Prague is the starting point for the Elbe Cycle Route to Cuxhaven. Strictly speaking the river Elbe does not flow through Prague, but the river Moldau. So we will follow the Moldau for about 40 km to the confluence with the Elbe near the small town of Melnik.
„Did you try the Absinth ice cream?,“ we overhear a tourist asking his friend at the Charles bridge. The friend did not, but we did. It was green, soft and tasted slightly of alcohol. Prague was the starting point for our one week cycle trip along the river Elbe, or Labe in Czech.
Bag overboard in the Moldau
The path runs along the Moldau River (in Czech: Vltava) for about 40 km before joining the Elbe in Melnik. The first day we took a very small old tow path along the Moldau over bumpy tree roots. Bouncing over one particularly big root, one of our saddle bags got loose and we could watch it roll down the slope. For a moment it seemed to come to a halt before it dropped hesitantly into the river. Fortunately the Moldau is a slow-flowing river and wasn’t too cold that day. We were able to fish the bag out with a long stick – and all the sleeping bags inside where still dry. Gear-test passed…
Cute villages and towns along the Elbe
Overall, the cycling route was rougher and less nicely paved on the Czech side, but it was also very charming and nostalgic, passing through several cute villages and towns such as Melnik, Roudnice, Litoměřice and Dečin, all with pretty market squares and Renaissance and Baroque town houses. Soon we began looking for the bakery in every settlement in preparation of the next bumpy trail, tasting our way through sweet Bohemian specialties, most of them involving yeasty dough, poppy seeds and curd. As the area is also a wine growing area we tried the Czech versions of Grüner Veltliner (a popular Austrian variety) and red St. Laurent wine.
For the first two days the weather was sunny with temperatures close to 30 °C. On the third day, temperatures went down to frosty 10 °C, and around noon we passed the Czech-German border near Bad Schandau.
Follow our adventures on the Elbe Cycle Route in some blog posts to follow! In the end, we split the Elbe Cycling route in two: In the first batch we cycled on to Dresden and Magdeburg. A year later we cycled the Elbe from Magdeburg to Cuxhaven. While the Danube Cycle Route is even longer, for us this was by far the longest river cycling route we have done. For instance, the River Spree along which we cycled from Berlin is much shorter. And the Aare may be Switzerland’s most important river, but the Aare Cycle Route doesn’t take longer than a week.
NB: We had no sponsoring for this blog post about the Elbe Cycle Route. We paid all expenses ourselves.
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