Trekking the Czech Republic - Part 1

Ramadan is well underway, a time for Muslims to remember the less fortunate by fasting from morning till night, then gorging on two or three separate feasts into the wee hours of sultry mornings; the fast is broken by the call to prayer around 7:00pm accompanied by the booming of cannons firing (for more on the Ramadan experience, see earlier blog, but this I have to share: during the half hour before the fast is broken, you’ll hear on average but every night half a dozen tires screeching in the distance. You wait for the thundering boom of metal against metal, but it never comes. As mentioned in earlier blog, folks here fasting are crazed with hunger, strung out with no cigarettes, whatever). There is something communally festive about all of Islam ending the fast together. Last night we heard the cannon and call, then clinked wine glasses. School is underway as well, but a frothy pint’s worth of our souls is till wandering the hallowed cobblestones of Prague’s glorious squares, towering cathedrals, and beer gardens. We spent one month traveling through the Czech Republic. You’ll probably want to hear about our sleeping over stables on a horse ranch outside of Mikulov; floating in the mineral-springs pools in the West Bohemian spa town of Marianske Lazne, backpacking through forests and passing girls wearing bonnets collecting wild mushrooms in baskets; learning about defenestration at Prague Castle (my new favorite word: it means the political act of throwing someone out the window); wandering narrow roads between villages and picking delicious apples and plums right off the tree; being given a personal tour in Brno of the home now museum of the great Czech composer, Janacek, by a lovely woman in a long flowing dress and hoop earrings who’s studied the composer all her life…. Yes, all this and more will I reveal with scintillating wit de rigueur, pausing only to reign in my galloping prose to harness for another day, but there’s an important issue I simply must address forthwith: camping and beer. The Czechs have figured it out. Carrie and I spent our first month of summer vacation in the States, both coasts, had an amazing time, saw wonderful friends and family, and then flew back to Aleppo, stayed two days, lugged our backpacks out of storage, filled them up, took a bus to Damascus and flew to Prague. At our hotel in Prague we spread the map out and traced a general route through the country, at least our first leg of the trip. The Czech Republic (like many countries in Europe) has an amazing and well-marked circuitry of trails. The blue trail, red trail, yellow trail, green trail, crisscrossing and interconnecting and spanning the countryside, through cities, along rivers. You can get anywhere and everywhere either walking or biking. So at the end of one long day hiking some 15-18 kilometers, we stumble into an auto-camp. I don’t think many Czechs backpack much, but many do the citified wilderness thing much like their American counterparts: load up the RV with creature comforts and park on a grassy steppe overlooking a river. A strange way of vacationing: it’s like setting up camp in your backyard. We never saw the mammoth rolling mansion motor homes that bulge and fart their way through America’s heartland to gather at holy sites (what Mecca is to Muslims, Wall Drug is to retired Midwesterners), but Czechs still made the weedy patches their home. RVs now sport front porches. Kids have bikes. Volleyball nets are strung, soccer balls booted about. Young couples sometimes play cards. But if your experience is anything like mine, you know what happens: you drive around looking for a “spot” in this cluttered neighborhood of RVs and trailers, agree on one that’s not in the glare of a bathroom but in proximity to one nevertheless, get even more excited if the spot has a surrounding wall of bushes that gives your spot a “private” feel, one of you gets out the ice chest and dumps it one the picnic table to claim the spot as yours, register with the olive green hat guy in the booth, return to your site and set up the tent, lay out sleeping bags, decide on where exactly the ice chest will be for ready use, if you have camp chairs you unfold them, sit, exhale, look around at the trees towering above, smile as relaxation slowly melts into your soul, and then…well, and then you…. What now? You and spouse decide to “have a look around”, so you wander the circling roads, snickering at latecomers driving cautiously with peering eyes and open mouths at the remaining scrap sites left to forage, then return to your camp chairs no more enlightened about your adventure. Let’s face it: it’s pretty much like sitting in your backyard. You can’t experience the majesty of backpacking in the wilderness (and anyone who’s done it knows those sacred days, so no more needs to be said). The Czechs have a different way of camping. I think they’ve figure out that it never lives up to the hype. So all the auto-camps we stumbled into had beer gardens and restaurants. What do you do after you set up camp? Drink! If you didn’t already know, the Czechs are known for their beer: they drink more per capita than any other country. Furthermore, their beers are damn good, and the beers in the auto-camps were on tap. So imagine our delight after a long day of hiking; we throw down our backpacks, set up the tent, then head for the beer garden to hold a frosty half-liter glass of cold and delicious Pilsner Urquell in trembling hands. I think the Czechs just tossed out the illusion of a “wilderness experience” like a soiled cocktail napkin. Carrie and I were carrying everything we needed for a month away from home on our backs. I suppose we could have dropped an ice chest full of beer into a wagon and dragged that behind us. Instead, at the end of each day we’d read a little, write in our journals, and then join the other campers for a few coldies. And no matter how remote or small the auto-camp was, a restaurant and beer garden/patio stood proudly greeting us as we sweated our way into their open arms…. Prague is a shitstorm. This is how it was described to us by Carrie’s friend, Akemi, who’s traveled. Indeed it was, but what a glorious congestion. All we did was wander and gaze upon the architecture, the culture reverberating beneath the streets, and bless the West that women weren’t covered in burkas. Hail to mortal flesh! To sun dresses hefting proud Slavic bosoms! To men and women just hanging out together! We also worried out loud about how we’d make it through hot Aleppo days without a tall cold pilsner right around one or two o’clock (and one or two at four o’clock, etc.). It’s just what Czechs do here. During a particular long and sweaty trek we came upon the small village of Novy Knin three or four days after we left Prague. All roads led up to the church—that’s how they designed towns back in the day—and we got a hotel room for the night. Next morning waiting for the bus to take us I don’t know where, we saw two elderly women waiting for a café to open. When the doors opened at 10:00, Carrie dropped her backpack to bounce in and get us a couple espressos. She comes back smiling. She told me she saw the two elderly women in the café. One had a latte, the other a tall cold pilsner. This is a Sunday. Which proves what I’ve argued all along: for morning beverages, beer and coffee are interchangeable. But of the trek: it felt good to know we could still load up a backpack and heft it across the countryside for days at a time like we were young. The trail systems simply made use of existing paths, roads, bikepaths. The memories are magical; it seems amazing that we did it. I remember us sitting down to rest on an old log, then turning to find we were surrounded by bushes of wild blueberry. Hiking through forests to come into long green meadows of wildflowers. Crisscrossing streams. Our first day hiking, we left the train station at Revnice and trekked the whole day. I have a picture in my mind of walking a long dirt path through billowing wheat fields, small villages holding on to sloping distant hillsides, late afternoon sun washing over the world, slugging mouthfuls of water while a hawk sails overhead, and thinking: yes, this is the Europe I’ve wanted. That picture in mind, culled from books or films, of a place where life just seems good. We hiked down a steep hill to a small town on the Vltava River. We were tired down to our bones, and it began to rain. The auto-camp on the map was nowhere in sight, so we booked a hotel room, changed out of our sweaty clothes, and—what do you know—ordered beers at the restaurant. After dinner we walked across a bridge and wandered a narrow road. A few small dwellings dotted the hillside. We passed a restaurant that looked empty, then further on came up a broken down looking cinderblock structure with an ancient bicycle parked against it. Weeds raced around the lot. But we thought we heard singing. Carrie and I looked at each other. Should we investigate? It was one of those moments when you felt you’d be better off just moving on. But this whole trip was meant to be an adventure. We agreed: if we don’t check it out, we’ll always regret it. So we ducked our heads in. About ten middle-aged folks were sitting around a table, huge glasses of beer proudly hailing, and two guys with guitars. They waved us in. They were all locals, disheveled looking. One of the men was turning this old barn-like structure into a pub. It was half finished. But this, they told us, is what Czechs do: they gather together in the evenings and sing. So Carrie and I spent the next few hours listening to Czech folk songs, drinking up the endless pilsners supplied by a young teenager (so that’s what teenagers are for), petting the dog ambling between chairs. I offered up Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” which they welcomed with warm applause. We drifted back through the dark, thanking the heavens we chose to intrude.