history, beauty, exercise, and four-star amenities by bike

The days are getting shorter and Indian Summer, full of riotous color, beckons for one last bike ride. But where to go when vacation time is already spent, back-to-school time is
looming, and the best you can hope for is a long weekend? The answer is simple: head south to the land of ponds and castles.

Southern Bohemia has it all: bike trails and lonely country roads running through rolling hills, blooming meadows, shady forests, and past placid ponds. You can stay overnight in fourstar hotels in medieval towns with forbidding castles and inviting pubs; dine on the local specialty, carp, or, with luck, venison or boar; and wash it down with a pint of Budvar.

Left: The Schwarzenberg Tomb

You don’t even need to worry about driving down. Czech Railways will whisk you and your bikes from Prague’s Hlavní Nádraží to the starting point in Veselí nad Lužnicí in two hours flat. Just be certain to reserve a spot in the baggage car for your bike, at 60 crowns per trip for loading and unloading, and notify the attendant of your destination.

Once in Veselí, you can either change trains or hop on your bike and head due south for 12 km to the medieval pearl, the walled town of Třeboň. The trail leads along the Nežárka and Lužnice rivers, past some half dozen ponds to Kleč, and then continues to the Rožmberk pond, which is best circumvented toward the west via Přesek.

This should bring you into the middle of Třeboň, nestled snugly between two of the region’s largest ponds, Svět and Rožmberk, around lunchtime. You can enjoy a hearty meal of fresh, grilled carp – or any other freshwater fish to be caught inthe lakes – at the cozy Šupinka Pub on the Baroque square, or in its more upscale version, the Šupina Restaurant. Then, you can check in at one of the many pensions off the main square or in the four-star Hotel Zlatá Hvězda on the main square.

Another option is the three-star Hotel Bilý Koníček, housed in one of the prettiest Renaissance houses on the square. After a brief post-prandial nap, hop back on that bike and spend the rest of the afternoon pedaling around the Svět Pond, stopping off at the Neo-Gothic Schwarzenberg family tomb and the Chapel of St. Giles. Once back in Třeboň, catch the last of the sun’s rays at one of the many pubs on the town square, over a mug of the locally brewed Regent beer – named after the town’s 16th century regent Jakub Krčín – a harsh and hated man who bears the brunt of the credit for the beauty you see around you now [see “Jakub Krčín and Co. vs. Mother Nature”].

After another fresh fish dinner in one of the town’s excellent restaurants, such as the Rybářská Bašta on the Rožmberk Pond, you can catch a candle-light tour of the Třeboň Castle, with guides in period costume.

The next day get an early start on the “Okolo Třeboňe” (Around Třeboň) bike path. It is a well-marked, easy, and relatively flat 42-km trail that starts at the Novohradská Brána
(Gate) and runs along the dike of the Svět and Opatovický ponds, then turns east into shady forests. Five hundred years ago, these were one big swamp, but the Golden Channel (Zlatá Stoka), which you will cross, was built to draw off surface waters and regulate the levels of the surrounding ponds and to irrigate the fields. After crossing the Lužnice, the trail continues north through the village of Kosky, along the dikes of the Kukla, Nový, and Starý Kanclíř dams to the village of Lutová, then on to the medieval villages of Stříbřce and Stará Hlína.

From there, cross the main road and turn off the “Okolo Třeboňe” trail and, for the most beautiful ride of the day, pedal along the dike of the Rožmberk Pond, back into Třeboň. On the final day, you can finish off your mini-vacation in the wellness center of one of the many spas in town. (Třeboň is a well-known spa, specializing in mud baths from the local
fens.) The Aurora Spa offers swimming, sauna, squash (if you haven’t had enough) and massages to the public as well as guests.

After lunch, you can pack your saddlebags and retrace your route to Veselí, where hourly trains will whisk you back to the tumult of Prague.

Above: Třebon – the town ramparts

Jakub Krčín and Co. vs. Mother Nature
Once you’ve seen Southern Bohemia, you might be
tempted to think that Mother Nature made it with only bikers
in mind – even throwing in a hundred or so cool ponds for
them to soak their weary legs in.
You would be wrong.

If Mother Nature had had her way, Southern Bohemia would be a swamp. The meadows were once soggy, marshes, full of noxious gasses, quicksand, wild animals, rusalky (devilish female water sprites), and mosquitoes.

The man who turned this morass into a living Disneyland was a commoner named Jakub Krčín, who may or may not have been in league with the Devil. Certainly, the landscaping feat he accomplished between 1561 and 1604 was one devil of a daring caper.

His vile temper, a penchant for marrying rich old widows followed by girls young enough to be his granddaughter, his raging perfectionism, blatant workaholism, and an annoying talent for management certainly didn’t make him popular with his peers.

The only thing Krčín had going for him was a talent for pond building. And as it so happened, in 16th century Bohemia, ponds were where the action was. Savvy landowners, realizing that a pound of carp would bring a higher return than a pound of wheat, and that ponds did not have to be plowed, planted, or harvested (which saved stacks of ducats in human overhead), started planting ponds on their land, blooming like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Every low-lying field, hollow, and otherwise unemployed stream was flooded, and in the course of 50 years, some 4,000 ponds sprang up all over the country.

And what better place to put a pond than in a place that is soggy already? Commissioned by the Rožmberk clan, which owned most of southern Bohemia, Krčín pulled off a massive feat of
environmental engineering, the likes of which environmentalists would never sanction today, and succeeded in turning the swamps into a perfectly balanced ecosystem of ponds, channels, dams, weirs, and spillways.

What is most astounding is that Mother Nature has not intervened. To this day, Krčín’s work remains intact. The dams he designed and had built are still held in place today by oak trees he had planted almost 500 years ago. Houses and villages nestle in their lee, secure from floods. Carp still swim by the thousands in the warm and placid ponds he designed and wild fowl still nest in the reeds rimming the banks. Of the original swamps, only the rusalky remain – not to mention the mosquitoes, of course.