Sara

DH and I will be traveling to Cesky Krumlov with another couple on August 20-22. Of course, we'd like to tour the castle, and we are especially interested in seeing the Baroque theater. I know that the castle is closed on Monday, so we'd need to do it either Tuesday, or Wednesday morning before driving back to Prague. Given that this is mid-week in a busy tourist month, can anyone advise me whether we should make reservations ahead of time (if that is even possible), or are we okay waiting until we get there the get tickets for a tour?

We would also like to take a boat ride, either on one of the wooden rafts, or by renting a raft. Is this something we need to reserve in advance, or would we be able to book that the day we want to do it? Does anyone have an opinion as to which would be better - the wooden raft, or renting our own? Thanks for any help.

annhig

hi, sara,

I'm no use to you at all, but posting this as we are considering a trip to this area next year, and I'm interested in the answer.

anyone?

regards, ann

Sara

Topping, hoping for an answer.

annhig

hi, sara,

I'm too lazy to do this and not on your timescale, but have you tried searching this forum for cesky krumlov?

I'm sure that there's a recent thread about it.

regards, ann

adnil1962

Hi Sara,

I was there in July. We didn't tour the Castle because we were there for just the day. I recall reading in one of my guidebooks that you needed reservations for the castle. The guidebooks were library books so I can't refer back to them....

As far as the canoe/raft rentals you do not need reservations. There were hundreds of them floating through the river. As we wandered around I noticed several rental places.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help. I just posted my trip report a few days ago which gives some Prague info on food & activities if you are interested.

Have a great time!! I have been home for a week and am still very much missing Prague.

Sara

Thanks, adnil, this is good news about the boats - I'd rather be flexible about when we do that. I guess I'll see if I can figure out a way to make reservations for a castle and baroque theater tour, especially as we'd want to take a tour in English, if they offer any. I found a phone number on the Cesky Krumlov web site, so I hope whoever answers speaks English. I did read your trip report, it made me excited about going to Prague!

Ann, yes, I've read through lots of threads on Cesky Krumlov (although I admit I didn't read every single one ever posted, that would take many hours - and since we leave for Central Europe on Tuesday, I don't have time!). I didn't find anything about the necessity of resrvations for either the castle tours or boats, however.

Sara

We've recently returned from our travels, so I thought I'd report back on how this worked out for us.

First of all, Cesky Krumlov is a dream - so beautiful, yet small enough to be manageable and get around easily on foot - it was like walking into a fairy tale. We had perfect weather, too, which really made our time there wonderful.

I never did get a chance to make advance reservations for the castle tours, but that was okay. We walked up to the ticket office the morning after we arrived, and asked about tours in English. We were able to take a castle tour about a half hour later, no problem. We took tour #1, which I thought was very interesting, and I especially liked seeing the Masquarade Hall, a beautiful, large ballroom/concert hall with wonderful painted frescos of costumed revelers on all of the walls, quite lovely and entertaining.

We we were also able to book a late afternoon tour of the baroque theater, which is what we really wanted to do. That was wonderful, we found it fascinating and beautiful, and worth the trip to Cesky Krumlov just to see that (although we are admitted theater buffs). We got to go underneath the stage to see how the scene-changing machinery worked - that was really neat. I highly recommend this tour.

Afterwards we walked uphill to see the castle gardens. Unfortunately, I thought this was a waste of our time amd energy, given the limited amount of time we had. It wasn't very exciting or special, and it seemed badly in need of maintenance - I was tempted to start pulling weeds, but I resisted. I was not impressed with the gardens,

The next morning we rented a raft to take the short ride through town on the river. We were able to walk into the raft rental place next to the bridge where the trip starts and rent a raft right then and there. That was a lot of fun, and we're really glad we did that. We had a small amount of time available, as we needed to get on the road, so we did the very short trip around the town. It would have been really nice to do a longer raft ride, and this is incentive to go back there agin and do that. It was fun going through the weirs over the dams - a little exciting, but not too scary. We saw lots of other rafts - there was even a riverside restaurant with a bar right on the water where folks could paddle up and order drinks right in their rafts.

We really enjoyed our time in Cesky Krumlov, and I would love to go back and spemd more time there someday.

annhig

Hi, Sara,

thanks so much for posting this.

our plans fro eastern europe are coming along nicely and we definitely want to include CK in our trip.

can you tell me about where you stayed and how much it was?

regards, ann

Brahmama

topping for our trip to Eastern Europe - but not until October 09!

annh,
you posted on my train thread (which got hi-jacked by the train experts!) and I am interested in where you are going? Have you posted any kind of an itinerary yet?

Sara,
This was a great help and thanks for coming back and giving us info after your trip.

Sara

We stayed at the Hotel Leonardo in a double deluxe room, which we paid 3,200 koruny (approx $158 USD) for per night. It was a good location, very near the town square, and charmingly old, yet updated, but it had some drawbacks. We were on the top floor, with no lift, so it was a long way to drag our luggage, plus go up and down all the time - if we stayed there again I'd request a lower floor. The room layout was very odd, too, and we had to step over beams in the floor. The biggest drawback was that they left, and locked the front door, at 6:00 pm. This wouldn't have been a big problem if they had given us each our own key, but since we were given one key per room to share, it was a difficult situation when we wanted to split up and do different things, and couldn't get back in independently after 6:00 pm.

Nearby was the Hotel Old Inn, right on the square - we had a very nice dinner in their outdoor restauarant on the square, and it looked like a very nice place to stay. If we go back, I'd look into staying there.

Snowflake25

Were you also in Prague on your travels? Did you take a bus to Cesky Krumlov or drive? We will be in Prague in October and are planning to go to Cesky Krumlov and then on to Budapest but have not confirmed travel plans because we are not sure if we should go back to Prague or to Linz and then on to Budapest. any suggestions?

annhig

hi, Brahmama,

we 've worked out a basic itinerary, which i am trying to refine.

at the moment, it looks like this:

prague [just to pick up car]
cesky K [one night]
melk [on the danube in Austria towards Vienna - one night]
Vienna [3 nights]
Slovakia [2 nights, en route to]
Krakov [3 nights]
Wroclov [1 night]
Dresden [3 nights]
back to Prague for flight home.

I think we will book Vienna, Krakov and Dresden, not sure about the other nights-we may just wing it. as there's only 2 of us and we've done this sort of thing before, i think this should be ok.

where are hoping to go?

regards, ann

Sara

Snowflake, we were in Prague, both before and after Cesky Krumlov. We rented a car and drove from there (we were traveling with another couple, who shared the cost). So I can't give you any advice on public transportation options. Cesky Krumlov is not too far from the border, and is certainly closer to Linz than to Prague. Earlier we traveled from Budapest to Prague (we were traveling on a tour bus with a group we were doing a concert tour with during that part of our travels), it was a very long distance, and made for quite a long and tiring day of travel (we did stop in Brataslava for lunch, where we enjoyed a mini-walking tour). If you travel to Budapest from Linz you would go through Vienna, have you considered stopping there at all?

We really loved Prague. It's a magical city, so I hope you are planning to spend some time there. Budapest is quite beautiful, too, but Prague is really special.

Snowflake25

Sara we have 3 days booked in Prague and 3 in budapest with 2 days in between. We are planning to go to Cesky Krumlov by bus (have read there is an early bus) and spend the night. We would then have an extra day to go part of the way to Budapest. Linz looks very interesting and we thought we would do a walking tour and hit some of the "must sees". Which would you recommend Linz or Vienna for one day?

Sara

I'm sorry, I haven't actually been to Linz, so I can't give you any guidance there. However, Vienna is a beautiful, historic city with so much to do and see you could spend days there and barely scratch the surface. It would also break up your travel to Budapest more evenly, if that matters to you. If you've never been to Vienna, that would be my choice, but Linz may have charms I don't know about.

If you're taking buses, this may not be an option, but if you do have the opportunity, a stop-off to see the Abbey at Melk on the way to Vienna is very definitely worthwhile.