Bohemia And Beyond

I stayed up all night dinking in Krakow the night before my early morning flight to Prague. I'll go off on a quick tangent here about something I love and something I hate about Europe.

Something I love: not only can you, as in the United States, buy liquor virtually anywhere, but you can consume said liquor anywhere you like. Walking along the street, in parks, on public transport, whatever. As with pot in Amsterdam, seeing this policy in operation makes me wonder why people expend so much effort preventing other people doing it. I suppose at worst it might lead to some broken glass in the streets (although this wasn't in evidence), to which the European response appears to be "Wear shoes, then".

Something I hate: charging money to use toilets. Public toilets are bad enough - there's nothing worse than fumbling with change in an unfamiliar currency when you're busting for a piss. On my last night in Krakow, however, I encountered my first pub which actually charged to use the pub toilets. The attitude seems to be that they can charge me for their beer both entering and leaving my body.

OK, end of tangent. After my flight to Prague I was pretty wrecked. I had a hostel bed booked so I headed directly there. When I booked my flights to Europe, my travel agent repeatedly inquired whether I was going to Prague. "You must," she insisted "stay in Czech Inn in Prague". I dutifully booked it, even though hostelworld.com had several other higher rated hostels. This is the last time I trust a random travel agent over hostelworld. It's not that it was a bad hostel. It was very slick and newly furnished, but this concealed some fundamental problems, the most glaring of which was the location. The normal tradeoff for an out of the way location is a quiet hostel. Czech Inn accomplished the difficult feat of being nowhere near anything useful, yet still located smack on a main road. My room was on the corner of the hostel facing the road. Given the hot weather, closing the windows was unthinkable, so they were wide open. The effect was as if there was a highway through the middle of the room. The traffic noise was thunderous and made sleeping tricky. Nevertheless, after my flight from Krakow, I slept fitfully until about 3:30pm, effectively writing off my first day.

The next day I daytripped out to Kutna Hora, a little town an hour or so out of Prague. The attraction there is the Kostnice Ossuary, a church decorated by an artist with bones dug up from around 20,000 people earlier buried in the church grounds. There's a chandelier built of bones and a huge Hungarian coat of arms made from bones.

The following day was the 16th, the first day of my Intrepid tour. After wasting a bunch of time doing laundry at a very inefficient laundromat, I checked in at the joining point. I knew already there were going to be 9 people on the tour. "Ah," said the lady from the accommodation agency "you must be Christopher". I was about to ask how the hell she knew that, when the most likely.explanation popped into my mind, and I lead forward and scanned the list of people on my tour. Yep. All females other than me. But it turned out that they weren't all "girls". There's no age limit for Intrepid trips, but it still surprised me a bit to learn that we had three women in their 60s on the trip. The other five girls were all normal backpacker age. But given the loose structure of the trip, my contact with the older ones was minimal, which was lucky since one of them was a total pain in the ass. There was also a trip leader (a Hungarian girl) and a trainee trip leader (an English guy, so actually I wasn't the only guy around). All the five younger girls were cool. Three of them (Ruth, Alison, Julie) were quietish, one of them (Julia) was a party girl and the other (Annie) was sort of in between.

There's no way I'm writing a blow by blow description of the whole tour, so here's some random stuff in point form. Pics will have to wait till I have time to upload them:

- Prague was nice, but I didn't have that killer a time there. I think that was probably just because I didn't know the good spots to go; Julia, from the tour, said she had an amazing time there.

- Cesky Krumlov was pretty, but there wasn't a whole lot to do.

- Vienna was good fun - we went to some nice bars there - and the architecture is incredibly grandiose. I found it a little amusing - it feels like they still think they're head of some immense empire, instead of basically being Germany's sidekick.

- Budapest was great. I can see where it gets its nickname "The Paris of Eastern Europe". It's kind of a cafe society, and capital of a country with a strong identity. The "House of Terror" museum here, featuring the crimes of the Nazis and (mostly) the Communists, is really good. It cost 10 million to build. We went to a great bar that was a converted auto mechanic shop. It was very atmospheric. It's a shame a place like that in Australia would be shut down by some stupid health and safety law. We also got caught in the most insane storm in Budapest. It was a nice, sunny day, if a little humid. Then - wham! Out of the sky comes a huge, tropical-type storm. Hail got whipped into us by ferocious winds. Then the rain came, and it was like running along the bottom of a lake. We got completely saturated.

- Bled was amazing. The scenery and atmosphere in the town itself was brilliant, but the main thing was the full day adventure tour we went on. When I say full day, I mean it - 8am to 7:30pm. It's called the "Emerald Mountain Adventure" and involves getting driven around to different places in the Julian Alps. At some we hiked a little up mountains, at one place we went to see the spring source of a river, we went whitewater rafting, we swam under a waterfall, we jumped off a 12 metre high bridge into a river.... all for only 88 euro, so pretty good value. The Julian Alps are brilliant countryside and the Slovenians we met (admittedly in a tourist town) were the nicest people I've met in Eastern Europe. I was strongly considering quitting the tour in Bled and staying for two extra nights, but nobody would stay there with me, so I instead resolved to return later and have a good look round Slovenia, including the capital Ljubljana and the cave systems and so forth.

- Venice was pretty much exactly what I expected - a town thoroughly whored out to busloads full of middle-aged sightseers. The portion of the streets not occupied by slack-jawed Americans was covered with stalls hawking all manner of useless souvenir rubbish, plus immigrants thrusting roses into the hands of passing girls and demanding payment from their boyfriends. The Piazza San Marco and Grand Canal are worth seeing, though, so I think it's worth calling in to the place, but you definitely don't want to stay longer than a night.

I'm in Verona at the moment, having spent last night in a hotel here with Julie and Annie from the tour. Today I'm headed to Florence. My trip plan from there is: 27th-30th Florence (including a daytrip to Pisa/Cinque Terre, and maybe one to Sienna), 1st-4th Rome, then I'm flying to Dublin on the 5th and joining an 8-day Shamrocker tour around Ireland starting on the 7th. That finishes on Saturday the 14th, just in time for me to fly to London and go to a house party at Emma and Waitey's. Then I'm staying in London until the 19th, when I'm meeting Doecke and we're flying to Stockholm, where a day or two later we meet up with Alana and her friend Lauren and go hiking in the north of Sweden.