Author: enjean2013

Connections: Beer Recommendations turns into Business Class!

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Traveling is a wonderful way to meet people! Unfortunately, often those connections are strong but only fleeting. Connections is our tag to recognize and remember some of the wonderful people we meet.

On our last evening in Prague, we decided to try the brewery near the Strahov Monestary. We hiked up the hill, which of course has some amazing views over the city.

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We sat down at the brewery and enjoyed a few of the beers. When we were almost done, a group of Americans sat down next to us. They asked us for some advice on which beers to try, which of course we answered. As we continued to chat, we found out that they were a group of flight attendants… who were working a flight to New York the following day… in the morning… It was the same flight as Donna and Steve were flying on! The flight attendants thought this was just as great a coincidence as we did and insisted on getting their names and a photo!

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We weren’t too surprised to hear that Donna and Steve met their friends again on the following day during their flight, AND got upgraded to business class for their trip home. Talk about a great connection! =)

Small Comforts: Conditioner

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There are a few small comforts that we run into now and then that really make us feel better while traveling…

There are certain normal comforts that I chose to give up while traveling. One of them was hair conditioner. It just didn’t seem practical to carry large bottles of conditioner around the world and it didn’t fit easily in our toiletry kit (especially after we decided to try shampoo bars). Instead, I chose to bring one small, travel bottle of conditioner which I would use sparingly.

I have gone without conditioner quite happily for most of the days on the trip, however, there are some days when it is just fantastic to use it! Smooth, unknotted hair, easy to brush right out of the shower – that’s a true small comfort!

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*In case it wasn’t clear – this was a Della post. =)

Prague, Czech Republic

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Our first stop in Europe was Prague, the capital of Czech Republic. Eric’s parents joined us as well, and we all enjoyed our time in the “city of 1000 spires.”

Where We Stayed

Airbnb in Zizkov

Since there were four of us, we decided to book a flat of our own on airbnb. There were a lot of options, but many that were close to the main tourist attractions were pretty pricy. Eventually, we found a flat in the Zizkov neighborhood for a good price. Even though we weren’t super close to the attractions, it was still only about a 30 minute walk through a scenic neighborhood Also, there was a metro stop just a few minutes from the flat (and the Prague metro is very efficient).

Another bonus is that we were right next door to the famous tv tower. This made for a very easy landmark to identify where we were were staying!

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The Zizkov tv tower

The Zizkov tv tower

Old Town Home Prague

Our itinerary is Prague was split… we spent six nights at the beginning of the trip there, then two nights in Český Krumlov, then one final night back in Prague before Eric’s parents flew out the next day. For that last night, we decided just to find something simple and convenient. It took some searching, but eventually we stumbled upon this property. We were able to reserve a private room with four beds and its own bathroom down the hall. The location was fabulous: just a few minutes walk from the Old Town Square, but on a quiet side street so we were able to get a good night’s sleep. Another cool feature was that it included a free ghost tour, since the same people also ran one.

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What We Did

Free Walking Tour

There were a lot of different tours of the city offered… horse drawn carriage, bus, fancy car, segway, etc., but we decided to try a free walking tour. It’s not truly free – they expect you to tip – but it does provide a great incentive for the guide to make the tour entertaining. In Prague there are multiple companies offering this; we went with Sandeman’s. We greatly enjoyed the three hour tour that our guide Filip provided. He hit on all of the highlights of Old Town and kept it enjoyable throughout.

Prague Castle

This structure doesn’t look like a castle from a fairy tale, but it is still pretty impressive. We started our day at the castle by taking a tram all the way to the Strahov Monastery and found an awesome panoramic viewpoint looking back over the city.
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We then went into the castle complex itself. It is still the office of the president, so there is a colorful guard standing watch. It is free to walk through the grounds, but to go inside the buildings you have to purchase tickets. We bought the one of the cheaper packages that let us get into the buildings we were interested in. We visited St Vitus Cathedral, the Old Royal Palace, St. George’s Basilica and the Golden Lane.

St. Vitus
St. Vitus
St. Vitus
St. Vitus
St. Vitus
St. Vitus
St. George’s Basilica
St. George’s Basilica
St. George’s Basilica
The Golden Lane

Walk Through Mala Strana

On the way down from the castle, we did a self-guided walk through the neighborhood below the castle called Mala Strana. Here we found the Wallenstein Gardens (although it was about to close), Kampa Island and the Lennon Wall.

Wallenstein Gardens
The Love Lock Bridge on the way to Kampa Island
Lennon Wall

On the way back, we walked over the famous Charles Bridge.

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Vyšehrad

We explored this site where some of the original fortifications of the town were found. There’s not much left except for the castle walls and some older buildings. We did enjoy the interior of Basilica of St Peter and St Paul located here.

Day Trip to Kutná Hora

Visit the small town of Kutna Hora. See what we did here!

Jewish Museum

This museum is actually composed of multiple sites spread through the Jewish Quarter next to Prague’s Old Town. We spent a good portion of a day exploring these various sites. Our ticket covered:

  • The Pinkas synagogue, which is now a memorial to the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia that lost their lives in the Holocaust. Inside, the walls are covered with each person’s name written by hand. (No pictures were allowed inside).
  • The Old Jewish Cemetery, with its thousands of tombstones and graves piled on top of one another
  • Klausen Synagogue
  • Ceremonial Hall
  • Spanish Synagogue

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Letna Park

We climbed up the hill to this park overlooking the river and Old Town. We also eventually found our way to the beer garden where we enjoyed a few beverages!

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Overnight Trip to Český Krumlov

See separate blog on this awesome town!

St Norbert’s Brewery at Strahov Monastey

After returning from Český Krumlov, we had a final afternoon in Prague. It was a nice warm afternoon (after multiple days of dreary, cool weather), so we decided to walk back through Mala Strana to the Strahov Monastery, where there was a brewery. On the way we enjoyed the views back over the city. At the brewery, we tried four different beers (a nice change of pace from the standard pilsners).

Here we also struck up a conversation with a table of Americans next to us. Amazingly, they were flight attendants on Eric’s parents’ flight the next day!

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Ghost Tour

As previously mentioned, this was free for us since we were staying at Old Town Home Prague. We enjoyed this tour both for the stories (and legends) that were heard and also for the chance to see Prague at night!

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Beer Museum

This wasn’t actually a museum but a pub with many beers to try. Unfortunately, we were in a rush so only got one taster tray. But we enjoyed all of the beers we tried and wish we had a chance to go back!

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Where We Ate

Prague was a very hit-or-miss city when it came to dining. It seemed like a lot of the places that we went. even ones that were recommended, had servers that seemed frustrated by our presence and lack of Czech-speaking ability. After a few tries, we started to get a feel for how much things should cost and what types of things to order. We did enjoy a lot of the pork dishes, and also the goulash.

Also, it seemed like you needed to constantly be aware of how much things should cost and make sure to not get overcharged. A dishonorable mention goes out to the food stalls on the main square. They listed a reasonable price for some ham and another dish, but when it rang up it was as much as a sit-down meal! The catch was that the price we saw was per 100g, and they made sure to serve more than that…

That being said, our favorite was…

Restaurace U Parlamentu

Standard Bohemian food for reasonable prices a with friendly service. Eric’s parents got a dish that included duck, which they quite enjoyed.

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Final Thoughts

We quite enjoyed Prague. It was a beautiful city with a lot to do! It was extremely touristy, of course, and we actually found many people relatively unfriendly. We’re glad we went but wouldn’t necessarily put it at the top of the list of places we need to get back to soon.

Český Krumlov, Czech Republic

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When planning our Czech Republic leg, one thing we heard from multiple sources was that while Prague was amazing, Český Krumlov might be even better since it is smaller and more intimate. Therefore, during the time we were with Eric’s parents, we took a brief two-night trip down to this charming town.

Getting There

We took our first (and hopefully not last) trip on the yellow buses run by the Student Agency company. This was probably the fanciest bus service we have used: padded leather seats, free hot beverages and most amazingly a touch-screen entertainment system for every seat. Watching movies helped the three-hour trip fly by!

Where We Stayed

Since there were four of us, we decided to book a private place through Airbnb. We found a pretty cool flat that had room for the four of us. The best part of this flat was the location: we had a great view of the Český Krumlov Castle, and could walk to it and the historic Old Town area in about 5 minutes!

The view of the castle from our balcony
Della is pointing at the building our flat is located in

What We Did

Český Krumlov Castle

Like the Prague Castle, this building does not look like the fairy tale castle, but is still fun to explore. It’s free to walk around the grounds, but to go inside you do have to pay for a guided tour. There are a few different tour options; we chose the one that took us through Renaissance and Baroque era rooms (no pictures allowed inside, unfortunately).

The castle from below
One interior courtyard
Another interior courtyard

The castle does have one tower that you can pay some money and climb up in. We did this and really enjoyed the 360-degree views from up here. If there hadn’t been a cold wind blowing, we think we could have stayed up here all day!

About to climb…
Climbing…
Climbed!

One interesting feature of the castle is that they keep live bears in the moat. Every time we walked in or out, we had a fun time trying to spot them.

Old Town

We spent most of our time just wandering the streets of Old Town. There are many winding roads and narrow passageways to explore. The Vltava River has a large bend surrounding Old Town, which makes it even more picturesque.

Old Town from above
The river
The main square

Eggenberg Brewery

We took a break from walking around at this local brewery. We were able to try four different types of beer: amber, dark, “yeast,” and lemon.

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Our Favorite Place to Eat

U dwau Maryí, a.k.a “At the Two Maries”

We found this place listed both in guide books and on some online resources. It stood out from some of the other places we ate because it offered some unique dishes that it claims more closely match to what the traditional Bohemians ate. We got a combo platter with interesting items like millet, buckwheat and barley. We also enjoyed the creamy dumplings with blueberry sauce for dessert :).

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Kutná Hora, Czech Republic

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During our time in Prague, we took one day from sightseeing in the city to visit Kutná Hora, another town in the area with some interesting tourist attractions.

Getting There

There are guided tours offered from Prague, but it sounded pretty easy to do it on our own, so we took that route. We figured out that there was a train leaving from the main Prague train station at 10, so we headed over there that morning and were able to secure a ticket. There were quite a few other tourists doing the same thing! The ride to the main station in Kutná Hora took about an hour.

Waiting for our train

Waiting for our train

Sedlec Ossuary

Our first stop was at the hard-to-believe ossuary in the suburb of Sedlec. Apparently the surrounding cemetery became very overcrowded during the Black Death, so they decided to store the bones of tens of thousands of people in this chapel. A woodcarver hired to arrange the bones used them to make quite a few amazing creations. Probably the most impressive were the chandelier with at least one of each bone in the body and the coat of arms of the local noble family.

St. Barbara’s Cathedral

After a nice lunch at a restaurant in town, we headed out to this very impressive UNESCO-listed cathedral. We thought that the exterior was pretty magnificent, especially the spires. Kutná Hora was a silver-mining center, so there were also some interesting older frescoes showing scenes from mining life.

Old Town

We also enjoyed walking around the cobblestone streets of the old town of Kutná Hora. We were impressed by their plague column and some of the other architecture.

Heading Home

Unfortunately, we had to catch our train back to Prague at 5, so we didn’t have time to see all of the sights that Kutná Hora has to offer. We’ll just have to go back!

 

Budget: South Africa

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This is one of our Budget series of posts to give you an idea of how much we spent traveling around the world. Here we will look at South Africa. Check our posts to see what kind of activities we did and where we stayed!

In South Africa we used South African Rand. We converted to US dollars using the current conversion rates at the time of our visit. It was approximately 10 rand to one dollar.

Total Spent (16 days): $1380.23

This does not include the days spent on our self-drive safari.

We normally break down into the following categories:

Accommodation: $550.11

We stayed only at hostels in South Africa.

Activities: $344.75

This included the various tours as well as entrance fees to sights that we took in Joburg and Cape Town.

Alcohol: $34.29

Food: $299.49

We ate out only a little in South Africa. We mostly bought food from the supermarket and cooked our own meals at hostels.

Miscellaneous: $23.24

This included laundry, stamps, and souvenirs.

This divides out to $86.26/day which, thankfully, is under our $100/day budget. Yay!

Shosholoza Meyl Train

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After returning our safari truck to Johannesburg, our next stop was Cape Town. To get to Cape Town, we had a few different options. We could have flown or taken a bus, but after reading some glowing reviews of the Shosholoza Meyl train on the Seat 61 train blog, we decided to take to overnight train.

We booked a 2-berth sleeper compartment for the train leaving on a Sunday at 12:30, with expected arrival in Cape Town the next day at 3:30 PM. So we knew it would be a long trip, but we were hoping to see some nice scenery along the way.

Our little compartment was nice and cozy. We had one bench seat that turned into a bed, and one top bunk. We had to pay a little bit extra for bedding, but it wasn’t too bad, especially since they made the beds for us. The compartment also had a small sink that could be covered by a table.

To pass the time, we mostly read books, although we did take a break and play a few hands of cards.

The train did have a dining car, but we didn’t eat any meals there because we couldn’t figure out how to lock our compartment (and we had our big bags in there with us). Luckily though, there was a waitress who came by and took our dinner order and then later brought it. We had a nice beef curry for a very reasonable price.

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The scenery for the first day wasn’t that interesting, but on the second day as we got closer to Cape Town we enjoyed glimpses of the green mountains and some vineyards.

Unfortunately, due to mechanical or other delays, the train didn’t end up getting to Cape Town until 7:30 PM, so it turned out to be more like a 30-hour trip! By the end we were a little ready to experience something besides the confines of our berth!

Overall though, we enjoyed the uniqueness of the train journey across the country!

Cradle of Humankind

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Our last stop on our self-drive safari was the Cradle of Humankind. This region just outside of Johannesburg is a UNESCO World Heritage site where many important discoveries of ancient hominid fossils have been found. The Cradle-designated area is rather large, so we chose to visit the two main tourist attractions to be found there: the Maropeng Visitors Centre and the Sterkfontein Caves.

Maropeng

This nice (and relatively new) museum is set up to explain the history of life on Earth and the history of human life as well.

Heading up to the main building

Heading up to the main building

Once you enter the main building, you are taken down into the basement and you do this cheesy but fun boat ride that takes you though the different elements necessary for life.

We then went through the different exhibits in the large space. There ranged from discussions about DNA,to extinct animals, to the different types of hominids that paleoanthropologists have identified (many of which have been found in the Cradle) to what it means to be human. We enjoyed all of the interactive displays as well.

Sterkfontein Caves

The site where many of the most famous fossils have been found is the Sterkfontein Caves, a set of limestone caves in the region. Our ancestors did not live in the caves; instead, they may have fallen into the caves where there bones were very well-preserved. We took the 45 minute tour through the cave itself.

Most of the route through the cave has been developed for tourism, but there were a few tricky spots where we had to walk through while mostly ducking. That’s why we had to wear hard hats!

After our experiences with the cave in Belize, this cave did seem a little tame. Also, we wished that we could have seen the actual excavation areas – they didn’t point out any of these on the areas we walked through. But caves are always fun to explore, so we were glad to say that we saw this one as well.

Budget: Self-Drive Safari

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We wanted to give you an idea (and figure it out for ourselves) of how much our self-drive safari cost. We knew that it would take us above our $100/day budget, but we figured that it would be worth it.

Total Cost of 25 day self-drive safari: $5,599.36

Throughout the safari, we used South African Rand, Botswana Pula, Namibian Dollars and US Dollars. We used the current exchange rates.

We divided this cost down into the following categories:

 

Transportation: $3785.89

 

The transportation includes the cost of our Bushlore Truck Rental ($3001.00), gas ($685.99), various road fees, and a ferry.

 

Accommodation: $860.25

We were actually quite shocked at the expense of our accommodation. We used our truck company to help us pre-book many of our campsites because we knew it would be high season for safari. We decided that it was a good choice for some of the parks in Botswana, but was probably a bit unnecessary for Namibia. We also found that the parks in Botswana were outrageously expensive, even though we were just camping. For example, there were park fees of about $28 per day. In addition to the park fees, we paid for camping. The camp grounds within the national parks are all private and they are amazingly expensive. You pay per person and they cost $50 per person, per night.

 

Activities (This includes all park and entrance fees): $448.73

These are the park fees mentioned above. They were much more expensive in Botswana than they were in Namibia.

 

Alcohol: $55.97

We purchased 2 boxes of wine for our camping and also purchased a couple of beers here and there in the lodges.

 

Food: $261.35

This mostly consisted of groceries for camping. However, we did end up breaking down and buying a few meals along the way.

 

Miscellaneous: $42.51

We purchased maps for all of the major parks. Again, the Botswana prices were much more expensive than Namibia. We also had to pay for the bathroom in a couple of places.

 

Souvenirs: $17.53

Our safari was 25 days, so this cost averages $223.97 per day. That definitely blows our budget. However, the good news is that because it was at the beginning of our trip, we did pay our deposits for the truck and accommodation prior to leaving. Therefore we feel as if we didn’t actually pay it now… Or at least that is what we are going to tell ourselves.