Sun, 07 Sep 2003

author Tim	location Ostrovacice, Moravia, Ceská Republika
posted 09:09 CEST 09/09/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Ceska Republika ( all photos )

Kutna Hora ( 9 photos )
Making the best of the available wireless internet connection, after breakfast at the caravan park we spent the morning getting up to date with various things, even into the early afternoon.
Eventually it was time to give up this luxury and get on the road. The weather was great as we drove ourselves out of Prague. This city was hard enough to get in to, but getting out was not much better. We stumbled along, following the signs for the road we wanted to be on, but as is so common, they just sort of disappeared, leaving us driving along tram tracks, dodging pedestrians and Skodas as we randomly choose roads which might lead us in roughly the right direction.
This finally paid off, as we joined the E59/D1/E50/E65 (couldn't just call it one thing) heading south-east towards Brno. However, this wasn't quite what we wanted, so we deviated a little north towards Kutna Hora.
This was yet another World Heritage town, but after a bit of a drive through, we were less than impressed. The tourist office was well closed and pretty derelict. Compared to other such towns we have seen, this barely rated a mention.
We pushed a little out of town in search of the other attraction this place has to offer - Sedlec Ossuary. Seeming as it is such an attraction, I have no idea why it was almost impossible to find. We drove back and forth a few times, eventually stopping at a large church which had a map on the front of how to get to the ossuary. It seems lots of people do exactly the same thing.
Eventually we found our way there, parked the van and walked in and paid. The history of this place is interesting - some sacred dirt scattered in the church grounds lead to people far and wide wanting to be buried there. This lead to massive overcrowding and hence piles of human remains everywhere. Not wanting this to go to waste, people used the bones as decoration - we saw chandileers, altars, countless decorative strings and four massive pyramids all built out of bones and skulls. Macabre, sure, but not nearly as bad as we were bracing ourselves for. In fact, it was a little underwhelming, perhaps because we have been to lots of places outlining Nazi history recently.
From there, we pushed south for a couple of hours along crazy roads dodging insane drivers, in the direction of Telc. We elected not to go into the town itself, instead heading out again to a quiet campsite in the middle of nowhere. It was very strange, seeming to have no working toilet block and very few patrons. The old Czech reception man told us to drive in and pick a spot, all in German (plenty of the older generation speak that here, rather than English) - he was quite nice and perhaps a little suprised to see anyone turn up at all.
After driving past locals haphazardly parked on the driveway (no tourists expected, I guess), we parked then walked back up to have a dinner at their restaurant. We pointed and gestured for the benefit of the young Czech-only speaking girl, and eventually Liz got a meal which was just average, while my specialty of the house (three meats in four spices) was great.
We slept soundly in the near-total silence - very uncommon for us.

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