The Best Vegan-friendly Tiki Bar in Prague

(Note: This is the same post as earlier, we just added a couple photos of Prague at the bottom.)

Things sure have changed around here. Once, we were strange curiosities on our bikes, squeezed on the side of the road, worried we'd end up as a two-dimensional smudge on the side of a Romanian highway. Now we´ve entered the world of Northern European bicycle touring, complete with maps, numbered bicycle highways, and plush Euro campsites.

After leaving Budapest we followed the Danube for 350 kilometers to Vienna. The road was dead flat. In one section, where it follows a canal, it's absolutely straight. We wondered if cyclists ever fall asleep on the wheel.

Still, every journey has its challenges. On the third day we were determined to make it more than 120 km to Vienna by evening. We were pretty pleased with ourselves as we set out, ate lunch in Bratislava, and continued under sunny skies to our second capital city of the day. Sadly, it turns out that cycling in the heat for seven hours is taxing--not so much on the legs, but on the small regions where the legs connect to the rest of the body. It's normal to have friction after two months on the road; but it's usually between the travelers, not between their legs. We spent a day recovering in Vienna. Then we continued on our way, fortified with diaper ointment and KY jelly.

Bicycling north from Vienna through Austria can only be described as idyllic. Small, paved roads over gently rolling hills through the manicured countryside of the wine region. There are many bicycle routes: the winery route, the castle route, the family route, etc. The only accommodation we could find was a winery bed and breakfast. For 50 Euros, which was outside our usual budget, we stayed in luxurious surroundings, drank "fresh" white wine, and ate a simple dinner of thinly sliced ham, local cheese and bread. In the morning, after discussing rural economics, Harley Davidsons and the international wine markets, the owner gave us a bottle of the house red. When David padded into our hotel room sipping his second glass of wine and flipped on the TV to watch the highlights of the Sweden-Paraguay soccer game, he remarked that maybe the bourgeois lifestyle he´d mocked in his youth isn´t quite so bad, after all. (The place is Hotel Burger, highly recommended.)

After briefly losing our way among the bicycle routes of southern Czech Republic (there are so many signed bicycle and hiking routes it can be quite confusing) we caught a bus to Prague. We´re staying with Milan, a reporter at the newspaper in Idaho Falls who´s now working at the Prague Post. Milan and his roommates publish an English-language arts magazine, ProvokatoR, and generally try to keep alternative culture alive in a city that´s slowly being overrun by stag party holidayers. One of Milan´s roommates also works nights at a Prague tiki bar... which we plan to visit tonight.

P.S. Budweiser (the beer from Budvar) is really, really good here! Whodathunk?

P.P.S. We did go to the tiki bar, and sampled soymilk-based orange "cream sickles." Yum!