Chapter 19: Six days in Czechia

Yes, Czechia. They changed the official English-language name last year. Google Maps has followed suit, but Autocorrect hasn't. Nor, for that matter, have many Czechs: it doesn't appear to have caught on at all. But Czechia is what the powers-that-be apparently want me to call it, and when in Czechia one should do as the Czech(-ian)s do. Except that most Czechs are still calling it the Czech Republic. So who knows.

Writing about Prague - it's mostly about Prague, apart from a brief sojourn to Plzen - is a bit of a funny one because as you're reading you'd be forgiven for thinking I had a disappointing time. I didn't. If I ever have the opportunity to live in Europe (something I'd like to do one day) then Prague will be somewhere around the top of the shortlist of places to live.

Prague also has a special significance for this trip. It's the turning point: day three here was day 100 overall, and because I like round numbers and this is an exactly 200 day journey, I've passed the halfway mark. So this might be as much a reflective essay than my usual grab-bag of bemused observations. 

Not everything has turned out as planned, of course. In my imagination, pre-travel, I was out of the hostel at nine every morning, never back before seven, too busy packing as much as possible into every day for mundane things like being tired. In reality I am more often than not still hanging around at 11: the energy and, indeed, the desire to run around like an Energizer bunny on an adrenaline rush typically isn't there. I've never been particularly good at being up and about in the mornings (thank God for the public service's flexible work practices), and being in a different hemisphere hasn't changed that.

In my imagination, pre-travel, I was using hostel kitchens much more, preparing more meals on my own, both to save money and to maybe have the occasional vegetable with dinner. I am getting the *occasional* vegetable - I'm quite sure I saw carrot in the bean stew thing I ate last night - but I can't remember the last time I cooked dinner for myself. Actually, I think it was in Brasov, ironically perhaps the cheapest place to eat out that I've been to so far. It's expensive, but by the time you factor in that many hostels don't have proper kitchens you can use - this was true of Athens, Sorrento, Rome, Dubrovnik, Zagreb and Prague, just in the past month or so - its often the only option. And because I'm a vegetarian travelling in parts of the world with varying degrees of sympathy for vegetarians, I'm falling back on fast food more than I care to admit. In my imagination, pre-travel, I was going to go home much lighter than before. In reality I will have grown, both figuratively and literally.

In my imagination, pre-travel, I was much more willing to range a long way from a base, going on long day trips to see far-flung places without the trouble of moving hostels. In reality, they are rarely worth the expense, time, early wake-up or most of all effort. Partly it's because I'm travelling for so long. Am I really going to travel for two hours to see a pretty little old town or castle, when I've already seen many pretty little old towns and castles? Don't get me wrong, I enjoy both. But the marginal benefit of the 10th castle on a single holiday is pretty small. I'd often rather find a more relaxing day's entertainment in the city I'm staying in. And from what I've observed from other travellers, rarely do people come back from a €50 day trip with much more than tepid enthusiasm, in any case.

In my imagination, pre-travel, I was super organised. I had a spreadsheet of the trains, buses, ferries I needed, and even when they would open for sales so I could get the best possible fare. Pre-travel it put me in good stead: I got some tickets for €19 that would have cost four times that much booking a day or two ahead. But I've stopped looking at the spreadsheet: it feels like too much hassle. As a result I've missed out on a few early bird specials.

And now I've missed a train that I *did* book early. I'm not sure how I got it in my head that the Ljubljana to Vienna train went at 7PM, but lodged in there it was, and so by the time I discovered my mistake it was too late to fix it. After swearing at my iPad for a moment or two, though, I moved straight to figuring out what to do next. That's something I've gotten much better at, I think. I no longer lose my feet quite so easily when I trip over a stumbling block: I stagger for a moment and regain my balance, then I work out a plan B, run with it and count the cost later. That's what the budget line labelled as 'oh, shit' in the spreadsheet was for.

In this case, my options were a €96(!) night train that involved a change of trains in the early hours of the morning - no, thank you - or a €40 no-frills Flixbus that would get me to Vienna two hours later, and to a bus station across town from the hostel, which I'd chosen specifically because it was across the road from the train station. My comfortable 11 hour layover was now a miserable nine hours. By the time I got to bed it was 1AM, with a 7:30-ish wake-up call. It would have been ok but I couldn't use my ear plugs - I risked sleeping through the alarm - and I had one of the world's worst snorers in one bed and one of the world's most inconsiderate early packers in another.

By the time I got to Prague that afternoon, then, I was cooked. The hostel I'd chosen was in a sub-par location, but I'd picked it because it had a pool - a pool! - and that seemed like a rather nice little luxury with which to celebrate 100 days on the road. It never occurred to me, though, that an out of the way location might be to provide room for a bus parking bay, or that the pool (and sauna) might be geared towards attracting a certain demographic. Then I saw this out the window:

Uh oh. 

It was okay, though. The hostel has a contract with them - and another with Busabout, their sister company which operates hop-on, hop-off, choose-your-own-adventure style tours. I think the Contiki groups get crowded into their own designated dorms, because I didn't meet any of them, though I had lots of Busabout people. And it seems that Busabout's main target market are Australians. About 70% of the accents I heard - I'm not exaggerating - were Australians. The six-bed dorm on the first night had six Australians.

Or at least it would have had. As dusk fell our dorm full of six Australians became a dorm full of six Australians and approximately 5,000 Czech insects, who despite not having paid at reception were swarming around all the lights, blanketing the beds and coating the shower. Me and the other three who were there at the time went down and demanded a new room, and we were joined later by new Melburnian friend Shaun. The sixth Australian - a young Shepparton woman - said she got in at 1AM, after the staff had sprayed everywhere in the room, so she'd simply brushed the dead bugs off her bed and slept there anyway. They breed them tough in Shepparton.

Aside from dealing with the bugocalypse, I was far too tired to do anything that day other than swim in the pool and find some dinner. Thankfully a pool is a great tonic for exhaustion - even an unheated one, as the hostel pool proved to be - and while in there I chatted to a 16-year-old Texas high school football player, with aspirations to play at college too. He was in Europe on some sort of youth leadership program, I think, but I'm not sure he really knew what it was about. He'd also never heard of a union before, so I did what I could to preach the virtues of workplace rights, but I think I only made the poor kid more bewildered. I hope he makes it all the way to the NFL because otherwise he's going to have some trouble in the workplace.

I finally made it out and about in Prague the next day. I'm forming a habit of heading for the iconic, cliché landmark first, so I made my way to the astronomical clock:

It's 600 or so years old and has some pretty whizz bang features, including a guide to the phases of the moon (hence the astronomical bit, I suppose), and a second dial that identifies the patron saint for each day of the year. Apparently you were expected to name any baby born on that day after the relevant Saint, and even now you need special permission to give a Czech baby a name that isn't listed on the clock (though you pick from anywhere along the dial). I caught myself wondering what you were supposed to do if you had twin boys or girls: were they to be, say, Petr and Petr? 

The clock has a little performance on the hour: there's a bunch of little statues, including some that represent the enemies of God (Death is up there, as are a Jew and a Turk, unfortunately). When Jesus makes his appearance from behind a trap door the bad guys all shake in terror. Pretty clever, for the 15th century, though the spectacle hasn't aged so well these days. More interesting was the story I over-heard a tour guide telling.

When the clock was finished, the good citizens of Prague allegedly held a banquet in the master clockmaker's honour. He was the toast of the town, and they got him uproariously drunk. Then once he was comatose they put him to bed and cut out his eyes and tongue. It was the medieval equivalent of a non-compete clause: they didn't want him to be able to build another, better clock for some other city. Luckily he got the last laugh. They needed somebody to maintain the clock, so they left him his ears to hear if anything went wrong with it. He listened for the right moment, removed one part from the clock and the thing didn't work for the next hundred years.

From the clock I went on a wander through town, with the general aim of crossing the river and back again via the Charles Bridge, which is about as famous as the clock but without, as far as I know, the violent back-story. Before I got there I stumbled across one of the more interesting public artworks I've seen on the trip:

Each pelvis rotates around by about 60 degrees to spray a wider area. Classy. Once on the bridge - it's nice enough, full of Gothic statues of religious figures and Czech heroes  - I spotted this plea from a street artist:

Look, it's fair enough, to be honest. 

I finished my wandering for the day at the Museum of Communism. At first I had some trouble finding it, but it was hidden beneath a deep layer of delicious irony: it's situated above a McDonald's, and it shares an entrance with a casino. The museum was a little unsatisfying for different reasons than the one in Budapest, which was really a political polemic masquerading as a museum. The one in Prague is heavy on the kitsch and has a display style that could best be called haphazard:

The best bit was a video that jumped through a few different stages of the Communist period, from the aftermath of the Prague spring up to the 1989 revolution.

I spent the next day - the milestone 100th - at the Prague zoo, which is one of the cheapest, one of the biggest and one of the best I've ever seen. I also had a zoo planned for day five, but in between I had another day in Prague, and decided to check out the Castle. It's billed as the biggest in the world, and rather than a 'castle' as such it's really a big walled citadel at the top of a hill. Alas, I was unimpressed. All you get to see of the main palace is a big, empty great hall where the paintings haven't been preserved, a couple of smaller rooms and a balcony from which you can look out over Prague. The entry ticket also covers a couple of churches (very much a same/same but different experience at this point) and the 'Golden Way', which is a small alley way along the castle walls, lined with pastel-painted cottages that were once home to commoners (including Franz Kafka for a time), but which had already largely been turned into a tourist attraction 100 years ago. They're nice enough, but overall the castle visit was a bust. 

I'd intended, originally, to visit Plzen Zoo as a day trip from Prague, and I'd made my hostel booking with that in mind. I made a last minute decision, though, to stay overnight in Plzen and be there early in the morning instead, both because I didn't trust myself to be up and about early enough in Prague for a two and a half hour journey, and because I'd managed to snaffle a rather special experience for an animal nerd. I left most of my stuff behind in Prague - my insulin supply, minus what I'd use overnight and my main backpack - and booked a hotel in Plzen. On the way to the Prague station I found this fellow just hanging about:

And stopped past the Dancing House:

It was inspired, apparently, by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and was designed by the same architect who gave the University of Technology in Sydney a massive new building that looks like a crumpled paper bag. As one does.

The hotel was an experience. When I arrived the staff had packed up and gone home, and I found a sign directing me to the bar next door, where the barman had my key. I let myself in and found a room with wifi that appeared to work on a rotational basis - I had it for five minutes, then I suspect it was the next room over's turn and so on - and a mattress that was thinner than a supermodel with hyperthyroidism. There was a working TV, but it seemed to run through a set top box connecting it to web channels, and about 80% of them were webcam sex lines. €28 not very well spent (on the room, not the webcam things. I didn't spend €28 on those).

Plzen is most famous for its breweries - the German name of the city is Pilsen, ie Pilsener - but I don't like beer so going to them would be rather pointless. I like animals, though, and over the past 20 years something extraordinary had been happening at Plzen. Whereas virtually every other big zoo in the world has been shedding species and holding smaller and smaller collections (if you've been to Melbourne in the 1990s and again recently you'll know what I mean), Plzen has gone from a mid-sized, typical Eastern European zoo to having the biggest collection of birds, reptiles and smaller mammals in the world.

The reason for that is a man named Tomas, who before he worked at the zoo had built up his own collection of over 100 highly endangered bird species, taking it upon himself to try to breed them and prevent extinction in his own backyard. Eventually the cost burden became too much and he donated them to the zoo, where he later became curator, and applied the same values to his new job. When he arrived they had two rodent species: ten years later they had over 100, overwhelmingly endangered species, with three breeding groups of each and partnerships with research institutes in the species' range countries. The numbers are similar for the birds. Tomas and his tiny little team of three keepers are probably doing more for conservation, and working with more species, than all the zoos in Australia combined. 

Nearly all of the super-rare animals are kept behind the scenes, but I'd emailed Tomas a couple of days earlier because I'd heard on the zoo nerd grapevine - yes, there is such a thing - that he was welcoming to enthusiasts. Not only was he welcoming - he personally met me at the gate, took me into the off-show area and showed me around for half an hour, taking time out of his schedule to identify what I was looking at and chat about how they make it all work. As he departed he told me if there were any other off-show areas I wanted to see I should simply tell somebody I was there as his guest. It was incredibly kind and generous of him, and worth breaking my habit of not writing about zoo visits here to tell the story.

I went back to Prague for my last night in Czechia, where one of the hostel staff was very relieved to see me. He thought I'd checked out and left my insulin behind in the fridge, and was very worried. I thanked him and lied that I would never do such a stupid thing as leave my insulin behind somewhere. That night I hung about with a young Scottish couple I'd met before going to Plzen: Dylan had endeared himself to me by guessing that I was 25. It had been hot and steamy all week in Prague, and that evening the mother of all electrical storms finally struck. We couldn't both open the windows to listen *and* turn the lights on - I explained about the bugopalypse - so we sat in the dark instead. It was like camping, but with wifi and mattresses.

My last day was a footy day. The Swans enjoy toying with my emotions. They always have, but I think they must be taking my absence personally because they are determined to make this year as much of a torment as possible. I've declared them finished for the year five times now. Then the Rooster wins one with a goal after the siren, snatching hope from the maws of despair one more time. My last impression left on everybody at the hostel was of a shaking, half-laughing, half-crying Australian madman in the hostel lobby.