Czech Caves: both of wine and in mountains

We skipped back over to the Czech Republic hoping to check out the Moldavian Region (South-East). In contrast to the Bohemian region, wine dominates over beer, which is why we came! The ‘capital’ of the wine region is Mikulov, a tiny town with a massive chateau that wouldn’t look out of place in the Loire or Rhine valleys. The area has been likened (perhaps by the Czech Tourist Board) to Tuscany, with rolling green hills and rather tasty reds. Rather fortunately the town was hosting a wine fair the day we turned up, with singing choirs, lots of tasty foody things to eat and an abundance of wine stores hawking tasting glasses for about 25 cents each. Rather unfortunately, the Czech Republic has a zero alcohol tolerance to driving (0.00%), so I couldn’t indulge, and Hayley was gracious enough not to get sloshed on cheap good wine either… so we bought a few bottles for later and wandered up a big hill overlooking the town. That evening we drove out to Camping Apollo, which is perhaps the most god-awful campsite we’ve stayed in, things were looking grim as the rain also started driving in.

The next day we visited Lednice Chateau, which was open only to guided tours in Czech. Having not much else to do, we paid our 4 euros each and went for a wander around a big fancy house of some long dead family… I’d tell you more details if I had understood Czech. Another evening spent in a dodgy campsite (hot water seems to be a rare commodity in April in Central Europe, maybe its Putin…).

As an aside – I’d like to detail the thought process about starting our trip in April. First, we thought about how long this whole Eastern European trip would need to be (in close consultation with the bank balance, daily expected budget and when generous oil bonuses get paid out). We landed on about 4 months. Factoring in another month or so on the tail end to get back to the UK, sell the van and get a flight to Australia – we were looking at 4-5months in all. Everyone knows it gets way too crowded, way too expensive and way too hot in the southern European countries in July and August – so we wanted to be on our way back into France/UK by then. Nobody wants to be wedged between to a family of 8 fat French peoples and 3 sweaty naked Germans on the beach – but for some reason the entire northern European community descends to Greece to do exactly that in the height of summer. The perfect time, we figured, to be in Greece was early June, good weather without the crowds, and we back calculated our timing from that. What we didn’t anticipate however, was that the Czech republic campsites would nearly all be closed in April, and the ones that were left open were the crappiest of the bunch. So, neatly circling back to the original rant, we didn’t appreciate the daily horror of finding the one open campsite within 50km and discovering the evils that lurk within the bathroom walls… (Why not wild camp you say? Well it was still getting into low single digits at night – so we needed to plug our little heater into the mains electricity…)

The next day we made a brief foray into the town of Brno, which is quite nice and worth a visit if you’re in the area, but not worth making a specific itinerary for. And then my birthday arrived! Hooray! Turning 29 in the Czech Republic, my guess is that wouldn’t have been seen a possibility in 1987…

We went up to some limestone caves in the hills outside Blansko, which was doubly exciting as we got a little underground motorboat tour of the caves. We found the one open campsite in the area, and I celebrated in the lounge with Czech beer and The Walking Dead, while Hayley slaved away in the "kitchen" making peanut-butter chocolate cups… yum!

Chateau at Mikulov

The view over Mikulov

Chateau at Lednice

The minaret

View from the minaret

Train to the caves

Caves

Caves