If there need be a motto for our trip, it is the Israeli expression "More luck than sense", or in English, serendipity.
KV is a spa town; in researching our options, it appeared that all the spas were connected to hotels, and as we weren't staying in a hotel, it seemed that our chances of having a massage and some form of hydrotherapy (balneological treatment) weren't very high.
In order to get to KV, we would have to take a inter-city bus, and in order to take the bus, we had to get to the Florenc bus station. Although I believe that this is no more than a ten minute walk from our hotel, we decided to take the metro, thus adding to our Prague experiences. The B train stop underneath Namesti Republiky is very steep, so much so that I couldn't look down when we were riding the escalators to the platform. Apart from this, the metro is similar (though much simpler) than the London Underground, so we had no problems here, nor in the bus station where we bought tickets for the bus. The tickets are all numbered and are for specific times, like an aeroplane. When trying to buy return tickets, we were asked what time we intended to return, and as we didn't know, we elected to buy single tickets. Big mistake.
The trip itself took two and a quarter hours which were mildly interesting. On the bus was shown a Hollywood film, but this had been dubbed into Czech so we didn't watch it.
Upon arriving in KV, we wandered around a little until I found a sign for City Information. Following our noses, we arrived a bit later at the Elisabeth Spa (the photograph does not do the building justice).
As the information office was closed, we decided to have a pot of tea in the restaurant (the three bay windows in the front of the building on the first floor). After this relaxation, we found the office, which sold us a guide to KV, and there they said that this spa was open to all visitors! So we found where we could book treatments and ordered a full massage for my wife and a herbal bath for myself. The prices were about a third of what we would have paid in Israel.
The herbal bath treatment means getting naked into a huge bathtub which was full of warm, green coloured water, bearing a smell similar to my herbal shampoo. Once in, the attendant turned a tap on, and air started bubbling through the water; this was so strong that at first it blew me out of the water, until I figured out how to keep myself submerged (everything bar the head). After fifteen minutes of this (measured by alarm clock), I rang for the attendant; she helped me out of the bath and then enclosed me in a cotton sheet. From there she took me to an examination couch in the room, told me to lie down and then covered me with a heavy blanket. This was similar to being in a straight-jacket. I was to lie there for seven minutes (again by the clock), at which point the treatment would be over. So lie there I did, then managed to get free from the blanket and got dressed. I'm not exactly sure what this treatment did for me, but my wife thoroughly enjoyed her massage.
Noticing that it was now nearly 4pm (and we were intending to catch the 7pm bus back to Prague), I suggested that we up our pace a little. We walked back to the Post Office (we had been there on our way to the Elisabeth Spa) and were about to start the tour described in the booklet when I noticed that there was a market on the bank of the Tepla river). So of course, my wife had to browse there for at least half an hour, spending what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time in choosing a nail file for our daughter. Once we got past the market, we walked a little into town and then took a path through a wood overlooking the town; this lead to a vantage point which gave us an excellent view of all the buildings in the area. From there, we walked back down to the colonnade and strolled around.
The buildings themselves and the way that they were laid out seemed very reminiscent of Bournemouth (where my mother lived for a while), and when reading the booklet, I came across the sentence "This stately building, which was built in the Neo-Gothic style typical of England, was opened on May 1st, 1866", thus making it contemporary with Bournemouth. After more walking around and eating a very late lunch (or early supper) in a restaurant, we made our way to the bus stop where we had dismounted in the morning.
When looking for somewhere to buy tickets, it became apparent that we weren't at the main bus station but rather a stop for local buses. So we had to walk another kilometre to the main station; the time was fast approaching 7pm. We arrived at the station and saw the bus waiting; I ran upstairs to the ticket office which was just about to close and ordered tickets, only to be told that the 7pm bus was full and that we would have to travel on the 8pm bus. OK. The girl demanded cash (as opposed to the credit card with which I had paid in the morning) and gave me my ticket. Here is where things get a bit funny. Although I paid her the same amount of money that I had paid in the morning (for two tickets), I became convinced that I had only paid for one seat on the bus, and the ticket appeared to uphold this theory. So it looked like I would have to wait for the bus to arrive and all the passengers to get on before we could see whether there was any room left.
No one was at the bus station until about 7:50pm, when suddenly people descended from all over the place. We spoke to the 'flight' atttendant, and she said that the bus was fully booked, and that we could only get on if someone did not arrive to claim their place. There were a couple of girls in the same situation as us, so it wasn't clear that there would be any spare place at all. Come 8pm, there are still four seats vacant on the bus (one of those is ours), so we give the ticket to the attendant and she smiles us on and refused payment from me. It turns out that I had bought a double ticket after all!
Very very relieved, we got onto the bus which made its way back to Prague, arriving at 10:15pm. More fun and games trying to find the metro station's entrance and our destination station's exit, but that was par for the course, and we arrived back at the hotel, tired but happy, at around 10:30pm.
More luck than sense - despite prior research which indicated that we would not be able to get a massage in KV, we stumbled onto the one spa which does give treatment to non-residents. The bus incident was another example.
My wife worked for a while in a travel agency near the kibbutz; there she met a lady who has since become our personal travel agent, booking the flights (I normally book the hotels). She had recommended not going to KV for unknown reasons, and my wife has declared that she will set the travel agent straight.
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