Days 24-27: Dresden to Prague: scenery and adventures along the Elbe and Vltava

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC – After our long, restorative pause in Potsdam and Berlin, and a strategic train ride to Dresden (that accounts for days 18-23 in case you were wondering), we were itchy to finally get back on our bikes, which we finally did this past Friday evening after a day of practicalities and sightseeing in Dresden.  From the "Florence on the Elbe" we proceeded into "Saxon Switzerland," continuing along our old friend the Elbe Radweg (wouldn't that be a nice name for a child?  I also like how Google translates it as "same bike path.")  This stretch, especially leading out of Dresden, was easily the most heavily trafficked route we have yet encountered (probably in large part because it was a beautiful early-Autumn weekend.)

The scenery, if not too specifically Swiss-seeming (except maybe for the endless impossibly quaint little houses and mini-castles dotting the hillsides), was extremely pretty, and increasingly dramatic especially as we crossed over into Czechia ["Czech Republic" is just so annoying to say], where we very quickly noticed some cultural differences, including a major uptick in the number of rollerbladers (evidently it is huge here), the frequent smell of burning trash, and, as Elsa says, less wholesome clothing (i.e. much less wool and more synthetics.)

These four days of cycling have been long (around 70 km per day after Friday), late (despite our best efforts and intentions, and for various reasons, we've ended up riding past nightfall each night) and increasingly hilly, but they've also been, for me at least, possibly the most fun chunk of the trip yet – it really feels like we're getting into a good groove with the riding, the routes have been lovely and (fingers crossed) the weather remains overwhelmingly pleasant.  I have many many pictures for you, and some stories as we go, but first here are some maps of the route:

Friday, 17/10 – Dresden to Pirna (~29 km)

not sure what those gray dots are about, Google being fritzy, but anyway we rode along the river...

Saturday 18/10 – to Ústí nad Labem (75.5 km)

Sunday 19/10 – to Liběchov vis Litomerice and Terezín (68.8 km)

Monday 20/10 - to Praha (69.5 km)

bye-bye Berlin

hello Dresden!

arriving to Dresden at night – Gothic galore

our Warm Showers hosts,  Jörg and Gesa (and their three children, aged 1, 4 & 6) lived inside this funky artist boutiques-and-apartments complex, the Kunsthofpassage.

this is the view from their bathroom window

giraffes seem to be something of a thing in Europe (?)

rainwater collection system/fountain... their toilet flushed with rainwater

heading into the Altstadt

Catholic church – not the most exciting, but some nice marble 

and this rather unusual Pietá (i think?)

opera house

Frauenkirche

now there is some marble.  pretty gorgeous, though Elsa found it a bit too Miami Beach

the Zwinger palace complex

stone seaweed; kind of unusual

the princes of Saxony, all lined up

leaving Dresden, back to the Radweg...

my camera lost its juice right around this time so I didn't get a good close-up of the ridiculously cool-looking fortress build into these ridiculously cool-looking rocks.  but, you know, it's been photographed a few times before.

(taken with the iPhone)

there is a castle on a cloud...

our ferry in Königsberg

it was a particularly colorful day for Elsa too

from our picnic bench in Bad Schandau

our second successful tire change in two days (following a frantic flat fix at Checkpoint Charlie)

looking back from Bad Schandau

are you bored yet?

more cool rocks

I was taken with this little pink chateau dwarfed by some massive cliffs, close to the Czech border

funky paintings on the radweg, which continued for quite a while

yay Ferdy and Esmé, they made it to Česky!

the paintings continued (and got even funkier) beyond the border

getting into Decin

this is apparently a library; the colorful stripes are "book spines" with the names of Czech authors 

awesome playground; tire-swing/zipline paradise

 this massive barge (you can only see about a third of it) was being pushed along the river (it's called the Labe here), at a pace just slightly slower than ours.  the sunset, which was just starting at this point, was easily the most spectacular one I can remember, and it seemed to go on and on for close to two hours.  some of the pictures maybe make it look even more gorgeous than it actually was (to my mere human eye), but even so it was quite something.

nifty pipe-bridge... that triangular sign indicates a 16% grade, which is interesting because we've definitely encountered some steeper grades here that were not so clearly marked

more pretties

these last few shots (it was really quite dark by this time... I continue to be very impressed with my new camera...) are of Ústí nad Labem (i.e. "Ústí on the Labe" – they seem to reuse town names a lot here so you need to be specific), which felt quite urban as we ducked in to try to get some food / beer / koruna (Cz. is in the EU but not [yet] on the Euro, as we realized perhaps a tad belatedly) before camping for the night 

glad to see Rossmann still representing in this country (the emblem is a rampant centaur – think I should adopt that?) – I also like the use of English.  (Incidentally, possibly the most common English phrase on establishment signs here is "Sports Bar."  They also, like every other country we've been in thus far, seem to have fully adopted the phrase "Second-Hand" for thrift shops.

see what I mean about the giraffes?

After Ústí, where we got a little excited about the very cheap prices at the supermarket we found, we continued on – well after nightfall – toward a campsite we had seen marked on the map, figuring that even if the place was closed we'd at least be able to pitch a tent nearby.  It turned out to be closed and locked, but, apparently, the campsite WiFi was still working, as we encountered a man sitting in his car outside the locked gate, using his laptop.  When we told him our situation he offered to let us camp out in his yard, just a few hundred meters away – which is apparently something he's done for cyclists many times before, usually in the summer, when the campground fills up.

Before we start to set up though, he unlocks his cellar door (the area is prone to flooding so most of the houses are built on a high foundation) and beckons us over to see what he has inside: it turns out to be a five-month old fawn, whom he rescued after its mother was hit by a car and, together with his "woman," has been feeding and keeping in the basement – his plan is to bring her to live on their small farm in Poland.  They feed her apples and grass (the lawn is kept quite long for this reason, though it's unclear whether they allow the deer to graze or just pick grass to bring in for her) and apparently she's very fond of cornflakes.  Of course, they call her Bambi.

a deer in the basement!!  wtf!!

delicious curry - one of our greatest camp cooking triumphs so far – made with lentils and coconut milk from a Dresden natural food store, the quinoa we'd been carrying all the way from Gothenburg, and various vegetables we'd collected along the way.

our beautiful (by morning) camp spot in their yard, right on the river

here are our hosts, Jürgen and Agnieszka.  in the morning they insisted on having us inside for breakfast (including homemade apple jam), where they played us YouTube videos of Jürgen's brothers military brass band, and he showed us photos and regaled us with stories from his career as a paratrooper in the East German army, serving in Afghanistan and Kosovo, and training in Poland, Holland, and elsewhere around Europe.  pretty amazing!

bye-bye Bambi!

it was a suitably grey and gloomy morning as we headed off toward the Holocaust site Terezín 

but there's always time to take a picture of a nice church

the charming town of Litoměřice, just across the river from Terezín, where we learned that free WiFi is very easily had in Czech coffee shops, and that, although their central squares are just as picturesque as those in Germany (often more so, as this country was largely spared the destruction of WWII), they are much more apt to use them as parking lots

some of the highly prevalent work of the town's favorite architect, Octavio Broggio

this church was sadly not open (on a Sunday?) but we got a nice look through the bars

more Broggio Baroquery

And we get to Terezín. This is a really fascinating place.  It is of course best known for its connection to the horrors of the Holocaust, but its history goes farther back and is more complex.  It's essentially an entire town inside of a fortress, which was built under Joseph II as a stronghold on the Austro-Hungarian border with Prussia (during the time of Frederick the Great), but it never saw any military action.  Instead it was a garrison and part of it (the "small fortress," separated from the main body of the town) was used as a prison – among other things, most of the assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 were imprisoned and eventually died here.  

It's right on the border of the Sudetenland, so although it wasn't part of the territory initially annexed under Hitler it started being used as a Nazi military prison the day after they took over the rest of the country.  Then they started using the town as a ghetto, a place to send Jews from all around Czechoslovakia.  It wasn't until a few years later that they forced all non-Jewish residents of the town (a few thousand) to leave, and made it into a full-on concentration camp.  

But it wasn't a mass death camp (although many Jews, Russians and others did get executed in the prison/small fortress – pictured here) – instead it was mostly a "transit camp," where people were sent before being deported to the death camps, in greater or lesser volume depending on the current situation.  In the mean time, the Nazis created a semblance of "self-government" among the Jews living here (who included many of the wealthier and better-educated Jewish families from Germany and elsewhere), and tolerated and even encouraged some degree of "normal" social and cultural life, including education, art, and a daily newsletter (whose content was, of course, completely dictated by the Nazis.)  For instance, there was a lot of music performed and even composed here, including the children's opera Brundibar, which was recently adapted by Tony Kushner.

The Nazis shot several propaganda films here to demonstrate what a nice life they were creating for the Jews here, and later in the war, as the international community (and in particular the Red Cross) was clamoring to be allowed to see inside a concentration camp, they opened Terezín up for several visits – very carefully staged and controlled, of course – which (mind-bogglingly) actually satisfied the Red Cross inspectors that conditions were good.  This "barbershop" in the small fortress/prison complex, was part of the area shown off to the inspectors:

these sample recreated "barracks" for the Jews in the camp don't even look so bad – hey, they have nice clothes! it's kind of like summer camp! – until you realize that they were forced to live here for up five years, and this is probably as good as it got... at the peak of overcrowding people had an average of something like 1.5 square meters apiece.  also there was vastly insufficient food available, rampant disease (especially after the war ended, when evacuees from liberated death camps were sent here – kind of unimaginably – bringing even more overcrowding and typhus epidemics)

outside the small fortress.  not sure why the cross is so much bigger than the mogen david.

it's unclear why this phrase ("work makes you free"), which was usually the lie plastered at the entrance to death camps, was written here in a place that was used as a prison.

site of mass graves for prisoners who were executed nearby

and the tunnel they were marched through before being killed

Eastern entrance to the fortified town.  Aptly, the sun started to shine just as we were leaving.

We had a seemingly excellent sleeping plan for the evening – to stay in the trailer of some friends of an absent Warm Showeree, part of a little off-the-grid community established on a sour cherry plantation just outside the little town of Libechov – so we made the decision to push it and keep biking through the dark.  

This was on the hot chocolate menu at a surprisingly excellent pizzeria in Roudnice nad Labem, our quasi-indulgent dinner stop

a serious fog set in as night fell, to the point that we had probably fewer than ten feet of visibility

illuminated by a passing headlight

eerily, beautifully lit webs at the base of the bridge into Steti

we got to Libechov around 11pm, after a challenging but strangely pleasant and peaceful ride (from my perspective at least), and spent the next hour riding up and down a steep and very rocky dirt road trying to find the location of the trailer based on my careful interpretation of the googlemaps pin our prospective host had sent us.  long story short: the gate was locked and we ended up just pitching our tent in this field, under the stars (the fog finally lifted.)  by daylight it turned out to be a pretty nice spot.

terraced vineyards on the way out of town

the meeting of the Labe (a.k.a. Elbe) and the Vltava (a.k.a. Moldau) from the town of Melnik.  after this point we left the Labe and followed the Vltava (which is actually the bigger river at this point, even though it is treated like a tributary) south – well, windily South – to Prague

see, it even says

a little more of the view from Melnik, since we went to the trouble to pedal all the way up there (mostly in search of a coffee shop)

nice little main square as well

with a street piano!  (sign says: piano is under video surveillance by the metropolitan police." hmm.)

Melnik from below

funky wooden road bridge over the kanal

the Vltava flows quite swiftly in many spots.  here the current was (probably more than) enough to power our ferryman's boat – it's attached to a cable across the river and he just sets the rudder and lets it float across.)

i think he's yelling at me to get off the bench and stop taking pictures

this chateau just popped up in the middle of muddy rural nowhere, with a "no bicycles" sign on the gate

after a long and particularly dramatic ride – including lots of nice riverside paths but also some pretty dodgy cycle routing on a bumpy unpaved forest trail, and a massive uphill (and utterly glorious descent) away from the river at the town of Kralupy – we made it into Prague shortly before nightfall.