More travel results from tourism, and tourism from the idea that holidays should be far from home. For partly historical reasons, this is not an idea that appeals to the Czechs. Perhaps it will contribute to the debate about travel if I try to invoke my own experience of holidays, as I have known them both in the bleak years of communism and in recent years.
The nation in the cabbage patch
It is a hot summer day in early July and my family and I have been spending the first week of the holidays at our countryside retreat in Borusov in northern Moravia. The children have gone swimming with all the other children from the village, I am quickly weeding the vegetable garden before it gets too hot and my wife is sitting in the shade of the yard putting into jars the whortleberries that we brought from the forest early in the morning. The pick of mushrooms was not very impressive today it is still early and it has been too dry lately but we have enough for our mushrooms in cream sauce in the evening, and a hearty potato and mushroom soup.
Mrs Nemcova, a neighbour, comes to have a look at the grass. Her sons cut the grass on the steep half acre that surrounds our house, itself a small farm once, to feed their animals and make hay for the winter. We get a rabbit or a chicken or a duck now and then, and a regular supply of rich yellow eggs in return. I negotiate with her an extra supply of two chickens because we have invited some neighbours and friends for an evening around the fire later this week. And in the afternoon I had better check with Mr Soska, the village carpenter/joiner/cabinet-maker, on the progress he has been making with the large garden table and benches that he had promised would be ready for the party.
Ours is a small village of around forty houses scattered on the hillsides and stretching along a stream for some two kilometres in the foothills of the Sudeten Mountains. A dozen of the houses now belong to townspeople like us. Our chalupa (cottage) was a small farm built in 1811 by the German family that farmed and lived there until its last members were expelled to Germany after the Second World War. The whole large area of the Sudeten was then slowly re-settled by Czechs from the central Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. But they never quite succeeded, and a lot of villages and farms remained empty, gradually crumbling to pieces. We bought the lovely little farm in 1976 for 42,000 Czech crowns ($1200), and even then there were still seven houses in the village that had never found new owners. There were thousands and thousands of these farms and houses in Bohemia and Moravia, and in the 1960s you could buy an empty house, with its old furniture and pots and china still inside it, at 5-10,000 crowns ($140-280).
Three tribes on the move
There are many of us who spend most, or all, of our holiday in the country. In fact, among all my friends and acquaintances, I can only think of four families who have chosen to ignore the movement, which, since the 1960s, has become a part of Czech culture, with a lifestyle of its own, with its magazines, books and TV shows. Three tribes inhabit the countryside at the weekends and during summer and winter holidays: the trampove (hikers or wanderers), the chata (chalet) people, and chalupa owners like us.
The trampove are the smallest tribe, but the proudest and oldest, distinctly working class in origin and anti-establishment in ethos. Intoxicated by a wave of Americanophilia that swept through the new country of Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, and romanticising the American frontiersman and his noble enemy the Red Indian, they burst out of the cities in search of the remotest and wildest places they could find to build their osady (camps) of log cabins around a totem pole and to create a bizarre escapist subculture of rough life under the stars and camaraderie around the camp fire. Clad in a picturesque combination of battledress and deerskin, they fill the platforms of Czech railway and bus stations every Friday evening, clutching their guitars and chronicles, off for a weekend away from it all.
Inspired by the trampove and fuelled by an age-old Czech nostalgia for simple country life (immortalised in the best-loved classic of Czech literature, Bozena Nemcovas portrait of a saintly grandmother, Babicka, published in 1855), the middle class started building the first chaty at lakes and rivers before World War II. There were not many of them for some time. Although spending a countryside holiday had always been a must for the Czechs, after the war and in the 1950s it was still more usual to spend your holiday with your farming parents or other relatives, or to hire a room at a farm for the summer. But by the 1960s when the grim truth that there would be no foreign travel under communism had finally sunk in, when people had become desperate to create a small private world for themselves in order to escape the omnipresent watchful eye of the Party, and when, in spite of communism, they had become modestly better off a chata craze overwhelmed the country.
Now the chaty are everywhere. They come in all shapes and styles, from garden huts to Scandinavian chalets, from log cabins to small houses. Taken by surprise at the beginning, the Communist authorities soon realised that it might be prudent to let the frustrated population enjoy this small taste of private ownership and private enterprise, the only outlet they would permit in Czechoslovakia. They turned a blind eye by demanding very little in the way of planning permission, and so the chatari (owners) quickly spread through the whole country. They built their wooden cabins and chalets along rivers and lake shores, deep in the ravines as well as high up near the mountain tops, in the vast emptiness of the Bohemian Forest as well as amongst the vineyards of South Moravia.
While the trampove are not very numerous and their log cabins are well hidden in the forests, the chaty have mushroomed at popular resorts and beauty spots. One such chata village is just over the ridge from us, in the next valley. The two small lakes at its bottom are now surrounded by a colony of at least four hundred chaty, most of them huddling together near the waters edge, but some running away on the slopes and disappearing into the forest.
It may well be everybodys dream to own a solitary chalet at a serene mountain lake, and a lot of people do, but most chatari end up here, in these large villages, from which the idealists have long fled in terror. Here, the view is most likely that of the neighbours kitchen, and the incessant sound of children, radios, swimmers, tennis rackets, radios, pots and pans, lawn mowers and dogs may differ somewhat from what you had in mind when you first started looking for a quiet remote place for your chata. But it is a bit of property of your own, built and lovingly mended with your own hands, and you wanted a place in the countryside badly, just like everybody else. Besides, the colony is a community of friends. There are always enough people for a game of volleyball or cards, and there is nothing like a good company for a barbecue and an evening of singsong. In the morning, if you feel like a swim, the lake is only fifty yards down the slope, and you only need to walk five minutes into the forest to hear nothing but birdsong.
The seductions of simplicity
There are, of course, chalets and cottages and second homes in other countries too, but a few characteristic features make the Czech countryside retreats a unique cultural phenomenon. First, I suspect that in western countries countryside retreats are associated with class and wealth. Not so in the Czech Republic. Almost everybody has a chata, their ownership cannot be narrowed down to a particular segment of society. Almost all of them were built in the communist years, when we were all equally badly off, and since they are simple structures, they are cheap to run even today, when the cost of living has increased.
Second, the movement has an identifiable ideology of simple peasant life. We live simply when on holiday: with the exception of some of the chalupy and the large chata villages, theres no electricity, no running water, no gas. We do little shopping: we eat our own produce, because every place has a garden and an orchard or at least a few fruit trees; we do a lot of baking in the old ovens; we go fishing and mushrooming; and all the fruits of the meadow and forest also end up on our tables or in our jars, preserved for winter. We dont have gas, nor do we buy coal. We use firewood to heat the houses in the winter months instead.
Finally, and most importantly for the current City & Country debate on openDemocracy, the chata subculture offers an alternative to the assumption, nowadays almost automatic, that you havent had a holiday unless you have flown to a distant part of the globe or covered three thousand miles motoring around on the Continent. There is very little travel involved. The early chaty were built within reasonable reach of municipal or other public transport, and even today a lot of people take a bus or a train and then walk the remaining short distance.
Most of us do use the car nowadays, of course, but interestingly, we only use it to get there, not while we are there. I am sure that we are not more environmentally conscious and disciplined than other nations. It has to do with all the things that a countryside holiday is so strongly associated with in our minds: refuge, quiet, return to nature and to simple peasant life. It is simply not done to drive to do your shopping or to go swimming. In the country, you walk or cycle or, in winter, ski. You walk when you go mushrooming or fishing in the morning. You walk to the farm on the other side of the forest to buy your milk, eggs or honey. You walk again, or cycle, to visit the local castle or museum. And of course you walk to the village pub in the evening.
Better to arrive than to travel?
Is all this going to disappear or change soon? Am I enthusing over a lost cause? Many had predicted that the chaty and chalupy could not survive the fall of communism, saying that once people were free to travel to spend proper holidays abroad, no one would have any use for the primitive countryside retreats any longer. True, after forty years behind barbed wire, we were starved of foreign travel and we couldnt wait to see the Colosseum and the Costa Brava. But now that we have seen them, and many more, we have also discovered that there is nothing like our second homes.
I find that one of the main delights of the chalupa is that it is a very active holiday; it is recreation by work. We build and repair everything ourselves. We cut down the trees and chop them up for firewood. We trim the hedges and prune the trees, dig up the garden and grow the vegetables, pick the wild strawberries and collect the wild herbs, dry the rose-hips and pickle the mushrooms, make the sloe wine and the elderberry jam and enjoy it too. How on earth could I do all this in the hotel-land of Mallorca?
And its recreation by sport, too. The masses of people you see out in the Czech countryside at every time of the year, walking, cycling, skiing, skating, canoeing, sailing, fishing, mushrooming, are truly impressive. When we go walking on a Sunday, we meet parties of hikers and cyclists every five minutes on the well-marked walking paths and trails; when we do the same on the other side of the border, in Austrian Waldviertel, we usually meet two or three groups of people a day. The car is simply forgotten: if you have so many delightful jobs to do every day, the idea that you should jump into the car and set off in an empty pursuit of more new things to see does not even cross your mind.
I suppose it all might simply mean that the Czechs are not an urbanised people at heart and that the memory of a childhood in the country is still the defining influence in our lives. If that were the case, it might indeed all disappear or change with the next one or two generations. But what if it were a viable alternative to the high level of travel and of cultural and environmental degradation that the tourist industry has come to epitomise?
