I Am A Polar Bear

One thing I expected when I started researching my West Bohemian Spa Towns trip was that every town would have some kind of central bathing experience, probably using the famed spa water and what I found instead was hundreds of small-to-medium hotels offering a list of medical treatments that would put most hospitals in the UK to shame. And to be fair, most of them do feature a pool and often a sauna. But what I couldn’t find was any kind of spa – in the sense I’m used to rather than in the sense Czechia uses the word. A luxurious pool experience, with steam rooms and multiple saunas and a main pool and somewhere outside to enjoy the warm water in the fresh air. Mariánské Lázně just doesn’t have that. But according to my guidebook and my research, Františkovy Lázně had something that was worth at least investigating.

If you take the train from Mariánské Lázně, you’ll most likely change from the RegioJet to a tiny single-coach shuttle train at a small town called Cheb. From there, it’s a seven minute journey to Františkovy Lázně’s main station or you can jump off after just five minutes at Františkovy Lázně Aquaforum, the concrete platform apparently built specially for visitors to… well, Aquaforum. It claims to be “the largest and most beautiful aquapark in Czech spa resorts” and while I’ve got some competition for it to show you in a week or so, it does stand out as absolutely the most prominent water experience on the Triangle. Since I was arriving early in the morning and didn’t fancy hiking a kilometre with all my luggage straight back down to the activity that was going to start off my adventure in Františkovy Lázně, I took advantage of it having its own station (which I’d only discovered a day or two earlier) and was in the water by 10am, having taken two trains from Mariánské Lázně in what felt like both the longest and shortest morning I’ve ever lived through.

First and foremost, Aquaforum is indeed a waterpark. As with all water-related facilities in the West Bohemian Spa Triangle region, it’s attached to a clinic, in that both Aquaforum and the clinic are part of the Pawlik-Aquaforum Spa Resort. That means the adjoining Spa Hotel Pawlik (guests get unlimited free access to Aquaforum) and possibly the Imperial Hotel across the road, which seems to contain the Imperial Spa, although all three websites are a little vague on the latter.

For outsiders like me, you’ve got quite the menu of admissions. There are different prices for summer and winter, since the large outdoor area doesn’t open until May and closes again in October. You can choose a 2- or 4-hour session or add a sauna to a 4-hour session or even go for 5 hours with sauna. I didn’t realise the “plus sauna” option was available so I chose a 4-hour session. I didn’t necessarily want to stay the full four hours but I’d probably want to stay longer than two hours. On winter prices, that cost me 450 koruna, which is about £16, which I think is quite a lot for what you get.

You take your shoes off in the entrance to the changing rooms and then you go into your private changing cubicle, which is a jack-and-jill space with a door leading back to the entrance and a door on the opposite side opening onto the locker rooms. While changing is perfectly private, you should be aware that anyone in the lobby can look straight through an open changing cubicle and see you walking around the locker room in your swimwear.

The lockers are operated by your wristband, which also functions as your key to get in and out of the turnstile and as a credit card for visits to the snack bar. I found a tall thin locker and managed to force all my luggage in – I don’t often bless easyJet for their restrictive luggage pricing that made me take a personal item only but it saved me the effort of walking around the locker room looking for a bigger locker. Which do exist, by the way. The private changing cubicles and the locker room are unisex but then you get separate male and female showers, where you’re supposed to wash without swimsuit and with soap – and unlike in Iceland, which has the same rules, they don’t provide the soap.

So, once you’re in the pool area, the star of the show is the 550 m² relaxing pool. It’s got bubble benches and an umbrella fountain and a bridge that effectively divides it into two parts. On the right as you come out of the shower rooms is a bubbling hot tub that can take maybe eight or ten people and is a couple of degrees warmer than the main pool. It’s very nice but obviously it’s very popular. In the left-hand corner, there’s a kind of cave, tiled in small dark shiny tiles and with more bubble benches inside. And then behind a glass wall, there’s a 25m lane pool. Apparently there’s a sauna somewhere and the aforementioned snack bar but I didn’t find them. To be honest, I didn’t look for them. I didn’t need a snack and I didn’t know I had access to a sauna (because I didn’t).

If you look through the glass walls of the lane pool, you can see the outside area which must be great fun in summer but is just some slightly grubby green-ish presumed-rainwater in April. The outdoor pool is a lot bigger than the indoor one and it’s got a massive hot tub to say nothing of a load of slides. I hadn’t realised it wasn’t open – yeah, I didn’t do nearly enough research on this one. If you linger on the platform of the Aquaforum station – if, say, you arrive half an hour before the train which is then delayed – you can have a good look at the outdoor area. It was a nice sunny day, although it had been 0° as I walked through Mariánské Lázně only two hours earlier. That’s just eighteen miles away, so it’s quite likely it was pretty cold in Františkovy Lázně first thing and I do get why the pool isn’t open yet. Doesn’t stop me wishing it was because as the central pool of an entire spa town, Aquaforum is a little disappointing.

I quite happily spent more than two hours in the main pool with a couple of visits to the whirlpool when it was quiet enough. I tried out bubble benches and I lurked in the cave and I trainspotted the irregular little shuttles between Cheb and Hof. It’s a nice relaxing way to spend a morning and an excellent way to get your luggage off your back but as the star water attraction of a UNESCO Great European Spa Town, it was a bit underwhelming.

It’s nice to find something that even vaguely resembles a therme in̈ a Czech spa town. I’d like to see the sauna included in the general admission price, along with a steam room and indoor hot & cold plunge pools. That’s all it really needs to take it from slightly bare public pool (at least in winter; I bet the outdoor pools really wake it up in summer!) to something befitting a spa town. I suppose, though, it’s all part of “spa means something different here” and I shouldn’t complain that Czech spa towns don’t have a spa… but I really wish this place was just a little bit more like KissSalis or Emser Therme.