h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Eastern Europe is full of amazing places. Actually the whole world is, but this year I decided to discover Eastern Europe. We took a road trip with two cars, two tents and one GPS.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are all nice countries, but this time we decided to skip those. As much as possible - that meant a day of driving 750km.
Spending a night is a very important part of every trip. (Some think that eating is even more important, but I tend not to agree with that.) According to the plan we spent a night in a camping. There's a lot to learn about campings and this trip was quite an eye-opener for me. See, I hadn't camped in an official camping site before, only in wild nature.
Augustow is a nice Polish town, quite close to the Lithuanian border. It's full of canals and Netta river and it's located on a very important crossroad. The camping was quite close to a nice lake. All the adults were somewhat stiff from a day in the car but both teenagers of our company went to investigate it. Apparently there was something going on at the lake, as we saw a lot of blinking blue lights driving that way. All the excitement... Someone had had too much vodka and not enough swimming skills. Nice start for our trip.
The camping was nice and clean. Showers, toilets, electricity. The only fault I could point out is the land, it was quite slope. We cooked our dinner and had a deep sleep. That actually happened in most of the nights, so I don't think I'll mention that again.
As our main goal was to drive to Prague, we got up early in the morning and hit the road again. The next stop was Wroclaw, still in Poland. It was a hard days work t get there, as we had to drive through Warsaw. We didn't want to spend any time there, but it was just the fastest way to drive on. With only one GPS we had to stick together and that wasn't really easy all the time.
It was all dark already, when we reached Wroclaw. We were hoping to find a camping few kilometers before the town, but it had vanished. According to the caravan and camping guide it was supposed to be there, but then our book was 4 years old. So we ended up in Wroclaw.
There's a camping site in the middle of town, on a stadium. I am not really a sports fan but it was quite exciting to learn that it was an actual olympic stadium for the 1936 summer olympics. Wroclaw was called Breslau then and belonged to Germany. As about the camping site, it was huge, of course. The people we very friendly and helpful and the local dog looked like a stuffed toy. Too stuffed. In Wroclaw I also realised, that not all the travellers make nice neighbours. They may nice people, but camping not far from about 30 Dutch (or maybe Belgian) teenagers makes sleeping somewhat complicated. Then again, we were tired enough.
Unfortunately exploring Wroclaw wasn't in our plans either, and the next morning we hurried away again.
Now things got a bit more touristy. The landscape changed a big deal. We crossed the Sudety mountains which are located on the Polish-Czech border. There was a lot to see, as I come from the country where the highest peak is 318 meters.
The first stop in Czech Republic was Kutna Hora. Kutna Hora with it's suburb Sedlec are in the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. Our main interest was to visit the Sedlec ossuary. It's a small chapel where they store skeletons. Not just some skeletons but about 40 000 - 70 000 of them. Creepy, I'd say. Almost everything inside the chapel was made of human bones, even the chandeliers and a coat-of-arms. They say that the huge chandelier contains at least one of each bone from the human body. I must admit though, that the number of bones made it all somewhat surreal and I guess one skeleton is actually more creepy than this chapel.
From Kutna Hora it was only a short drive to Prague. As the dream destination was the Prague Zoo, we decided to camp near the zoo as well. That was easy since there was about 7-8 camping sites within 2 kilometers from the zoo, all on one street. We took the largest and stayed there for 3 nights. It was called Camp Sokol. The camping site was very crowded but we still managed to find some space for our tents which were both quite large. Our closest neighbours were 4 lads from Germany, very nice folks with a funny van.
Camp Sokol in Prague is yet another great place. The zoo is in the walking distance, there's cheap iternet access, nice and clean showers, kitchen (with microwave over, water heater, stove, sink), possibility to get your laundry done (including drying), pub, bakery shop and very nice and helpful people at the reception. I totally loved the place.
So, the zoo was in the walking distance and that's where we headed the next morning.

To be continued...

Ah yes, some photos to decorate the story: http://public.fotki.com/hatifnat/prague-and-others/

#120 is exceptionally nice

yes, glorious actually

They were hiding from the rain.

I'll look at the photos at the weekend, when I have time to look rather than just glance at them.

Good point, I'm afraid I uploaded tons of those.

Hati, those are great photos. I loved the retablos in the cathedral. And all of the zoo photos. I had a hard time getting the slideshow to work. It keeps quitting on me toward the middle of the zoo photos, so for some of them I've just seen the thumbnails.

Awk. So much world to see and so little money.

Just open the album and click on the first photo, it'll carry you to the next one etc.

I love zoos, as you may have guessed already. Well, I love botanical gardens, too. I wonder which one will be the next zoo I'll visit. Berlin maybe. I'd love to go there.

meet you there

* makes notes *

Should I do some pl*nning?

you might

mind you i'll not be able to go right now, so we should probably wait till spring

*makes notes*

mm .. pl*nning?

a few of us here have thought about taking a cheap bus to berlin and stay for two nights. i've done it before. was quite good!

From here flying seems to be cheaper. Or it should be a very big .

fly by all means. i couldn't see myself driving a bus from eekland just for a weekend

but then you needn't go to berlin just for a weekend just because we might

good pl*n .. B*rlin



Berlin ..