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Tour date: 1-17 June 2005. Total distance: 1400 km.

Bicycle Tour: Eastern Europe (Italy - Slovenia - Croatia - Hungary - Slovakia - Austria - Czech Republic)

Thomas Driemeyer
2005-10-16 14:37:51

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still early so we continued to Prague. We were less successful finding quiet side roads here, and spent some 15km on busy city streets. The terrain is almost level after Ricany, and not very scenic anymore. I think it would have been a better plan to enter Prague from the south, not from the east.

In Prague we first went to the main train station. The middle floor contains lots of hotel reservation offices, and we found a hotel fairly quickly, for half of what we paid in Vienna, just 100 euro for a triple per night. There are also hostels and hotels in more remote parts of Prague. We also bought our tickets back to Berlin. Long lines have cost us almost two hours here. I expected more problems finding a hotel.

Now Prague is a city that can compete with Paris and Vienna. It has a large beautiful old town, almost unmarred by modern additions. I had been here before, in communist times, and it was beautiful with a morbid charme. That time we arrived so late at night that hotel hunting was hopeless, so we had just rolled out our sleeping bags in the park. It promptly got closed off by police at four o'clock in the morning, and since our crime was so severe they didn't have a ticket for it and so gave each of us ten of their biggest ones. It came out to something like 1.50 Euros. I still have the tickets. Looking back, a fun experience...

In those years, just outside downtown, the roofs had holes, windows were missing, and everything looked ready to collapse. No more. Almost everything has been beautifully restored, and there are cafes and shops everywhere. Even on a Wednesday night the streets were packed with people, although most of them were probably tourists. Unfortunately there was also more traffic.

We stayed at the Andante Hotel, which is not very remarkable but friendy, helpful with the bicycles, and just one block from Wenceslas Square (Wenzelsplatz), which is Prague's Champs Elysees. Actually it's more a long and wide boulevard than a square. When we stayed there, the hotel had free WLAN access. They even packed us box breakfasts when we left two days later, very early in the morning.

We basically spent all of the following day walking about town, with special attention to the Hradschin. That's the walled castle district of Prague. It's on the other side of the Vltava river (German: Moldau), reachable through Karlsbridge, a large pedestrian bridge lined with 30 statues. We walked back across the next bridge, through Prague's new town. ("New" is relative, it dates back to the mid-fourteenth century.) At the other end of the new town, it becomes apparent that not all buildings are beautiful or renovated, and that there are communist legacies here too. But cleaning up all of downtown as they did in the past 15 years is an astonishing achievement.

In the evening, we relaxed in the park to the northeast of downtown on the other side of the Danube. It's on a hill and allows a wonderful view of the city.