Getting There
Intro
Journey
Shopping!
Where? Vsetin isn't even on most maps
but if you go east of Zlin, or south from Ostrava, you'll hit Vsetin just before the border with Slovakia, about 30 miles from Poland, 75 from Austria and about as far from Prague as you can go without leaving the country.
Intro
Our journey to Vsetin ended as it began, in a knackered white van. We arrived in pouring rain at 3 am, after leaving Cambridge at 10 am. At last, all my panicing could end, everyone was there.
Lets face it, organising mountain bikers is like herding cats. Now, I'm one of these quiet, shy, retiring types so I'd never have previously considered taking sever other people off into the depths of Eastern Europe, with very little idea were we where going, no ability to speak any of the languages the locals might speak and not a British Embassy in sight. Still, three years at Cambridge is enough to convince anyone of their utter superiority over the proletariat and it managed to convince me that organising this trip could be possible.
Still, I'm one of those people who has kittens over taking a trip as far as London, so the hassles of who's going, what everyone needs to do, general stressing and hair tearing was worrying me just a tad. Still, we got everyone there in one piece. Coming back in one piece was beyond us, but that's for later.
Journey
The flight, 129 quid with Czech Airlines, 156 quid if you're over 25,
bargain. Boring, but passable food and they didn't object at all when we
turn up at Stanstead with six bikes in varying degrees of packaging. 8
quid taxi from airport to station, no prob. Six hour train journey from
Prague, whilst in a slow, rattling and ancient carrige, cost us four quid,
first class. Not bad for 350 km, pity it was dark so no countryside
views.
To our utter amazement, Czech Railways took our bike from us at the
station in Prague, assuring us this was standard practise. Feeling
completely dubious about this, we checked the guard's van on our train. No
bikes. Argh! The two guards seemed unconcerned, although they seemed to
understand our frantic gesticulation. Of course, the bikes had arrived at
Vsetin well before us and were safe and sound. Having lost part x of the
pile of tickets and general beaurocratic stuff for the bikes, we had to
pay an extra fine, bringing the total cost of moving the bikes the length
of the country to somewhat less than a quid each.
Rob was there at the station waiting, with van. As always, far too many of us, with bags and bikes, clambered in the back for the mile journey to the hotel. Taking very little notice of anything other than the beds, we crashed at 4 am.
The next morning brought awareness of what a damn good deal we were getting. The SportMotel was added onto the side of the town sports hall, next to the ice hockey rink. Now ice hockey is big in Vsetin, a local millionaire has decided to spend all his cash on the town team and thus they're the current national champions. I assume the SportMotel would be where opposing teams would attemp to sleep before recieving a damn good thrashing at the hands of the locals.
Still, the hotel staff managed not to be too freaked by hordes of Cambridge's finest. The boiler room was turned over for a bike store. The beds were comfy, although short duvets meant that some of us has cold toes. En-suite bathrooms awaited us, all for 5q a night. Breakfast was somewhat sketchy, good bread rolls, but teh accompaniment varied from cold ham to nothing to sweet cheesecake with sickly icing. For that price, couldn't complain.
Shopping
First stop, Vsetin's best local bike shop. We go crazy ape bonkers and spends all our cash. Yup, it was cheap. Stupidly cheap. Next time I buy a bike, I'm flying over there. XT front mechs for 10 quid, we bought two. Andrea picks up some Ritchey Logic SPD pedals and shoes for the grand total of 47 quid. Tyres, of all types were 8 quid. Bargaintastic!
The shop, Rob's local, was friendly and open. Strangely enough, they treated us very kindly. Maybe it was because they shifted more stock in an hour of us being there than they would in a month. The stock varied, from some truely dubious ex-Iron Curtain bits, through a good selection of outdated Shimano stuff up to a reasonable amount of new Western equipment. Even the newest imports were passable value, SPD platforms for 55 quid, rather than the 70 they go for in England.
The best bargains were old Shimano kit and anything made in the Czech Republic, some of the local kit is pretty good. The best bits were found were locally made chain rings, by the name of Viavelo. As I'm supposed to be a metallurgist, I looked up the obscure Czech alloy number to find out what was in them. After much hunting through dusty old books, it turned out that these are made from the equivalent of 2014, the standard high strength alloy used for chain rings and handlebars in the West. The main difference being that the Czech ones cost half the Western ones.
(Warning! Commercial Advertisement type thing! The Czech chain rings are now being imported to the UK by Mike Dyason, under the name of Viavelo. Get them before the price goes up 'coz right now they're stupidly good value.)
Anyway, we dropped back there on one of our last days just to spend more cash. Everyone splurged.
The rest of Vsetin provided us with maps and munchies. The maps were very high quality, not in English, but that wasn't a problem. Usefully for MTBers, they showed in great detail the locations of peasant rebellions, notable trees and workmen's struggles. The entire area is set up for cross country skiing, so there's a huge network of trails, all clearly shown on the maps.
As for money, Vsetin's three main banks all had Cirrus cash machines, so our bank cards worked without hesitation. Its truely wierd, you're in a very foreign country, you walk up to a cash machine, it speaks to you in English and gives you Czech currency. Golly, the joys of globalisation, eh?