Český Krumlov, Czech Republic

Breakfast for one! The vast dining hall of the hostel had a solitary place laid out for yours truly when I went downstairs this morning. The kitchen staff were buzzing round me, arranging furnishings and putting things out stored during the Christmas break. Feeling as if I was in the way, I wolfed down my breakfast and checked out.

I headed back over the river and southwards, intending to check out the medieval buildings of the UNESCO world heritage town centre on the way. I spotted some medieval graffiti, a 13th century building on which someone had painted a mural of David and Goliath some three hundred years later. Wandering through the cobbled shopping streets I found a shop which was right up my street. Moments later the buildings ended and I found myself… back at the river again. Bugger. Far from working my way southwards, I had ambled in one big circle to find myself back at my starting point.

On the second attempt I retraced my steps successfully southwards to the station and bought a ticket out of Germany to the Austrian town of Linz, which was my gateway into the Czech Republic. The journey was via crap trains and took forever, so I was glad to find I had an hour or so to kill at Linz before my next connection onwards. I used it to stretch my legs and take in a little piece of Austria. Unfortunately, I found the little bit of Linz I saw to be generally unremarkable, although the shopping district did have some grandiose buildings. Regensburg had set the bar high.

From Linz, I took a train northwards, passing without ceremony into the Czech Republic. The train halted at the damp, musty, concrete station of České Budějovice – quite a difference from the glass-and-aluminium structures of the Deutsche Bahn.

The town of České Budějovice in Bohemia might not sound too familiar to you until you hear it called by its German name: Budweis. Beer has been brewed here in some form or other for about as long as the David and Goliath building I saw in Regensburg has been standing: over seven hundred years. Amazingly, the long drink of piss that is American Budweiser beer has its roots here, as does the somewhat tastier Budweiser Budvar (aka Czechvar) beer. Alas, I had no time to partake in a cold one, as time was marching on. Night had fallen and I needed to take one more train.

At least, in theory it was a train, although it more closely resembled a bus that ran on tracks. It was a two-carriage-long trundling thing that never dared to break 30 miles an hour on its stop-by-stop nighttime journey through the Czech countryside. I squinted at each of the station signs, not sure when my stop was coming, and noticed a group of backpackers at the front of the carriage doing the same.

At Český Krumlov I jumped off, as did the other few backpackers. It was late at night and I realised I didn’t have a clue where I would be staying or how to get there, so I piped up and said hello to the others. They were four Texan blokes on a whistlestop tour of Europe after having graduated from college and a girl who was apparently a model from Los Angeles on her way to Vienna to meet up with her boyfriend. Between us we checked the map outside the station and via a few dead ends, navigated the way down to the town, under the striking floodlit battlements of the town’s castle, and to a hostel they had been recommended by some other travellers in Prague. There was no dorm space available, but luckily the owner had a couple of rooms for us to crash in, and we celebrated our luck by going to the bar next door for beautiful Bohemian beer and hearty meals all round.