The Czechs have wandered about the continent during my lifetime. When I grew up they were in Eastern Europe. After the fall of Communism they were transported to Western Europe. Now, as Czechia, they have resettled in the heart of the EU. All without actually moving a centimetre.
The country’s vibrant intellectual and artistic tradition saw it have a playwright as President – Václav Havel, through the eventful 1990s when the Czechs split (peacefully) with Slovakia.
Add a fine collection of historic town centres, picturesque castles, and top place in the world’s quality/price ratio for beer (€2 or so for 50cl in a bar) and I couldn’t resist cycling the place End to End, west to east, with my chum Nigel. 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.
More lovely riverside paths took us in to Karlovy Vary, one of Czechia’s swishest spa towns. 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