Unmarked Vans: Always a Bad Idea?
There are certain rites of passage that every traveler has to go through: your first solo flight, trying to order food across a language barrier, accidentally hitting someone with your luggage then staring fixedly at the floor until you get to your metro stop… It comes with the territory, and mostly you look back on these moments fondly. But some rites of passage, you really could have done without.
During my first trip to Europe, my travel companions and I visited the small town of Cesky Krumlov in the south of the Czech Republic. The town is an UNESCO World Heritage Site and well worth the visit.
After a three hour ride on a train that bore a striking resemblance to the Hogwarts Express, we arrived to the outskirts of town and meandered downhill for about twenty minutes to find ourselves in what felt like a fairy-tale village. Cobblestone streets, a scenic river, and a castle up on the hill:
While we explored, we noticed that you could rent rafts to paddle down the river. We had just enough time for the two hour rafting tour before our return train to Prague, and they even offered an option where a car would pick you up at the end of the tour to take you back to the train station for a small fee. Perfect!
It turns out the term “tour” was a bit of an overstatement. When we arrived at the river, the “tour guide” strapped us into life vests, loaded us up in a raft, shoved us into the river and shouted, “Follow signs!” as we drifted away.
No problem, we thought. The river was pretty shallow and slow, and the views looking up into the city were breathtaking. We took off down the river, full of confidence.
As we moved through the city, the river moved a little quicker, and we saw our first “sign”. Essentially, there was a post almost exactly centered in the river, that seemed to indicate that on one side you could safely descend over a small rapid, but that going over the other side would result in certain death. One problem: the sign did not clearly indicate which side was which. As we approached the split, we debated, “Right, no left. Definitely left. Wait, maybe right?”
At this point you’re probably thinking, “Honestly Meredith, there is no way it was that ambiguous. You must have all just been too panicked to read the clearly marked route.”
I don’t have any pictures from our perspective to prove my point, but here’s one I found looking back up the rapid:
And sure, it seems obvious from this side, but trust me, as you approached the split, it was a coin-toss about which way you were supposed to go. Luckily for us, we chose correctly. As we bumped down the tires that soften the slope of the rapid, we looked to the side and saw the 6 foot drop that we came within seconds of mistakenly choosing to go over.
And that was only the first of several similar splits in the river. At each one we frantically tried to discern which direction would prevent us from capsizing. Admittedly, the view of the city between these terrifying moments was indescribably beautiful. Unfortunately, every few minutes our marveling was interrupted by this conversation:
Nerves a bit frayed, but otherwise unharmed, we eventually floated out of town and down to the end of the rafting tour. While the tour company had a very professional, inviting office back in town, the welcome at the end of the tour was…rustic. A wooden sign hung crookedly from a tree branch over the river informing us, “tour end.” After paddling to the riverbank and pulling our own raft up out of the water, we walked over to the only two people we saw, who were sitting in a small kiosk. I explained that we had booked a ride to the train station, which we were told was only a 5 minute drive away. The lady behind the counter spoke over a walkie-talkie, then returned to tell us that the car would be there to pick us up in 30 minutes.
I checked my watch. Our train was going to leave…in 30 minutes. I quickly told the lady that we couldn’t wait that long because we would miss our train. She consulted with her colleague in Czech, then they both looked at us with an expression that means the same thing in every language:
I checked the map and saw that we were only a few miles away from the train station…a few miles, directly uphill. We looked at each other, and a moment’s wordless communication was all we needed.
Although at this point in my life, I had never run even one mile without stopping, the adrenaline coursing through me made me believe we could really do it!
…for about the first half mile.
As my hope began to fail, I saw a vehicle approaching from behind us. A white 15-passenger van, with a 8.5x11 sheet of paper in the window reading “Tour Bus.”
I was a little ways ahead of my travel companions, so I flagged down the van, and as it pulled over I realized that I had no idea what to say. When the driver rolled down his window, I said the only Czech word I could remember.
“Nádraž?” I asked, and realized only after it came out of my mouth that I had actually correctly remembered the word for train station. At least something was going right! The driver pointed up the road in the direction he was travelling. I gestured to myself and my travel companions and said again, “Nádraž?” and he nodded in agreement.
I was in the motion of pulling open the door to climb into an unmarked van on the side of the road in rural Czech Republic when one of my travel companions called out, “Meredith, are you crazy?! Don’t get in that van!”
In the moment, I could not understand why this did not seem to them to be the great idea I knew it to be. Looking back…I see their point.
I waved off the driver, and he headed on up the hill toward the train station, and we resumed our trudging.
Just when we thought we couldn’t go any farther, the train station came into view… just as our train pulled into the station. With a surge of panic, we mustered the last dregs of energy we had left and half-ran, half-crawled the last few yards onto the train. As we collapsed onto the wooden bench seats, I noticed that our return train was not nearly as luxurious as our train had been that morning. There was actually a woman holding a chicken in a basket in the row behind us. Ah, the old bait-and-switch, apparently a Cesky Krumlov specialty.