Visiting ‘in between’ places

THE village of Kladska in the western Czech Republic isn’t included in most guidebooks. It’s barely more than a handful of houses on a bend in the road about five miles northwest of the spa town of Marianske Lazne, perhaps better known as Marienbad. It has a restaurant, hotel and paths leading into a boggy wetland, all surrounded by thick woods.

I passed through last month while visiting Marienbad and its sister spa Karlovy Vary, or Karlsbad. The little hamlet in the Slavkov Forest has lodged in my mind as one of those off-the-beaten-track discoveries that makes travel worthwhile.

I call them “places in between,” because they exist in an off-the-map netherworld between starred tourist sites. To find them you must have time and a way to get around.

So I rented a car in Munich, Germany, and headed along the border of eastern Germany before crossing into the Czech Republic near the town of Cheb, about a three-hour drive. Black clouds rolled in. Thunder boomed, and it started to pour, which added a touch of excitement to the trip. I made it to Karlsbad late that afternoon, but my memories of driving through the Bohemian countryside in that storm are as vivid as those of any of the esoteric mineral water treatments I tried at the spa.

After a four-night stay in Karlsbad, I headed south to Marienbad, expecting nothing much from the 25-mile drive, though I had marked on the map a few sites I wanted to explore.

The first was the Moser glass factory, in a working-class district on the Ohre River outside of Karlsbad. Ludwig Moser founded the factory in 1857, and it became famous for engraved glass.

Tours are offered, but I visited only the museum, which displays monogrammed drinking glasses specially made for King Edward VII of England and Pope Pius XI. In the showroom, I admired cut-glass crystal that reminded me of the candy bowl my German grandmother kept in her china cabinet.

From there, it took only about 15 minutes to reach the town of Loket, with a picturesque castle on a rocky promontory above an oxbow bend of the Ohre. The castle, which has a tower, museum, internal courtyard and torture chamber, was built on an important trade route between Nuremberg and Prague in the 12th century, when western Bohemia was a sparsely populated frontier, as wild and woolly as Tombstone, Ariz.

About the same time, gold was discovered in the nearby hills, attracting skilled German miners to the Czech hinterland. With them came traditions, affiliations and the German language, widely spoken in western Bohemia.

I think I took a wrong turn leaving Loket and ended up on a winding country road instead of the main highway leading to Marienbad. It was a fortunate mistake that gave me a memorable afternoon of shunpiking over hills, across meadows, through dense forests and alongside deeply cut streams crossed by old stone railway bridges.

Best of all was Highway 230 south of the town of Beeov, where I passed a seemingly deserted Soviet-era farming commune and fields turned into vast bridal bouquets of purple lupine and white Queen Anne’s lace. Who knew western Bohemia was so beautiful?

Lost but enchanted, I gave myself over to meandering. All roads go somewhere in the end. Fortunately, I found one that eventually took me to the Monastery of Tepla, with its landmark, twin-towered Romanesque abbey church. For centuries after its founding around 1200, the monastery controlled much of the surrounding region, educating and ministering to its people, especially in times of war and plague.

An early-19th century abbot developed the spa town of Marienbad on monastery property about five miles west, which grew into a tourist attraction, eventually funding the addition of a wing to house the institution’s extraordinary library and museum.

Tours of the monastery are offered only in Czech and German, so I tagged along with a German group to see the glorious Baroque interior of the abbey church and library with three stories of shelves containing 100,000 precious volumes. These include the first German translation of the New Testament dating from about 1400.

But other parts of the complex are in sad disrepair, reflecting the traumas that engulfed it when the region’s German-speaking majority favored alignment with the Third Reich. Like other Czech border areas, western Bohemia was ceded to Germany in the 1938 Munich Agreement, a futile attempt to appease Hitler, who seized the rest of Czechoslovakia the following year. The abbot at the time was a German Nationalist, but the repressive Nazi occupation took a toll nevertheless. After the war, the monastery was subject to reprisals by returning Czechs and Germans in the surrounding area.

Suppressed by the communists after that, the monastery reopened in 1990. Ten Norbertine monks live there now, planting little gardens, sweeping away rubble and helplessly looking on as Baroque frescoes peel off the walls.

Meanwhile, tourists have returned to nearby Marienbad, and the town’s vintage Art Nouveau buildings are being refurbished. It’s a lovely spot to settle in, drink the water and do nothing.

But I have trouble staying in one place. So one afternoon I took a drive through the Slavkov Forest, following two cyclists and then a logging truck to that bend in the road where I found Kladska. I parked outside the hotel and went in, discovering that it was originally a hunting lodge built by a German prince in 1875. The walls were crowded with racks and horns, trophies won by long-forgotten hunters.

I rang the bell on the polished wood counter, and a woman appeared who showed me the modest guest rooms, including one with a view, on the second floor, where I would like to stay some day. I’d like to hike around the pond across the road, try some Czech venison and get lost all over again on country roads in western Bohemia.