Hotel U Zvonu Kutna Hora

... br>Also, it has an "infamous" bone osuary. It's this small church/chapel location with thousands upon thousands of bones that the monks put together in a variety of arrangements, including a fantastic chandelier, and huge piles of bones. It was really impressive and quite macabre.<br><br>We then walked the other mile or so into town, walked around a bit, and made up to the fantaaaastic cathedral (oh, by the way both entrance fees were 50 Czech Krowns or 30 ...

... a couple minutes away. An Ossuary is used to collect bones when graves are in short supply as was the case here during the plague. The church is full of them including all of the decorations which are made from human bones including crosses, chalices and a coat of arms for the Schwarzenberg family. Freaky but fascinating. <br><br>30 minute walk further we arrive in the town. It is a quaint town, largely restored to the early 1800s. In the distance we ...

I got a little excited when we were planning this trip &#8211; driving for about 1.5hours from Prague and we are on the German border! From Adelaide I can get to Goolwa, or Mannum, in that time &#8211; not really the same&#8230; I think I was the only one excited though - it's all normal for everyone else.<br><br>We went to see Prav&#269;ická Brána, in the north of the country, which is a ...

There are two principal reasons people come to the small town of Kutná Hora, a day trip for some from Prague (though we spent the night here). The first is the Silver Mine tour, which really is a blast. There are tours in English; ours did not happen to be one of those. Still, they gave us a somewhat dull but informative English packet to be read along the tour. During the boring parts where the Czech guide was going on ...

... some bits!) Kutna Hora is famous throughout Eastern Europe - an ex mining town that had one of the richest deposits of silver in the world, and bankrolled much of the region for over 200 years. A visit to the old mine which is now abandoned except for some very small scale extraction was fascinating, with km of labrinthine tunnels and both original and reconstructions of the equipment they used. The conditions ...

... I hiked for about an hour or so to the Radio Tower where you can climb it and get the most amazing view of the city. I climbed the tower and that is where I realized that the rumor of Prague being the most poluted city in Europe was pretty accurate. The temperate was about 30 degrees and the smog that covered the city was quite brutal. When situtated in the center you have no idea until you climb and get a birds eye view of the pollution ...

... and we decided that our bodies becoming art wasn't so bad in the long run. We also visitied the Conventual Church of the Assumption of the Virgin. It is in the process of a large rennovation which I wont go into here. However, if you have read "Pillars of the Earth" the story seems freakishly similar. For lunch we poped into a cafe next to the church only to find that they spoke NO English. Not a ...

... every bone in the human body. The bone pyramids are all topped by a wooden crown, to represent the fact that all will be part of the kingdom of God eventually. The guides all push this angle, I guess to try and avoid the macabre attraction of the place, but it is hard to focus on that aspect when there are skulls blankly facing you from all angles. Anyway. It's an impressive feat of engineering/architecture/artistry at any rate. And we lit two candles for the long-dead we saw there.

... of being so ugly that you'll stay there just to avoid looking at it. The next day I broke camp and went in search of breakfast. I was feeling a little the worse for wear after finishing last night in a local bar that didn't seem to have a closing time. Ham and cheese toasties helped a little. My plan was to visit the ossuary in a nearby village, before heading south in the afternoon. The ossuary was about ten minutes ride from Kutna Hora and the streets were empty ...

... through the town with school children laughing). i do believe i conquered my fear of small, dark, wet spaces. Also saw a very majestic church called St. Barbra's (the patron saint of miners) and also a much smaller but much more morbid church decorated with human bones. and when i said decorated, i mean covered with candelabras, a coat of arms, and words all made entirely of ...