Starting at the beginning... Karlovy Vary is a town built on and about a whole stack of hot springs. These springs have been acclaimed for the healing power of their waters, which are apparently frequently prescribed as medicine for an array of maladies. Despite the... shall we say "curious" taste of the water, there still seem to be hundreds of people quaffing it down zealously.
We planned the trip there during the previous week and were to go by car (enter cocktail ingredient one from the right side of the road). Which, was to be our first efforts behind the wheel of any kind of vehicle since January and then with the obvious excitement factor of having to dodge so many cars persisting on driving on the wrong side of the road... I kid, and we had all of 2 experiences in this new and strange system.
Hayley collected the car with the kids on Friday and came through to the flat to collect the baggage and the husband. She couldn't jimmy the kids out of the car for all the sweets in the country though, they were thrilled to be sitting in a car again - this means that they don't have to walk anywhere!
Bugz proceeded to drive us there, and with the minor infraction of almost driving down the wrong way of the main road just outside our house, all went well and we arrived, precisely as my TomTom directed us, in front of our little B&B.
The drive down saw Hayley smiling from ear to ear as has been her expression many times since our arrival at the pure joy of doing all this cool travel and stuff - driving for the first time and being alive at that one hour into the trip.
If I ever get to submit a suggestion to TomTom it's going to have to be "add a scenic route option to the navigation choices" this for people who want to get places via as many others as possible...
The house where we stayed is owned and run by a German tannie with an unusual grasp of English, which made a welcome change. We had 2 comfy rooms, so had an amount of space for us and the girls, a view of the town from up on the hill, (and believe me, this town is very very pretty to look at), a kitchenette, and our own bathroom etc. Very nice. Apart from the very squeaky beds the place was perfect, expensive for what you get, but still cheap compared to other options in the town.
We decided to take a little drive around town before din dins on Friday nite just to get our bearings and see the place before the next day. It was late in the afternoon, but light enough with clear skies to see the very pretty little town so packed with colour below us as we drove down the windy roads to the centre.
Enter the next cocktail ingredient wearing a police officers uniform! :0
We were casually minding our business, Hayley driving us through the town when without any prompting 2 uniformed officers in the road ahead of us waved us down.
I think our collective blood temperature dropped a few degrees as we saw them motion for us to pull over as suddenly we simultaneously remembered all the horror stories we've heard about the foreign police, the fact that all our identification, passports, drivers licenses etc. are all back at the B&B, our kids were not strapped into the legally-required car chairs... and oh, lordy who will look after our children while we rot, forgotten in some Romanian jail???
The cops offered us a choice of German or Russian to converse in, which we were thrilled at... at least they gave us a choice.
Asking for passports we kinda had to admit that as a result of our delirious joy at being in their most magnificent town we had clean forgotten to bring them with and how terribly sorry we were for having been so forgetful.
On hearing this stream of English, the 2 cops grew visible question marks on their faces and wondered how we missed the "German or Russian" choice! repeating the question a few times and getting no intelligible answers, the one cop leant into the window and insisted... "Sprechen ze Deutch?" to which I boldly replied "Kleine... kleine" satisfied that I could manage a single word he proceeded slowly... "Die strasse" pointing emphatically to the road beneath his feet "is einmal strasse!"
I don't really know if I have the spelling of any of this right, but we figured out very quickly that the direction we were pointing in was not the one permitted by the two very obvious road signs at the beginning of the boulevard!
We burst into a chorus of deep apologies and, as a single person they wheeled on their heels and walked away! Sheepishly we "U-Turned" and waving to our fans on the roadside made our way directly back to where we had come from and got out of the car.
Dinner that night was et at a small local pub / restaurant thingy where the food was good, the beer was better and a great evening was had by us all.
Just before we left, Sarah declared that she needed to wee-wee and so off the troop of girls set to the loo, the door to which was not 20M from our table... after all the necessary doings were done the hand washing got under way... my girls are not particularly quiet on a good day so I could hear some kind of commotion behind the door.
Wondering what was going on, Sarah blew through the door calling to me loudly that they couldn't close the tap... "great" I thought "now we have to explain how we broke the tap!". Entering the girls loo i see Hayley and Amber twisting with all their might on the poor handle of the cold tap, Hayley has taken a position against the wall for maximum leverage and is really doing her best to screw that handle in.
Stubbornly the tap still has a decent steady stream of water running out. Walking up to the basin I gently take hold of the hot tap and twist it softly clockwise... unbelievably the flow ceases and I know my wife has had one too many beers!
The next morning we woke up to a significant drop in temperature which has been with us all week. From unseasonal and comfy teens to very low single degrees and great overcast skies - rain forecast, the whole tooty...
Bravely we ventured forth all dressed for the occasion and proceeded to have a great time in the city. Needless to say we took the bus into the centre, walked the place flat the whole day and walked home in the evening.
KV is pretty! It is by far and away the most colourful town I've ever seen. Despite the overcast skies, the colours of the buildings and surrounds was still striking.
KV spring water as I mentioned is a renowned elixir and there were hundreds of people filling containers and special drinking cups (that are sold everywhere - below Hayley choosing cups for the babies)
and merrily drinking their ills away.The water is hot - some of the springs have temperatures in the neighbourhood of 80 degrees C, others are a little cooler. The taste varies from horrid to disgusting and every sip sits like a hot rock in your stomach, well mine at least.
The babies didn't seem to mind though...
This is obviously just one aspect of the spring town - there is a massive industry around the baths and beauty treatments to be found here. This is one thing we didn't try... that's for next time :)
Like there is a wine route in the Cape - in KV there is a water route with springs popping out of the pavement all over the place. They are all sort of institutionalised, with their statistics like mineral content, temp and so on placed on plaques over them, and they are all housed in more or less grand colonnades...
KV is not as small as one might think, or certainly as one sees the spring centre. Built on hilly ground the town centre is in a valley and built up all around are suburbs and business districts looking down on it. A striking feature is that one finds the most run-down and abandoned buildings right next to flourishing hotels - very odd, esp as some of them have very good locations.We spent quite some time on the upper level of the town looking down.
There are a few "lookouts" built around the town, two named after Charles and Diana, we took a trip up the Diana lookout in a custom tram (funicular?) that had to climb a hill so steep that the cars are built like stairs and pulled up by a cable.
The lookout is built on the top of a hill in the middle of a forest - very pretty. But up there where there is nothing keeping the wind at bay it was a veritable gale and we didn't stay up too long.
We found a nice little out-of-the-way pub for dinner and headed home for an early nite.
Sunday morning was even colder than Saturday. The day was planned to be spent in the car doing some of the nearby sights and then going directly home in the evening afterwards.
Before we left the B&B Hayley suggested that we walk in the forest at the end of the street - literally one house away from our B&B.
The girls had an absolute blast - take a look...
This is the fabled "Pink Ninja" - mythical guardian of the Karlovy Vary forests. Death is a drawn out and gruesome certainty.
The girls wanted to build a nest for a birdie, so they set about gathering the small branches that had been broken off by the strong winds and assembling a large, but rough nest. Clearing a small patch in the centre they declared that even an eagle birdie could be happy here...
On to Andělská Hora and Loket Castle ...
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