Bohemian Bikers and Bones
Having a Scarver (aka BMW F650CS, for any reader outside f650.com) myself, it was a year-old plan of mine to visit the Czech Scarver Meet. Meets at unseen to me places are always interesting, and after having to skip the last one I absolutely had to visit this one. I planned to see beautiful and interesting places on the way there, so I split the way there to two days.
We began with perfect bodings: a drained battery, going back home for a sweater, losing the sleeping bags and the tent from the back seat over the first leg... the weather was cool and windy, so everything was perfect
The first picture was born at a fuel station along the Hungarian road 81 - because of the 'nodding' oil pump:
We left our country at noon, and headed towards the Little Carpathians... through a very funny village which was called Horny Bar
Then we challenged the twisties of Pezinská Baba, or Old Hag Pass for Touhou fans
In the picture above you can see a true Carpathian Forest. There was an extra red tabby cat in the parking lot on the crest, but no gazebo or anything. After a brief stop we rolled down the other side, where the town of Malacky/Malacka (meaning Piggy - we partly chose this route because of the name
) lies. We bought some food there, and headed towards Kúty and out of Slovakia. The vegetation changed a bit when we got north of the Carpathians, coniferous woods were following us along the road.
Of course we made another turn into the wrong direction at Kúty (which I had thoroughly explored via Street View before the trip
), but it could be corrected quickly so we finally arrived in the Czech Republic.
There we followed Bure's (the organizer of the meeting) advice and took a turn to the west. We went along nice hills with ruins on their tops, through the old town of Mikulov, and turned back through Pavlov and a lake dam:
We also filled up the bikes' tanks in Lednice, where I got this trip's worst tank, while shiNIN got a good one... I did windy and rainy commuting before we left on this road trip, while her bike was resting after a hot summer trip among Hungarian hills.
After this turn we returned the motorway to bypass Brno. The road was made of concrete slabs that didn't fit perfectly, jolting the bikes at every joint. Yeah, Bure was right, it wasn't that good - but it served its purpose, saved us from going into an inconveniently large city.
So we left the superslab soon, and headed towards our destination that day: a campsite at Jedovnice, via small forest roads. It was hard to navigate through the complicated Czech names on the map, which didn't even show all of the villages. If I thought I memorized the surrounding few villages, I saw a few road signs and it erased my memory, and I had to stop again to have another look at the map... this was the first time I really wished for a GPS... but I'll still try to hold on to the old school as long as I can - yes, I know I'm stubborn
It was getting already dark and cold in the woods, so it was refreshing to reach the campsite... these are some fixed points in time: the time we leave, the distance, are totally unimportant - we arrive late in the evening, no matter what
The receptionist didn't know any English nor German, but with drawing and the leftovers of my childhood Russian lessons we could place our tent and we even knew the price
We began the second day in the vicinity of the rift of Macocha, which I planned to see. See, but not to photograph, as I found that it can't be fit in the 18mm lens from the balcony on its edge. To take the picture we had to climb down a twisty trail, get through the Punkevní cave... and then, from the bottom, the camera could contain it
The road at the bottom, leading to the cave entry:
Warning! Breaking off the dripstones is strictly forbidden for evil zombies!
The cave itself was really beautiful, it was worth all the time, climb and entry fee:
We reached a branch on the water:
Then came the point where we dropped our original plans. We wanted to go on through tiny back roads, but learning from the last day's struggle I decided to take the roads 150 and 19 which were much easier to follow - and still led through nice hilly area, winding pleasantly. Along the road 19 we bumped into this stone dragon:
I don't know the exact location, and I couldn't find it after the trip, so it's a riddle for all of you
Everything changed at Havlíčkúv Brod. Traffic jam in the downtown, and the boring, almost straight, modern main road 38 after leaving. It was a pain to get past this leg, but Kutná Hora wasn't far... where a whole chapel was waiting, full of bones. A whole medieval cemetery was piled up in the ossuary hundreds of years ago, and now the carefully arranged bones stand there as a memento.
