Loket: Wednesday

An early start for Loket, a picture postcard one-street town huddled on a hill avove a bend in the River Ohre. A fourteenth century castle perched precipitously on the rocks above, resembling Edinburgh in minutiae.

A concrete bridge took us over the river from the graffitied bus stop. For the longest time it seemed as if we were the only two people in town. There was a yellow Skoda Favorit parked up empty in front of the castle, two women talking in low voices outside the post office on the main square, a small group of men waiting - for what? - at the start of the alley running up the steps to the left of the Hotel Goethe, a truck delivering beer and a Vietnamese shop advertising Textil, Cigarety, Alkohol, Napoje. I swapped Dobry dens with a man walking his dog by the riverbank; two middle-aged couples were going the other way along a narrow street. We wandered up and down in circles, looping round the centre like a ball of string, until we passed the U Svejku pub for the fifth time and went inside for lunch.