Day 252 Sun 24 Jun 2007 Ceske Budejovice to Olomouc, Czech Republic

It’s a world heritage day today with no less than six Unesco sites to be visited. Kenny gets to work planning the route and takes us first to the Holasovice historic village reservation which has pretty yellow, blue and orange cottages in ‘peasant baroque’ style clustered around a village green. Then its across country to the Historic Centre of Telc, an old town surrounded by defensive fishponds with a large cobbled square lined with more pretty houses and a cathedral tower to climb. We stop briefly to inspect the Jewish quarter and basilica of St Procopius in Tebric before heading for the Tugendhat Villa at Brno. Unfortunately we discover its by appointment only and 7pm on a Sunday evening is not the best time to visit this Mies van der Rohe functionalist house which anyway resembles the Rose Seidler house in Killara. So its on to Kromeriz Gardens and Castle which are also unsurprisingly closed on a Sunday evening. We buy a motorway pass, having decided after reading Kafka that the Czech police are likely to be less amenable than those in Austria and Switzerland to foreigners not paying tolls. Finally we reach Olomouc in eastern Czech (there must be a better name than having say Czech republic each time – may be Czechistan or Czechland or Czechia) with its listed Holy Trinity Column which we inspect after finding a lovely apartment full of antique furniture in the university quarter. There’s a rock band playing in the main square so we find another quieter square nearby for dinner, also with a column although not as fancy as that on the list.