get 'er done

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

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

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

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

A three-storey bike garage in Amsterdam.











Vitezslav, scouting out the route ahead for me.







The mighty Vlatava!

Prague

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

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...