South Bohemia is populated with a lot of forestry and pasture and only a few people. On a six hour circular walk this is what we saw.
But in every landscape there is activity. We met two mushroom pickers and here is one man’s haul. The other looked rather secretive, I think fearing that we might discover his source.
There are lots of different sorts of mushrooms and as a picker of field mushrooms I’d not think of eating these. But as an opera-goer my thoughts turn to Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk; as far as I am aware the only opera in which there is a fungi fatality, although the rat poison garnish is to blame. It’s on at the ENO now.
The forestry needs to be harvested too.
And in the pastures there are dairy herds. This animal is actually a cow, but on its way to a Fancy Dress as a bull.
It is beautiful walking but with a lot of hills – the sort of hills that an author might describe as rolling, but a walker as relentlessly uphill. That cannot be true and here’s the proof.
The villages are neat and tidy, like Switzerland, and the people very friendly; a contrast to the waiters and waitresses in Prague. It is getting late in the season now and there are only a few cyclists and no other walkers.
Mushroom picking is a Czech Religion, and nature’s cost free produce a sustenance in frequent times of hunger of the past….
Am I right in thinking that the mushroom gatherers are secretive about where they find them? I know that this is often the case in the UK.