Today was an early morning – the first getting up time that started with a six for quite a while. At 7.15am all of us were packed, downstairs, and ready to leave Prague. I just want to insert a quick note here about how much I loved this city – it certainly lived up to its reputation. It was a perfect mixture of amazing architecture, history, art and nightlife and everything was just so pretty. It was time to leave though, so off we went.
We grabbed a tram to the train station and so began our long, unexciting morning of transport. This included one tram, one two and a half hour train, one fifty minute train and then one ten minute local train – without a minute to spare between any of them. At around 12pm we arrived at Teplice and settled into our hotel… the place where we are currently staying has maybe two hotels, plus two or three restaurants and that’s it. It is basically a car park surrounded by nice green hills – the entrance point to the hiking in the national park.
We all grabbed lunch at one of the restaurants – chicken with mushroom for me, nothing too exciting to report. Then we headed off on a hike around the park to see all the rock formations they have here. The hike itself took us around two and a half hours and was relatively easy – some uphill but mostly flat paths. It was all very green and very fresh from recent rain. The weather here has actually been pretty nice today, not hot and not always sunny but perfect for hiking in a forest. The main attraction in this park is the rock formations they have everywhere, which have been given names by the Czech people. We had fun trying to attempt to see the figures that were meant to be there – the turtle, the minister, the giant’s shorts, the bride rock. It was a bit like trying to see figures in clouds and we got very excited if we actually managed to see them.
The most interesting part of the hike was a very steep climb of 300 steps (basically a ladder) to a lookout and the parts of the path that ran through two steep rock cliffs. The minute we got close to it the temperature dropped dramatically, we could all see our breath in front of our faces and we even found snow in one corner. That was a cool experience (that was witty, I know). Unfortunately the light was not really ideal for photos so I really didn’t get to capture anything properly at all.
I managed to be one of the pack leaders for pretty much the whole hike which I was rather happy with, although perhaps considering we have three people over 70 and a lady who recently broke her ankle this wasn’t the biggest achievement (that being said, I have to give a mention to how awesomely fit all of those people I just mentioned are). As soon as we got back we bought ourselves an icecream and sat down with a drink (‘Grapefruit Beer’) in one of the outdoor cafes.
After time for freshening up we basically spent the rest of the evening (5pm onwards) eating, drinking and playing cards. The hotel made us a big group dinner, including ‘welcome shots’. Julie, Marissa and I also ordered a one litre bottle of wine to share, to go with our pork and then bizarre pancakes with watermelon and chocolate syrup. Dinner was really great with lots of good conversation and Julie, Marissa, Dan, Sarah, Hamish and I continued on for a couple of hours after, playing ‘Presidents and Assholes’ (or ‘Scumbags and Warlords’). Everyone retired around 10.30pm and went off to get ready for another early morning tomorrow!
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