A Trip to Karlovy Vary

by Caroline Tien (Ireland)

A leap into the unknown USA

Snow began to fall, obscuring the view out of the windows, as our little tour bus wound its way up through the mountains on the outskirts of Prague. Not that there had been much to see, anyway: you could only ooh and aah at so many miles of bleakly beautiful countryside before you began to tire of horse paddocks and rolling hills. Every so often, a crackle of feedback would echo throughout the bus as the tour guide, an older woman named Clara, turned on her microphone to share a few facts about the passing scenery. “This is the town of Bruvary,” she said in her heavy Czech accent as we trundled past a small, rundown village whose few dwellings sported roofs of corrugated tin, walls of weathered brick, and backyards populated by rusty tractor-trailers, “a major producer of beer.” We were bound for the medieval town of Karlovy Vary, best known today for its abundance of hot springs, but first, it seemed, we had to get through the boonies. I had booked my ticket to Karlovy Vary on a whim after seeing it mentioned briefly in my “Let’s Go, Europe!” travel guide. It’s one of those places that’s famous but not famous, if you catch my drift: blockbuster movie upon blockbuster movie, including Queen Latifah’s “Last Holiday” and Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale,” has been filmed there, and wealthy French teenagers and twentysomethings flock there every summer to luxuriate in its waters, but your average tourist will probably say something along the lines of “Gesundheit!” if you mention it to them. (I had more than one friend confuse it with Karlovy Lazne, the largest nightclub in Central Europe and Prague’s partying claim to fame). Their cluelessness, however, becomes understandable when you consider that Karlovy Vary is by no means easily accessible, especially to students on a budget. Tucked away in rural west Bohemia, it’s a two-hour bus ride from Prague each way, and over roads that become precariously narrow at times, no less. If you can stomach this comparatively grueling travel time, though, you’ll be able to take the edge off once you get there in style: with a dip in the hot springs. Once in Karlovy Vary, around an hour after leaving Bruvary and its endless fields of hops, I was able to make their acquaintance firsthand. Ringed by crowds of tourists, all snapping pictures as if their lives depended on it, the springs took the form of above-ground brick wells from which billowed, train-stack-esque, constant clouds of steam. Give me a towel and some shower shoes and burn an incense stick or two, and I would’ve found it nigh well impossible to distinguish the place from a continental sauna---had it not been for the sheer number of people downing the spring water itself. Local lore holds that the springs have incredible healing properties, and it's a myth people have bought into wholeheartedly. Perched on a bench besides one of the most famous of the springs, Vřídlo, I met more of these devotees, some of whom had flown in from all over the world just to dip their hands in or wash their faces with its water, than I could have ever imagined existed. A young woman cast her eyes up to the ceiling, as though experiencing communion with God, as she sipped water from a china mug. A middle-aged woman bent down to the well, not without some difficulty, and splashed some water onto her cheeks. An older man, his eyes staring off in two different directions, shuffled up to me and thrust his wrist in my face. “Look at my hands!” he enthused. “They were all--” he made a gesture that seemed to indicate wrinkling--- “and now they’re smooth! Healed!” He shook them at me again with the zeal of an ardent believer. They still looked pretty wrinkly to me, but who was I to burst his bubble? I felt compassion mixed with a surreal sense that I'd gone undercover among cult members. "Yes," I said, "they are."