Nature Is Where People Aren't
May 11-13, 2018
Spring came early in Berlin with unusually warm and sunny weather, so we were looking to get outside and play as quickly as we could. We wanted to camp, but experience had taught us that camping in Germany wasn't exactly what we were after, so we decided to try a new country. Not long after looking into some options within a day's drive in the Czech Republic, our friends Auntie Lizard and Christoph told us they were also looking to go hiking and camping in that area for his birthday.
One time, shortly after we moved to Berlin, we asked our friend Spritzboi if he liked to go hiking. He replied, "I like dancing on roller skates." Not all of our hobbies meshed naturally with our new European friends, so we were thrilled that Auntie Lizard and Christoph wanted to be outdoorsy with us. Getting to take out all of our neglected camping gear and make inventory spreading it out on the bed felt like Christmas.
We rented a car that barely fit all of our gear and hit the road early Friday morning on a long holiday weekend. The route would take us east of Berlin and through Poland for a couple of hours before ending just over the border in the Czech town of Teplice. The literal moment we crossed over from Germany into Poland the highway disintegrated into a patchwork mess of asphalt slabs that shook the car like a coin-operated massage chair in a shitty mall. We could see clearly that the highway going the other way back into Germany was nicely paved, but this one remained ramshackle for at least an hour. We joked that the Germans had probably paid for the road going back into their country and the Polish just hadn't gotten around to fixing up their side yet.
The route eventually turned into single lane roads that lurched with large trucks, but the countryside was lush and the fields were covered in yellow flowers. At the border between Poland and the Czech Republic, some wooden supports had been put in place around the small road to look like a bridge of sorts. Ostensibly this was erected as a visual signifier that you were moving from one country to another, because it otherwise served no logical purpose. What this signifier actually accomplished was to make the narrow road even narrower - our compact Kia rental car was not much smaller than the passage. As a result, the sides of the unnecessary, decorative wooden supports were splintered and abraded from rubbing against what must have been dozens or hundreds of larger cars traveling between the two countries. Cool bridge, idiots.
We stopped at the information center in town and found out that there were two paid camping sites in the area: one off the main drag and one up the hill. We also learned that this was not an area where English was widely spoken or understood, but most people spoke as much German as we did, likely more. We were traveling with two actual Germans so we let them do the talking. Surprisingly to us, the only restaurant open for lunch was only serving German dishes, but the beer, unsurprisingly, was all Czech.
Having not liked the look of the open grassy field directly off the road that we passed on our way into town, we went to check out the other campsite up the hill and found it much more to our liking. Though it was still a far cry from what Americans have come to expect from either wild or car camping, we were able to set up our tents in a grassy area away from the A-frame cabins that most people rented, and unlike the campingplatz where we'd stayed in rural Germany, this place offered some of the actual rustic charms we associate with camping. The area we chose had a fire pit surrounded by benches, with a table for outdoor cooking, surrounded on three sides by trees. European campsites have functioning kitchens with fridges and communal seating areas, and all the tents are set up in communal fields with no picnic tables or ways to sit and relax near your tent. This place gave us some privacy and amenities like chairs and fire that are easy to miss when you can't have them at your campsite.
The draw of this area in the Czech Republic is a series of hiking trails showcasing an unusual cluster of sandstone rock formations. Named after the surrounding municipalities, Adršpach-Teplice Rocks is a national park with pay areas as well as large sections that are free to roam. The drive from Berlin took most of the day, so we started with the shortest of the hikes, which cost €5 to enter and supposedly took around 3 hours. It didn't take long hiking along the forest trail before sandstone pillars began poking through the trees. The path led alongside massive rock faces and through caves, with signs pointing out specific rock formations that the original settlers of the area thought resembled dogs, faces, skulls, and what have you. We've hiked through quite a few rocks in our time, and these were some pretty good ones. Each turn had new and interesting formations, and as it was already early evening there was hardly anyone else on the trail.
Though the weather was warm and had been for several weeks, we were shocked to find one section of canyon still covered in snow. This area, called Siberia, was a natural refrigerator. A thermometer affixed to the rock wall showed it was still almost freezing in the canyon, even though it was quite pleasant as soon as you exited and got back onto the trail.
At the beginning and end of the loop was a daunting set of stairs and ladders that led steeply up the side of the mountain into the rocks. After roughly 300 steps we found ourselves in the ruins of a "castle" that had been built as a lookout point on the peak hundreds of years before, with a panoramic view of the woods and town below.
There was a little bit of wood around the fire pit, so Kirb and Christoph started breaking it down into smaller pieces to get a campfire going for the evening. Before long a man came by and asked if he could share the fire with us, and then he and several other men started bringing down bundle after bundle of branches. We weren't sure if they gathered them in the woods outside the campground or brought them from home. Soon the fire pit was bustling with activity from a large group of lifelong Czech friends our parents' age who get together several times a year. They were quick to offer us Czech bread and sausages to go with the Czech beer we had bought at the nearby market. We thanked them for their generosity, but we had bought our own sausages, and before long everyone was grilling wieners on sticks over a roaring campfire.
Kirb put on some music, but after a song or two one of the Czech men pulled out a guitar and started serenading the group. He played classic American folk songs like Johnny Cash and Simon and Garfunkel but sang the words in Czech, with his friends singing along. Of the dozen or so friends, a couple spoke some English, and they asked us about ourselves and what we were doing in this part of the world. The guitar player said the hardest part of playing American music was understanding what people were saying in English (and remembering the words), so he mostly just sang them in Czech. He played an instrumental version of Celine Dion's theme from the movie Titanic; to him it sounded like she was saying "My hot wheels go on."
When the sun came up the next morning it set off a bird bomb the likes of which we had never heard. It seemed as if every bird in the country was screaming at the same time. It was beautiful in a way, like five symphonies being played simultaneously. When we woke for good a few hours later, it was bright and sunny and we reveled in the simple pleasures of cooking and eating our breakfast and drinking our coffee outdoors. The campsite was right outside the trailhead for that day's walk, so we could enjoy a leisurely morning with no rush.
Unlike the ticketed entrance and flat, nicely maintained 6-kilometer trail the day before, this 16-kilometer hike started in a pasture and made its way directly up the mountainside. There was a lot of bouldering up large rocks with both hands, squeezing through openings in rock slabs, and ducking through natural caves. By the time we made our way to the crest of the mountain we were good and sweaty. Mazz is a known klutz, and generally not a fan of hiking on uneven terrain because of it, but she trekked along without complaint even though internally she was experiencing a good amount of anxiety about falling down the mountain or having to be airlifted to safety because she broke an ankle. The dense woods and steeple rock formations made for a consistently gorgeous hike, and once again there was hardly anyone else on the trail. Eventually it led to a lookout tower with a 360-degree view from the highest point in the national park, before descending back down to fields full of sheep and wildflowers. Though the weather forecast had predicted thunderstorms in the afternoon, we were greeted with nothing but slightly cloudy blue skies all day long.
Feeling accomplished from a long and successful day of walking up and down things, we loaded up on more sausages and beer from the market and headed back to the campsite for an early evening of Yahtzee! and laying around drinking in hammocks before a repeat performance of campfire and Czech sing-alongs.
The first two hikes had been in the Teplice Rocks, so for our final hike we packed up camp and headed over to the town of Adršpach to see what kind of rocks they were slinging. The parking lot for this area of national park was comparatively massive and teeming with tourists on the warm, sunny Sunday. We hadn't known it before, but this area was the biggest draw of the Czech rock zone, and this turned out to mostly be to the park's detriment. Though it essentially had the same towering rock structures as the other paid area, this one was laid out to accommodate big crowds. The ideal way to enjoy the beauty of nature is not to catch it in your periphery while struggling to maneuver through gaggles of German senior citizen tourist groups. We tried our best to let the crowds pass by us so we could leisurely walk through the grounds and enjoy the park in peace, but it was clear we'd saved the worst destination for last, and there were simply too many people here to get what we wanted out of the experience. Much of the afternoon was spent queuing to walk up and down long, narrow sets of stairs, with plenty of crying along the way from small children who didn't want to walk up and down any more sets of long, narrow stairs. The scenery was beautiful. We'd had more than enough by the end of the hike.
Perhaps the nicest part of Adršpach Rocks was the picturesque lake at the entrance to the park. After the crowded hike, it felt good to find a secluded spot by the water off the trail to eat lunch and enjoy the views in silence. We'd hoped to get all sweaty like we had the day before and then jump in the water, but there was no swimming allowed in the lake and none of us had broken much of a sweat milling along the trail.
After two days of good walks we weren't put off too much by ending on a slightly sour note. We left the Czech Republic perfectly pleased with our weekend of hiking. Getting to spend sunny days trekking though picturesque surroundings with good friends is about as much fun as any of us could ask for. Throw in some campfires, weenie roasts, and Czech sing-alongs and you've got some happy campers.