The idea of the Czech Republic having canals came as a bit of a surprise. It’s like finding cricket pitches in Denmark, or pork pie shops in Bangladesh. But I cycled along a Czech canal today, as part of my latest research trip updating the Bradt Guide to the Czech Republic.
I was in Klatovy, a pleasant and friendly town about 130km southwest of Prague. It’s quietly on the domestic tourism circuit thanks to two attractions, one bizarre, and the other even more bizarre.
The bizarre one is the Baroque Pharmacy, a chemist’s shop unchanged since the era of alchemy, exorcism and leeches. It still has twisty-pillared shelffulls of exotically labelled potions, like a Boots run by Dumbledore. And leeches.
The even more bizarre one is the Catacombs under the church in the main square. As so often in the country, you can go underground into vaults and cellars and labyrinths. Usually these have old storehouses used by market traders for wine, fruit and veg. These, however, are for mummies. Yes, real local people, air-dried and preserved from three centuries ago, when grave space was even rarer than a vegetarian Czech, and they had to stack local bodies down here instead. It’s a spooky place but, as ever over here, the museum is very well done, with respect and insight.
More positively, Klatovy is also a gateway to the Šumava Hills, sparsely-populated uplands on the German border. I took a bus to the Šumava village of Srní, to find the exhilarating sight of hundreds of leisure cyclists limbering up for their day ride by having beer and dumplings at a kiosk. (To be fair, non-alc beer was the choice of many.)
There are many well-signed cycle routes round here, sometimes good gravel forest paths, sometimes quiet tarmac lanes or car-free paths. The Czechs like their outdoor stuff.
I was keen to follow a canal I could see on my map – the map being that of Mapy.com, a Czech mapping app that is superb for working out cycling (and walking) routes.
The watercourse in question is the Vchynítsko-tetovský plavební kanál, which is pronounced as it’s spelt. This was never a route for narrowboats or barges, but a slender and winding channel for floating logs from the forests down to the sawmills way below.
I spent a happy couple hours following the pink cycle-route lines on Mapy.com and crunching along forest tracks on my folder. Sometimes I was dodging the families on hire MTBs, other times I had a side-track through the woods all to myself.
For a small village, Srní is well-equipped with essentials such as restaurants, pubs, hotels and wolf-viewing platforms. Its Co-op however proved more difficult to access than GCHQ’s server room. You can only use the supermarket if you have the Co-op app registered to a Czech phone number, which isn’t much help if you’re a Brit desperate for a can of fizzy pop and a sandwich. I had to make do with the petrol station down the road.
The whole Šumava Hills area is great to explore, and well-connected by public transport. Some of the buses even take bikes, carted behind the vehicle on a fearsome-looking rack. No wonder it’s so popular with Czechs who love outdoors stuff, in other words, Czechs. And with guidebook updaters who have a folding bike with them.
