In my haphazard mental map, the Czechs have wandered about the continent. In Mozart’s time they were at the heart of Europe. In the 1970s I vaguely believed they were in Eastern Europe. During the 1990s I thought them transported to Western Europe. And through the 2000s, I understood them as resettling back at the heart of the EU. All without actually moving a centimetre.
My images of the country were similarly approximate. The split with Slovakia in the 1990s: a mystery to me then, but a blindingly obvious outcome to me now (‘Czechoslovakia’ was a 1920s fudge, not some ancient unity). Historic squares. Ice hockey. Castles. Lugubrious atonal guitar sonatas. Sentences with no vowels. Cartoon moles. Commonly-used letters of the alphabet whose shortcut on a standard Windows keyboard is [ALT]+0345. (No wonder Brno gets written about in preference to Kroměříž.)
All appealing. But also, most enticingly, the world’s best quality/price ratio for beer (€2 or so for 50cl in a bar). So I couldn’t resist cycling the place End to End, west to east, with my chum Nigel. And we started today in Cheb, near the westernmost point on the border with Germany.
Last night we were in Nuremberg’s historic town centre – insert your own joke about rallies and noisy racing cars here – and this morning took the train to Schirnding, near the Czech border.
Where once there was an Iron Curtain and shoot-on-sight guards, there’s now a bike path and simple sign saying ‘Česká Republika’. The worst that’s likely to happen to you nowadays at the border is not assassination by fearful young military with hair-trigger rifles. It’s your camera falling off Nigel’s Brompton when you try to use it as a tripod for a selfie.
The first thing I see entering a new country on an End to End often tells me something important. In Belgium it was a chocolatier; in Denmark, a sex shop. In Czechia, anyway, it was a war memorial. Next to which was a casino.
The short day’s ride was almost all on excellent quality bike paths: flattish alongside the River Ohre, wide, smooth, and car-free. It was also sunny and hot: suncream and hat weather.
The first town we got to, Cheb, proved a good, friendly place to stop for a snack lunch in the pleasant shopping centre and historic square. A local bike shop provided me with new brake blocks, too: my bike’s were worn down, grubby, and not very good at knowing how to stop. Rather like me.
At Loket we passed a rather splendid castle, dominating a headland overlooking a 355-degree river bend.
Really we should have stopped for an ice-cream, if only so I could demonstrate my impeccable pronunciation of ‘zmrzlina’ – the satisfyingly onomatopoeic Czech word for it.
A little further along, over a bridge, was an area of cabins and huts whose woody cafe provided us with some cold refreshment: a nice chilled Kofola. The sweet, fizzy soft drink was first produced in the 1960s by scientists charged with finding a use for surplus coffee-flavour syrup.
Now it’s Czechia’s (and Slovakia’s) equivalent to Scotland’s Irn-Bru or Peru’s Inka Kola: the plucky local rival to Coke and Pepsi. It tastes every bit as good as you might expect of a substance first produced in the 1960s by scientists charged with finding a use for surplus coffee-flavour syrup.
More lovely riverside paths took us in to Karlovy Vary, one of Czechia’s swishest spa towns. It’s very well-touristed, possibly because its name can easily be entered on a standard Windows keyboard. The well-scrubbed buildings and well-scrubbed visitors strolling the grand streets give it a slightly strange, staged, filmset air: apparently it’s regarded as quite ‘Russian’ in many ways. Shades of touristy Jūrmala in Latvia, which I rode through last year, perhaps. Whatever, there are a lot of upscale brand emporia here, as well as one of a chain that sells, er, only rubber ducks.
Anyway, I very much enjoyed having a swim and a sauna in our hotel. Nigel and I then strolled out for a tourist-price dinner of fried carp chunks washed down with some Bernardus beers in a Goethe-themed restaurant (the polymath poet was a famous resident of the city).
Goethe wrote Faust, of course, in which a man makes a terrible deal. Which did rather make me ponder on how much my fish dinner and three drinks had cost.
Still, a very very good day, and a delightful start to our Czechia traverse.
Miles today: 45
Miles since Cheb: 45