Prague Spring

It was meant still to be deep winter when we visited Prague at the tail end of January. Indeed we hoped to see this city of a thousand spires sparkling enchantingly under a layer of snow. Hope often deceives - we endured spells of sunshine amidst temperatures of around 10 degrees Celsius. Hang on, do I sound like I'm complaining? Yet it looked to be the destiny of Prague springs to promise much and deliver little.

Below: Our favourite spot in Prague, overlooking the gentle Vltava valley and the arched grace of its many bridges.

Bohemian Rhapsody

The poster girl of Eastern European tourism, Prague manages to be regal, ravishing and rhapsodic all at once. Time seems to stand still in this bejewelled and much beloved city. There seems hardly to be any room for the city's rich history amidst the droves of self-absorbed spire-seekers jostling in its streets. But it is nigh on impossible not to be self-absorbed in Prague. Looking from the castle ramparts at dusk towards the Old Town, often aglow in a golden haze - snow or no snow - the opening verses of Queen's immortal song spring to mind. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Below (top to bottom): the impressive spire-scape in the Old Town Square, boasting from left to right the Astronomical Clock Tower, the Church of St Nicholas and the Church of Our Lady before Tyn; the view from near the Astronomical Clock, where crowds gather like clockwork on the hour to witness the elaborate passage of time.

Like the rest of the song, the city is an eclectic admixture of human attempts both febrile and feeble to fashion the beautiful. And like the rest of the song, he who delves into the city's past finds a profound darkness barely concealed by the veil of nonchalant gaiety which some have come to associate with the term Bohemian. Although it has come a long way from its early days as a slaving station, Prague hardly stands aloof from the long civil war that is European history. The city even has a place in the violence hall of fame. Twice, Prague witnessed defenestrations (an act which usually involves throwing hapless subjects of popular wrath out of the window) which sparked long ruinous wars in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. The former was a vicious civil war that involved Czechs condemning (and burning) one another as heretics. The latter, known to posterity as Thirty Years' War, was Europe's most destructive conflict until the cataclysm of 1914.

Below: The Jan Hus Memorial near the northeastern corner of the Old Town Square, commemorating the fourteenth century reformer whose efforts led to civil war. Nearly two centuries before Martin Luther, Hus railed against the corruption of the Catholic Church and pushed for the use of, in place of unfamiliar high-flown Latin, the local vernacular in worship. Incidentally, the square also saw the dying agonies of Hussites and burnt at the stake.

It was as if the embers still smothered when we arrived at Florenc bus station. Smoke hugged every step of our twenty-minute walk to the apartment we booked. This was born of tobacco and not gunpowder, though we didn't know which was worse. It wasn't apparent to us before, but it seemed that every other person in Prague had a cigarette clasped by either lip or finger.

Our apartment Pragapart was run by a Georgian-Czech family whose heritage was given away by their large collection of Russian DVDs in the reception. It stood just two minutes' walk off Wenceslas Square, where the Old and the New Towns met. Today's Czech Republic was born at Wenceslas Square in November 1989, when what began ostensibly as a commemoration of International Students' Day gathered pace and led ten days later to the collapse of communism in then Czechoslovakia. Dubbed the Velvet Revolution because everybody kept their heads (literally and figuratively speaking), this and the Velvet Divorce which spelt the end of Europe's most unpronounceable state in 1993 (the state broke up into the Czech and Slovak Republics) were heralded for their anomalously peaceful resolutions. These in fact numbered as one of the few occasions when European discord wasn't settled by a decisive show of force.

Below: Wenceslas Square, where the Czech Republic we know today was born in 1989 and where the Old and New Towns met.

Our Winter's Tale

We sought as much as possible to avoid the throngs, which formed around the usual attractions - namely, the Astronomical Clock at the Old Town Square, the entrance to Prague Castle and Charles Bridge. Brief drizzles apart, the weather was quite delightful, and we wondered how it was still only January.

Below: Front and back views of St Vitus Cathedral in the castle complex, possibly the most photographed landmark in Prague where Bohemian monarchs (many of whom also occupied the throne of the Holy Roman Empire) were crowned and (some of them) buried.

Prague owes much of its beauty to its location in the winding wooded valley of the Vltava, a blue ribbon across a rolling sea of tiled roofs, stately domes and iron spires. The aforementioned attractions also proffered the most popular blockbuster views, where the desired panorama often unfolded above a tousled, polychrome bar of hats and hair - felt, velvet, polyester, matt, auburn and blonde. We decided on two other vantage points where the same views could be savoured without having to vie for elbow room. These we covered at either end of a long day's walk, and were situated on the hilly slopes of the Vltava's left bank where the castle also stands.

Below (top to bottom): A walk along the Vltava yields possibly the most famous view of the Prague Castle complex from across the Vltava; and also of Art Nouveau facades south of the Old Town.

The first was Strahov Monastery, a Premonstratensian (named after the order's place of origin and not any inherent predilection to preach) establishment which boosts two magnificent libraries. The monastery could be reached by following the famous Nerudova Street (which once linked the castle across Charles Bridge to the Old Town) uphill from the Mala Strana. We left the Nerudova as it turned north towards the castle. At that point the views began and the street became refreshingly quiet. Disappointingly, we could only admire the libraries' gilded splendour from behind a simple barricade. It had been a while since we were last in a silent library.

Above: Strahov Monastery, west of Prague Castle and an unheralded location from where marvellous views could be savoured of the Old Town.

Below: Eyes only were allowed to roam the beautiful libraries to which visitors to the Strahov often flock.

After the Strahov, we walked northeast through the castle grounds to Letensky profil - the second viewpoint and possibly my favourite spot in Prague. Set on a bluff at the edge of a out-of-the-way city park, Letensky profil offers arguably the best view of the city's bridges. Few tourists knew of or bothered to get there. Apart from a few dedicated photography enthusiasts, the only people we encountered were locals either walking their dogs or exercising. We got there just in time for dinner, which we had at the adjacent Letensky zamecek. There was no other alternative. Romantic views alone did not staunch Mary's pressing hunger.

Below (top to bottom): The perfect Prague evening involves first watching the sun go down from Letensky profil, a viewpoint north of the Old Town; and then enjoying dinner at the Letensky zamecek, the restaurant just behind.

Hints of home

Prague also marked six weeks away from home for us. We missed the warmth and regular daylight hours of Singapore's eternal summer, and thought sometimes about char kway teow and kway chap (especially at night when our rumbling stomachs complained about suppers taken too early). Yet it was still mostly manageable, and we had not then stepped yet into the Eastern Europe shunned by tourists and comfortable infrastructure. A visit to an Asian fastfood restaurant on our first evening in Prague changed all that.

Whilst the green curry we ordered wasn't all that fantastic, it provided the most immediate reminder of home we've had thus far. Henceforth, each picture on Facebook or Instagram taken in Singapore triggered little pangs of longing. It didn't help that these depicted the revelry of pre-Chinese New Year festivities - of tub after tub of pineapple tarts and bakkwa, lor hei-strewn tables and pun memes involving festive greetings and animals from the Chinese zodiac.

With Vienna and Budapest still to look forward to, the tipping point came much later. But where homesickness was concerned, it was evident that we crossed some sort of Rubicon when we arrived at the Danube.

I blame the Czech attempt at Thai green curry.

Bratislava: Once and future princeling of the Danube

On a snowy afternoon, we finally arrived in the little big city of Bratislava - all many ever associate with Slovakia, and the once and future princeling of the Danube (or Dunaj, as the famous river is know in Slovak).

Below: Bratislava Castle and historical prominence, all water under the bridge.

Once and future princeling, or forgotten king?

Bratislava was the first of three cities (the other two being the usual suspects of Vienna and Budapest) we would visit on the Danube, accounted mighty amongst Europe's rivers. Yet many travellers would typically devote more time to Vienna and Budapest, and Bratislava would be for them a place to break the journey between the two - a lesser light amongst shinier jewels and where visitors may proclaim there I've been to Slovakia.

It wasn't always the case. The site occupied today by the Slovakian capital had always been valued as a place where north-south and east-west trading routes converged. The Celts and then the Romans were there long before Slavs, Germans and Hungarians arrived on the scene. Centuries before the city officially became Bratislava in 1919, it enjoyed a celebrated history as Pressburg (in German) and Pozsony (Hungarian). Under the above names, the city became the capital of the Hungarian kingdom between 1536 (when the previous capital Buda was taken by the Ottomans) and 1784. During this time, Buda (still separate from Pest) by contrast was a relative backwater. It was the fateful decision by Joseph II in 1784 to move the capital back to Buda which consigned Bratislava to the slide into its present provinciality.

Below (top to bottom): The yard at St Martin's, the cathedral where Hungarian monarchs were crowned; St Michael's Gate, the northern entrance to the Old Town and the sole surviving gate from its medieval fortifications.

Bratislava in a day, or ten minutes

We set aside three days in Bratislava in yet another of our periodic slowdowns amidst being constantly on the go. One day, however, is enough to take in the main sights in town. If city panoramas from a lofty viewpoint suffices for you, then that figure can be further reduced to ten minutes. (Time was when travelling as a student in a bygone era without smart devices, I would make a city's highest point the second stop - after the tourist information centre.) This can be obtained from several places, most notably from Bratislava Castle, the viewing deck atop Novy Most (New Bridge, popularly called the UFO Bridge because of its saucer-shaped viewing deck at its atop) and St Michael's Gate. We recommend the second if only because both the castle and the entire Old Town can be seen together.

Above: Views of the Danube, or the Dunaj as it is called in Slovak, and the Old Town from the Novy Most (New Bridge) viewing deck.

Below (top to bottom): From the same vantage point, one can peer into Hungary (wind farms); and Austria (hills) too; Novy Most looking most convincingly like its nickname on a foggy evening.

 

The good, the bad and the ugly

We remembered Bratislava less for its landmarks than for the people we met there. Nothing serves up the universality of humanity - immeasurable yet intimate, familiar yet foreign - more thrillingly than meeting people on the road. With one's perceptiveness heightened by a profound vulnerability, kindness is for the spirit ether to rudeness's brimstone. Good, bad and ugly were juxtaposed as if in a morality play.

We started with good, thankfully - for good is harder to mar when established than to make when absent. Igor lives with his family in the unit next to our hostel, and gave us so comprehensive an introduction to the city that we might as well have taken it for sightseeing. He also teaches at a school for the visually impaired. The hostel job was taken on to supplement the meagre salaries teachers received in Slovakia. (Incidentally, there was a teachers' strike the following day.) Knowing Braille is useful though, I later remarked. A half-smile formed on Igor's face. Yes, but we hope we won't need to use it, was his terse response.

Below: Another view of the castle from Obchodna Street where our hostel was.

We had a vastly different reception when we went to the train station to get tickets for Prague. The cashier's glare as we approached her (we'll refer henceforth to her as Nemesis) counter would have turned even Medusa to stone. Her volcanic outburst came when we discovered the price we paid was twice that advertised on the Internet. To cut a long story short, her (much) friendlier colleague at the customer service centre explained that the discounted fares can only be obtained online (which didn't exist) and then wrote us a refund note in Slovak. When we returned to Nemesis and later asked (very nicely) if she could reissue the tickets at the discounted price, she flew inexplicably into a rage. Internet! Internet! she thundered. I raised my hands in mock surrender. It's okay, don't be angry, your internet isn't working. If condescension could be honeyed, this would come close. Inexplicably it softened her tone, although she still had unapproachable written all over a sullen face.

I suppose it all adds to the romance of the unheralded train journey we earlier wrote about - travellers still have the run the old-school gauntlet of buying tickets from cantankerous cashiers.

Below (top to bottom): Watching mechanical chefs air-bake imaginary confectionery outside a lavishly decorated tea room. If only all our interaction with service staff could be so deliciously straightforward.

Now, the ugly - Nemesis might have been a mere inconvenience, but what follows is a lot harder to swallow. As we posed sillily near the iconic Cumil statue downtown, a Kazakh girl approached us hesitantly. Can I walk with you? We hesitated too. And then the reasons came along - a gaggle of well-dressed girls on her tail, Romani by the looks of it, one of whom shoved an umbrella into the Kazakh lady's face as we watched in stunned silence. They walked away soon after, and our expanded party broke again into its constituent components by the next junction.

Where do we even begin to unravel these tangled layers of discrimination? Although not all the facts have been established, the act we witnessed seemed to confirm one thing. In a world (outwardly at least) aspiring to be colourblind, only that pathogen we call prejudice really operates regardless of colour. At this point, green seems to be the only unaffected hue.

Not for long methinks. Race, religion, language - they're all fair game.

Below (top to bottom): Mary puts her foot down on voyeurism, at the iconic Cumil statue where we witnessed a very disturbing instance of public (read, racialised) bullying; elsewhere, disturbance comes in the form of my wife's preference of tin men over me.

The latest Green movement

We visited just five weeks before Slovakia's next parliamentary elections. Everywhere the benevolent faces of candidates courted from billboards and buses the votes of passers-by, delivering pomp and promises as bread and beatitudes. Moving Slovakia forward, one said. Slovakia, a better place to live, another read. One of the more eye-catching ones (it has certainly caught the attention of the foreign media) declared, next to the steely gaze of present Prime Minister Robert Fico, Protect Slovakia. In a recent widely-reported rally, he announced that if elected he would close Slovakia's doors to Muslim migrants. - bold claims made on behalf of a city with a distinctly un-Slovak history.

Below: A scene from a city cemetery on our last morning in Bratislava, eerily  representative of the latest turn in Slovak politics.

Having said all that, I'd still urge readers to visit Slovakia. The mountains are really worth seeing. They are probably the only places in Slovakia where white, green and brown sit by each other harmoniously.

Zilina: Slovakia's unprepossessing hub

To travel on a lean wallet is really to perform a mental landgrab with a shoestring. It is a necessary corollary to having both limited time and money. The further one goes from home (and by extension the higher the original transport expenses), the more frenzied becomes this scramble to cover ground. Decisions become key - which places to include, how much time to spend there, what are the back-ups, when to change the plan. And then - have we made the right call? Because we've come so far, and we're not coming back again.

Below: Snilovske Sedlo (Snowy Pass in Slovak) in the Mala Fatra Mountains, where Plan C landed us. Zilina is a really useful base, though there's little to see in it.

Our plans for Zilina, where we spent two days between Poprad and Bratislava, underwent two iterations. These demonstrated how options were legion in this unprepossessing hub of a city. Originally we had intended to visit the Sulov Rocks southwest of town. The rock spires in these low hills have come to be known locally as the Slovak Dolomites. Having seen the High Tatras, we thought better of it. Plan B was to visit the castles of Strecno (just 7 kilometres east of town along the Vah, Slovakia's longest river and historically an important east-west conduit of communications and trade) and Orava (an hour and a half by bus northeast). Plan B withered when, on the train from Poprad, we saw the ridges of the Mala Fatra Mountains pulse on the northern horizon. Mountains > Castles.

Plan C was to take the cable-car to Snilovske Sedlo (Snowy Pass in Slovak) in the Mala Fatras. Having learnt the bus schedule, we later contrived to screw it up by first dallying over breakfast and then trusting to local contingencies which didn't exist. Having missed the direct bus to the cable-car station from Zilina, we really should have waited for the next one. But that didn't leave for another three hours and I thought we could shave at least an hour off by looking for alternatives along the way.

So we boarded the next bus for Terchova (which was en route, and the closest thing in the Mala Fatras to a ski resort town), tried looking for a taxi to the cable-car station (there was none), settled for another bus that only took us halfway and tried to hitch the rest of the way. Thank God for a kind Slovakian skier who stopped for us. We saved 15 minutes. The unfortunate sequence of events neatly encapsulated our contrasting approaches to travel - Mary likes to take her time, I like to take my chances. As with all polar disagreements, the truth lies in between, under molten layers of conflicting conviction where nobody cared to look.

Below (top to bottom): Terchova, gateway for visitors to the Mala Fatra National Park; walking towards the cable-car station, after the bus alighted us halfway and many hundreds of metres before we got a hitch.

The cable-car station looked closed. The cashier at the ticket booths looked like she didn't expect anybody. Emblazoned with decals showing a capped leprechaun-like figure grinning over heaps of gold, the cabins looked like Scrooge McDuck's famous treasure-filled pool. The figure depicted had a nobler place in Slovak folklore though. He was none other than Juraj Janosik, an eighteenth-century Robin Hood-type character who hid in these parts and who today is hailed as a national hero for fighting oppression on behalf of the downtrodden Slovaks.

We shared our cabin with another family of three. Papa had a DSLR slung around his neck, Mama their 3-year-old daughter. They used to go on photography excursions into the Slovakian mountains, but confessed that their daughter's arrival consigned those trips firmly to the past. This brief, clairvoyant glimpse of our own future was burned out of my head by a sudden brightening of the cabin. We had been lifted above the tree line, and the weather was clear. I kept a tight lid on my excitement, determined to not embarrass the child by beating her in the enthusiasm stakes.

Below: The upper station on a beautiful day - worth all the trouble getting there.

Set between the two highest peaks in the Mala Fatras, Snilovske Sedlo thoroughly deserves its name. We observed that the snow on its northern and southern slopes was textured differently. The south-facing slopes looked almost pristine, with only the faintest of furrows betraying the intrepid folk who trekked up on skis and snowshoes, pressing doggedly on to either Velky Krivan (highest peak) or Chleb (second highest). The north-facing slope, where the upper cable-car station stood, resembled a field torn up by giant gophers - here a track of potholes which heavier footfalls expanded and deepened, there a series of white bumps which were the unmistakable signs of clumsy tumbles down the slope. No prizes for guessing which crowd we better belonged to.

Above (top to bottom): Seasoned cross-country skiers hike up the southern slopes leading up to Snilovske Sedlo, with lithe lines in the snow the only sign of their toil; Meanwhile, ordinary folk plod up the northern slopes, showing the world the only way a snowfield can be scarred.

Below (top to bottom): Panoramas atop the saddle - first to the south where the Velka Fatra Range can be seen (the tallest hump-backed ridge to the right is Velky Krivan, the tallest peak in the Mala Fatra; Chleb is the other hump close to the leftmost margins of the photograph) ; and then to the rest of the Mala Fatra Mountains to the north.

Below (top to bottom): Respective close-ups of the Velka Fatras and the Mala Fatras. While Velka means Greater in Slovak and Mala means Lesser, the Mala Fatras are actually, interestingly, the taller range.

When we got back to Zilina, we spent more time on cake and coffee in the mall (the unusually named Mirage) than the two hours it took us to explore the Old Town on foot. Mary remembers little from our time in the city itself except the first night when the hot water ran out in the middle of her shower. It took nearly an hour before the technician came to have a look at the boiler, and even then the water remained close to freezing.

Below (top to bottom): Andrej Hlinka Square in Zilina (named after a Roman Catholic priest who was in the public face of Slovak autonomy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the fin de siècle period) presided over by the Holy Trinity Cathedral; the Jesuit Church of the Conversion of St Paul the Apostle on Marian Square; the Old Town Hall; a panorama showing (left to right) the facade of the New Synagogue, the Gymnasium of St Francis of Assisi (where minds, not muscles, are worked) and the Rosenfeld Palace.

The kind receptionist on duty waited with me at the porch for the technician to arrive. I learnt that he had read philosophy in university, that he loves the Tatras as much as I did and finally that he didn't enjoy his present job very much.

Nine in the evening, under driving snow, waiting to fix up an overworked boiler - it wasn't hard to figure out why.

Logistics

Terchova (pronounced Ter-ho-va) is the gateway for visitors to the Mala Fatra National Park. For the Snilovske Sedlo cable-car, take the bus from Zilina for Vratna Vytah (the name of the very last stop). From Zilina there are many other options. Strecno is easily reached by either buses and trains. For Orava Castle, take the bus to Oravsky Podzamok.

Moving on, Bratislava is two and a half hours south by train. Poprad, Kosice and the Tatras are two hours east by train. One could also get to Prague, some five hours away, by bus or train. Head to the helpful tourist information office on Andrej Hlinka Square in the town centre for maps and brochures listing options in both Zilina and its wider region.