Discovering the West Bohemian Spa Triangle by train

A week of exploring spa towns and relaxing in warm waters should be the sort of refreshing, rejuvenating experience that has you dancing back into work feeling like a new person, rejoicing “as a strong man to run the race” but instead it’s Thursday, just after lunch and I’m taking a five minute break from updating distributors to note that I just want to lie down on my bed and fall asleep. Not only that, it’s taking a certain amount of effort to not just fall asleep at the desk right now.

There’s nothing that will undo the magic restorative powers of a spa week like getting home at quarter to two in the morning after your orange plane was delayed. To be fair, even if it had all run on time, there was no way I was getting home before one in the morning but an extra forty-five minutes you have no control over, at that time of night, is just the icing on the cake.

London by night seen (at quite a dramatic angle) from a plane flying over the north side of the Thames.

But besides that, this trip involved six trains in six days, a day and half in Prague (which feels like one of the least relaxing cities I’ve ever been to) and however many times I say the words “a week”, the spa portion of it was actually only four and a half days, in which time I went to three different towns. That’s actually not really a setup for a relaxing trip.

So let’s talk about it! I’ve already covered each town and each spa individually but let’s do a bigger overview of the trip.

Just up under Germany’s right armpit is a region of Czechia rarely visited and little known by English-speaking tourists. Oh, we love to come to Prague for boozy weekends or classy city breaks but we don’t venture beyond the very centre of the capital.

Germans, on the other hand, spend so much time here that any obvious out-of-towner gets addressed in German by default – and to be fair, in ancient times, the inhabitants of the region were a German tribe, before the Slavs who became the modern Czechs moved in. It spent quite a while as part of the Holy Roman Empire, which is more German than its name suggests, and then quite a while as part of the Habsburg (Austrian) Empire and then just as it thought it had escaped to be part of Czechoslovakia, WWII came along and Bohemia got annexed by Germany. As of 1993, the West Bohemian region is firmly Czech but if it isn’t officially bilingual, you’ll see a lot of German still around. Because English-speaking tourists haven’t really discovered the area, it’s handy to have at least a smattering of “Tourist German”, even if you can’t put a sentence together.

It’s very easy to explore this area by train. I started in Prague on Tuesday morning, had a hiccup getting from the airport hotel to the main station (completely misread the directions at the nearest metro station and panic-dived onto a commuter train going at walking speed in the wrong direction) and got on a lovely blue Czech train to Mariánské Lázně. I had the seat to myself – actually, I had the seat to myself pretty much for the entire week – and I had a table and a window and my big bag (well, easyJet personal item sized bag) in the luggage rack overhead and it was comfortable. It also took two and a half hours to cover about 170km which averages about 42mph. Even in the UK, with our notoriously unreliable and bad rail network, we could have easily shaved an hour off that time. But no matter. I was comfortable.

A selfie in my yellow jumper on the train to Mariánské Lázně. The seats are dark blue and big and comfortable.

I’d tried to plan my trip to give me exactly the same time in each of the three towns but the nature of night and day meant that the closest I could get was about 44 hours in Mariánské Lázně and Karlovy Vary and only 32 hours in Františkovy Lázně. Trains after midnight and before 5am were both impractical and not in the spirit of spa. So I arrived in Mariánské Lázně about 1.30 in the afternoon on Tuesday and had the afternoon and then all of Wednesday before getting on the train to Františkovy Lázně at 9am on Thursday. To be honest, a day and a half was more than enough to cover Mariánské Lázně. I could have moved on by lunchtime on Wednesday and still felt like I’d done everything.

So, alarm at 7am, breakfast at 7.15, walking the 2.5km back to the station by 8am because I was too lazy to figure out which bus to take down to the station and how to pay for it. It was freezing – by which I mean that the grass in the spa park was frosted and the sign at the crossroad announced that it was 0° but because I was wearing all my layers and carrying a bag and underestimating how long it takes me to walk 2.5km, I was hot. To be fair, while I waited three-quarters of an hour on the station platform, it did get pretty cold. I had to start unpacking layers.

The spa park at Mariánské Lázně at 8am, the grass frosted white because it's 0° right now.

Once the train to Prague, in the opposite direction, had come and gone, I went and investigated the train to Cheb that was parked on the opposite track. Was I supposed to be on this train? It was the right platform and going to the right destination but the info board said it was leaving at least ten minutes after I was supposed to go and the Deutsche Bahn website said it would be making half a dozen stops and get in too late for my connecting train. But if I was expecting a second train to come and go before this one… how was it going to do that? This train would be in the way. I had to go all the way back down and into the main station building to check the departure board to discover that the the train I was expecting was definitely due.

A train parked at platform 2 in Mariánské Lázně. It's a sleek modern blue train and it's going to Cheb but it's not the train departing from the very same platform to Cheb that I'm supposed to be getting on.

The trouble is that Czech trains differentiate between platform and track. Almost all trains that morning were leaving from platform 2 but some were at track 1 and some were at track 2. I’d assumed track 1 was northbound and track 2 was southbound but ten minutes later, my northbound train arrived on the same platform that the southbound Prague train had left not so long ago.

It was about 20 minutes on the mainline train to Cheb. There is a train that goes directly from Mariánské Lázně to Františkovy Lázně – I was on it on Tuesday! – but it presumably runs later in the day. In the morning, you need to take the train to Cheb, a town not worthy of its own mention in my guidebook, and change onto a tiny little shuttle that’s part of Nuremberg’s regional transport which will take you either the seven minutes to Františkovy Lázně’s main station or the five minutes to the dedicated Aquaforum stop. As I’ve already told you, I jumped off at the Aquaforum and spent the morning there.

The spa centre of Františkovy Lázně. On the left is a round building and on the right, a square yellow stone one, which both house mineral springs.

The original plan was to arrive in Františkovy Lázně at 10am on Thursday and depart at 6pm on Friday but again, there’s not that much to do if you’re not receiving medical treatment or able to just chill out in the park eating wafers and drinking brown water for days on end. So I left my hotel a little after 9am on Friday and ambled to the Aquaforum, discovering on the way that I could either rush for the next train or wait an hour and a half for the one after. I didn’t want to feel like I was rushing, in case there was anything that caught my attention, or in case I felt guilty for running away from Františkovy Lázně so I spent a lot of that morning sitting in the park. I tried to eat my way through some of my supplies, I made notes for future blog posts, I found another spring (although not one with attached tap) and then the train was five minutes late. It was the little shuttle train that only takes five minutes to get to Cheb but the trouble was that my connecting train to Karlovy Vary would be leaving six minutes after our scheduled arrival. One minute isn’t a lot of time to change trains.

The station at Cheb, with various sleek modern blue Czech trains coming in and waiting at the platform.

Luckily, I strongly suspect they held the train for us. The little shuttle train arrived on the same platform as the long-distance train so we just had to cross the concrete but it stood there for long enough that I found a non-shared seat and got settled in and began to wonder if everything was ok before it finally began moving. This was actually the train back to Prague, which would make a lot of stops for the first nearly three hours, including at Karlovy Vary in around 45 minutes. Long enough to get comfortable, long enough to feel like these three towns aren’t as close together as I’d believed when I started planning.

The road up from Karlovy Vary to the upper station. Down here, we're alongside the river, which is contained within straight stone walls. Behind it, a road bridge rises up sharply to the ledge above the spa part of town where the station sits.

So I arrived into Karlovy Vary about four hours ahead of schedule in the end and at the wrong station. Karlovy Vary has two stations and my guidebook had assured me that my train from the countryside would come into the lower one. It also said that trains to Prague go from the upper one and this was first and foremost a train to Prague, so I arrived unexpectedly into the upper one. That’s great because it meant I didn’t have to figure out where that was when I came to leave and it was very easy to find the spa part of town from it because it’s raised above the town. You walk down an angled bridge over the river and the main road and come into town and then once you’ve got past a busy roundabout, you’re only a five minute walk from the Hotel Thermal, which pretty much marks where the spa part of town begins. 1.69km from hotel back to station on Sunday but it felt twice that arriving on Friday.

Karlovy Vary, as I’ve said already, was a shock to the system after the two Lázněs, which were just parks with hotels around them. This felt like a bustling city. I knew there were fifteen springs to try, I knew my list of things to do was twice the length of the list at either other town and I had to fight through crowds to do it all. And yet I felt about done after a day and a half. I could have stayed longer but I’d tried the water, I’d bathed in the hotel pool and the Saunia mineral pool, I’d been up to the viewpoint, I’d even found the commemorative gold coin that was going to mark each of these towns in my Voyage Award scrapbook. Really, what more is there to do?

The Easter Fair outside the Hotel Thermal, starring a tree covered in colourful ribbons and a sort of boiler that resembles a steam locomotive to cook various street foods.

So rather than waiting until 3pm on Sunday to head for Prague, I paid those four hours I’d stolen from Františkovy Lázně forward and went straight to the station. This time I didn’t look at what time the train was. I knew it was an uphill hike to the upper station and I didn’t want to be rushing or feeling under pressure and the result was that I had an hour and a half to just sit on the station platform. When it eventually came, it was basically the same train I’d arrived on 36 hours ago, the blue RegioJet to Prague and it would take three and a half hours. I swear, when I first started looking at this trip, it was only about an hour and a half from Prague to either point of the triangle. Maybe I just got unlucky with the services that went into my original itinerary and my actual one.

A single car Regiomouse local train parked at Karlovy Vary as I waited an hour and a half for the Prague train.

It was a busy train. Well, it’s Easter Sunday and everyone’s going to Prague for the long weekend, I figured. And then, a bit over two hours later, we arrived at a place called Ústí nad Labem and three quarters of the passengers disembarked. What’s drawing everyone to a small industrial town I’ve never heard of? On a Sunday lunchtime? Is this where everyone’s parents have moved to after retiring from their working life in the big city? The best I can figure is that it’s only ten miles from the border with Germany, less than thirty miles from Dresden and apparently a bit of a hub for international trains between Berlin, Budapest, Graz and Zurich.

A selfie on the train to Prague, wearing my Ethan Hunt t-shirt. Behind me, you can see a wide river with green hills rising up out of it.

It was then another hour and twenty, hour and a half back to Prague’s central station with the only stop being at Prague-Holesovice which is a station by the river on the north edge of the city, where it looked like half the inhabitants of Prague were having Easter picnics in the sunshine. No fear of anyone coming to sit next to me here. And yes, this train was just as slow as the one that had hauled me out to Mariánské Lázně early in the week. I conclude that Czechia doesn’t do high speed rail, or even medium-speed. But the trains, when they come, are clean and comfortable, they have a nice overhead notification system that tells you where you’re going and when you’ll get there and what connections there are and how fast (or not) you’re moving and a trolley of refreshments comes along regularly and if they could just put on a bit more speed, I’d wax lyrical about how great they are. They’re great. They’re just a bit slow.

So that was my spa trip. A day and a half in two towns and 24 hours in the last, six trains, an obscenely early alarm under the circumstances and a lot of walking with luggage. Not entirely relaxing in itself but definitely not relaxing to tag 36 hours in Prague onto the end of it plus a late night flight and a two-hour drive home from the airport. And so you spend three days at work feeling like you should be all relaxed and refreshed but actually you’re more tired than before you went and at long last it’s Friday and you can have a long bath with no one else around and lots of bubbles and a face mask and definitely not fall asleep in there as you start working through the blog posts on your tablet.