Finland.

We walk south around the pond, for about a kilometre, into the wooded park which faces back across the water to the town. At the centre of this park is the small, neo-Gothic, octagonal and ornate Schwarzenberg Tomb: it's very pretty, and the setting is wonderfully understated, but since it only dates from the mid-1850s you feel it can't have all that many Schwarzenbergs inside. In fact, it begs another question - if it's now owned by the state, then do the Schwarzenbergs still get to be laid to rest here? Even if only to fill up the empty spaces?
We walk slowly back into town (slowly, because I'm suffering a bit) past rows and rows of little fish nurseries (those will be the cause of Trebon's ubiquitous fishy smell) and re-enter through the south gate at the brewery (pivovar). The brewery has a large and cheap beerhall, but doesn't serve food, so we move on.

Pressing north through the well-preserved Svinenska Gate we reach another "square" (wide street): Zizkovo nam, which opens onto and runs perpendicular to Masarykovo nam. Down the excessively twee and pretty Rozmberska we find a nice hotel/restaurant (Myslivna) which serves us a bowl of good garlic soup, chips and (70g of) tartare sauce for Milla - all for 42 crowns (80p). We also have a couple of glasses of Regent beer, which turns out to be pretty good. The only downside of the place is the decor of stags' skulls, which puts Milla off a bit (until the tartare sauce arrives).

By this time the light is failing, as is the battery in my camera, so we head back through the palace and the park (with roaming peacocks) to the "bus station". We only have to wait ten minutes, and then it's back on a bus to Ceske B, where we change onto our regular 18.15 express service to Cesky K.
Trebon didn't really have any jaw-dropping buildings, but it was very pretty and historic and a good place to potter away an afternoon, so it gets 2/10.

More optimistically, these few days of travelling haven't actually killed me, so it looks as if we're capable of moving on again, after a month in Cesky Krumlov. We just have to find a route . . . and pack.

The weekend has more to do with leaving Cesky Krumlov than being in Cesky Krumlov.
The hostel laundry is operational again, after being out of action for the work downstairs: despite the total convenience of getting all our clothes washed and dried with no effort, Milla is still unimpressed that everything doesn't come out perfect. Also on the clothes front, we need to get my new trousers taken up. There's a bizarre Czech fashion, which we've seen in Prague and in Cesky K, whereby guys wear their jeans halfway between their bum and their knees. They presumably think it makes them look cool, but actually it makes them look retarded (especially when they're trying to move at speed, or climb aboard buses or trams). Hopefully it won't catch on - it certainly won't with me. My requirements are much simpler - a pair of trousers which reaches to the bottom of my legs and no further. Kaca and Milla locate and plug in the sewing machine, but after half an hour of false starts and using lots of thread they are really no further forward than "plugged in". Blanka comes round later and does a brilliant job in about 3 minutes.
Amusingly, the Belgian girls are trying to sleep early this weekend and keep sticking their heads out the room asking people in the kitchen to be quieter - ah well.

On Sunday we fall out in the morning and go out separately - I get train and bus information and walk along the river; Milla looks at the impressive castle paintwork through binoculars, buys a ring, and gets bitten by the ducks she's trying to feed. That makes Cesky Krumlov the only place I know of where anyone's been bitten by a duck.

After making up, we go out together and buy a pair of ear-rings to match Milla's new ring, and then take a long walk right around the castle gardens. The walled garden is closed for winter, though Blanka, Paul and Oskar have climbed in recently (while I was in hospital) - extending for ages (a kilometre, perhaps) into the hills, the gardens are flat, so the height of the surrounding wall varies considerably. From round the back, the wall at places is little more than a metre high, so you can see in to the lake and trees and paths and hedges, etc. We didn't bring the camera, but may come back this way once we're packed.

We finish off the weekend with coffee, internet, alcohol and discussion about the route back. We have several options back to Budapest (we're sitting on open tickets for Budapest-Bucharest):
1.) The Great North Circle of Plzen-Karlovy Vary-Dresden-Berlin-Wroclaw-Krakow-Kosice-Eger-Budapest. This is effectively resuming my/our original plan.
2.) The Quick Straight Route of Telc-Brno-Bratislava-Budapest. Although quick, this is dull (we've only heard bad things of Brno, and have seen Bratislava).
3.) The Great South Circle of Salzburg-Graz-Ljubljana-Pula-Zagreb-Pecs-Budapest. This sounds good to me, but Milla refuses to visit either Slovenia or Croatia unless she has a bomb.
We eventually compromise on Salzburg-Vienna-Gyor-Budapest, which should be quite quick but interesting (even though we've both seen Vienna before).