What a day...! Hopefully Toni will add a post-Prague section to this, but I'm just going to blog about the 10:00 til 11:00 part of the journey...
Flash-back to Thursday when I arrived in Prague - the guy that took me to the apartment managed to find me some secure parking at a restaurent ran by his friend. But, he wanted to charge me 450 Kr (around ?2 per day) for three days, which I didn't fancy. He said that Prague was fairly safe but that for 3 days parked (illegally!) outside the apartment someone may try and steal it, etc. So I decided to leave it there - around 2 metres from our front door! Of course when Toni suggested (last night) that I put the bike cover on it to protect it from the rain I said, no no no, it will be fine. So this morning, at around 10, around 5 minutes before we were due to set off, I tried to start the bike.
The bike didn't start the first time, nor the second or third. So I decided I'd turn the lights off (they already were, I didn't remember doing that), and to push the bike up our little hill to bump start it. So I pushed and puffed and pushed again until I reached the top of the hill, and then I pushed it down and tried to start it. It didn't. Toni wasn't pleased when I told her I'd killed the bike.
Toni helped me push the bike back up the hill and back down - it didn't start. We pushed it back up with the help of a local who took pity on us - it didn't start. We went back in for some water and oxygen and then pushed it back up the hill. Figuring the hill had failed us several times we decided to push it up another couple of hills. Towards the end of the last hill we spotted the best hill of all... no traffic, even steeper than the others, and with dry asphalt. SO we pushed it up, and then pushed it nearly all the way down.. it didn't start.
Another flash back to Thursday when Toni sorted AA European breakdown cover... we figured that we'd free-wheel the bike back to the apartment, book another night, and call the AA. I glanced down at the bike... choke off, second gear engaged, lights off... then something struck me. Why were the lights off - I really didn't remember switching them off. Then I noticed the Run/Off switch - essentially an on/off switch for the bike. It was in the off position. Then it made sense... someone had, either for a joke or out of concern for the battery life of the bike, turned my lights off (which weren't on without the key) and the Run/Off switch to off. The bike would have started first time at 10:00. I turned it to Run and hit the starter... the dashboard lights dimmed and I heard a relay click - I'd drained the battery in trying to start the unstartable bike. But I knew it would work with just the slightest push (having done this before). With a final push the bike started after 5 meters. I screamed and yelped, so much so that a family across the road stopped in their tracks, but I didn't care and shouted again... back on track, the Pan European never fails, only the driver.
In five minutes we'd packed the bike, got changed, dropped off the key, set the GPS, and with ear-to-ear grins, were back on the road.
Hi from Toni!!! Well once on the road at last, we set off for our first destination, Kutna Hora. It is the home of the infamous Church of Bones. (As 'immortalized' - no pun intended! - in the programme, The Long Way Round.)
This church was once a monastery, but after the Great Plague and some 30,000 deaths this tiny final resting place started to accumulate skeletons, piling up outside the church walls. The bones were then interred within the church. As a tribute some 200 years later, a czech craftsman carved the bones into ornate decorations for the church interior, after disinfecting and whitewashing them! THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE SIGHT!!! Entire chandelliers made up from human corpses! As it is quite overwhelming upon first entering, it is odd but it doesn't immediately strike you as freaky, but after a while I mentioned to Jon that I couldn't see what the bits of 'chain' were that was holding up the chandellier. It was only when we realised that it was either jaw bones or the pelvic bone that we started to comprehend quite how gruesome this was!!! That said, they charge tourists to enter the church so that it can be maintained and preserved, and they appear quite insistent about the protection and respect aspects - ie. don't mess with the dead!!!
After a refreshing coke and a spot of lunch at a nearby cafe, we went to leave. Whilst in the church, we'd spotted a couple of very large hairy bikers who turned out to be Russians on Harleys. (Put it this way, I wouldn't have wanted to bump into them in the church of Bones any where near dark!!!)They were gathered around outside, waiting to leave when we saw another (Russian) Honda Pan ST1100, parked next to ours. This one was driven by Vladimir and Olrika from Moscow! In very broken English, we exchanged the pro's of Pans and the con's of Harleys, we commented on how good their English was compared to our Russian, and wished them a happy and safe journey!!
With the weather looking gloomy, we headed for our next overnight destination, Pod Pec Snezkou. It was a beautiful drive through the countryside, on 'twisty turnys', through some very pretty villages and I thought at last that this was what we had so wanted to see. The only downside was that it had started raining and the temperature had also dropped quite remarkably. We were both freezing. We arrived at Pec Pod at around 1700hrs and looked for the (only) hotel in the village that had boasted Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, we found it but access was up the side of the mountain! We got the bike roughly halfway up, but had to abandon the idea. It was just too steep and the road/track was pretty broken up. Eventually we got the bike back down and settled on a comfortable place in the centre of the village. Those beds were soooo comfy and I think we just fell asleep within seconds!!
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We are posting from an internet cafe - minus the cafe - and will post todays (cant find apostrophy on keyboard!) later if we can get hotels WiFi to work. In the meantime heres a couple more piccies from zersterdaz..
Toni just after we arrived in Kutna Hora
Kostnice (the Church of Bones) in Kutna Hora
Coming back down the side of the hill after bottling it trying to find the hotel!
View from our hotel window in Pec Pod Snezkou
4 comments:
The photos are brill !!
Kill switches eh! Been there, done that, but without the pushing!!
Hello Jon and Toni
I have been in Prague for 2 weeks, I absolutely loved. I was there with my friends. During the day we went to visit what the guide told us to: )
We have been to Kutna Hora. I was amazed by the cathedral and the caves. We stayed in a weekend house of a friend we made in Czech Republic.
But the evening we spent them in bars. I will leave you here a list of some nice Prague music clubs you can go or if any of your fiends want to go there.
I found the city beautiful, like a fairytale land, the towers, the castles, the cathedrals….
I also found the city safe as you can see in this article from the government pages. We could always be out till late that we never had problems or ever saw any incident.
In the end it was too sad to leave Prague, all that ritual…airport, check in, boarding.
Your blog is interesting..
I LIKE THE photos you have posted..
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