After we’d spend 5 amazing days in Prague, it was time to take a train and travel to the hidden beauty of the Czech Republic: the bohemian paradise.
To give some context: the bohemian paradise is both an area and a region in the northern parts of the Czech Republic. In Czech this nature reserve is called Český ráj and it’s most famous for big. ass. rocks.
35mm nikon
WHERE TO STAY?
Depending on how long your staying, your ways of transportation and your willingness to lodge in an area where nobody speaks English the best place to stay will vary. For reference I can say we stayed in the town of Jičín. Whilst it offers a very practical location where you can easily explore the park with a car or with train/bus it still is a very small town in the middle of nowhere, Czech Republic.
When we arrived at our appartment the lady turned to me and asked me ‘Why do you come here? Why Jičín ?’. Apparantly 3 young girls from Belgium aren’t the usual tourists there and she was somewhat bewilderd that we came all the way out here. It was also the best english we’d hear for the next 3 days.
HOW LONG SHOULD YOU STAY?
A big difference in this is whether or not you have access to a car. We didn’t as so we relied soley on public transport. When we went to the local tourism office we found a lot of areas or activities that we wanted to do but couldn’t because of the long travel time. Had we stayed for more than 3 days we might have gone either way but since we had little time we didn’t want to spend hours in a train or on a bus so we opted for staying and hiking in the local area.
If you stay in Jičín or a simmilar small town I think 3 days is perfect, if you’re planning to stay a little bit long I would recommend a slightly larger city (Turnov is a fan favorite for this).
WHAT TO DO?
It won’t be a suprise that your main activity will be hiking. There’s a lot of great marked hikes that will take you literally between the giant rocks. On Scesky-raj.info you can find a lot of great options for things to do. There’s not only hikes but also some museums or monuments you might want to check out.
Good to know is that there’s something called ‘The Golden Path of Bohemian Paradise’, it goes trough the entire region and would take several days to complete. But no worries, you can easily hike individual sections. The path is marked with red symbols and is about 119 km. This is a great site with more information: link.
Voila! I hope that you’re motivated to visit this place now because it was really beautiful, plus it’s not super crowded. If you do go feel free to share your experience in the comments!
-Sandrien
Pin it!
FINDING FOOTING 