Karlovy Vary is a SPA town with multiple hot natural springs running through the old town. The hottest is 72 celsius.

Tourists seem to buy little flasks to drink the water but I doubt 50ml is going to help much and a lot of the hotels have SPA facilities.

We have not really been to a town like this before - basically every shop is either a very hi-end shop selling clothes or jewellery.


So overall not a lot to do and there is really almost no bars to speak of. We found a couple but they were shut.

The town is visited by a lot of Russian people as can be seen by signs and menus in Russian.


 

We found a nice restaurant online called Salvator - https://www.restaurantsalvator.cz/


I walked there and made a booking for 8pm.

At about 7:50pm we walk to the restaurant which is only about 5 minutes away.
 
We check in and sit at our table and order a couple of drinks and dinner.

Chris chose a Beef Tatare for a starter and Pam decided against a starter.

For main we both chose the duck dish.


At about 8:20pm the power in the whole inner city of Karlovy Vary went out and we were sitting in darkness. As these things go it sort of made kind of romantic.

After about 5 minutes they decided to put little tea light candles on our tables so we could see. But you really could not see much with them at all.

Another 5 minutes and they delivered my Beef Tatare - reminded me of a restaurant we were supposed to go to in Singapore called Dine in the Dark.

I took a photo with flash of my dish.


The power came on for about 5 seconds twice but overall we were not going to get our mains as they were not cooking with no power.


We had to pay for our drinks but they gave the beef tatare for free.

We left about 9:15pm and walked back to the hotel in the dark.

Pam had no dinner and obviously no where else was open either.

Power came back on at 11pm

The restaurant had an amazing coffee machine which can be seen in the first photo and also below. The coffee machine looks black but is actually stainless steel, my phone camera with flash makes it look black, probably because the room was in darkness. It was made around 1908.

We caught an Uber from the hotel to the train station for about 79 CZK well below the hotels fixed price 300 CZK for the same 3km route.

We found our bus # and waited for it to turn off - about 20 minutes prior to departure it turned up and we checked in. It was heading to Amsterdam via Frankfurt, but we were only going to Karlovy Vary just over 2 hours from Prague.


There had been a lo of snow and the fields were pretty white along the route.


We arrived at the Karlovy Bus Station and caught a taxi to our hotel - 190 CZK.

There are lot of people with large smokers who have hams cooking over wood. They look very nice but are a tourist trap as they charge 100 CZK for 100grams of meat. But if you buy it you will more likely get 400-500 grams of meat and charged a lot. 500 CZK is about $33 NZD. Rather eat in a restaurant than out in the rain.



Stacking up for the coming crowds


Very nice large sausage - 80 czk