Europe by Canoe

Executive Summary (and moralizing)

2008-08-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

For all you executives out there reading my blog - you know who you are - this one's for you.

You: who don't have time to read the whole blog. Here's the trip in a nutshell.

You'll also find the moral(s) to my story - the place where I sum up what I learned from this trip, why it was worth it all in the end, why I did it, and how I've grown as a person from it.

But keep in mind - those of you who are skipping all my finely considered prose and just reading this executive summary - I'm offering special prizes to all who claim to have read the whole blog and can answer three questions testing their knowledge of what is contained in these pages...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
I spent a month canoeing through the Czech Republic, from roughly its centre to its western border with Germany, where I stopped paddling because I wasn't having much fun. The trip failed to live up to my expectations because: (1) almost no one spoke English, so I was by myself and lonely most of the time, and (2) paddling upstream for nearly 20 days (240 km) was a real pain.

Stats
Total km paddled/wheeled: 485
Total days paddled/wheeled: 24
Total days off: 5
Total paddle strokes (estimate): 288,000
Total beer consumed en route (estimate): 30 litres
Total rocks hit: 5,641

I decided on a whim to backtrack to Karlovy Vary for the International Film Festival there, where I watched 3 films a day for 9 days, while camping in a stadium with hordes of other film buffs. It was the best film fest I've ever been to. I had a great time. I managed through much effort to sell my canoe to a fellow in Prague at a great discount, and headed for Slovenia for no good reason.

The couchsurfer I stayed with in Slovenia got me into climbing that country's highest mountain, Triglav, which I did - and it was the best experience of the trip. I finished my week-long stay in Slovenia on the Adriatic coast.

On the way back to Amsterdam to catch my flight home, I stopped in to visit Vikki and her boyfriend Sergio (they had joined me for a few days of paddling earlier) in Bern . Loved it.

The End

Now for the moralizing:

"Why did I need to do this?" I often asked myself. I've been home for 3 weeks now, and the answer is still in progress. I've developed various theories (and they all hold some truth, I think): that I needed to suffer to make me appreciate how good my life was; that I needed to exorcise unfinished business from my 20s - like the idea for this trip - before I could grow up and move on. Now, I think I just needed to make a break with my life in Wakefield. I could have done anything. I just needed to halt the forward momentum (or was it kick me out of my inertia?) of my complacent, easy, contented, unchallenging, unambitious life. Throw a wrench in its works.

One of the personal realizations that grew out of this trip was that I have consciously set up all sorts of limitations on my life and what I can do, believing, perhaps, that I could find happiness by narrowing my options, shaving them down to fine point. But I painted myself into a corner here in Wakefield - made my world so small that I became desperate to break out. I still think Wakefield is a very nice place to live - and plan to continue making my home here - but it can no longer be my whole world.

It was silly, I suppose, to try to make it so. But it's the same old story with me: swinging from one extreme until I'm driven to the other; I live in Toronto, then flee to Wakefield.

The trip also raised the question for me: is there much value in travel anymore? Maybe 50 years ago, before globalization had really taken off, and tourism to boot, travel was a way to experience truly different cultures. But now, much of the world is different only in superficial details, and the parts of the world that are still quite different are usually also quite fucked up, and not places you'd want to go.

Now, I feel a much stronger desire to get to know this region better - I've never explored the Laurentians or the Eastern townships, for instance, or New England - than to travel to distant places.

Somehow, also, this crazy trip has made me more normal. I've seen how I've been afraid of "normal" my whole life (another self-imposed limitation), and how this trip was part of that. I couldn't simply behave like all the other tourists in Europe - I had to do something never done before. Yet when I quit my supposedly adventurous canoe trip and started seeing Europe in a way closer to other tourists (although, admittedly, couchsurfing is not exactly mainstream, at least not yet), I enjoyed myself much more. Next time, I may even buy a guide book.

Is Europe better than Canada? That was one question in the back of my brain as I left for this trip. I had chosen Europe for my destination because I didn't want to go to another oh-so-interesting-in-its-disfunctionality Third World country. I wanted to go somewhere where they seemed to have it a bit more together - socially and environmentally - than we in North America. It's a hard question to answer after so short a trip, but my impression is quite positive of Europe. It's not that it's significantly better, but in subtle ways, I prefered the cultures I found there to Canadian culture. Perhaps the most significant difference I noticed was that Europeans seemed generally less afraid of each other than Canadians. I think that our much vaunted politeness is actually a sign of our fear of each other; it stems not from graciousness but from a reluctance to get involved, to open up to strangers, to be intimate. Perhaps because we have the space here, we tend to take it (that and our largely British heritage, of course). But in Europe, they don't have the option of running away so much. They must engage each other.

I don't want to overstate my case, though. Canada is a wonderful place to live, and in some ways is better than Europe, such as with multiculturalism. Europeans, with their more rigid sense of national identies, have a harder time with immigrants than we do. Also, Europeans have lousy breakfasts - how I missed the greasy spoons of my birthplace.

Was the trip "worth it"? I suppose I got what I needed out of it - but I don't think it was particularly good value. I didn't need to blow all my savings to get what I needed, and I could have had a lot more fun doing it.

Anyway, believe it or not, I'm not sick of canoeing yet. In fact, I'm just killing time here, rambling on about my feelings, etc., while waiting for a friend to come over to take the canoe out on the Gatineau for a little afternoon spin.

Thanks for reading.

Wrapping up: a sea, and more mountains

2008-08-14T04:55:00.000-07:00

Piran's rabbit warren of streets.

The town was full of little brown boys playing soccer.

Roofs of Piran. How about some rooftop gardens?

Piran, jutting out to sea.

Piran, with the Julian Alps in the background.

Vikki with her Guatamalan friend, Maura, in Bern, Switzerland.

The Reitschule squat in Bern.

After the emotional and altitudinal highs of climbing Triglav, a couple days of lazing on the beach was the perfect counterpoint. I don't usually enjoy beaches much, but I was tired enough after my climbing and hiking adventure that I didn't get bored of the beach until the second day. And the liberal Mediterranean attitude towards clothing helped too - though I did get a bit burnt in the nether regions.

I first arrived in Piran at around 8 in the evening. I located the hostel, but was determined to camp by the ocean, so set off, fully laden with gear, down the coast, in the direction someone told me there was a campground. The fact that it was back in the direction my bus had just come didn't help my moral. I walked for an hour and a half, the uncushioned straps of my malfunctioning hiking pack raising red marks on my shoulders, the tread of one of my shoes flapping half-off with every step - an incongruous sight shouldering through the relaxed, well-fed and tanned crowds strolling amongst the seaside touristic flotsam. But such was my determination to find a little piece of ocean breeze of which to breath deeply as I drifted into contented sleep, I carried on all the way to the campsite.

The first sight - and sound - that greeted me at the camp was of an accordion, and accompanying singing. A pleasant surprise. But it went steeply downhill from there. The campground was basically a long, thin strip of road and gravel, chain link fences on either side, packed with cars with doors open and radios blaring, and young, partying Slovenians, shouting and drinking. From nearby, the thumping of a dance club competed with the puttering and squealing of a go-kart track. A good time, no doubt, if one were in the mood. But I was not. Fortunately, some respite from the mayhem could be found on some none-too-level terraces of grass somewhat above the throng. I set up camp in the dark, content in the fact that at least this was a degree better than walking endlessly through a tourist wasteland, laden with absurd amounts of canoe camping gear - a portage without a boat.

The next day I checked out Piran. It doesn't take long - it's a small place: a rabbit warren of tiny streets all crowded together on a peninsula jutting out into the Adriatic, with a fortification protecting the old city from the inland side. The coast is an unbroken stretch of restaurants, with large boulders draped in sunbathing bodies, spilling into the calm, clear, warm water. After a few hours of soaking up this Mediterranean atmosphere, I felt more relaxed than I had in weeks. Something about the combination of perfect climate and a civilization that has had centuries to settle into its own rhythms, makes a perfect recipe for contentment.

Later that evening I went for a walk through the hilly suburbs, and passed many a yard from which I could hear the happy sounds of people dining outdoors.

My second day was spent much as the first, except that I considered it the official end of my trip, as tomorrow I would be starting to make my way back to Amsterdam and my flight home. I celebrated that evening with - what else - a plate of spaghetti carbonera, and a huge glass of wine (I found that here, on the Mediterranean coast, the central European fixation on beer gives way to wine, with correspondingly low prices).

A day of travel got me to Bern, the capital of Switzerland, where Vikki and Sergio had landed after they left me in Cheb. Vikki had a Guatemalan friend, named Maura, whom she was visiting there, and she was living in a squat (more on that later).

I tried to find Vikki at the squat, but it was all locked up, and the drug dealers and users outside were no help either, so I took a tram out to the suburbs and a campsite by the Aare river. I love public transit in Europe, and it's especially good in Bern. Electronic signs at stops countdown the minutes until the next tram (never more than 10 minutes), and LCD screens inside the tram display upcoming stops.

The next day I met up with Vikki and she showed me inside the squat. Outside it's covered with graffiti, but inside it has a courtyard covered in ivy, offices for non-profit groups, a gym space, a theatre, a cinema, a bar, and the apartments where Vikki and 13 others live, sharing common areas. It's like a community/cultural centre, where no one pays rent (although the city did recently get them to start paying for utilities). It even has a website (http://www.reitschule.ch/). Such well-organized, city council-recognized squats can be found throughout Europe.

Switzerland is known for its harm reduction programs and general tolerance for hard drug users, and it was in evidence outside the squat. The addicts actually had nothing to do with the squat, but were there because the city encouraged them to congregate in this area by operating a soup kitchen and giving out clean needles nearby. The coordinators of the squat weren't too happy about this, and had complained to city council, but understandably didn't have much leverage with which to bargain with.

So evenings outside the squat form an interesting tableau: over to one side, the junkies huddled over their tinfoil; centre stage, an outdoor bar; and on the other side, a game of ping-pong on an outdoor table. A graduated triptych of depravity. Not a bad place to bring a date.

That afternoon, we made a stab at the H.R. Giger museum (he's the amazing artist, best known for designing the aliens in the the movie, Aliens), in a nearby town. It wasn't quite nearby enough, though, as we failed to make it before closing time. But we did get as far as the town of Fribourg, a 20 minute train ride from Bern. We wandered around the town a bit before heading back; it was French speaking (while Bern is predominantly Swiss-German), and I discovered that, unlike Quebec French, I actually enjoy trying to speak European French. Je m'excuse to mes freres in Quebec, but French on the continent just sounds way nicer to me.

That night, back in Bern, I was treated to a walking tour of the old city - which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site - by Pan: a Swiss friend of Vikki's who used to live in Guatemala. I had an image of the Swiss as a reasonable, quite, unremarkable people, but that was altered significantly by Pan's tour. He showed me fountains topped with colourful statues of people eating live children, huge clocks with figures that become animated when the hour strikes, and Bern's famous bear pit, which has been around since the 16th century (the city is named after the German word for "bear"). But the pit was set to undergo a major transformation: after years of protests from people concerned about the welfare of the bears, a new enclosure is finally being build for them, where they will have access to the river and, presumably, an escape from the rain of debris that tourists and locals could inflict on them at will in the past.

Pan also showed me the Munster, a towering Gothic cathedral, with a scene carved over its main portal depicting the Last Judgement, with the righteous in heaven on the left and the damned in hell on the right. (If ever this scene is updated for modern times, I might suggest using the one outside the squat, with the ping-pong players in heaven, the addicts in hell, and the bar representing the real world.) The hell scene (obviously the one to which I gave most of my attention) was something straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. You can look straight up through the open mouth of one screaming sculpture to the sky above.

We ducked down for a quick look at the ornate dining room in the Kornhaus, a building that used to be a storehouse for wheat and wine and was now a cultural centre. The huge underground space looked like an expensive place to eat, but would probably be worth it for the ambiance alone: thick pillars and arches, dimly and warmly lit, gave a unique sort of bunker/cathedral feel to the space.

Bern is a natural fortress, built in a loop in the river, with high cliffs sealing it off. Looking down vertiginiously from one such cliff, I noticed a net maybe 50 feet below. "Is that to catch people who fall?" I asked Pan.

"There's signs over there," he pointed, "asking people to please not commit suicide here."

Too bad - it's a beautiful place to die.

Walking the streets with Pan, delicious local beers in hand (street drinking is allowed here - in fact, Pan couldn't even comprehend why it would be illegal), I had a hard time seeing why anyone who lived here would want to kill themselves. Indeed, I was struck by how happy and contented most of the people I saw appeared to be. The cost of living is high, but so are wages. Bern reminded me somewhat of Ottawa. And like Amsterdam, it manages to combine Germanic efficiency with a laid-back joi de vive - in other words, the best of both worlds. Also like Amsterdam, there are many bikes and mopeds instead of cars (although no where near the scale of Amsterdam). The city even lends bikes for free by the day.

I had expected a more rigid, conservative Switzerland, but instead found a cosmopolitan place full of strangers who actually talk to each other on the street. Little scenes in Bern - scenes you would never see in Canada - such as a grandfather riding on a push scooter with his grandson, or a family with backpacks departing for a camping trip at the train station, left me with a warm feeling for the place. Although my visit here was brief, I think that Switzerland was my favourite country I visited, and I'd like to go back to see much more of it.

And the surreal thing that happened on my way back to my campsite on my last night there did nothing to diminish my feelings for the place. Pan had ended his nighttime tour at the Rose Garden - a park high up on a hilltop, overlooking the old city and river below. The last tram had left at midnight, so I began the half hour walk along the river to the camp. The streets were deserted. On the second story of a building across the street, my eye caught an open, lighted window. Then I saw the huge black woman in it, cleavage everywhere, holding her breasts up in a clearly propositional manner, eyes imploring: come up. In true Canadian fashion, I smiled a half-smile meant to convey, thanks for the offer, but I'll pass tonight, and quickened my pace from the scene.

And that's pretty much it. Took the train to Amsterdam the next day, sat in a cafe and enjoyed the street life one last time, splurged on a 2-star hotel, and flew home the next day, bumping into a couple of people on the plane I know from Wakefield (one of which I couldn't quite place, until I asked where I knew her from and she said we met skinny dipping at Brown's Lake. Oh yeah...guess I didn't recognize her with her clothes on).

TRIGLAV - part 2

2008-08-13T18:04:00.001-07:00

The day began with a bus ride from Ljubljana to the town of Moystrana, a little further north than I had been the previous day; Damjan had said that this was an easier spot to begin an ascent of Triglav from.

It involved a 4 hour hike up the Bistrica river valley to get to the base of the mountain. You could drive this route, but I'm glad I walked, because it was stunningly beautiful. I realized it had been many years since I'd walked among real mountains, and was struck with the feeling: how did I ever live without this?

The fast flowing river was an amazing aquamarine (I think because of all the limestone in the area), the mountains kept looming up higher and higher on either side the further upstream I progressed, and I passed a waterfall that sent me into ecstasies of joy. I'm not sure what it was about this waterfall, called the Pericnik, that made me fall in love with it. It wasn't huge (50 metres), but it was perfect. And you could walk behind it. I spent about an hour admiring it from all angles, dancing about its base like a giddy schoolgirl, before continuing up the valley.

At 4pm I reached the first of the mountain huts that conveniently dot the landscape in Triglav National Park, Slovenia's only national park. This hut (lodge would be a better term), being at the bottom of the mountain, is one of the few that can be reached, and supplied, by car. Most of the others can only be supplied by opposite ends of the technological spectrum: helicopter or mule. Consequentially, food is expensive, washing water is non-existent, and it's recommended you carry all your own drinking water in. Still, it's well worth the cost to not have to carry a tent or food up and down the craggy peaks that comprise the park.

Anyway, I mention the time, 4pm, because the sign at this lodge (altitude 1000 metres) said it was another 4 hours of hiking to get to the next lodge (2300 metres), nestled below the summit of Triglav (2800 metres). It would be cutting it a bit close to make it before nightfall, but I decided to go for it.

Judging from the fact that everyone and their dog climbs this mountain in Slovenia (I did pass someone climbing with their dog), I suppose I had imagined the ascent to simply be a long hike upwards. But as I started to really gain altitude, the reality quickly hit me that this was much more like rock climbing than I had anticipated. The path was basically straight up a thousand foot cliff face. Fortunately, there were many iron rods and handrails hammered into the rock face to assist climbers up the most difficult stretches. It occurred to me that such "defacement" of the wilderness would be a hard sell in Canada; here, we still believe in the preservation of a "pristine" wilderness. In Europe, conversely, people seem to have long ago given up on such notions, accepting that humans live here. It's not unusual to find a castle plunked defiantly atop peaks throughout Europe. To Canadian sensibilities, it might seem a defacement, but I kind of like it. I think that the idea that wilderness can only be "pure" if no trace of humanity can be found in it reinforces the myth that humans are separate from nature. Better, in my opinion, to strike a harmonious balance between nature and civilization. I doubt that there are any mountains in Canada both as high as Triglav and as accessible to novice climbers.

As I climbed, I sweated equal parts exertion and growing fear. A flatlander like me wasn't used to looking down and seeing such dizzying expanses of air beneath. One misstep could easily get you killed up here. Ironically, the higher I got, the more I felt like I was digging myself into a hole; I knew that getting down is usually even harder than getting up. I just tried to focus on the rocks in front of my face, and not looking down - although the view was thrilling. Another irony was that, to climb something so high, you spend most of your time looking down.

I felt I was in something of a race against the setting sun. I was in full sun for most of the climb, as the cliff was facing westward - the shadow cast by another mountain range across the valley slowly creeping up the cliff below me. For hours, the sun seemed to hang at the same height over the opposing mountains - me going up, it going down, the two movements balancing out. Finally, shortly before reaching the lodge, the shadow caught up with me, quickly plunging my sweating body into cool mountain air. I had a quick "bath" in a snowfield.

I reached the lodge just 15 minutes before its kitchen closed, and got a hot meal of sauerkraut and meat soup, and a cold beer. So civilized. The lodge was only about half full, so I got a whole dorm to myself. Man, I slept well.

I got an early start the next morning, wanting to summit early, due to reports of bad weather coming later in the day. It took me an hour and half to walk to the last lodge (2500 metres) before the summit. I paused here for a rest. Inside the cosy confines of the lodge's dining room, I watched a group of Germans getting suited up for the final ascent. They had helmets, poles, and self-belaying systems, for clipping onto the railings. They started me worrying that I was unprepared, gear-wise, for this challenge. I was still wearing the only footwear I'd brought to Europe: water shoes designed for boating.

I went outside to look at the path ahead. It lead straight up. I could see a tiny procession of ant-like climbers inching their way upward. Maybe this is high enough, I thought, trembling from more than the cold. Maybe I don't need to go all the way. But I banished such thoughts; I knew I would regret it if I didn't finish the job at this point, after all the struggle to make it this far. Only another hour to the summit, the signpost said - then I could hightail it back to solid, flat earth before the storm clouds rolled in. How I yearned to be back on ground where to trip would mean nothing worse than embarrassment.

As I climbed I realized that I was now above all the other peaks around me. I tried really hard to concentrate on nothing but the next foot or hand hold in front of my nose.

Then the clouds rolled in. While it was a shame to lose that mind-numbing view, it was also a relief, for I could no longer see just how high I was. I was especially grateful for the lack of a view when I had to walk along the top of a narrow ridge, dropping off into nothingness on either side.

Because there are two paths to the top of Triglav - one on each side of the mountain - I passed a number of people on their way down after climbing to the top from the other side. I stood aside for 5 minutes as a long procession of teenagers passed by - a mixed group of Argentinians and Canadians. They were dressed for a walk in the park: sweatshirts, track pants, sneakers. After seeing the uber-outfitted Germans, it reassured me to see that people less prepared than me had survived the summit. Germans, I have come to realize, are the yuppies of Europe - they're not likely to undertake anything unless they've spent a small fortune on it.

My first hint that I was almost there was the sound of singing: a group of low, male voices carrying through the fog from an indeterminate place slightly above me. When I arrived on the summit I was greeted by the sight of a group of about 20 French "pathfinders" - boy and girl scouts, dressed in brown uniforms of shorts and long-sleeve shirts, white scarves, and black toques. Their leader was backing up, camera in hand, trying to get a group shot, and nearly backed right off a cliff.

There was no great view to savour, due to the clouds - just mist and rock - though at least I had already seen the view in the film I saw earlier. But I did savour the victory for 20 minutes or so, then started heading down the other side of the mountain.

Suddenly the cloud blew away and I was treated to the sight of brilliant white clouds several hundred metres below, and above: the brightest blue sky you could imagine . It was like the view out an airplane window - that same crystal clear light. I was simultaneously treated to a sudden and alarming increase in the wind. I could see the clouds below running into the side of the mountain, then whipping up over the peak like frothing rapids. The weather up there was clearly changing fast. And I wanted to get down even faster.

I made it down to the lower cloud level, back in the bosom of the mist, out of the fierce winds. This path down turned out to be much more gradual than the one I had come up, which was a relief, since it would have been very difficult to descend the cliff I had come up. I even found myself on a (relatively) wide mule track for awhile, doing switchbacks down to the next lodge, at 2100 metres, where I had lunch and something warm to drink.

I spent the rest of the day walking through the park, a different way than I had come in, towards Bohinj lake. Slowly the landscape began to transform from the the weird, alien, rock-strewn world of the high peaks, back to the more familiar world of evergreens, lakes and meadows.

Whenever I passed other hikers, I had to decide how I would greet them. The little guide I received from the tourist office on climbing Triglav suggested saying "dober dan" to those I met - which means "good day" in Slovene. I did this at first, but got few responses in kind, and soon realized that almost all my fellow trekkers were foreign tourists like myself. I heard "hello" in many languages while in the park, and tried out the range of my repetoir. But never knowing the nationality of anyone until they opened their mouth (and often not even then) it was always a crap shoot. So I eventually just settled in to the international language of default, with an English "hi" to all I met.

I finished the day at another lodge that, being beside a lake, had water for a cold outdoor wash by the pump. I met a couple there - an Italian woman and a man from Montreal, both working in Holland. A question I often get is, "How are you able to get 2 months of holidays for travel when you live in Canada?" It seems Europeans are aware of the paucity of North Americans' holidays. I tell them I had to quit my job. I asked this couple how much holidays they get in Holland, 4 weeks maybe? They tell me, somewhat ashamed of their riches, that they get 8 weeks. It must be nice, I think, to work in Holland, and have 2 months a year to see all that Europe has to offer.

The Italian woman voiced the usual disdain for Germans, who were talking at the the next table, and whom she could understand, as she spoke German. "They're always complaining," she complained. Maybe if I could understand them, I would feel the same, but I feel like defending the Germans. All the time I've been in Europe, I've never heard a kind word for them. I suppose they are like the Americans of Europe - the people we love to hate, and are allowed to be prejudiced towards because they're on top. I can understand how being invaded and occupied twice in the last century might turn people against them. But I am impressed by their love of the outdoors, of travel, and of adventure travel in particular. Most people, including Canadians, if they travel at all, it's in their youth. As they get older, they usually just want to go to a beach and bake in the sun. But not Germans. They're out there climbing mountains, paddling rivers, hiking through the wilderness well into their "golden years". They're fit, organized, prepared. If anything, they're too good, and that's what makes people uncomfortable around them.

That night, I had to share my dorm, but still slept well - especially knowing that I was dry and safe from the storm that unleashed rain and lightning outside for much of the night. The next morning I hiked down one last mighty cliff, back down to the waterfall by Bohinj lake I had visited several days ago, and caught a bus back to Ljubljana.

From there I caught the last bus of the day to Piran, a heartbreakingly picturesque medieval town on the tiny stretch of Slovenian Adriadic coast. From the country's highest point, to its lowest, in a day and a half. I could still see Triglav to the north. Climbing it was the high point of my trip.

TRIGLAV - part 1

2008-07-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

After the film fest, I blundered into the best experience of my whole trip. You remember that film I described, "The Sunny Side of the Alps"? I suppose it must have planted a seed in my mind, because when I later went to Slovenia, I climbed the same mountain that the father and son climb in that movie (sometimes life imitates art). It's called Triglav, and it's the highest peak in Slovenia, at 2864 metres (almost 10,000 feet), in the Julian Alps.

But I'll remain a slave to chronology, and fill you in on a few other interesting experiences I had before getting to the mountain.

I had a good last day of movies at the film fest, finding at least one romantic comedy to renew my faith in life: Un baiser, s'il vous plait, by "the French Woody Allan", one Emmanuel Mouret

Also saw a half-realized poetic doc called Peace with Seals, made by a Czech about the dying out of the Mediterranian harp seal (tourists are occupying all its beaches). It was ambitious but lacked any narrative arc. There was a scene in it where they're interviewing a white South African man who is a strong defender of the seals there. Then he suddenly breaks off from the interview and yells at someone offscreen, "We're trying to do something here, and you walk through like a bloody idiot!" The camera turns to reveal a black man, looking offended, his expression saying, "What's your fucking problem, jerk?" He wasn't interfering with the shot at all, and the seal defender just comes off looking like a prick. I have to wonder why the filmmaker put that in the film, because it harms the credibility of the save-the-seals message he's aiming at. Later on, the seal defender calls humans "the cancer of the world". It's too bad that most defenders of wildlife are so anti-human, although I understand where they're coming from - if you're a muslim living in Bosnia it's pretty hard not to be anti-Serb, for instance. But I think we have to rise above these group hatreds, whether they be based on ethnicity, or species, or even kayakers vrs. canoeists. I actually agree that taken together, humanity is the cancer of the world. I don't think you can look at the collective impact of us on the non-us world and come to any different conclusion; in almost every case we make life worse for other species (and the few exceptions - pidgeons, some viruses, blue-green algie - have usually succeeded despite our best efforts to control or eradicate them, not because of benevolence towards them). Climate change can easily be analogized to a planet fever, and we are the virus that the Earth is trying to rid itself of. I believe all this, but I still like most humans as individuals.

The final film of the fest was one of the best : Involuntary. It's a Swedish film about how people behave (badly) in groups (and as such has something to do with what I was just talking about). What's really interesting about it is how it was shot: each scene is done in one long take, the camera never moves, and it often doesn't even include everyone involved in the shot. For instance, the first shot of the film is just of people's feet as they arrive for a dinner party and are greeted by the hosts. The scenes switch back and forth between four seperate story lines, with completely separate characters (thankfully, none of the storylines or characters interweave - that's been done to death lately), each one illustrating in an almost clinical manner different examples of the mob mentality. Entertaining, and educational.

I can't wrap up my description of the film fest without mentioning one of the stars of the festival: the dude who came onstage at the end of the filmmakers' introductions before each film in the Grand Hall to lay the mic stands down on the floor so that they wouldn't block the screen. Every time he did so, the mostly young crowd, having recently discovered irony, gave him a rousing round of applause. But perhaps there was more to it than simple irony, because there was a certain decripid charisma to the man; his stooped walk, his wrinkled suit, his fraying hair. And he played his role well, drawing out his performance much longer than necessary, waiting for silence to fall, then murmuring a few well-chosen words into the mic and bowing to the crowd before shuffling offstage.

My favourite film of the fest was definately Tulpan; I noticed that it won a prize in its category. On the whole it was a very good fest. But I do have one beef: no popcorn. What a huge disappointment. When I brought this issue up with Eva, she had a strong reaction: thank god there's no popcorn. All that munching is distracting. Whatever. If your concentration is so compromised that you can't handle a little innocent mastication from the seat next to you, then wait for it to come out on DVD, when you can watch it at home, silent and friendless. Most cinema is not high art, and as such a perfect compliment to eating, drinking, whispering, snoozing, and/or making out.

The film fest over and the canoe mailed to its new owner, Christian, I set off for Prague to meet up with Christian and collect my money. We met up, he bought a couple of paddles and the wheels as well, then invited me to stay at his place just outside of Prague for the night. I had a train ticket to Slovenia leaving at 6 the next morning, and happily agreed to stay at his place. We spent the evening drinking Czech rum and talking about our lives and South American politics. He is Ecuadorian, and I spent 6 months teaching English there almost 10 years ago. He was one of the lucky ones to escape that country's grinding poverty, and had a job in Prague working for Monster.com. He had married and had a child with a Czech woman, but they had seperated, and now his son lives right across the Vlatava river from him - which is partly why he wanted a canoe, to make visits easier. He also wanted to take his son out canoeing.

Onward to Slovenia. I enjoyed this train trip much more than the one to Prague from Amsterdam, because it was only about half the length, and went through some beautiful hills in Austria. When I got to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, I gave my coushsurfing host, Damjan, a call. "Are you the one with the canoe paddle?" he asked. As if he had to ask. He was already in the train station, looking for me.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do in Slovenia, but Damjan did. He quickly intuited my predilections and suggested I go to Bohinj lake, amidst the mountains 2 hours bus ride away, which I did the next day.

I hiked partly up one of the nearby mountains, lost my way on the poorly marked trails, and then walked to the Savica waterfall at the far end of the lake.

From the lake, I could see the Julian Alps to the north, topped by Triglav. The idea of climbing it first entered my mind as an idle fancy. I wanted to see Ljubjana, and the Mediterranian, and didn't have time for a mountain trek.

But pretty soon I started taking the idea seriously, and inquired at the tourist info about doing it. It sounded pretty doable; it's a Slovene national rite of passage to climb Triglav. Everyone here does it at least once in their life. The mountain is even on their flag. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. So I decided to return the next day to climb Triglav.

Karlovy Vary Film Festival - Part II

2008-07-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

The Grandhotel Pupp - home to the stars.

One of the theatres.

Sure is bright outside of the theatre.

The Prostitutes - a band a saw at the Rotes Berlin Club one night.

One of the grand prominades constructed around a mineral spring.

The Aeroport Club - a club set up just for the festival week in a derilict building.

I made it through another test of my stamina; it wasn't quite as gruelling as canoeing upriver for weeks, but 9 days of sitting on your ass does take a different sort of toll on the body. Fortunately there's easy access to spas for recouperation.

In all it's been great. I've really enjoyed my time here. Definately the best film fest I've been to. It seems to attract excellent people. But by the halfway point in the fest, my fortitude for films about harsh subjects was worn down to nothing. Wednesday was the day that broke my spirit: "Dead Hand Knocking" (child dies in motor scooter accident); "Karamozovi" (child dies after falling off bridge, then father shoots himself); and "Captive" (bond formed between opposing soldiers in Chechnya, but then Russian forced to suffocate Chechan prisoner to avoid being discovered by the enemy).

I think that the focus on tragedy I'm finding at this fest is not just that movies in general focus on it, nor just that I tend to gravitate towards tragidy in storytelling, but Eastern Europe in general - from which this fest draws a majority of its films - tends more towards the tragic in both storytelling and life. Many surveys on "subjective happiness" have found that Eastern Europeans are the least happy people on the planet, and they usually have the top suicide rates. Maybe it's a legacy of communism; but when I think about Russian literature that predates 1917, it seems similarly concerned with the dark side of the human spirit.

After that day, I decided to search out whatever light comedies I could find in the festival program. For the first time in my life, the words "romantic comedy" peaked my interest. I got off to a good start with "Tulpan", which is my favourite for the whole fest. It's set on the Kazakstani steppe - a perfectly flat moonscape of dust and scrub, where a few herders living in yurts make a bare-bones living. The protagonist returns from the navy and begins his search for a wife, for he needs a wife before the boss will give him a herd and allow him to fulfil his dream of creating a little rural paradise on the steppe, which in his eyes is the most beautiful place on earth. But, while there's thousands of sheep around, nubile women are few and far between. And the only one around has no interest in him, apparently because his ears stick out too much. It's a film of long, slow, wide shots, the camera left to roll while children scurry through the shot, playing games, livestock runs into the near distance, and dust devils spin across the plain. The director (who was in attendence) had the actors live together for a month in a yurt before beginning to shoot, so they come off authentically as a real family living in these conditions of no running water, no electricity - just a transitor radio that the son listens to, then recites the news to his father that evening as he straddles his back, picking blackheads off it. But the animals are the real stars of the film, in my opinion: donkeys comically mounting, a camel who chases her baby across the steppe, as it is strapped down in the motorcycle sidecar of the region's vet; a goat who licks the face of the protagonist after he bursts into her barn, thinking his love was in there. And thankfully the only death in it is a few stillborn lambs. It even has a fairly happy ending. A perfect film - everything a film should be. It certainly was no candy-coated version of reality, but it wasn't a total downer either. It just felt like real life, beautifully distilled.

The next film held great promise, based on its write up - playing frisbee on the beach in Goa, discussing philosophy - but took itself way too seriously. There was a ten-minute sequence, complete with "tragic" snyth music, of a woman crying, looking at photos of her dead husband, crying, splashing water on her face, crying - then finally writing her suicide note and heading off to Goa to walk into the ocean. Please. Who commits suicide like that? I should have walked out then, but stuck it out a bit longer, until a hippy on the beach drew a circle in the sand and started explaining how, if all the earth's history was in an hour, humanity would be the last millisecond - as if this was a huge revelation.

I'm glad I walked on that one because I was just in time to catch the last screening of "Be Kind, Rewind" - even though i didn't have a ticket. Though I love Michel Gondry's work, I'd missed this one when it played in N. America, so was glad to get in. It was a little more mainstream than his other films, but still very enjoyable. His characters are like innocent children. I've read that he directs with a very spontaneous, improvisational style, and it shows. This was just the antidote that i needed to the broodiness of many of the other films I've seen here.

This wasn't my first attempt to get into this film. I had gone to the Grand Hall - the premiere theatre here - at the appointed time, only to find no crowds waiting to get in. I waved my ticket at the guard, though, and he let me in. Pushed through the heavy doors; disoriented in the dark, i fumbled for an opening in the curtains. Finally I emerged near the front of the vast theatre, packed with people. I looked at the movie playing with confusion - judgingf from the faded colours, it seemed to be an older film. But maybe Gondry was just up to some of his tricks. No, this wasn't right: I fled the theatre. Back out in the light, I studied my ticket closely. Of course! I knew perfectly well that they use the 24 hour clock here. Why did I think that 11:30 meant 11:30pm? That would have been written as 23:30 here.

The next day's selection was a disappointment, unfortunately. They were all decent films - perhaps I've just reached that point of movie overload, where it takes a truly exceptional film for me to appreciate it. The film, "Mermaid", typified this day. It began well: the life story of a girl with supernatural powers. It was playful - sort of like "Amelie". But as the film went on (and it was on the long side, at 2 hours) is slowly deteriorated into a standard story of unrequited love, of the girl who tries to redeam the cynical older man. And then, just when things were moving towards a happy conclusion, the girl is run over and the guy chooses another woman. Maybe because it was a Russian film, it was as unable to finish happily as an American film is to finish unhappily.

Something else that this film did which really annoys me in movies: the build-up to an accident. I've seen many accidents - mostly involving cars - in these movies this week, and you can see almost all of them coming. Your fist tip off might be that, suddenly, the camera seems to suspiciously focuss a little too long on the simple act of driving. Why are we being shown all this driving, with no dialogue, you ask yourself. Because: something bad's about to happen. Then there's the cutting between the hero's car, and those unpleasant people in the red sports car, driving recklessly. Why do filmmakers feel it is necessary to warn viewers of an impending accident? Wouldn't it be better if on-screen accidents occured with the same unexpectedness as off-screen ones? Occasioanally I've seen a director confound this expectation - show all the lead-up to an accident, but then, at the last minute, it's avoided. But even this is just playing with the convention. I'd rather get rid of the convention all together.

I did see one good film that day, however - and it was the strangest film i've seen all festival. It's called "The Sunny Side of the Alps" and it's a Slovenian short film. It's a simple film with little dialogue, about a man who is jealous of his neighbour's new car, then takes his young son on a hike up to a nearby peak. The film ends with a song about the beauty of Slovenia, sung by a band in traditional dress in a bar, with a smiling, rocking back and forth crowd. So what's so wierd about that? All the characters are deepest Africa black. This is never explained - it's just taken to be normal. I loved it.

In non-film fest news, I've changed my return flight date to fast-approaching July 24. I alternate between thinking its too soon and too late - which i suppose means it's just about right. Based on a recommendation from Eva, I plan to do some couchsurfing in Slovenia for at least some of the remainder of my time here. And judging from that film, "The Sunny Side of the Alps", it is beautiful. And maybe they are all black there.

And I sold my canoe. 5000 Czech Crowns. I don't want to remind readers of how much I paid for it - it's in the archives somewhere. But I'm happy to get something for it, anyway. I said goodbye to Sarka yesterday, picked up by the courier, off to a town just outside Berlin. Sounds like she'll have a good home - father and son trips on the Vlatava. I have to meet him tomorrow in Prague to get the cash.

I went out again with Eva and her friends, this time to the Rotes Berlin Club, to see a band called the Prostitutes. There are apparently one of the most highly regarded bands in the Czech Republic. And I did really get into them. It's always nice to get a bit drunk and listen to ear-bleeding music once and a while. And a plus was that the lead singer was English, so I could understand most of the lyrics. Some memorable ones were, "Such a nice girl / Now she's dead!"

Another self-realization: My central dilema, or "why i love movies", is that I'm an introvert with a hunger for life. I don't know how to solve that one.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival - part 1

2008-07-08T00:08:00.000-07:00

Halfway through the 9 day fest now, and it's been pretty good times. This is a laid-back, casual film fest, with a lot of good films to offer. Its relaxed nature doesn't mean, however, that you don't need to fight a bit to get into your first choices of films. Practically every sceening is packed solid; if the tickets didn't sell out beforehand, it quickly fills up with ticketless but pass-holding fans who are let in 5 minutes before each showing.

It works like this: each morning the box office opens at 8, when you can buy tickets for that day and the next. A festival pass entitles you to three free screenings a day. You can buy more tickets, if you like, or you can show up and hope there's still room. But personally, after overdoing it at some previous film festivals (a binge of something like 50 films in 12 days at the Vancouver film fest a decade ago comes to mind), i find that 3 a day is my limit anyway.

The first bus of the day from the stadium where i'm camped to the Thermal Hotel, where the box offices are located, is at 8am. So every morning - almost - i'm up in time to catch this bus, after usually staying up past midnight to catch some interesting late night film screening, to buy my tickets as early as possible. Even arriving at the box office that early, though, I'm still at the tail end of the morning rush. But, especially since the crowds diminished slightly after the weekend, I usually don't run into too many sold out shows. And there's so many films I'm interested in seeing, I've always got backup choices if my first ones aren't available.

So my days start early and end late - and my sleep is never great in a campground with hundreds of others, not all of whom are there to sleep - but my days leave plenty of time for eating, writing, cappaccino sipping, and people watching.

The eating is not great. By this time I'm sick (literally) of Czech food: greasy, meaty, bready. But there aren't a lot of other options. There's so-so pizza and pasta. There's questionable Chinese. There's expensive sandwiches. Last night I ate at a Lebonese place called Ali Baby's. In Canada, Lebonese food is synonymous with cheap fast food, so i was surprised by the prices (though it was fast). I paid twice what i'd normally pay for a meal, though it was twice as good, my first truly good restaurant meal in ages. And vegetarian! Despite the price, I think I'll have to go back.

The normally sleepy and geriatric town of Karlovy Vary is transformed this week into a youthful party town. Students from around the county who would never have anything to do with such a relaxing, boring place, descend on it for this one week a year. While the packed theatres and crowds of youth fighting - though ever so good-naturedly - for a free seat attest to the passion they have for the films, they are here equally for the partying. Czechs - in particular the youth - seem to have an almost insatiable appetite for partying. Beer is for sale, and consumed, everywhere. I read one British critic's comments, saying this was his favourite festival to come to, because of the enthusiasm of the crowds, the lack of pretentiousness - and i can say that's true from what i've seen. There's a bit of the high-class, ritzy thing going on - black audis chauffering people from the fancy hotels to the shiny clubs; security guards in black suits trying to look essential; crowds gathered around red carpets (only, they're green), waiting for a limo to disgorge some director they've never heard of - but for the most part this is a down-to-earth affair.

This fest has shown me a new side of the Czech people. Maybe spending so much time in the countryside, I saw mostly older people. Here, I'm seeing the younger generation, and I'm impressed. They seem of a different breed than their parents - understandably so, given the changes that have occurred here in the past 20 years. The older generation is great in its own way, but more impenitrable than the youth, at least for me (and not just because of the language barrier). I find the youth to be open, hopeful, happy, and fun-loving. A good balance between free-spirited and thoughtful. Always traveling in groups of college buddies. I don't want to overstate it, but you could say it's the first generation to grow up here in quite awhile free and prosperous, in an independent state. It shows. Much of the great atmosphere at the film fest owes itself to the youth who flock here once a year. I can say that this is best best film festival, on the whole, that i've been to.

Today I saw a film called "Rok 68", a poetic documentary about the time around the Prague Spring. I knew little of this history. The Czechs tried to take socialism in a different direction from the Warsaw Pact countries - put a "human face" on it, open it up to real democracy - and their "brother" states sent in the tanks. The Czechs have always lived on the edges of other great powers. As i know from permaculture, "edge" is where the action is. They receive multiple influences. They straddle the ethnic and cultural divide between eastern and western Europe. They've tried repeatedly to chart their own course, only to be thwarted, betrayed, time and again by the great powers in whose shadow they are forced to live. I see their position in the middle of Europe as the reason behind why they seem to have a particular talent for balance. During the Cold War, they were communist, but not part of the Warsaw Pact. They were inbetween. And they love peace. Maybe it was just that they saw that fighting was hopeless, when they were ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, invaded by the Nazis, occupied by the Soviets and their allies, but I think they also genuinely hate violence. Many small nations, after all, have fought invaders to the last man - but the Czechs have taken a different course. It's not that they lack bravery: civilians risked their lives and died in the streets offering symbolic protest against the Soviet tanks; students immolated themselves in an effort to awaken their people to revolution. But they seem to have reached a common calculus that the costs of violent resistence were greater than a temporary aquiescence to the will of the powerful - even if that temporary retreat meant sacrificing another generation to the stagnacy of ideology. I respect this approach. I think that, in the end, it has paid off for the Czech people. They now have a culture that has passed through the worst horrors of the 20th century with its optimism, culture, and heritage intact.

But back to the film fest. A series of shorts are screened before each film. Each one depicts a past winner of the Crystal Globe, the KVIFF's award for contribution to world cinema - Milos Forman, Danny De Vito, Harvey Keitel - and what they're using their little statuette holding a crystal ball aloft for. Harvey Keitel, for instance, tells a bartender in a Brooklyn dive about how "some asshole" dropped the award on his foot, thus accounting for its bandaged condition; Milos Forman uses his to crush his pills; a slumbering De Vito to knock over a ringing bedside phone he doesn't want to answer. They're very well done. But they also show how this festival doesn't take itself too seriously. And the fans clearly support this sentiment, because they always appaud these shorts, even though they must have seen them many times by now.

A few years ago Prague tried to start up its own film festival, and essentially replace KV as the premiere award giving festival in the Czech Republic. But KV's fans rallied behind the older film fest (this is its 43rd year) and turned out in large numbers to show their preference for it. After a few years, the Prague fest folded.

I must have been here for awhile now, because I'm starting to run into people I've met on a regular basis. It began with small incidents back in Cheb, like seeing that same thick-eyeglassed fisherman who was fishing beside our campsite one morning, then fishing in the river in the middle of town the next. Or exchanging a few words with some German tourists sitting across from me in the internet cafe, then seeing them the next day biking on a path along the river, as I paddled downstream. Here in Karlovy Vary, i ran into a couple of girlfriends of Lucie's who I'd met when i was here before. Then a few minutes later, i bumped into a woman i'd last seen in Cheb, and hoped to never see again. With a sinking heart, she told me that she lived in KV. She comes off as a little insane. My first tip-off was when, after she'd struck up a conversation with Viktoria, Sergio and I, she didn't let me get off the bus at our stop with the others, because she was writing her address on a piece of paper on my lap. I told her this was my stop, that i had to get off, that my friends were getting off as i speak, but she just said, "you can get off at the next one," and i watched helplessly as the doors closed between my travel buddies and I, and the bus pulled away. They caught up with me at the next stop, me still in the clutches of this woman. She seemed very keen on speaking Spanish with us, and getting us to stay at her parents' pension. All the while her face was flushed with a gaping smile and wide eyes. When we finally escaped i said to Viktoria, "Now i know what's it's like to be a celebrity stalked by fans." That is what it had felt like.

On this second encounter, she dragged me downstairs to meet her friends. But they had already gone into the movie theatre, and I didn't have a ticket. Then she made a brief but unsuccessful attempt to persuade the usher to let me in anyway. Then she bent over and started rifling through her bag, looking for her ticket, and blocking the flow of incoming movie-watchers. The usher had to ask her to move aside. Then one of her friends did arrive, and looked at her like she was crazy for trying to arrange some sort of meeting with me minutes before they were supposed to go into the theatre. I finally escaped when she went into the theatre, me saying i'd call her tomorrow. i don't know which I'm more afraid of: calling her and getting together, or not calling her and running into her and facing - what reaction? Her smile is the sort that i worry can turn to rage on a dime. I haven't called her yet, nor run into her again. But chances are high I will run into her, KV being as intimate as it is.

A more welcome encounter was with Eva and several of her friends. As I mentioned, she's a couchsurfer from KV (though, like almost all young people, she goes to school somewhere else, and is moving soon to Prague). She's a language student (Spanish) and many of her friends are language teachers. So i got another opportunity to speak Spanish, while we ate some pretty good Mexican food. After lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon on the patio of the Thermal Hotel, drinking beer and talking, while more of her friends (who were all crashing at her parents' house in the suburbs - there were about 6 of them there i think) dropped in. The fact that everyone has a cellphone - or "mobile", as they call them here - greatly facilitates the kind of spontaneous meeting up for drinks that is a staple of social life for young people here. Every time I've called someone here, they always say, "I'm at such-and-such a bar, with some friends, come join us," or "i'm at such-and-such place, waiting for some friends to meet me here, then we're going to the bar. come meet me." this goes on all day, it seems.

Eva had a really smart, interesting, funny group of friends - which didn't surprise me considering the high quality of people I've met so far through couchsurfing - and I enjoyed hanging out with them for an afternoon. I can get quite talkative when I've been deprived of conversation for awhile. I had to hold myself back so i didn't monopolize things, especially in a foreign language (though they all spoke English well). Later that night, I met up with several of them again at a screening of Nicholas Roeg's (for whom there is a retrospective here) "Two Deaths" (which, despite its dark theme of the triumph of sexual obsession over morality, set during the Romanian revolution of 1989, I greatly enjoyed), and could have gone out to a club after that, but choose sleep instead. (Which i didn't get much of, since at 5am a group of people right next to me seemed to be either taking down or setting up a tent, talking and laughing loudly all the while. "I hate people," I grumbled into my pillow.) But I will go to a club tonight, as Eva recommends the band (something about the "chorus of the prostitutes"?), and i should go clubbing at least once while i'm here. It's at a place called Propaganda, which is KV's only year-round club (though a number of other ad-hoc ones pop up for the festival).

And what about the films, you ask? They've all been good, except for a couple of duds, and several exceptional ones. The only one I had to walk out on, was a documentary called "Christopher Colombus: The Enigma", by renouned Portuegese director Manoel de Oliveira - who, i believe, recently turned 100. I had a vague recollection of seeing something else of his, and liking it. But this film was just a humourless guy in different stages of his life, dragging his wife around to every historical monument or ruin that had anything to do with Colombus - who, he was out to prove, was born in Portugal. They would walk up to some statue, and the guy would spout off for several minutes about the significance of it. I don't even find this form of tourism interesting to do, let alone watching someone else go through it. Manoel, what were you thinking?

The highlight of the fest so far for me was, to my surprise, a Canadian film. I don't usually like Canadian films, but Guy Maddin is definately a category to himself. Although I don't usually like his films that much either, i like what he seems to be trying to do. i like his style a lot, just not the execution. But this film, called "My Winnipeg" - a poetic rumination on his love/hate relationship with the city he's lived his whole life in - I liked better than his other work. It's got some moments that drag, but there are also some inspired sequences. I'm not sure the Czech audience liked it much, though. There were a number of walkouts, and it only received tepid applause afterwards. I don't blame them; Maddin doesn't make it easy for people to like his films - often blurry, black and white, badly acted. If you can see through the warts, though, there's treasure.

The first film I saw was "In the City of Sylvia". I was attracted to the screening because it was advertised as having little dialogue, and i often like films that emphasize their power as a visual medium over a literary one. It wasn't great - not enough happened for my tastes - but i did enjoy it because it so closely mirrored aspects of my own life right now. It featured a guy wandering around a city in France, travelling alone, sitting in cafes and looking intently at the people around him, all talking. The envelope of silence that he moved within, amidst the chattering of the world around him, felt very much like my reality of late.

There has also been a midnight series of English horror films from the 1930s - 1950s. I've seen a couple of these: "The Man Who Changed His Mind" about a brain surgeon who discoveres how to implant the mind of one in another's body; and "Peeping Tom", the controversial film about the maker of snuff films that apparently destroyed director Michael Powell's long and illustrious career.

One of the best, and the most brutal, films I've seen is the Russian tale "Gruz 200". It depicts a 1984 USSR so dark, evil, and corrupt as to be unimaginable to someone with my background. There are scenes in it i hope to soon forget, but never will. This film totally obliterated the feeling of tranquility I had been floating on after having a sauna that afternoon.

I don't know if it's just this festival, or that, since reading "Haunted" I'm noticing it more, but the great majority of the films here are dark. Drug addicts, war, rape, murder, adultery - you name it, it's dark subjects that seem to constitute most of the films. i used to have more tolerance for this fair, but find I'm growing more desperate for any films that offer light, joy, happiness. Why is it that people like to be told stories about all the worse stuff that can happen to people? I'm not looking for total cotton-candy fluff; i just like films that balance the light and the dark. Two perfect examples of films with this sort of balance are "Burnt by the Sun" and "Heavenly Creature" - both films on my top ten list. That's what I like. Show me the lows, but show me the heights too. And it doesn't have to end on a high either. Both those films i mentioned start high and end tragically. But i find that way too many films just concentrate on the darkness, to the almost total exclusion of the light. And i don't want to see that anymore.

I realized recently that my history is repeating itself in strange and incomprehensible ways. After the canoe trip 11 years ago that inspired the idea for this trip, I went to the Vancouver Film Festival and engaged in the legendary spree of cinematic gluttony mentioned before. Now i find myself at another film fest after another canoe trip. What can it all mean?

A Slight Change of Pace

2008-07-06T01:07:00.000-07:00

Just another beautiful street in Cheb.

A typical riverside hospoda, or bar, where I stopped in for sausage and beer on both the way up and way down.

Sunset on the river Ohre - which I am no longer padlling into.

Cheb again.

The throngs gathered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Fest, waiting for someone - anyone - famous to walk down the green carpet.

The most ornate place I've seen a film in yet. I was way up in the highest balcony; first time I've had too look down to watch a film.

A selection of movie posters.

The coveted...naked...luminescent...beachball playing...award.
.
Where I'm camped, with several hundred others.

More throngs gathered to watch the opening night fireworks. They were my Canada Day substitute.

Watching the movie from way, way up.

So it's official - I've called it quits on my European canoe adventure. I always intended to wrap it up if it was no longer fun - fun being the main purpose of this trip. Not: "Get 'er done", as I may have misled. I'm not into reaching goals just for the sake of reaching them - there has to be a point to it all. I suppose I might experience a sense of pride if I made it all the way to Amsterdam, but - screw that, i'd rather enjoy myself. I feel pride enough in myself for making it this far. Hell, I could have stopped after the experience of buying the canoe and still felt proud enough.

I regret ever characterizing this trip as being from point A to point B. i realized this towards the end of my planning process, and began telling people i was going to start to canoe in Amsterdam and head east, until I felt like stopping. But then, at the last minute, I did an about face in the direction of my trip (just to confuse the assassins), after which it made slightly more sense to begin referring to this as a Prague to Amsterdam trip, because, to benefit from going in this direction, I'd have to get through all the middle-Europe ups and downs before I could start on the long downriver stretch through western Europe. In a moment of imprudent exuberence, I even wrote in indelible marker "Praha" at the back of my canoe, and "Amsterdam" at the front, with corresponding arrows pointing in the appropriate directions...which, now that I'm trying to sell the canoe, I'm rubbing with gasoline, baking soda toothpaste, and any other substance that some website claims will remove permanent marker.

Actually, you know where I can find some pride in this situation? I take pride in the fact that I know when to quit. And that I'm good at finding pride in the most scarce of circumstances. And that I'm good at rationalizing.

So anyway, I was wandering around Cheb, not really making much progess with selling the kanoe, and wondering what to do. I was thinking i might wait one more day for answers to some emails, and then continue upriver into Germany. It would be another week until i was in another town large enough to offer any hope of selling the canoe. But I'd had a few days rest - enough time for partial amnesia to set in about the agony of upriver travel - and was getting little nudges from that 'ol, "I wonder what's around the next corner," feeling.

But then I saw a poster for the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. I'd seen preparations for it when I was with Lucie in KV a couple of weeks ago, and she'd had good things to say about it. I returned to the internet cafe and checked it out. It actually looked pretty good: it had a reputation, at least, as the premiere film fest for eastern Europe; one of my favourite directors, Nikita Mikhalkov, was going to be there, presenting his new film; they'd also lured Robert De Niro in with an award for lifetime contribution, etc, and some screenings of his earlier films; all the films had English subtitles; and it was cheap - $70 for the full 9 day pass, and camping available in a stadium at the edge of town for less than $5 a night.

It didn't take me long to realize how much sense this made; i had to return to KV anyway at some point to pick up the GPS (if it was ever delivered), and the film fest would give me something fun to do while i figured out how to get my canoe sold. It would also give me time to prepare for the next leg of my trip: couchsurfing through the Mediterranian region. And, perhaps best of all, it was down river. I hopped in Sarka that afternoon and headed back down the Ohre towards Karlovy Vary. One last ride in my faithul companion!

I figure going downriver was about three times as fast for a third of the effort. It was 70km to KV; i did 20 of them the first day, and mopped up the remaining 50 the next day without too much trouble. It was a good way to end the trip - a little payback for all my effort. During the fastest stretch - the one Viktoria and Sergio and I had sweated and groaned and cursed our way up a week previous - i lay back and watched the trees glide by on either side and laughed.

My ill-advised directional markers in permanent ink on the side of the canoe at least earned me a free beer at one of the riverside bars i stopped at. After my first beer, I had my usual debate about ordering a second. One is never enough, but then two, I find, makes me sleepy midday, and is not very condusive to canoeing. I could always order a half beer, of course, but then it's not as good value, and i rarely seem to take this option. Nope, as usual, the second beer won out. As I was nearing the end of that one, however, another one suddenly appeared on the table in front of me; connected to it was the hand, arm, and body of a man smiling approvingly at me and saying, "Amsterdam." He must have seen my canoe pulled up on the shore - luckily, because i paddle it backwards when solo, the Praha and Amsterdam arrows were still pointing in the right directions. He didn't speak English, but his wife, miraculously, did. Actually, it was unfortunate, in this instance, that she did speak English, because it meant that, upon interrogation from her, i had to admit that i hadn't come all the way from Amsterdam. But they still seemed suitably impressed with what I had actually acheived. The man didn't take his beer back, anyway, and he even patted me on the back as he left.

Needless to say, I was excessively drunk when i got back onto the water for the last 15k to KV. I probably hit a few more rocks that I would sober, but otherwise came out okay. The rapids are easy enough that you can navigate them drunk - i don't think most Czechs would even consider doing them sober anyway.

I wasn't sure where in KV the stadium i could camp in was, but on my canoeing map there was on oval labeled "STAD" - near the river too - so i pulled over by that. It was a short but near vertical bank to get up - with a railing at the top - but somehow i got Sarka over it. The stadium, already with a few dozen tents in it, was right there, maybe 100 metres away. I couldn't have pulled over in a better place. I got my tent set up just in time for the rain that had been threatening all day to come thundering down.

The End.

But wait: there will be a lengthy postscript, in coming updates, to this trip. The first ones, of course, will be all about the film fest. After that, hopefully some adventures in the Mediterranian, until my planned return to Canada around the end of July. So stay tuned.

On Shore Leave in Cheb

2008-07-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

After sharing a 40 of fake Tequila (but Real Tequila Taste!), I needed a little sleep. With sunglasses.

My co-conspirators.

Yes, the going was hard, especially when the Mayan slaves revolted. (This and some of the following pictures look bad because I photographed them off of Viktoria's camera. You can see the reflection of my camera in them.)

Setting out from Lucie's house. Note Sergio's tin whistle, ready to pipe us towards glory.

Fuck paddling, let's walk and listen to tunes.

Those lazy slaves needed a firm hand.

See how happy coffee makes you. Improves race relations too.

On the road again.

An idyllic scene of fellow canoeists at a bar on the Ohre.

Sergio pretending to paddle while Viktoria pulls.

No, I'm not actually still in Canada - they just have stop signs here for some reason.

My new shades.

Yes, I even had to put up with people in love.

Loket: a lovely little place. We razed it to the ground, of course.

I don't know what the fuck this is, but it has the sign of the eye in the pyramid on top. Those Illuminati - they're everywhere.

Viktoria lurking in the Water Closet.

Loket's castle.

Enjoying some well deserved fried cheese and beer in Loket.

Viktoria Mara, woman of adventure and mystery.

Cheb - last stop in the Czech Republic. Perhaps the last stop in the Great 2008 European Canoe Adventure. Yes, I am beginning to feel like gracefully bowing out of this performance. I think it was the recalculation of my schedule - based on my careful observations of how many kilometres I was actually able to paddle upriver per diem. I had hoped for 20, but it's turned out to be more like 15. And then I recalculated the distance, baring in mind that my 1:500,000 scale map of Germany doesn't show all the torturous twists and turns of the actual river, and increasing my estimates by 15%, and came naturally to a longer distance. My new estimate would have me arriving in Amsterdam not by the end of July, as I'd hoped, but on August 26. It's a case of theory crashing headlong into actuality. The impossibility of reaching this distant objective in the two months maximum I'd like to spend canoeing, has led me to conclude that I'd like to wrap up the trip soon - as soon as I can sell the canoe for a reasonable price. I have really enjoyed my three couchsurfing experiences so far, and would like to spend my remaining month in Europe doing that - preferably in the Mediterrainian region.

Voicing these thoughts, Viktoria and Sergio were quick to jump ship. They were willing to stick it out for another couple of weeks - after which they had to be in Switzerland - and help me get up this last stretch of upriver. But I felt that the trip was probably winding down and that they should go and do what they wanted. An honourable discharge.

They performed valiantly. I wouldn't have been able to paddle up some of the stretches of river that awaited us if not for the combined effort of three paddlers. During one interminable stretch, where the river turned into a concrete encased chute, too deep to get out and pull, and with no paths alongside to escape to, the three of us paddling full tilt were just barely able to make headway. I was afraid that I might have a mutiny on the Sarka, but fortunately my crew was made of stronger stuff than that.

And this despite their woefully inadaquate outfitting: tissue paper thin garbage bags for dry sacks, all-cotton clothing, and a tent from Wal-Mart that was designed for a planet where it never rains. I tried to help out from with loans from my high-performance MEC gear whenever possible, but they still never slept as well or were as comfortable, relatively speaking, as I.

This river was supposed to get easier after Karlovy Vary, but it was a cruel lie. Yes, perhaps there were less rapids, but the current was often stronger than ever. I've found that paddlers who have only ever paddled down a river really have no conception of the current. You have to go up it to really get to know it intimately. I felt a constant sense of guilt for inflicting this wierd form of punishment on unsuspecting Sergio and agreable Viktoria. This is my pennance - for a life of excessive ease and comfort - how did I ever get my friends mixed up in this?!

It took us four days to reach the outskirts of Cheb. After three days, we were happy to get off the river and walk the rest of the way. Cheb itself is a bit of a letdown. The goonish security guards in the the grociery stores and the 'no guns' signs in many store windows (alongside 'no ice cream' signs - the noxious mix of tourist and crime) alerted us the to prevalence of crime here. When Viktoria tried to set up her display of Guatamalan crafts for sale, she wasn't harrassed by the police, but by about 30 Gypsy kids who swarmed her from a nearby apartment building. We are told that Cheb is known for its thriving prostitution industry; it's cheaper for Germans to come here and hire them. I suppose it's the kind of seediness common with many border towns.

This is my fourth day now in Cheb, and my current mission is to try to find a buyer for Sarka. Thanks again to my guardian angel in Prague, Stan, I've got a list of possibilities, including a scout camp, and three rental companies. But the big question before negotiations can even begin is, "Does anyone speak English at any of these places?" If not, I've got a couple of other options: maybe the shop that sold me the canoe would like to buy it back, in which case i could courier it to them. Or, if all else fails, I'll push on and head into Germany, continuing the trip while looking for someone to buy my canoe and release me from its terrible bondage.

Relief in Karlovy Vary

2008-06-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

Freshly arrived in Karlovy Vary, I found a phone, gave Lucie a call, and waited for her to pick me up. Meanwhile tourists strolled by, casting odd looks my way.

Lucie's family, plus Viktoria and Sergio, enjoying a BBQ my first night with them.

Matthew and I. You can see that paddlers look the same the world over.

Me passing Sergio his brand new paddle in the canoeing shop, with Lucie looking on.

One of the mineral hot springs in Karlovy Vary that people drink for its curative properties.

Ah, the fabled city of Karlovy Vary. Fabled in my own mind, at least. When I first found out that this was a spa town, I thought: that should be a welcome treat after weeks of paddling. And as the trip itself progressed, KV attained the status of a magical turning point, a place that, if I could only reach, this trip would finally cease purely being a difficult yet worthy existential challenge, and actually start being enjoyable too. After all, if I could only make it there, i would at last have some company - and help paddling - from my old friend Viktoria and her Guatamalan boyfriend Sergio, a very welcoming couchsurfer to stay with, spas to soak my weary muscles in, and would be through the worst part of the uphill battle that was the Ohre river.

But it wasn't easy to get there. If I had not had such a tantilizing goal, I'm not sure I would have had the willpower to make it.

From Kadan I had optimistically hoped I could make KV in 2 days, through bypassing the worst of the rapids by simply wheeling my canoe along paths and roadways for 30km. But it turned out that the paths often led up into the high hills on either side of the river, and the only thing worse than paddling up this river was trying to push Sarka laden with gear up hills. So for the majority of the trek I was trapped on the river - the relentless flow of which reduced my progress to about 1km/hr and my arms to aching mush.

Much of the time I wouldn't even be paddling - just poling my way up through the gravelly shallows at the river's edge, where the relentless current slackened somewhat - or simply walking through the water, towing the canoe behind me on a line. J-stroking was a forgotten luxury; it was too ineffecient and I had to do power stroke on either side constantly.

The low point came on the 2cd day, when I felt nausiated from intestinal problems that have been building for some time, and the conditions meant I had only made 3km by lunchtime. I found that maintaining my mental stamina - the will to carry on - was even harder than maintaining my physical stamina. After running aground on my 200th rock of the day, I'd sometimes just sit there for a few minutes, while I tried to muster the willpower to carry on. My morale had also bottomed out. To make matters worse, I was facing a headwind for much of the time. I tried to vent my emotions by hurling expletives at the wind, the water, the rocks; the only element not set against me was fire, for the sun at least was not too hot. If anyone heard me pass, they'd probably think I had Turette's, Certainly they must have questioned my sanity to be heading upriver.

Later in the afternoon, by which time I'd only managed to fight my way 7km upriver, and was just hoping I could do 10 by the end of the day, I thought it might take me 4 days to reach KV. Fortunately, at that point I finally found a road that stuck pretty close to the river and didn't go up any big hills, and gratefully wheeled Sarka onto it. I stuck to it for the remainder of the day, and by sunset had made 16km total, enough to put me through the worst of the rapids and within striking distance of the city of redemption, KV. For the first time, I stayed in a real campground. I had no appetite for food, but did go to the restaurant and downed 3 shots of jagermeiter while flipping through a motorcycle magazine featuring lots of shots of scantily clad women draped over Harleys, and felt much better for it. As I progressed up the river, I noticed more and more German, and this campground restaurant seemed to be run by Germans. There was a big wedding or something happening in the other room, full of cigarette smoke, and buffets, and Abba music, the walls adorned with antlers and deer heads, and a constant parade of huge plates of food being carried 4 at a time by the servers into the diningroom.

I only had to paddle 8 hours the next day to make it the final 16km to KV - a relatively speedy pace. It was a Saturday and the weather was perfect, so I passed a near constant stream of Czechs canoeing the Czech way - downriver of course, with beer and dogs and babies in their laps, funny mexican sombreros on their heads, strumming guitars, and always in big laughing groups. I think I shouted "Ahoy!" to nearly all of them, if they didn't shout it first. Then it was usually followed by laughter, crazy looks, and comments that I couldn't understand but could certainly guess as to their content. When I was on the Sazava and the Vlatava, no one really batted an eye that i was travelling solo, or in a wierd looking canoe, or wheeling it through towns. But paddling up the Ohre certainly unleashed a flood of comment. I don't think anyone had seen that before, and I could tell they all thought I was nuts. One guy who spoke English said, "Are you going all the way to Karlovy Vary?" This when I was maybe 7km from there. "Yeah," I said, "all the way there..."

When I got to KV I wheeled my canoe into the city centre, found a phone booth, and called my couchsurfing host, Lucie. Soon her and her boyfriend appeared with a car with a roofrack, to sweep me and Sarka away to suburban, middle-class comfort. I had been feeling like I stood out in my river wear: short shorts and T-shirt, messy hair, scruffy face, eating dried fruit from crumpled plastic bags. But then Lucie and Matthew looked exactly the same (minus the scruffy face on Lucie, of course). They were paddlers too, which is partly why Lucie was excited to host such a crazy person.

It was all I had dreamed about and more. I am Lucie's first couchsurfing guest, and she has spared no effort to make me (and Viktoria and Sergio) feel at home. We have displaced her brother to another part of the house, while we occupied his spacious bedroom. We have been provided with soft beds and softer duvets, BBQs, homecooking, laundry, internet, tours of the downtown, beers with friends of theirs, showers, baths, late night walks through the forest...the list goes on and on. Her and her parents' hospitality knows no bounds. She and her boyfriend, Matthew, are both paddlers themselves, and are very athletic and are studying recreation at university. I have finally met a group (her and her friends) of Czechs who don't smoke. Though beer drinking is still a popular activity, of course.

Moreover, Lucie and Matthew have been fun and interesting people to spend time with. Lucie has just graduated, and before heading off to graduate studies in Prague in the fall, she's about to embark on a summer of working abroad. She's still not sure where: Ireland or Norway maybe. It makes me envious that Europeans can so easily take off to a completely different culture to work and live. She says she can book her air ticket the day before she leaves, no problem. She actually learned English while living in Denmark, and then later in the USA. In many smaller countries, such as Denmark, Holland, or Norway, nearly everyone speaks English well, because their own populations are so small, to only know their own language would be very limiting. And English, of course, is the international language. Not so yet in the Czech Republic - as I discovered - but it is moving in that direction with the youth.

Yesterday I had my long awaited visit to one of KV's spas. I asked Lucie's mom which one was the best, and she told me where to go. KV is a sedate town full of older people and staid tourists - most of the youth don't stay here - and the spas are these grand places charging high prices. But Lucie's mom told me where the locals go. Around behind one of the grand spas, white columns rising magestically in front, you go, to what is almost a back alley. And there you find an indescript doorway. You pay about $10, and that buys you 2 hours in the spa. It was basically just a regular public swimming pool, but with a side room with a wet and dry sauna, cold bath, and relaxation room. There was also a whirlpool - tepid but surprisingly relaxing to lie back and let the frothing bubbles levatate you. But i spent most of my time sweating in the saunas, jumping into the cold bath, and almost falling asleep in the relaxation room. There was actually a sign on the doorways to the saunas saying "no bathing suits" so i had to comply. I also followed the lead of the other sauna-goers by rubbing my skin until all the dead skin and other accumulated crap rolled up into what looked like eraser crumbs and was washed away in the next cold bath. Afterwards I felt so relaxed and happy wandering around the downtown with Viktoria and Sergio, eating pizza and ice cream and drinking beer - not a care in the world - it was the polar opposite of how I had felt just a couple of days earlier.

The plan now is to leave tomorrow morning to continue up the Ohre toward the German border. This plan might be sabotaged by the delay in the delivery of my GPS unit, which Andrew has Fedexed from Canada, and was supposed to be here already. But apparently it is being held up in Prague, reason unknown. In any case, we have to leave Lucie's tomorrow, as she is going to Plzen for her graduation ceremony. So we'd have to find a hotel or campground if we had to wait longer for the GPS.

Viktoria and Sergio may not be with me for too long. I am asking for three weeks - that would get me through the hardest part of the trip left - but Viktoria is under pressure from a friend in Switzerland to come there. The reason that Sergio was able to afford his flight here is that a rich Canadian is in love with a friend of Viktoria's who used to live in Guatamala and is now living in Switzerland, and gave Sergio a bunch of money so that he and Viktoria could go keep her company there. They have also brough a bunch of Guatamalan crafts with them, which they are trying to sell on the streets along the way. This is of course illegal without a permit, and invariably a cop comes by after an hour or so and threatens to fine them. But before he comes, they always manage to sell some stuff. Yet this is all stuff that must be carried on portages.

Moreover, I'm not sure they feel up to the work involved in a canoe trip. Sergio believes that it's bad for you to work your muscles hard enough that they're sore. But i bought him a paddle today, and I'm hoping they'll get into the trip and enjoy it. I don't want them to do it unless they enjoy it.

Even if I am left alone again, it might not be so bad in Germany, as I hear that most Germans speak at least some English.

I've updated the map, so if you haven't seen it recently, have a look (link is in the "Map" post below)

against the flow

2008-06-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

View from my hotel in Louny.

The river ahead; from Kadan into the hills of western Bohemia...

Things got a little tight on my portage through Kadan.

The massive dam spillway I had to get around and over to get to the lake.

Parked my canoe for a bite to eat.

Too tired to smile for the camera.

The embankment from hell.

Ah yes, the serene beauty of a canoe cutting gracefully through the water...

Not too much to report on this leg of the journey, except my own thoughts, which is about all i have left to me now.

Four days of hard slogging from Louny have brought me to Kadan. I came down with a little flu bug (i bet i picked it up from a 2-litre plastic bottle filled with draft beer i shared with a couple of boys at a portage), which knocked me out for my day off in Louny (i'm sure this is no coincidence - illness with me will usually wait until i have a moment to spare for it), then sapped my energy for the next two days of journeying. Together with the rainy, cool weather, this was the low point of the trip so far. But then my strength returned and i actually started to enjoy the struggle against the current. there's something satisfying about going where - or in a direction - you're not supposed to. And my body is starting to feel like it might be shifting into a higher gear, getting accustomed to this new physical regime i'm putting it through. I don't wake up in pain anymore.

I had what was probably my most physically challenging day yet yesterday. It began with the usual upriver paddle, for 4km. Then I dragged Sarka and everything else up a steep concrete embankment (see photo), then up a rocky path, then along a level bit for about 4km, then up and over a high man-made embankment holding back a lake. Then I paddled across said lake, for about 10km (this was the easy part of the day). Then had lunch. Then paddled for another 7km upriver, through a new kind of rapids: these ones had less water in them, but were full of bigger rocks, so even though i could paddle into the current, i'd invariably get caught up on rocks.

Then I came upon a stretch of four dams in about as many kilometres, and was happy to find a trail along the side of the river that took me past them all - almost. After walking my canoe through Kadan (and stopping for the best spaghetti carbonera of my life at a riverside restaurant), i had to paddle across the river to find the portage for the last dam. I set up my tent in the last of the light.

Now I'm enjoying a day off in Kadan. I had another plate of spaghetti carbonera for lunch.

Having said all this, what I've been thinking about lately is, well, the same thing I've been thinking about for years, which could be summed up as the 'excitement of discomfort versus the bordom of comfort'. And again, the book I've been reading, "Haunted", by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, sheds much light on this subject. It's about a group of people who go on a writers retreat but get locked there, and then they all go about trying to make the experience as agonizing as possible for themselves so that, when they are rescued, they'll have a great story to tell and will be famous, loved, rich, etc. It's basically what I'm doing to myself with this trip. I know that the more misadventures i have (enter Vikki?), the better story I'll have in the end. Palahniuk takes the idea further, basically saying that humans in general love pain, suffering, drama, stuff to happen, and they love flaunting their suffering for others to see. he (or a character in the book) makes the analogy that the earth is like a big rock polisher, and we're the rocks, banging together for years and years until all our hard edges are worn off, and we're smooth, refined. He implies that then, when we've reached this stage of enlightenment, we can finally just sit back and enjoy life. He says this takes many lifetimes to accomplish.

I'd say that humans, as a group, are not headed for any spiritual enlightenment. But individually, for one human lifetime, his metaphor does makes sense to me. as we get older, we do, hopefully, get our hard edges worn down by the drama in our lives. And maybe after enough of this suffering, we're wise enough to find all the enjoyment we need looking at a flock of birds, or whatever turns your fancy, and no longer need to seek out difficulty.

But until then, I know that I still need at least the occasional injection of struggle and strife that a trip like this provides for myself. And i know that it will help me be a much happier person when i return to my real life.

From Prague to Louny-Town

2008-06-13T01:50:00.000-07:00

I've seen a few of these historic water level markers. This one dates back to the 1700's. The highest one, so high you can't quite see it because it's shaded by the roof, is from the great flood of 2002 on the Vlatava.

A motorcycle convention that I raided (successfully) in search of drinking water.

Through the locks.

The Charles Bridge: about 700 years old and the most famous tourist attraction in Prague.

Me portaging through Prague.

I have to laugh when i remember Pavel saying to me that he couldn't guarantee that my new canoe wouldn't get a few scratches in shipping. I assured him that the Sarka is guaranteed to get a lot more beat up than the courier could possibly manage, as this photo attests to.

My 5km portage through the countryside.

A field of poppies.

The cursed Cepel, at one of its wider spots.

Portaging through Roudnice.

You don't have adventure, it has you. This was my realization this week as I paddled from Prague, down the Vlatava and the Labe, then up the Ohre to Louny.

The Vlatava and Labe are big rivers with motor boats and cruise ships from Germany and huge barges piled high with commodities and pushed along by tugs. Long stretches of flat water, broken up by a few dams. About the most exciting thing to happen to me on these waters was going through a couple of locks. The first time, the lockmaster descended from his tower when he saw me paddle into the vast lock, meant for cargo ships, and said one word: "Little."

Then he said, "No problem" and told me to hold onto the ladder.

And it was no problem, and saved me a portage - made extra nice by the fact that i had foolishly early inadvertedly let all the air out of one of my little canoe wheelies. It was a perfect example of what i was talking about earlier: trying to make things perfect and in the process wrecking what was working pretty good. My tires were a little on the soft side. But i thought, "wouldn't this be even easier if they were nice and firm?" And then i started fiddling with the presta valves, just to see how they worked, because i'm not familiar with presta valves. and before i knew it, there was a hiss of air escaping, and i had a flat tire.

no worries, i thought: i'll just find a cyclist with a little air pump and pump it back up. there were lots of cyclists riding on trails along the river.

i found one quickly enough, but just as quickly found that my wheels were too small to fit one of those little compact bike pump in between the spokes.

it took a couple of days, but i eventually found a resourceful moped mechanic who solved the problem by attaching a small length of plastic tubing to the end of his air gun, and with me holding it tight over my wheel's value, got them nicely inflated. I like people like this, 'get 'er done' people, who don't give up on something just because they don't have the right tools.

I found this guy in Roudnice, which is where my adventure began. I had been paddling for a couple of days down these big waterways, covering lots of kilometres (48 one day!) but getting increasingly bored. then i noticed this little river than ran from the other side of Roudnice into the Ohre. I had been planning to follow the Labe in a big loop to the north then back down again to pick up the Ohre, but this little shortcut would knock 20km off my paddling - 10 of them upriver. All i had to do was portage about 2km through Roudnice. and now that i had my wheelies back, that shouldn't be a problem.

The first bit was hard slogging - pushing my canoe with all my gear inside it up a long, steep hill. but once i reached the top of that, it was a long, slow decent to the little river, called the Cepel. Pushing the canoe along was as easy as pushing a bike.

I was surprised by how few looks or comments i got from passersby; there is a certain Czech stoacism, it seems, that keeps people from too much demonstration. but there was one little toddler on his trike who couldn't stop staring. he was like a deer caught in headlights as i came down the sidewalk towards him, he deaf to his mother's calls to follow her.

When i first got to the Cepel, i was amazed by how big it was. But then that turned out to be just a little man-made reserviour, letting out a trickle into the Cepel below it. The Cepel must have earned its name in higher water times, because when i went through it it barely qualified as a ditch. when i went through a village it smelled more like a sewer.

One thing i am laerning on this trip is how slowly most things happen. Gestation, growing up, red tape, and paddling are but a few examples of things that happen very slowly. i've had to learn to be more patient. the Cepel was a prime test of my new patience. For five hours i pushed and dragged my way down the 7km of the Cepel. it was alternatively deep enough to float without too much bottom scraping, but so narrow as to be totally overgrown with grass and nettles on either side, just barely a canoe's width, or it was wide enough to avoid the overgrowth, but not to float very far before i had to get out and push again. every time i got back into the canoe, i'd track more brackish water into the boat, until my gear was swimming in it. i soon developed a kind of gondoleer style of standing up (which got my head above the weeds) and polling myself along with my paddle (which allowed me to push with greater force).

I ran into a few people along the way, and this time they were amazed to see someone crazy enough to be canoeing down this trickle. on a couple of occassions kids in riverside homemade forts followed me for awhile down the stream. i had a close call as i passed a farmer couple. i was just waving to the wife, when i heard a loud thump in the back of the canoe, and turned to find a baseball sized rock there. the husband had been digging his garden, throwing stones he dug up into the stream, and nearly got me with one by accident. He should have looked for passing canoeists first, obviously.

by the end i felt half-crazed to get out of there, with my sweaty, dirty, nettle-stung skin itching and my muscles weary. but i didn't want to stop - i just wanted out of there. when i finally made it i pulled over at the first adequate campsite i could find and had a swim, then took the next morning to let all my stuff dry out.

all told, i don't think i got there any faster then if i'd gone the long, easy way, but an adventure was had. or had me. and now, no matter how bad things get, i can always say, "At least I'm not on the Cepel," and feel a little better about my predicament.

After that i spent 3 days fighting my way up the Ohre. It isn't easy, in stretches, but at least I'm making headway. progressing 20km is a good day. I've come to love the little dams now, because every time i portage up over one, i'm sure to find at least a few kilometres of slack current. then, as i get closer to the next dam, the current tends to pick up more and more.

i reached one point where paddling into the current was just getting stupid. i was expending all this energy, and just inching my way forward. so i had a look at my map and noticed a "bike path" i could take to a point further up the river, avoiding a big loop in the river. it was between about 10km of paddling upstream, and 5km of portaging with my wheelies, to get to the same point. the choice was easy. i wheeled my canoe down a quiet country road (the "bike path"), through three villages, and back to the Ohre. This was one shortcut well worth it. I have a feeling that, from Kadan to Karlovy Vary, where the river looks like it's half rapids, I'll be using this technique a lot. Hell, i might even walk the whole way.

After three days I reached my planned rest stop, Louny - right on schedule, too. Amazing, when that happens. I locked my canoe to a tree by the river, in what looked like an unused and hidden bit of bush, and found a hotel in town to rest for a couple of nights. I figure that since i'm not spending anything on camping along the way (in fact, i spent ridiculously little money on this leg of the journey, because there were no restaurants geared towards canoeists and easily accessible from the river. i went 5 days without a beer - which must be a new record for the Czech Republic), i can afford to splurge on a hotel occasionally. and even that doesn't cost much: about $37/night. It's an modest place, but it feels like the Hilton to me. The first thing i did was take a long, hot shower until i was practically drooling with pleasure. A couple of beers, a couple of big meals, and some English Aljazeera on the satilite TV, and it was off to bed for me.

Predictably, I had the worst sleep in ages, because i'm so unused to sleeping in a bed. I should just spread my thermarest out on the floor, and i'd probably sleep better.

Good news from Vikki: her and her boyfriend Sergio are flying into Prague on the 15th, and then coming to find me. Human contact! Conversation! Help paddling! Yes!

Getting my feet wet

2008-06-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Sazava proved to be the perfect little warm-up for what is to follow on this trip. Water levels were low, which made for a relaxed paddle, though Sarka's a few milimetres thinner in several places now. Often I'd only have a paddle blade's depth to push myself along in. the water was murky and smelled vaguely of rotten fish, but that didn't stop me from swimming in it several times a day when it was hot.

My bedtime's about 9pm. And I try to get up at dawn - 5am - to hit the water early and avoid the wind and heat. though sometimes i am delayed in the morning because i have to spend upwards of an hour picking dozens of slugs off my tent and canoe, then go back and pick off the ones that oozed up again while you were deslugging the other item. i need some unpaid interns to take care of this kind of shit.

I crossed about 40 little dams - most with water flowing over them in varying amounts, and most down a gradual incline (a few were true waterfalls of a metre or two), so if there was enough water flowing over (a rarity), you could paddle right over. This was hazardous, though, as I learned the hard way. There's a moment when your bow is in the flat water below the dam, while your stern is still sticking halfway up the watery ramp, and those are the only two points in contact with anything. So natually the canoe tips violently to one side or the other. It's not quite enough to capsize the boat, but it was enough to throw me out of it once. It was just into a couple of feet of water, though, and I went wading after my canoe. Luckily there was no one around to see this happen (often there's someone swimming or fishing at the dams).

Another way to cross the dams is through these concrete chutes that they all have. I'm not sure if they're constructed for canoeists to go down, or fish to go up (i saw both using them), but if they're for canoeists, they're designed for higher water than I had. I saw some youth groups run a few of them, but their boats are basically open kayaks, and made of some virtually indestructable plastic, and could handle the sharp drop down into the shoot. If i had tried these, it probably would have ended in catastrophy. I did do one successfully actually, but it had no sharp drop at the beginning and had plenty of water flowing through it.

The only other way around the dams was to, of course, portage. This I only had to do a handful of times, because the dam was a waterfall and i couldn't just pull my canoe over it.

Although i often cursed these dams that would come up every few kilometres, they provided a little spice in what otherwise would have been a whole lot of unbroken paddling.

On my last day i got a taste of what the river might have been like before all the dams; after i crossed the last dam the river took off through about 10km of what felt like an endless series of little Class I rapids. They posed no danger; the challenge was to avoid the submerged rocks and save Sarka's hull for future battles. I got pretty pleased with myself at my improving ability to pick out the suspicious looking waves indicating a rock from all the innocent standing waves, and my developing backwards draw which saved my ship from many a looming rock. Though after so long of staring intently at the roiling waters, i felt like my eyes were beginning to play tricks on me. And during the few interludes when I wasn't being propelled relentlessly forward by the current, it felt strange to actually have to paddle. it was good fun - my best day yet.

The day was helped along considerably when, feeling hungry and fatigued from the day (i eventually paddled 45kms that day - by far my longest) i came across in the late afternoon a little riverside bar and had a refreshing beer and ubiqutous klobasa (sausage with mustard and rye bread). It fortified me for the rest of my journey.

There are many little bars, restaurants, and camps along the river, but unfortunately I was a little before the main holiday season, and most of them were closed. When they were open, however, it felt quite civilized to pull over in your canoe for a cold beer. I ended up camping anywhere - in a park, by the riverside, in a closed campground - and never had any problems. i asked permission when possible, but sometimes a thunder storm would be chasing me, beginning to spit rain, and i'd have to pull over and hastily make camp in the first available bit of real estate i could find.

While there were a few stretches with no development along them, most of the river had either towns or cottages along it. And there were fishermen hiding in the bullrushes everywhere, nearly always wearing camo, and always smoking a cigarette (everyone smokes here - and everywhere). They usually pretended i didn't exist, and i tried to do the same - after all, this was probably the first bit of solitude they'd had i ages. The kids i passes would always shout out "Ahoy!" and I'd answer back. One house even had "Ahoj!" painted on its side.

So I nearly always had people around me - many of them extremely tanned older men in speedoes and with huge, distended bellies (half a lifetime of beer with every meal will do that), wandering around their cottage yard, cutting the grass, etc. They looked quite comfortable and contented. But despite being constantly surrounded, hardly anyone spoke English, and my Czech consists of about ten words (please, thank you, beer, water, toilet, and few kinds of food). I'm reduced to one word sentences and lots of pantomime. So it was an isolating experience. I haven't had so much time with my own thoughts for quite awhile. I eventually started to feel a little unhinged, in fact, and could be found singing or babbling to myself - occasionally getting caught out by a well-hidden fisherman.

I almost didn't bring my MP3 player, but am i ever glad i did! The first time i listed to it - laying in the grass after a beer at a YMCA camp - i nearly wept with happiness. i don't know if it was merely that i hadn't heard any good music in 2 weeks, or that it appeased my homesickness to hear this familiar music, but since then Sufjan Stevens, Hawksley Workman, David Gaudet, Gogol Bordello, Lila Downs, Danny Michel, Beirut, Spike Jones and even Tenacious D have been my best friends on this trip.

I've also had a lot more time to read than I anticipated. I quickly finished the two books i brought from home that were supposed to last the whole trip, but found some more in Prague. I particularly enjoyed Louis de Bernier's "A Partisan's Daughter". His books - especially his later ones - are so simple and truthful, perfectly capturing the human tragicomedy we're all players in. This book in particular deals with the tension between excitement and security, idealism and acceptance, and i find these themes very apt for my present circumstances. I am realizing why I'm on this trip: to learn that adventure is not all it's cracked up to be, and to accept modest happiness. I had a good, modestly happy life in wakefield. But i got bored with that so i took this trip. I wanted great excitement, great love, a great, big, wonderful life. But i don't think anyone ever gets to live like that. you can't be human and not be dragged down by something or other. the best you can hope for is a modest, nice sort of happiness, on the whole more good days than bad, and if you find yourself living such a life, well then by god don't throw it away in the hopes of finding something better! you should count yourself lucky if you get to live this much happiness. to ask for more is to comit the ancient mistake of hubris - perhaps the fundamental human flaw. And i think this trip has taught me that - in fact, it already had begun teaching me it before i even left, as i started to already miss what i knew i must soon leave.

so, ok, lesson learned - can i come home now? part of me would like to return now, a wiser man, but i've spent too long thinking about and preparing for this trip to stop now, before it's barely begun. and besides, i got all of you to try to entertain. this is the first time that i've done something with the aim of writing about my personal experiences. in a way i'm trying to turn my life for the next couple of months into a interesting work of art. so far i don't feel like i've succeeded in making it very interesting. but my friend vikki tells me that her and her nicaraguan boyfriend will soon be joining me (too bad i had to take out that third seat!), which, knowing Vikki, will undoubtedly spice things up considerably. I'll try to keep it on the comic side, rather than the tragic.

I'm back in Prague now, taking a day off and stocking up on supplies. We've outfitted the Sarka with 8 barrels of pork, 200 gallons of water, 4 bags of gunpowder, two tortoises (to be later eaten), and 50 gallons of rum (the crew will have to be rationed to a cup a day). Our next safe port is in Karlovy Vary, a two week sail away. It is a spa town; i think I'll need it by then.

To get there I'll have to paddle UP the Ohre river - in total 240km to get to the German border. I think I'll be okay for the first third, but after that it heads up into the hills, and there's whitewater. i checked a website that tells you information about all the rivers in the Czech Republic, and it said that the average speed of the current was 5-7km/h. my top speed paddling solo is probably about 5km/h.

I am so fucked.

If i get stuck the back-up plan is to find some source of transportation for the Sarka, to get it up to a point in the river where i can handle the current. It's either that or wait for reinforcements to arrive. With three paddlers, we should be able to paddle right up the rapids!

I love my canoe wheels! at first i would take all my gear out and awkwardly lift the canoe and try to set it down on top of the wheels, and the supports would never be facing up. anyone watching this exercise would quickly jump to my aid. but now i've worked out a system that is so easy it should be illegal. i don't even have to take my gear out. i just put the wheels on the ground, supports facing up (i figured out that they will stay like that if you're careful) and wheels stopped from rolling with a paddle on the ground. then i lift one end of the canoe out of the water, leaving the other floating, and simply place the middle of the canoe on the wheels. strap it on with a couple of bungees, wheel it across, and repeat process in reverse on the other side. absurdly easy! i haven't even used my hard won yoke once yet - and if i never do i won't be sorry!

i've heard cuckoos for the first time - they sound just like the clocks. i get the feeling they're commenting on me.

Sazava photos

2008-06-06T06:23:00.001-07:00

Angry papa swan; not a pretty sight. He chased me for a good long while for getting too close to his chicks.

Where it all began.
How old is this gum?

The gear doubles as balast when I have no bow paddler.

Welcome to my kitchen - first night out.

You see these sorts of signs all along the river.

One of about 40 dams (wiers?) we had to cross.

A pretty town; I slept it its park.

I saw a few of these giant snails. And many, many slugs.

The slavs do like to drink.

Signs advertising a riverside bar - hard to miss when they're right in the rapids. I stopped here for a much needed beer and sausage.

My first real dam, on the Vlatava. But nothing my trusty wheels can't handle.

get 'er done

2008-05-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when you want a job done, you just gotta do it yourself. I woke up this morning with a furious determination that, one way or another, my canoe would be yoked today and i would shortly thereafter be happily paddling down the Sasava. I arrived at the canoe shop to the bad news I had been expecting from Pavel: he'd have to order a yoke from Holland (it has crossed my mind that perhaps it would have been wiser to start my trip in Holland after all), it would cost lots of money, and take more time than i was willing to spend waiting. But i already had a plan B. I headed out to the end of the metro line, into suburban Prague, to a big box store that was a carbon copy of Home Depot, and bought me a nice piece of some sort of hardwood, some nuts, bolts, and washers, and sandpaper. Then took said hardware back to the canoe shop, where Pavel's extremely helpful technical guy gave me free use of his tools, and i soon had me a yoke - if a little crude looking. actually, it wasn't quite that easy, since the courtyard i was working in was baked by midday sun and at first i had to try to cut my hardwood with a pathetic little hacksaw equipted with a blade intended to cut aluminum or something. it was almost like trying to cut through the wood with a nail file. my shirt was soon off from the exertion and the sweat was soaking my shorts and stinging my eyes. luckily the technical guy - who spoke almost no English - saw my plight and intrusted me with his skill saw. much better...in all it only took me about 4 hours from purchasing raw materials to finished product.

after the job was done i tried it out and the balance seemed a little back heavy, but in all not bad. i cut a V into the board to better fit my neck, and plan to spend down time on the river further perfecting its curves with my whittling knife and sandpaper. the technical guy and his assistant even improved it by sticking a couple of reinforcing blocks against the side of the canoe just under each end of the yoke where it joins the canoe's hull. i bought them a few Budvar beers as thanks.

but i was struck by how friggin heavy it is; it took all my strength to get it up onto my head. granted, my lifting abilities will surely improve as the trip goes on, but i suddenly had an idea for yet one more accessory: one of those two wheeled contraptions used to lug boats around. I asked Pavel if he sold them, but unfortunately he was sold out. But he told me where i might be able to buy one, and I quickly headed off there.

quickly, because i suddenly learned that i would actually be leaving Prague the next day - probably early. This had been my fantasy all along, but truth be told i doubted it would happen. i managed to get the canoe yoke done in time for Pavel to call the courier, but he was having trouble getting through, and said that was typical. he said i'd probably have to wait until monday, with delivery of the canoe to the sasava on tuesday. then he tried the courier one more time and got through! they'd be there to pick it up in 50 minutes, and deliver it the next day to Nedec nad Sazavou, the little town on the Sasava that Pavel recommended i start in. (where to deliver it was a whole other problem: Pavel made some phone calls and found a penzion that was willing to receive the canoe on my behalf.)

on the way to the other canoe shop, i stopped in at the railway station to buy my ticket, and discovered i'd really have no time tomorrow morning for last minute prague preparations: the train leaves at 7:45am.

off to the other canoe shop, i find it easily (nothing like that ever happens easily), they're still open, and - yes! - they sell the wheels. i have a feeling that this will be $75 very, very well spent. and low and behold, this canoe shop is close to my favourite beer garden in Prague, so off i go there for a quick bite and a celebratory drink.

i am still in awe of how well everything went today. i put aside my usual laid back self, and channelled my growing frustration, anger, and faltering patience into incredible productivity. my motto for the day was "get 'er done", and it worked!

So i'm off bright and early tomorrow to at long last begin this trip. I don't expect to find much internet access out there in the wilds of Bohemia (but plenty of beer - i love how there are icons on my canoeing map indicating where you can buy beer), so the blog updates may be few and far between from here on in.

i am naming my boat the Sarka (pronounced "Sharka"), after a woman in Czech mythology who was part of a female uprising against men, which led to a city of all women and Amazonian-like warriors. (they eventually got bored and let the men back in.)

wish me luck. i'm sure there will still be many challenges ahead, only they will be of a differt sort from now on.

feverously clutching my duct tape,
Sean

killing time in prague

2008-05-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

The great Czech canoe quest has left me with some spare time. But I don't really like playing the tourist, and find I'm happier if I remain focussed on my "mission". Today, for instance, I walked the length of the Vlatava River - which runs through Prague - scouting out how I'm going to navigate all the little waterfalls and locks such. This kind of activity helps me feel like I'm still making progress towards my goal. But there's only so much I can do for trip prep, so from time to time I'm forced to engage in leisure activities. Vitek and the other Prague couchsurfers seem to meet up in a park for beers early every night, sometimes as a precurser to other activities. I often tag along. Here's a sampling of how I've been killing the time until I can trade diesel fumes for sweet river breezes:

A typical beer garden in a park, one of my favourite features of Prague.

A Balkland Gypsy band at the Cross Club; an interesting place. A maze of rooms decorated with used engines and camputer parts all fused together, some glowing, others moving. It started as a private hang-out for a group of friends (who apparently all live above the bar), and only recently opened to the general public. Live bands from all over Europe and the world nearly every night of the week.

Vojtech Jancar and I.

Just a funny mix of activities.

A monolithic TV tower that looms above Prague, reeking of the Soviet era.

A fire spinner in a park. There's a group of them who gather here once a month, accompanied by drummers.

The International Roma Festival blew into the main square today.

worse places to be stuck than Prague

2008-05-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

So much for a quick start to my trip. Maybe I should have started in Amsterdam after all, given the better availability of canoes there. Here's a brief play-by-play of the quest for a suitable canoe so far:

Saturday: arrived in Prague and was promptly whisked off to party in a park, then a restaurant, then a bar.

Sunday: shops closed. Forced to be a sightseer. Is that anything like a seer?

Monday: Went to HG Sport and met my saviour: Stan. He sort of looks like me, which is to say he has that watersports look that seems to be universal. Stubble and quick-drying clothing. He's inspired by my trip and promises to help me find the best canoe available. The only Canadian style canoe he sells is Mad River Explorer, 14 and 16 foot. I try them both out on the river (the 14 footer we pull fresh out of its plastic wrapper, and Stan looks on uneasily, afraid of scratching it, as I hoist it over my head, testing its weight. It's pretty heavy (31kg), a solid plastic boat, but i manage not to drop it. But it doesn't paddle as nicely as the 16 footer. Yet the 16 footer is definately too heavy. Stan says he'll make a few calls, and that I should come back tomorrow morning to see if he's found anything else for me. He says he'll even send me to his competitors if necessary, because we as paddlers are part of a higher fraternity than that of commerce (or words to that effect).

Tuesday: Back at HG, Stan says the only other option he's been able to find is a 16.5 foot fiberglass boat being sold secondhand by his chief competitor, Boatpark. He phones them up and sets up a date for me to go view it, later that afternoon.
I check out the boat, a Czech made model called the Orlice, and it's nice - barely used - with a keel (good for paddling solo) and wooden gunwhales and 3 seats! The owner wants 16,000 Czech crowns for it (about $1000) and i think it's a fair price, but I walk away indecisive because I'm worried the length is too long for soloing easily.

Wednesday: I return to HG to speak to one Vojtech Jancar, whom Stan described to me as the most famous canoeist in the Czech Republic. The Czech Bill Mason! Stan said I should talk to him about my trip. I got out my map and showed him my route. The Czech Republic naturally drains mostly to the north, into the Elbe, which runs to the North Sea. But following that route would take me through a flat and presumably boring landscape, and I'm going to try a different route: it involves going upriver for many kilometres, up the Ohre, into the mountains that form the western barrier between the Czech Republic and Germany. If I can make it through that continental divide, it should be mostly downhill from there to Amsterdam. Everyone says I'm crazy to go upriver on the Ohre, but - significantly - both Stan and Vojtech think it's POSSIBLE. Great, that's all I need to hear! Actually, even if they had said it was impossible, i still would have gone for it. ESPECIALLY if they had said it was impossible.
Anyway, something about this encounter ends my indecision, and I decide to buy the Orlice. I go to the Boatpark and make a deposit. But there's one more hurdle: the boat has no yoke, and I'm definately going to need a yoke. So now I'm waiting, again. They might be able to order one. Though last time I talked to Pavel, the owner, he said that he was talking to a woodworker friend of his about custom-making one. I was glad to hear this, as it means he's being proactive about getting this done. Once the yoke is installed, I'll have to wait another 2 days to get it delivered to Havlickuv Brod, upriver on the Sasava River, where my trip will begin.

So I'm still up the creek without a yoke.

Map

2008-05-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

The beginning of a map showing where I've last been sighted and where I plan to go. I haven't begun the "real" trip yet, so I haven't placed myself on the map (i'm still on Prague). I'll make that long straight line from Cheb to Amsterdam more detailed later.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110392237354218157428.00044e5dc3373d713e75b&t=p&z=6

photos from Amsterdam and Prague

2008-05-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

A three-storey bike garage in Amsterdam.

Vitezslav, scouting out the route ahead for me.

The mighty Vlatava!

Prague

2008-05-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

If there was a finite amount of beauty in the universe, we'd be in trouble because Prague would possess a disproportionate amount of it. Luckily, Prague's beauty doesn't detract from beauty elsewhere. If anything, Elsewhere, in the form of hoards of tourists, detracts from Prague's beauty by overrunning the downtown for several months every summer. It's humanity's way of balancing out the beautiful places in the world; the more beautiful the place (which usually means the less modernity has trampled all over it) the more that beauty is rendered unenjoyable by herds of bored westerners digitally recording every moment of their ennuei. The saving grace of tourists is that they tend to stick together, and though they may overwhelm one city hapless enough to be attractive, they will typicaly leave neighbouring areas more or less alone.

The reason Prague is so beautiful is that it escaped bombing in the Second World War. Europe, of course, used to be full of places like this, but war obliterated that. Prague is a reminder of what it used to be like. it reminds me of the way each generation of humans forgets how bountiful nature used to be. we know, academically, about the flocks of passenger pidgeons that used to blacken the sky for days, or the schools of cod you could practicaly walk across, but without direct experience of these sorts of things, our image of nature undergoes an innevitable deminishment into mediocrity. It's tragic that the bison don't have an equivilent of Prague to remind us of how they used to be.

Prague escaped bombing because some of its pilots, denied by political betrayal from defending their own country, escaped to England when the Nazis invaded, joined the RAF, and helped defend Britain. Prague was bombed once mistakenly when some bombers part of the force sent to annialate Dresden went off course and mistook Prague for doomed Dresden. A rare example of a tasteful modern building now stands on a corner by the river where one building was destroyed.

But beauty is superficial. I can take in a beautiful sight for a moment, but then i'm left asking, what more is there to this place? It reminds me of a scene in the Chevy Chase movie, Vacation: he and his family walks up to a lookout over the Grand Canyon, he puts is arm around his wife, they admire the vista for a few seconds, then Chevy say something like, "OK! What's next?" How do you interact with beauty? There's usually not much more you can do than sit in passive admiration of it, and that doesn't hold much appeal for me.

I much prefer interacting with the Czech Republic's beer. Prague is as liberal with its beer as Amsterdam is with pot. This could very well be the beer capital of the world: practially every little village has its own brewery (about 300 in total in the country); the beer is of excellent quality and dirt cheap (as low as $1 a pint); some bars never close (the infamous "nonstop" bars, where there are no windows and it's all too easy to loose track of whether it's day or night); the drinking age is not enforced; you can drink practically anywhere; and parks are dotted with "beer gardens". The beer literaly is cheaper than water. (Unless you go to the tourist areas; there you'll pay 5 times as much for beer. stupid tourists. the Czechs have every right to rob them blind.)

I can see why Prague is home to an estimated 30,000 American expats: it has an American feel about it, with it's wide, car-friendly avenues, relative affluence, and nice people. Last night, walking down the street, I almost felt i could be in Toronto (except there are few immigrants here). Prague is like North America, but with prettier buildings and cheaper beer. One thing I'm finding so far on this trip is how similar Europe is to N. America. Globalization has been doing it's work, for better or worse.

Couchsurfering is proving to be a godsend. it's a rope dangled down into the pit that tourists easily fall into, ready to haul you out and into the real culture. My Prague host, Vitezslav, showed me a great time yesterday. no sooner had we dropped my stuff off at his flat and met his American landlord and flatmate (just having his first beer of the morning, on day four of a party that began when his Slovakian wife left town for a couple weeks), did we head off for a park where the Prague couchsurfer (CS) community was meeting up. Vitek (as people call Vitezlav) is a hub in the CS community here, the one organizing things and pulling people together. He's not hosting right now, because of his roommates, but made an exception for me, perhaps because of the crazyness of my mission. The CS community is a really nice group of people. We drank beer (of course) and played frisbee in the park, took over a restaurant and had a good, cheap meal (full dinner and two pints of beer for under $10), took a long, dusky walk along the waterfront, and ended the day at a disco bar on a boat. Some of the nationalities represented in our group of a dozen or so (which included both hosts and current travellers) were: Ukranian, Colombian, Spanish, Italian, Canadian (besides myself), Swedish, Chinese/Australian, American, and of course Czech. I met the guy responsible for distributing Stella Artois and Becks in N. America, and a couple of guys cycling to China.

On the train here, we passed several rivers that i will later be canoeing on. It excited me to finally see these places I've long stared at on maps. Despite being in one of the most renowned cities in the world, I find that I keep casting longing glances at the Vlatava, that muscular snake of water around which Prague is built. Tomorrow is Monday, which means the stores will be open again, and I'll be canoe shopping.

Amsterdam

2008-05-23T02:14:00.000-07:00

My first post! No canoeing action yet, though I'm already planning my next European adventure, which will be on the many bikepaths of Holland, and any other countries I can find them in. I'm in Amsterdam and the bike culture is truly inspiring to someone like me, who bikes nearly alone through the cold winter. Here, everyone bikes - though admittedly their winters are much less harsh. The overwhelming majority of bikes are heavy, one-speed, peddle brakers - the kind most people in Canada would never dream of riding, but they turn out to be the perfect bike for Holland. They're solid, reliable, inexpensive, and quite efficient on flat surfaces. Any little uphill, though, and they're almost useless. There's a few other kinds too: there's ones with a child seat built in up near the handlebars, with a little windscreen for the kid. Then there's cargo bikes, which have a large container built into an extended front. I'm told that these bikes are favoured by middle-class moms; a quintessential Amsterdam sight is a mother with one kid in the front container, another kid in a rear seat, and the remainder of the cargo container stuffed with grocieries. It's the Amsterdam equivilent of a minivan.

Sorry to keep rambling on about the bikes, but this is a dream come true for me. Yesterday I rented a bike and rode through the countryside to the nearby town of Haarlem. Even though I had no map, it was easy to find Haarlem because there are numerous signs along a network of paths, leading off in every direction, telling you which way and how far to neighbouring towns. Some of these bike paths are actually just very narrow roads, and the occasional car or scooter will putter past, as a few farms are actually serviced by these roads. To me, though, it looks like these beautiful old farmhouses are situated on bike paths. I can't even claim that this particular point is a dream come true, because i never even dreamed of something so good.

I've decided it would be smarter to do my trip in reverse - start in the Czech Republic and paddle back to Amsterdam. That way I'll be going with the current most of the time. The downside is I'll be going against the prevailing winds, but i figure that the current is more likely to be a better friend than the wind is a worse enemy. So tonight I'm off to Prague, in search of a canoe and a good point to launch it from...