Czechia: Sněžka (16/28)
Crossing from Austria into Czechia we headed for Český Krumlov. A picturesque town, which had been recommended to us by some friends, as it features a castle guarded by bears living in the moat.
Leaving the car park we struggled to find the castle. It turned out it had since merged it’s buildings with the town, and our route took us through the gates and courtyards out into the main town. Before that though, we sought out the bears.
The story goes that the bears took up residence in the moat in the early 1700s, and that as those ones died off more have been gifted or donated from aristocrats. However, the present day bears didn’t look particularly happy pacing around their concrete moat enclosure. I’d imagine modern day zoos would have better living conditions for a sleuth of 4 bears.
As we strolled round we were trying to decide what we should do next — should we carry on driving through Czechia or spend the evening here. With much back and forth we eventually settled on staying the evening and found ourselves a nice spot by the river for some local cuisine and beer.
The next day we drove through the rain, arriving at Prachov Rocks in the early afternoon. It’s a large collection of sandstone pinnacles (geologically similar to Meteora).
The Climbing Club Prachov was formed in 1907, with claims on the first recorded climbs in the area. It’s quite an unusual climbing destination, as to prevent damage to the soft sandstone rock metal protection is prohibited. Instead climbers use knots tied into rope to jam into cracks to protect their ascent. Both the rain and the lack of familiarity with this style of protection prevented us from having a go, but I’d be keen to attempt it in the future.
The following day was our hike up Sněžka, the highest peak in Czechia. We started early as we also wanted to get a head start on driving through Poland to Lithuania later in the day. It also attracts a lot of visitors (7,000 per day according to one website we read), and later we saw that one-way footpaths had been implemented to ease the crowding. So by starting early we also managed to avoid the masses.
We made our way up the wooded valley — along a well made path — before climbing steeply up to the saddle along which runs the Czech-Polish border.
At the top, we poked our heads into the small church which had been built on top; now nestled in between a number of other restaurants and souvenir shops.
After admiring the large cloud inversion on the horizon for a second or two, we had our summit photo taken, and caught the cable car down — continuing our practice of hiking up and catching the cable car down when available.
