Home of the Human Skeleton Museum and Short Silver Miners

Kutna Hora to Prague June 2-4

By Joan

The camping place was so great we decided to stay for three days. It was quiet, peaceful, cheap, and had clean bathrooms. (For those of you who haven't spent months or more of your life living in campgrounds, it's a little like finding a new apartment to live in every day of your life--and shower pressure and temperature is always key).

The next morning, we went into Kutna Hora, which turned out to be our favorite city in Czech. It's small, but like many town all over eastern Europe, it has great looking baroque buildings around a pedestrian only marketplace (what is it with the U.S? How come we have hardly any pedestrian malls?) It also had Net access in the information center.

We spent our first day in town shopping. Sounds silly, but if you like to get souvenirs (or wedding presents for friends, in our case), you have to shop for them. And Kutna Hora is a great place to do it. It has lots of puppets and glass, at about half the price they go for in Prague.

Our booty included two huge glass vases that weigh about seven pounds each. I convinced Eric that it wasn't totally stupid for bicyclists to buy large, heavy fragile pieces of glass, because we would only ride with them as far as Dresden, and mail them from there. (We have heard that the Czech post office is famous for stealing packages). Eric reluctantly agreed.

Well, I'm writing this chapter from Holland now, and we still have the vases, roughly 1300km later. We've dragged them over all kinds of hills. It turns out it's extremely expensive to mail them home, so we hope to fly home with them in July. The good news is, since the glass is so thick, it's not fragile. We've each either dropped or thrown down our bikes--in such a way that the full weight of the bike landed on the vase--and they are still intact.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho ...

Anyway, Kutna Hora is a great place to vistit. We spent a lot of time lounging in cafes. One day we went down to the medieval silver mines (holes in the ground is becoming a theme of our Eastern Europe tour: first we had wine cellars in Hungary, then the salt mines of Krakow, and now the silver mines of Czech). The tour felt a little hokey because they give you a white frock and a hardhat and flashlight. Then you all have to squirm through these really really tight places. Plus people back then were shorter, so you can never quite stand up. At one point, we were all hunched over in some passageway when a large person near the front of the group got stuck. It took five minutes (maybe it was only one minute, but it seemed longer) for them to break loose.

Just before we left, we visited one of the most bizarre museums we've ever seen: the Sedlec Ossuary, or a museum/cemetery, featuring sculptures made entirely of human bones, including skulls! (this site has more pictures and lots of info). Some of the sculptures are just artful piles of bones, but some are chandeliers. There's even a coat of arms. The cemetery is in the town of Sedlec, just outside of Kutna Hora.

A lot of people died in the area during the Bubonic plague, and they were buried in the cemetery. Then someone came and sprinkled 'holy' earth from Golgotha on the cemetery, so all the rich people wanted to be buried there. The museum didn't say this, but we think that in order to accommodate the overflow, whoever was running the cemetery had all the bubonic plague-era paupers dug up to make room for the rich, paying customers. So there are now supposedly 40,000 full skeletons above ground in that cemetery. In the 1800s, a sculptor started making them into the things that are now on display. It's quite creepy.

The next day we ate well and often our way into Prague (banana splits, chocolate covered pancakes, pizza, beers, turkey, you name it).

The Prague arrival was a bit of a horror. We spent a lot of time lost in the urban ring, but eventually made it to Wenceslas Square, just before the Amex office closed. And they had our package! My brother Vince had sent our new ATM cards (the old ones expired in April) and our new Amex card. He had sent them almost a month earlier, so we could have had them earlier, but we kept changing our route, and ended up coming to Prague much later than originally planned. It was great to have our bank cards again. We raced to an ATM and took out some cash.

Then we made straight for the train station, where a tout said he could find us a room for $50 a night. We said that was way too expensive so he said he could find one for $25. We said, OK, go ahead, so he had to call his friend's hotel. We stood around for a long time. He wouldn't say why we couldn't just go to the hotel; he insisted his friend had to drive to the train station to get us. We gave him 10 minutes to produce his friend. After 15 minutes, I walked into the train station's hotel booking office.

Eric and I are at that point of the trip where we don't want to work really hard to get the ultimate housing deal, especially in big cities which are hard to enjoy from crappy hotel rooms. We'd much rather throw money at the problem.

Well it turns out we didn't have a choice. Everyone wants to go to Prague, and all the hotels seem to be booked. We finally ended up booking two hotels--one for the first night, which was booked after that, and another one for the next three nights. The first one was walking distance from the center, but the second one was about 10 minutes away by tram. They each cost roughly US$75. Ouch.

We found the first hotel pretty easily, walked into town for dinner, and then spent the next morning in a laundromat (our first since January, in France!) cleaning our disgustingly dirty clothes. After that, on the way to the second hotel, we got completely lost, and accidentally rode all the way out of Prague (following, of course, my sense of direction), before riding all the way back in, to the hotel. It turned out the hotel was just a few blocks away from a place we had been looking for it hours earlier. We got so pissed during this search that Eric got off his bike and tried to park it by slamming it against a light pole. It fell over, right on top one of our new glass vases. I was horrified. But I took it out of the box and it wasn't cracked or chipped Nothing. That stuff is really heavy. I highly recommend it as the perfect souvenir for other bike tourists When we finally reach the friend we plan to give the vase to (a very late wedding present), we can tell her that we carried it 2,000 miles, over mountains, in our bike panniers.

Next: East German style party in Prague

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