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Czech Republic Continues

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Page 4

Day 7 - Cesky Krumlov to Pisek

A taxi picked us and the bikes up and took us about 20k north to a town called Holasovice. This is a beautiful little town built around a big sort of village green, which was unusual for that area. The facades of the houses were each painted a different bright color, pinks and greens and blues, and with different kinds of white decorative motifs all around the edges.

Hlobka Nad Vlatou
Hluboka from a distance
We set off from Holasovice through a series of small towns interspersed with fields and orchards. Our first destination that morning was a town/castle named Hluboka nad Vltavou. The castle was regally situated atop a huge hill and could be seen from miles away as the surrounding countryside was pretty flat. The town below the castle was charming as well.

Hluboka Nad Vltavou
Twin of Windsor
Hluboka Nad Vltavou Hluboka Nad Vltavou
Interior Courtyard
Interesting Door Knocker
We walked around the castle grounds and the interior courtyards, but I was too hot and bothered to go for the full tour. We thought the castle looked a bit familiar, and then we learned from our guidebook that 19th Century renovations had remodeled it to look like Windsor Castle!

Midday now and roasting hot. Most of the rest of the day was fairly uneventful. What we remembered most was the heat, which was totally draining. It was approaching 40 degrees (celcius). We stopped for lunch in a town called Protovin, which seemed mostly closed up as it was a Sunday, and anyway we were too hot to eat anything.

Pisek
Pisek
We finally pulled into Pisek (which was signed as being "twinned with Caerphilly", an obscure town in Wales!), which is a fairly big town, one of the biggest we'd been in on the bike trip, and I swear you would have thought the neutron bomb had hit the place. There wasn't a soul out on the street. I suppose this was due to a combination of the heat (mad dogs and Englishmen….) and the fact that it was the middle of the big holiday weekend, so many people may have actually been away. Anyway, it was eerie.

Our hotel, the "City Hotel" in Pisek, was on one of the main squares, and we pulled up in front, left our bikes on the bike rack and went to check in. The receptionist was a bored looking floozy who was sitting and chatting with a friend in the gloriously air conditioned reception lounge. They were the first people we saw in the whole town.

After a beer in the hotel's relatively cool and quiet foliage-filled back garden we went for a stroll around the town. It was finally dark, and cooling off ever so slightly. And there were people out walking around, so we felt better. We were promptly way-laid by the famous Pisek talking maps. These giant maps were located at various spots around the town, and had all sorts of buttons and lights on them; all the references were in Czech, so we had no idea what we were looking at. We pressed the button for the castle (since we knew the word "hrad") on one of them, hoping it would light up the location of said castle. Not only did the map light up the location, but it also started talking, giving a long speech about what we could only assume was the castle because it was in Czech.
Pisek
On the Bridge - Pisek
It went on and on and on - for a full two or three minutes. And it was loud, which was particularly noticeable in the silence of the practically empty streets. It was just hilarious. We then proceded to sneak up on the other maps, pressing a button and running away, listening to the thing drone on and on in the darkness about --- who knows? And we finally located the castle, walked around it and along the river and onto the town's most important landmark, a bridge that's been there since the 13th century.

Day 8 - Pisek to Orlik and on to Prague

Speaker
Inspirational
Speaker
The last day, or really half day, of cycling. It was another scorching day, so we decided to leave as early as we could (9 was the best we could do) to try to get the cycling done in the cooler morning hours. Most of the riding that day was through farm lands and small villages, with a few short but very steep hills. We passed a number of former collective farms, and the loudspeaker system that had been used to make Communist-inspired announcements was still physically in place, although whether the audio was still functioning was unknown.

Our destination for the day was a castle called Orlik nad Vltavou. We arrived there around noon, fortunately not melted. The castle itself was quite an impressive structure, situated on a promontory overlooking a huge lake. What we learned later was that the original site of the castle was even more impressive. It had been on that same promontory overlooking a huge and beautiful valley of villages and farmlands from way on high. But the Communists decided they needed a source of electric power more than they needed a beautiful valley, and so a dam was built and said valley was flooded. Too bad, although the lake is also quite beautiful.

We had time to kill, so we decided to take a tour of the castle. At least it would be cool inside, as those castles always are. We signed up for the English language tour and we ended up being the only two on it with a guide who was happy to practice her English (and asked us to correct her mistakes).

Orlik
Orlik Castle
You had to take your shoes off in the entrance foyer of the castle and don a pair of felt slippers so as to not scratch their beautifully restored wood parquet floors. For the most part it was just another castle - lots of rooms of furniture brought back from trips to Italy and China and such, and lots of carved wood things, especially ceilings.
Orlik
Orlik Castle
The castle was used by the family to conduct large hunting expeditions, so there were over 1000 heads of deer and other creatures mounted on the wall, each on a plaque bearing the name of the hunter who killed it and the date it was killed. A bit gruesome. Then there was the huge collections of firearms, some of which were quite beautiful - there were probably close to 500 rifles. Some of them had intricately carved handles of silver and others were inlaid with mother of pearl. Some had the initials of their owners carved into them. It was a fascinating collection. The whole tour was very interesting, and we learned a lot of the history of the region.

By the time we were done with the tour our taxi driver was waiting with our luggage to take us and the bikes on to Prague.


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