The Spirit of Dixie Is Alive in Czechia
July 8-11, 2021
Once we had the appointments for our vaccinations in the books, there wasn’t much more to do than wait. Different segments of the European Union had made both vague and explicit promises to open back up to international tourism in the summer of 2021, but it didn’t take long into the warmer months before entire countries shut off their borders again due to rising case numbers. We got our first shot of Moderna in June, and after two weeks it had been reported to offer 80% efficacy against the original, now-outdated strain of Covid. That was just enough peace of mind for us to be willing to get on a train for three hours, and cross the border into the Czech Republic, which was carrying a designation of “least worrisome” places to travel from Germany.
The town of Děčín was exceptionally easy to reach and seemed like a solid base for a weekend of hiking. It’s on the other side of the border of Saxon Switzerland, an area of German wilderness we’d explored way back in 2016 for Mazz’s birthday, and was also not so far away from Teplice Rocks, where we had hiked and camped in 2018. The direct train between Berlin and Prague made a stop there, a fully functional Airbnb only cost €50 a night, and the busses from town seemed to run to all the trailheads we wanted to visit. Until we could go on a “proper” vacation again, this seemed like a perfectly pleasant stopgap.
Even if there hadn’t been interesting wilderness to explore, simply going to Děčín to drink beer and eat traditional Czech food would have been enough of a draw to get us out of Berlin. After settling into our flat for the weekend, we set out looking for a classic dive bar with traditional cuisine. We ended up at Bar Bodenbach, praised online for being one of the only bars in town to serve beers from local microbreweries. Kirb tried two of them - both very good - while Mazz got an unlabeled bottle of cider that was so delicious we had to ask our server if there was even any alcohol in it (there was, 5%). We ordered a dish of raclette potatoes as a snack and asked the owner if he knew of anyplace in town that was serving traditional Czech duck with dumplings and gravy, and he wasn’t entirely sure. He explained to us that Děčín had been hit pretty hard by the pandemic; there used to be three other restaurants on his street, but now they were all closed. He only survived because of the extra income he made from a food cart at the zoo and another business venture.
Based on some online research, we thought we could find the food we sought at a nearby restaurant called Tankovna Na Skřivance, and it turned out they did have the exact dish we were looking for. We were still pretty skeptical of eating inside anywhere, and the waitress looked at us like we were lunatics for hesitating before coming indoors when all the outside tables were taken. People in this town did not share the same reluctances we did to breathing shared indoor air without masks. We survived, and the food was great.
It took a little while the following morning to figure out exactly how the busses worked in Děčín, but once we got the timetables from the info center and a map of the terminals and connected bus lines, we were on our way. Our first trail began in the town of Mezná and led through forests to Pravčická brána, the largest natural stone archway in Europe. We set up the hike as a big, day-long loop, so that we climbed up to the arch right in the middle. The Falcon’s Nest at Pravčická brána was beautiful, but had a lingering scent of sewage that intensified the closer you got to its base. We stopped for drinks overlooking the valley, but all around the arch there seemed to be an inordinate number of people coughing uncontrollably and spitting, so we decided to finish our drinks, take our pictures, and move on back to the relative safety of the trail.
Kirb would have been perfectly fine eating the same duck and dumpling dinner every night in the Czech Republic, but the Castle View River Restaurant was offering one of his Bavarian favorites - Schweinshaxe - so he had to order that instead. This time Mazz got the duck, and unfortunately neither the bird nor the ham hock were particularly good, though the view of the castle was nice. Pro tip: never order the thing that’s been put on the menu (Schweinshaxe) simply for the tourists (Bavarians) who only want to eat what they know instead of trying something they don’t (although, in this case, the local dish wasn’t particularly good either, so it was a lose/lose). Back at the Airbnb, we laughed about the fact that we had brought a bottle of nice Czech wine back into the country with us from Berlin. Even though there was zero chance you could actually buy any of Petr Korab’s wines in Děčín, there was something farcical about having imported a wine into Germany just to bring it back into the Czech Republic to drink it.
The next morning, we tried to show the bus driver where we wanted to stop on our phones, but he didn’t speak English or German and just sort of looked at the screen blankly. The stop was well before a proper town, and even though we pressed the stop button he blew right past it and we had to yell out on the crowded bus to be let off. The trailhead was draped with caution tape with a sign written only in Czech, but luckily two teenagers were leaving right as we arrived and translated it for us. It said that the trail was closed because some trees had fallen, and we asked if we should just go on through anyway and they just sort of nodded at us, like, “yeah, duh.” Although relatively close to Pravčická brána, this forest was completely unlike the one we had hiked through the day before, all mossy and damp and green and reminiscent of the forests we have in the Pacific Northwest.
Before long, the forest changed, and then the trees were barren and the forest floor was completely covered in green pine needles. Chainsaws were buzzing in the distance, and we really hoped the people who were wielding them weren’t going to yell at us for disobeying trail signs. The path emerged into a small village, which thankfully had cell service so we could piece together how to continue on using the map we’d downloaded on All Trails, as nothing was properly marked in the town itself. A Google Earth car was slowly roaming the streets, so we might be immortalized wandering around in the street view of Arnoltice, Czechia. The trail continued in a third completely different type of forest, with tall, slim trees and a sea of ferns, before opening up into a field of wildflowers that led to the small town on Labská Stráň. There’s a hotel from the 18th century on the edge of the cliff, where a wedding was being thrown on an outcropping overlooking the valley.
We stopped for lunch at a lookout point near the hotel, and it was at this point that Kirb was wholly regretting a decision he had made before the trip. There comes a point in every workout shirt’s life - if it’s lived a good, full life - where even though it smells clean out of the washing machine, one drop of sweat transforms the garment into a putrid, stinky rag. Kirb knew the shirt was on its last legs, knew he should have trashed it and not brought it along. But he liked that shirt. They’d been through so much together. So he packed it, then he climbed up a couple big hills and got sweaty in it, and as a result there were visible stink lines coming off of him by lunchtime. Luckily, the hike ended in a cute little riverside town called Hřensko, which from the road seemed to be bustling with shops and clothing stalls. The smell emanating from Kirb was so awful that he fully planned on buying some random t-shirt or soccer jersey in Hřensko and just tossing the shirt he was wearing in the trash. Mazz had even offered him the shirt off her own back, leaving her to walk around in a sports bra, as that was a better option than having to smell her husband anymore.
When we’d passed it on the bus, Hřensko looked like a quaint village, but we quickly found that it wasn’t the sort of place we wanted to be at all. Anything but charming upon closer inspection, Hřensko was nothing but trash shops and discount cigarette emporiums that had metastasized on an otherwise idyllic river hamlet. It seemed to be entirely populated with trashy Germans wearing Monster Energy sweatpants, drinking cans of Monster Energy. Dealing with the smell of Kirb’s shirt strangely became a more palatable option than wearing any the clothing on offer in the shops. The idea of taking a boat trip through the canyon that departed from Hřensko seemed less appealing than simply taking the bus back to Děčín and doing literally anything else.
After getting burned at the Castle View River Restaurant the night before, we decided to try a “hip” local restaurant instead of chasing some unfocused idea of Czech tradition that we were having a hard time pinning down. When we asked the guy who owned Bar Bodenbach for restaurant suggestions, he kind of shrugged and told us to go eat at Karls, as everyone seemed to like it. From the look of the place, Karls would have seamlessly fit in any bigger metropolitan city. And the food was...fine. It tasted like it could have come from any stylized-yet-mediocre metropolitan city burger shop. Berlin has a million of those. It was the only meal on the entire trip that felt expensive. In hindsight, we should have tried harder to go and eat something we could only have found in the Czech Republic, but dealing with public transport that only showed up every two hours made it seem like more work than it was worth.
We gave ourselves plenty of time on Sunday before our train back to Berlin so we could take multiple busses to the seeming middle of nowhere to walk around some big rocks. It took several transfers to get out to Tiské stěny, but we managed not to mess it up. This paid tourist attraction lets you follow a family-friendly trail through a large assortment of weird sandstone rock structures, ducking under natural arches and squeezing between narrow passageways. It wasn’t so much a hike as a stroll, but it was a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Mazz loves herself some big, weird rocks. A weird bug bit her on the top of the cliff and it made a baseball-sized welt on the back of her leg for a week.
Something strange happened on the way home from the big rocks. On the way there, the bus was decorated with a variety of Minions, football pennants, and dozens of colorful tree-shaped air fresheners dangling from the ceiling. On the way home, the bus was decorated with a single confederate flag affixed to the sun visor. We saw another confederate flag flying in a side street in Děčín a few days before and were equally perplexed. This bus driver did not speak English; we learned this getting on and paying for the bus. So we couldn’t help but wonder (dwell, really): What on Earth was a Czech bus driver doing with this flag on his bus? There were only a few reasons we could think of.
He’s a racist. That flag is racist, and if you’re from the Czech Republic, you can’t spew nonsense about how it stands for “heritage.” The Dixie flag is a worldwide symbol for white power.
He’s into Lynyrd Skynyrd. American classic rock is far-reaching, and many bands used the confederate flag as a cultural signifier to let people know that not only were they never going to college, they definitely weren’t going to major in African American studies. That said, this particular bus driver might have just thought the flag meant “Freebird.”
It has become a symbol of “rebellion” in other parts of the world. Many people don’t know exactly what a symbol means before they decide to co-opt it. There’s a chance he’s not a white supremacist, he just doesn’t want foreigners coming into his country. Huge difference.
No matter how we cut it, it was a bad look. Kirb had to fight the urge to snatch it down on his way out of the bus and yell, “No!” at the man like he was a dog that peed on the rug.
In the 6+ years we have lived in Berlin, we have never traveled back to the city on a Sunday in the amount of time it should actually take to get there. There is always a delay, always some sort of hold-up that adds several hours to the trip. Lo-and-behold, this Sunday was no different. So, we spent the rest of our Czech coins on French fries and beers at the train station and made friends with the guy running the restaurant there, then we bought more beers from the shop and drank those on the platform, waiting for the train to eventually come through. By now, we’re used to it. Plus, it wasn’t like we were in a particular rush to get home. It seems weird to complain about a couple extra hours of vacation.