Třeboň

As the snow melts, we are looking forward to warmer biking, hiking, canoeing and maybe you are too. A little less than 2 hours from Prague you can reach the city of Třeboň. This area is flat and full of ponds famous for the production of carp. Most of those ponds were built in the 16th century by Jakub Krčín. If you visit this place, you should definitely have carp for lunch or dinner at the restaurant. They know here how to prepare it right. Carp is not very popular in the rest of the Czech Republic, but during Christmas time, you will see carp being sold everywhere. It is a tradition to have carp for a Christmas eve dinner and to keep at least one scale from the carp in your pocket or wallet for the whole year. It is believed that in this way you make sure that you will never be short of money.

We visited this place several times with our nonelectric Apache bikes in the past. The reason being, yes, you guessed it, that it is flat here and we didn’t like to bike up hills at all. We stayed in the hotel Zlatá Hvězda (Golden Star) on the main square in Třeboň. This hotel is accustomed to handling the invasion of bikers, especially on the weekends when the bike storage room is literally overflowing. But we can definitely recommend it especially having a room facing the square.

You will be riding along a lot of ponds, or sometimes on a narrow piece of land between two ponds, or along the river Lužnice. The only annoying part of the trip may be stretches of road built of concrete slabs, which make the riding quite bumpy. But beautiful scenery more than enough makes for this little trouble. Two maps below will give you a choice of short (31 km), or longer (62 km) trips. The only tricky part is on the short trip between the start and point 4, where you will be riding on a very narrow path next to the water canal. After point 4 you will be on the dam of the biggest pond Rožmberk, where you can actually witness the word’s curvature. (But do not show it to your friend, if he/she is a member of the flat earth society, because it could ruin their lifelong belief.) Another trip you can do here is to go around the whole world in less than an hour – faster than astronauts on the space station. The pond south of Třeboň is called Svět (World or Earth) and you can ride around it in much less than an hour. And it is quite flat – maybe that could be the proof for your flat earther friend…

If you would be staying for a little longer, you can consider a canoe ride on the Lužnice river. The stretch from Suchdol to Stará Hlína is too much for one day trip if you don’t want to end up totally exhausted. But as a two-day trip with a break at Majdalena (point 2) it is very reasonable. And if you would be lucky and Lužnice would have enough water, the part called Stará řeka (Old river) is the best canoeing trip in the whole Czech Republic. However, never try it with not enough water – you would end up walking and pulling your canoe most of the time. Canoeing is extremely simple, you just reserve the canoe on the website of a very friendly company Samba and they will deliver the canoe at the right time to your starting point and pick it up at the end.

https://en.mapy.cz/s/ranehekuga 62 km, 180 m elevation gain