Cesky Krumlov

Cesky Krumlov is a small city mainly known for its castle (guarded by bears) and its old buildings and streets. we were lucky enough to spend 2 nights here but could have gladly stayed 5 nights. our first day we arrived just before lunch time in the pouring rain.

A street in Cesky Krumlov

we got out our rain coats and set off to explore the town, we walked around the streets and got some fresh potato chips from a market.

Ewen with the chips they were pretty good, a little soggy from the rain though. and you kind of felt like you had drunk half a bottle of oil

we went up to have a look around the castle, as you walk up to it there are too large pits i suppose (but they are humongous) on either side of the bridge. in each one was a bear! a real live brown grizzly bear! one was sitting in a corner eating his lunch not doing much else. the other one was a bit more lively running around and going for a swim in a pond and fighting with a stick. we got a pretty good video of it wrestling with this stick.

Bear Number 1

Bear Number 2

After spending a bit of time watching the bears the rain started to get heavier so we headed back to the hostel to get our washing. we spent the next hour or so playing games in a laundromat.

Rain in Cesky Krumlov

We had dinner at the pub next to our hostel which turned out to be some of the best (and cheapest) meals we have had in a long time. It was kind of like the food you might get from the Boundry in Bendigo. We ended up eating basically all of our meals here during our stay.
After dinner we went for another walk through the town because the rain had finally stopped. this time we walked up into the castle (the free parts) and got some nice photos of the view over Cesky Krumlov.

Our second day we had a sleep in and then went on a rafting pub crawl. Yep 7 of you hop in a raft and then float down the river stopping at bars. It was pretty fun! Luckily the weather was much nicer than the first day with the sky blue and the sun shining. The hostel dropped about 20 of us 15km from town and we hopped into three rafts. our raft had me and Ewen, an Irish guy, two English guys (one from Macclesfield in England) and two other Aussie guys. We were supposed to stop at three bars before floating back into town but some how we missed the second two. Once we floated into town we stopped at two more bars and then floated back down the river to the base of the hostel. It was about 6 hours all up i think. In the photo above you can see the spillway which is like a little mini rapid, we had to go down about 5 of these in the rafts which was a lot of fun, especially because no one on our boat seemed to know how to steer so often we were still facing backwards or sideways only seconds before righting ourselves to go down. We don't have any digital photos from this day as i am way to precious about my camera to take it on a raft, we took our disposable water proof camera so hopefully some of the photos we took work out.
Our last morning Busabout didn't pick us up until 11.30 so we went for a last walk around the town and then had a delicious breakfast at yep you guessed it, the pub near our hostel.
We are in Vienna at the moment, just arrived an hour or so ago. luckily we found our hostel easily, for once Google instructions payed off!
Missing you all
xoxxoxo