Lacrustine days (hiding from the heat wave)

We spent 10 days camping beside Lake Lipno, situated in the wooded hills in the southwest corner of Bohemia, a few kilometres from Austria and Bavaria. I can't recall ever having stayed in one location for that length of time previously. It is a lovely, peaceful spot, but that's not really why we stayed so long. 

The Met Office 'Ten Day Trend' - their in-depth medium range forecast that they put out on YouTube every Tuesday afternoon - predicted the day we arrived in Pilsen that a severe heat wave would develop centred on the borders of France and Germany with temperatures forecast to reach the low forties. The UK on it's western fringe and the Czech Republic to the east were expected to heat up too, but a few degrees cooler than in the Rhine valley. The forecast has been spot on, however the hottest air is now beginning to spread eastwards.

 We figured the area around Lake Lipno would be cooler because it's wooded, near water and a couple of hundred metres higher than the Vitava valley around Prague and Ceske Krumlov.

Under blue skies and in perfectly calm weather it is very beautiful here, dreamlike almost, the lake like a constantly changing mirror. Magritte clouds at midday...

... long magical twilights in the days leading up to the solstice.

The hottest it got was the upper thirties, we carry big cotton throws that we can hang from the awning to create shade.

During the hottest part of of the the only thing you can do is huddle in the shadows.

Nights were more challenging, a couple of them hovered around the low twenties making for an uncomfortable snooze. Mostly though the temperature dropped towards the mid-teens - staying beside a lake in wooded hill country was a good move, I think.

We weren't rendered entirely comatose. In the morning and the evening I managed to get out on my paddleboard. The conditions were perfect. 

The best moment came on our final evening when two swifts decided it would be fun to buzz the paddleboarder, swooping low, almost touching the mirror-still water a couple of metres in front of me.

We split our time between two campsites 

Camping Olšina

We stayed here four nights, then decided we needed a change of view and moved to a different site. Then we concluded that Camping Olšina was one of the loveliest sites we've stayed on so we went back to spend our final three nights in the Czech Republic there.

It's difficult to say just why we loved the place. It's a simple no frills lakeside site. It seems to be family run, the staff were attentive without being intrusive, the facilities simple, but clean and well maintained. 

As well as paddling about and swimming in the lake you can cycle along a track by the shore to the nearby village of Černá v Pošumaví. There's little to see, but it had a café and the coffee cherry and chocolate cake were excellent. 

From here there's a dedicated cycle way across the dam but after then the waymarked route follows minor roads, the temperature was edging up into the low thirties, we decided to head back.

Though it's called Lake Lipno, as the dam indicates it's actually a very big reservoir. Work on the dam began in 1952; it was the first major public infrastructure project undertaken by the recently established communist government and it included hydro-electric power generation as well as water storage. The woods that surround the lake are partially natural - a beautiful mix of broad leafed trees, and pines; the latter, I suspect, were planted for timber.

Camping Lipno Modřín

The second site we stayed on was at the southeast end of the lake near the main dam. It was a bigger and more organised place than Camping Olšina with chalets and Yurts as well as pitches. It specialised in accommodating groups of teenagers and provided outdoor activities for them - mountain biking, water sports and volleyball. Generally Czech teenagers looked very sporty and seemed amazingly sensible, easy going and confident. Though the place never got rowdy it was vibrant and busy. After three days we missed the tranquility of the previous.

The nearby village of Lipno nad Vltavou is a purpose built winter sports centre. The small harbour is lined with purpose built holiday apartments with a ski chalet vibe. The hills behind the place are marked out with toboggan runs and cross& country ski runs. 

There is clearly an attempt to make the place more of an all year resort with a lake steamer service in the summer season and what looks like a recently built marina. The toboggan runs now are repurposed as scooter tracks and a big wooden tower had been built with treetop walkways as a visitor attraction. 

The bike track running along the lake shore from here to Frymburk was more our thing. It's was metalled the whole way and mostly level. 

Much of the 7km track runs through broad leafed woodlands, very beautiful, but the roots bulging through the tarmac created unexpected hazards, particularly in the more shaded sections. Wearing sunglasses made this worse.

Frymburk is an attractive lakeside village, it obviously predates the creation of the reservoir and is more low key than the purpose built resort of Lipno nad Vltavou.

Picnic spots have been created along the way. The one nearest Frymburk had an information board with a picture of the lake in winter. It was frozen solid and featured a skate track. A truck was parked on it so the ice must have been very thick. Standing there with temperatures in the mid thirties this seemed unimaginable.

After three days we felt we had exhausted the delights of this part of the lake. The resort aspect of Lipno nad Vltavou was not to our taste and the campsite was less shaded than the previous one, not good with the forecast predicting temperatures reaching the high thirties.

We decided to head for another campsite by the lake a kilometre or so from the town of Horni Plana. When we got there it looked crowded and the pitches unshaded. So we doubled back and booked for three more days in Camping Olšina. The guy on reception was very pleased that we preferred his site to the others around the lake. He should be proud of the site, the staff are very attentive, the facilities are spotless and the pitches well tended, without destroying the place's 'lost in nature' ambience. 

It joins the shortlist of special places we have stayed, maybe a dozen or so of them out of the hundreds of sites and aires we have used over the past 12 years.

Ceske Krumlov - histories, real and imagined

Kutna Hora would be our furthest point from home, next we headed south west towards Ceske Krumlov, close to the border with Austria and Bavaria. There was no direct route, getting there involved zig-zagging about using a mixture of motorways and main roads through small towns and villages. Away from major urban centres the Czech Republic feels sparsely populated and the roads are quiet. It's only when you drive in less populated places, like rural Czechia or the byways of Extramadura or Arizona that you twig just how crowded the UK's roads are and realise driving at home is rarely relaxed or pleasurable.

Ceske Krumlov is one of the most visited towns in the Czech Republic, famously picturesque, a tourist trap really. The upside of this is that it has a municipally run Aire situated next to the tour bus park. 

The medieval core of the place is perfectly preserved, a red roofed village almost encircled by a looping meander of the Vitava, the same river that flows through Prague. 

Here, however, it has narrowed, shallower and faster flowing. Rafting is a popular activity.

 We stopped for a coffee and cake at a cafe with a riverside terrace.

Next we headed to the old market square. A big stage was being constructed. "What's happening?" I asked my new know-all companion. Chatgpt duly replied -

Five-Petalled Rose Festival (June) – The town's signature event. For one weekend near the summer solstice, the historic centre transforms into a Renaissance town with costumed parades, jousting tournaments, medieval markets, music, theatre, fireworks, and hundreds of locals in period dress. 

Even outside of highdays and holidays most shops that aren't cafes seem to be hawking medieval themed knicknacks and the buildings not given over to Airbnbs, catering, or gift shops repurposed as museums. 

It's undeniable that Ceske Krumlov's location is spectacular, the way it is almost encircled by the meandering river and overlooked by the palatial looking castle on the craggy outcrop above the town. 

However I found it dispiriting, its ancient centre more like a theme park than a functioning town.

The modern town, about a kilometre to the north, looks bland and unremarkable, England too has many historic towns besieged by workaday outskirts where the people actually live and work. In this regard we happened across a slightly startling and very familiar parallel, Ceske Krumlov has an excellent Tesco's superstore. It's the only overt British influence we encountered in our visit Czech Republic.

The store was identical in every way to a Tesco's at home - down to the layout, in-store graphics and club card points, apart from the fact that every label and every sign was equally incomprehensible. 

We couldn't even work out which mineral waters were still, which were very fizzy and which only slightly so. 

One big difference - 'every little helps' was not emblazoned on the front of the store. Maybe the genius phrase, which manages to encapsulate a core characteristic of Britishness in three simple words, doesn't resonate quite so much in Czech - Každá maličkost pomáhá -  so Google Translate informed me. 

Back at the van I looked into the history of Ceske Krumlov in a little more detail and began to wonder if the preoccupation with showcasing the medieval period stemmed from a reluctance to confront the more awkward issues surrounding the place's more recent history. It's fair to say that my grasp of the history of central and eastern Europe is somewhat sketchy. I do remember covering the Sudetenland crisis of 1938 in O level history but never appreciated that the German speaking areas of Bohemia had histories stretching back hundreds of years.  

Moreover, at the end of WW2 the allied powers - Britain, America and Russia - were complicit in the forced 're-settlement' into Germany of 2.9 million German speaking Czech citizens - almost 20% of the country's population. It was not achieved peacefully - it is thought that up to 200,000 people died. I began to perceived Ceske Krumlov not as a theme park, but a ghost town.

However, these issues are not straightforward. When we visited Kutna Hora a couple of days ago I noticed clusters of small ceramic plaques embedded into the cobbled pavements. They recorded a name and two dates. They were all Jewish residents and the dates recorded day they were born and when they were rounded up and transported to a concentration camp in Germany. One plaque was particularly heartbreaking, it commemorated a girl born in 1935 and transported in 1942, aged seven.

We are both fortunate to have lived most of our adult lives in a largely peaceful country during times when there was a concerted effort to bring Europe together, economically, culturally and politically. Sadly it is becoming ever clearer that such progress not a given, nationalism in Europe is on the rise and the USA is edging towards oligarchy and autocracy. 

We crossed the Channel on the 82nd anniversary of D-day, then drove east following the valley of the Somme along roads lined with military cemeteries. It's important that this is commemorated, but sadly this tends to be done along national lines - separate British, American, and Canadian cemeteries, very few German ones and virtually no collective recognition of the scale of civilian casualties. However the extent of the human disaster that engulfed Europe during the mid-twentieth century can only be truly appreciated if you consider the  total casualties. So far as military losses are concerned seventeen million deaths between 1939 and 1945 is the most common estimate. Civilian deaths are even higher, it is estimated that between 35 - 40 million non-combatants died and that during WW2 between 40 - 60 million people were displaced.

In this context the creation of the European Union seems almost miraculous and it's motto - “United in diversity” - brave, hopeful and aspirational. It has been great to be here with Matthew, Kristyna and Jesse - a truly European family. Equally, thinking about Europe's violent and bloodstained past is sobering. Collectively European nations really do need to make some savvy electoral choices in the next few years. Take heed of what has happened in America and don't listen to the voices of nationalism intent on rolling back the progress we have made towards a more peaceful Europe. I knew visiting the Czech Republic would be interesting, visiting a new place is always thought provoking, but it has also helped me perceive the history of our continent from a different point of view, realising that European history viewed from an island on it's western fringes is both figuratively and literally an insular perspective.  Habitually we have looked on from the sidelines, intervening now and then, but regarding 'the continent' as elsewhere, nearby foreign territory that somehow we are not part of. It's an odd notion, 22 miles of shallow water is not an ocean, it's swimmable!

 

Kutna Hora

I can't remember when the idea of meeting up with Matthew and Kristyna in Prague was first mooted, or whose idea it was. Arrangements must have been firmed-up up by late April because we booked our ferry crossing on the 24th, two days before we flew to the Far East. We agreed that we would all meet in Karlstejn, Matthew and Kristyna staying in a chalet in Krystyna's Mum's garden and we would book into a campsite nearby. Prague was only a 40 minute train ride away so it all made sense.

However, we agreed that it might be nice to explore somewhere else in the Czech countryside. Matthew came up with two suggestions. A couple of years ago he attended a film festival in Karlovy Vary, a spa town north west of Prague, he remembered it as an attractive town with nice cafés. The route home would take through Saxony and Thuringia, new territory for us, but in all honesty not places we had any particular desire to visit.

His other suggestion was a little more left field. He wondered about visiting Kutna Hora, an ancient town about 100kms east of Prague. Matthew likes historically based computer strategy games. Kutna Hora featured in a recent favourite, 'Kingdom Come, Deliverance II, where as fifteenth century peasant, you are tasked with making your way in life, challenged by the machinations of late medieval Bohemian politics and the ever present hazards of plague and famine or being denounced as a heretic. 

We went for this option, partly because it was the quirkiest, but also it meant we would leave the Czech Republic by a southerly route that skirted the Austrian border and took us back home through Bavaria. Lake Lipno in southern Bohemia has a clutch of campsites around it, some bike tracks around the shoreline and many of opportunities for me to fall off my paddleboard. We had a plan!

We stayed at Camping St Barbara on the outskirts of the town; it's about a 10 minute walk into the centre. The Search for Sites app had pre-warned us of the somewhat convoluted entry system. On arrival you are faced with a solid steel security gate with a big yellow sign on it giving a mobile number.

Thankfully the person who answered it spoke English, and gave us the entry code, explaining they would call around at 8.30am the following morning to collect the fee - they accepted euros or Czech krona. At €40 per night it's one of the more expensive places we have stayed in Europe.

It's an attractive small site, a little idiosyncratic, but the pitches are a decent size and hedged to give privacy.  

Trees are dotted about here and there to give shade and in the middle there's a communal firepit encircled by stone benches. The place feels like a big garden, which I suspect it was originally. 

You needed a token for a shower, which seemed a bit steep given the price of the place. Obtaining the token involves a trip down memory lane. Attached to the wall next to the shower block is a small, vending machine, familiar, I suspect, only to people aged over sixty. I am struggling to describe it exactly - I wish I'd taken a photograph - the best phrase I can come up with is 'vintage gob-stopper auto-vendor'. About 40cm high, with red metal top and a glass box below, back in the day the machine would have been packed full of garish coloured gob-stoppers,. When you placed an old penny in the slot on the top of the grey metal knob on the front, and twisted it anti-clockwise, in went the penny and out popped a giant globular gob-stopper from a shute below covered with a handsomely engraved silver coloured flap. Suddenly I had become the seven year old me! Repurposed in rural Czechia the contraption worked identically, though the coin was now a 20kr piece and what popped out was a zinc shower token contained within a clear plastic sphere. 

Gill showered first and was happy to give a debrief afterwards. Yes the token worked once you figured out how to open the plastic sphere with wet fingers. The slot on the shower was above her eye level, so for anyone shorter than 1.7m proved a challenge as the grooved token can only be inserted one way. The water was warmish eventually and lasted just about long enough for a hair wash. When the flow pulsed the water is about to stop...and the thing that looks like a birdbox on the wall next to the shower entrance is a receptacle for your spent plastic token holders.... Really, taking a shower should not be this intricate!

Though Camping Saint Barbara is somewhat idiosyncratic it is worthwhile putting up with its peculiarities because Kutna Hora itself is a truly delightful place to visit.

 

There had been a Celtic settlement here in the first century BCE, but it was in the late thirteenth century that the town grew in importance when its silver mines developed. Fifty years later Kutna Hora had developed into the second most significant place in Bohemia after Prague when the royal mint was established in the town.

It's significance as a financial centre waned during the seventeenth century as the mines became unviable. However, the town continued to flourish as a seat of ecclesiastical learning with the growth of a significant Jesuit college. 

By the nineteenth century Kutna Hora had become something of a provincial backwater and because of this there was little development. Consequently the town retained a magnificent collection of buildings ranging from the medieval period to the early modern Not just signature buildings but entire streets and squares that are historically significant, including rare examples of seventeenth century houses decorated with murals featuring scenes everyday life. 

It was about a fifteen minute walk from the campsite to the historic centre. We headed for a spot on Google maps marked 'gothic fountain' which we figured must be in the ancient bit. 

It was, but the streets around it were a bit of a maze and it was difficult to find the centre of the old town. I had spotted a tall church tower and decided that it may be in the central square. It wasn't, but in the process of not finding it we did stumble upon the market place.

The square is lined with substantial houses from the Renaissance and early modern eras. The best example of a painted facade is located here, the mansion of a former mayor Google informed us dating from the middle of the seventeenth century.

Wandering further we happened upon the church with the tall tower which we had spotted in the distance. The church of St James is situated next to the 'Italian Court' - site of the ancient mint. 

The area attracts two kinds of tourist. People with a keen interest in the heyday of the kingdom of Bohemia and gamers. The church of St James features in 'Kingdom Come, Deliverance II' depicted with a wooden crane on its roof as almost complete in the early 1400s, the era featured in the game.

Matthew Whatsapped us to say that they had settled into their hotel and wondered about finding somewhere to eat in the early evening. Gill checked her phone and found 'Restaurace V Ruthardce' nearby, the place had good reviews and a menu that included lighter dishes as well the more robust, meaty offerings usually found on a traditional Czech menu. I can't recall what we all chose, but everyone found something to their liking. 

The only photo I took was of my beer illustrating how Czech drinkers appreciate a big foaming head. Something back home which would be interpreted as being seriously short-changed!

Kutna Hora is a hilly town, but not a classic medieval hill-town with a castle at the top with a walled city beneath it. Here the old town meanders along the contours of a steep valley. The view from the area around the restaurant illustrated this with a prospect of one of Kutna Hora other famous monuments, the startlingly Gothic St Barbara's Church.

The vaulted roof of St. Barbera's church is very eye catching. In Western Europe the style would probably be described as 'flamboyant', but the same timelines don't really apply here, so I was somewhat flummoxed.

Another striking aspect of Kutna Hora is pastel coloured stuccoed houses.

When I mentioned this to Kristyna she speculated that this may be relatively modern because when she came here as a child many of the buildings were dull concrete coloured. It's a trend we've noticed elsewhere, when we first visited the villages in l'Aude in the early 1990s they were dour looking, twenty years later they'd assumed a Provencal look with dusty pink and ochre toned facade.

Our plan for the following day was to visit the part of the town that we'd admired from afar today - the area in the vicinity of St Barbera's church. 

It is a startling looking building, it looks too perfectly Gothic to be true, almost a pastiche of the style. Matthew and I bought tickets to see the interior.

A section of the gallery had a series of information boards outlining the development of the building. Due to political instability work on the building was intermittent, it took over two centuries to complete the work. During the seventeenth century the unusual vaulted roof was replaced by a more stable conventional ridged design, only to be replaced in the nineteenth century by something approximating to the original. The church was substantially remodelled at this time, so in a sense what we see today is to some extent a pastiche.

There were some interesting frescoes in one of the side chapels. One depicted the town's silver miners acknowledging their contribution to the Kutna Hora's prestige and wealth. Another painting included an African and an 'oriental' figure. Judging by the style they looked to be seventeenth century additions.

By this time Kutna Hora had become an important centre for training Jesuit priests whose missionary work reached out across the globe. One interpretation of the scene is that is an assertion of the church triumphant, reaching out across the continents.

One of the delightful discoveries of the trip has been Czech wine, similar in style to German, but maybe less flowery. The valley next to St Barbara's church is covered in steeply terraced vineyards. A booth sold wine by the glass which you could drink amongst the vines.

The tables and chairs were somewhat precariously positioned, but it was fun, and the wine was excellent.

It had been threatening rain all day and in the early afternoon it started to drizzle. We found a traditional tavern that was still serving food - robust Czech fare - dumplings with everything.  The decor definitely had a medieval vibe, lots of suits of armour and weaponry.

It also had a ball pool, Jesse's first encounter with one. He loved it.

Matthew, Kristyna and Jesse headed back to their hotel, we returned to Camping Gob-stopper. We've had a great time together, on almost all of our motorhome travels it's just been the two of us. However, over the previous two decades we travelled as a family; it's fun experiencing places with children. They always have a unique take on places. A quote from the American poet, Louise Gluck, popped into my feed a couple of days ago, "We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory".