Czech Republic We Must Leave Now! S05E10.

We are currently in the beautiful Czech Republic and we've been doing our best to stay off-grid and out of epidemic hot spots in major cities. In this episode we are dealing with wildfires and a state of emergency in the Czech Republic that is forcing us to leave before the borders are closed. What to do? East, South, North, West. We are driving around the world. You guys are invited to, so subscribe and buckle up. It's one heck of a ride. I've been at this spot for about three days now. Our nearest neighbour is 200 metres away, so it's been a great place to be socially isolated and I've been trying to fish every single day and I still have not managed to catch me a trout. If anyone knows how to fish, please take me fishing so that I can actually catch a fish. Here look, I've got a fish. Thank you, I've got a fish. It's been a beautiful place but things are getting real. Basically the Czech Republic is getting really bad with coronavirus. It's one of the worst places in Europe right now and cases are spiking. This week they've had more cases than they had in the entire of March at the peak of the pandemic which is not very reassuring and I'm sure that's something to do with the fact that they've got their testing down a little bit better than they did in March. However, I don't think that we can stay here very long. There is a meeting happening tomorrow with the Prime Minister considering a new state of emergency in this country and neighbouring countries are starting to put restrictions on people coming from the Czech Republic so it is time for us to get out now before we might not be able to. The one question is where do we want to spend lockdown 2.0 because at this point it seems like a second wave of coronavirus is inevitable and we are smack bang in the middle of Europe. I don't know what to do but at this point I really feel that we need to make a decision fast. The last thing we want is to get caught up in a foreign country's state of emergency again. When that happened to us in North Africa in March 2020 we found ourselves unable to leave Morocco and stuck in a necessary but super strict lockdown for nine weeks. There we could only leave the house for a weekly food shop and that was really tough. We wish it wasn't necessary to consider the pandemic all of the time but it's just a reality of travel in 2020. We suppose that borders will remain open this time during the second wave perhaps with compulsory testing and if you've undergone an invasive coronavirus test you'll know that it's not exactly pleasant so we plan to leave before that is mandatory just as soon as we put out this damn wildfire. Some people just came past us in a boat and said there's a fire on the riverbank down here it's just started so it must have been the previous campers lift the fire somehow so we're just trying to see if we can do something about it. Evidently we were not really dressed for firefighting. We had wanted to get the fire out as quick as possible and see if we could control it before it got out of hand. The water bag was basically useless as it was way too flexible to get water into it. What we needed was a bucket so Lia ran back to pack up our combi and fetch the bucket. In the meantime the shovel was much more effective at putting out the small flames that were beginning to spread down the bank. Even though we got the flames out due to the heat and the plentiful supply of dry grass the fire continued to reignite itself so the bucket was necessary to douse the flames. The whole riverbank was connected via dry grass and reeds to a vast and extremely dry forest region just to make sure we thoroughly doused the entire area with water. We were fortunate that we had access to the river water to sort the situation out but mostly we're just stoked that we were alerted by the passing boat and that we were able to get here quickly before too much damage was caused. Thanks mate. That's the guy that went passing the boat coming back to make sure the fire went out and if we see if we needed any help. Good job he told us when he did because it was getting a bit out of hand. Another casualty. New shoes. Now dead. Trying to get a fire out with thongs is probably not the best idea. Okay now we can leave Czech Republic. It's a shame to be heading out of the beautiful Czech Republic so early and in the wrong direction too. As we're attempting to drive around the world from the Americas to Australia eastbound would have been our preferred direction but right now there are travel restrictions to the east also so we decided to change direction and head west to the closest border which was Germany. There is one important matter of business before we leave Czech Republic. We have to thank the sponsor of this video which is Surfshark VPN. You guys have a VPN right? If you don't know what a VPN is it is basically it keeps our data safe when we are on public wi-fi which we are quite a bit. Yeah all the time and it's really great to use the Surfshark VPN one because it basically just sits in the background and we don't have to worry about it which is the kind of technology that we like. It provides a great service without getting in the which I think might be the only VPN provider that actually allows you to do that so that's really useful. We use it when we're doing things like internet banking or connecting on public networks that we don't trust or if we want to access content that's in another country because the VPN allows us to jump from where we are to appear like our internet connection is coming from another country. It's extremely useful and if you haven't got a VPN we can highly recommend Surfshark VPN because we've been using it for over a year so if you want it you can get 83% off and three months free. That's an offer for our community so thank you Surfshark for giving us that link to share with you guys and thank you for sponsoring this video. Now shall we leave Czech Republic? Maybe maybe a bite to eat first? Yeah I'm pretty hungry. Come on, let's go. I haven't actually been to a restaurant since we've been in Czech Republic. We've been trying to keep our distance and eat in our van but we would like to try a bit of Czech food before we leave so let's see if we can find a restaurant. We have only in Czech language. Okay what do you recommend? Fried cheese with french fries and mayonnaise. Fried cheese that's very Czech right? Yeah very traditional. Beef steak, pork neck steak, chicken steak. Does that say tiger? Yeah. Tiger in brine. What? Oh so fast. Oh thank you. I'm gonna just pick a random thing. How do you say? Not zebra. Lee's steak, rump steak was 9 euros 68 cents. Under 10 euros 8 pound 80 or 11 dollars 50 american. I think that's pretty good value. Czech Republic is quite cheap. This is our Czech meal. Full belly Czech. Next stop Germany or maybe not. We didn't quite make it out of the Czech Republic so we will try and get out tomorrow morning before the prime minister calls the state of emergency and potentially starts closing borders. We want to be out before that happens. We're going to spend the night in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately our navigation to the spot where we were intending to sleep didn't work out so well. We've been taken down a route which there's no way that we can possibly fit down. It was actually a little crazy of us even getting this far as you were about to see. To show you what we're working with that's what we can't get past. There's no way we're going to fit through that. It basically turned into a walking trail. To compound the issue we now have to reverse out of this extremely narrow road and our reverse lights have just gone out. Leo you're going to go and stand on the back bumper with a head torch on and bang on the car if I'm going to crash. And bang on the car if you're going to get injured or crushed or something too. I'll go slowly and we'll try to back out of here and see if we can find another place to camp. Yeah there were quite a lot of trees and branches so I might get smacked in the face a few times. Yeah yeah just stay low okay and yeah good luck. Yeah you can sleep here right? I think so. People are going to have such a shock when they come to see us in the morning. And good night. Of course we wouldn't be able to do all of these miles that we've been doing recently without taking care of our number one pride and joy our CB Performance engine. It's not exactly maintenance intensive but it is a vintage vehicle so it does require more work than a usual a typical other regular modern car. The good news is it's easier to work on for the most part apart from when you're trying to fix reverse lights apparently. On my days this is turning into a procedure. That's our starting battery and this is our trusty faithful lithium ion battery for our studio. Unfortunately the connections to do with our reverse lights are tied in with our brake lights which are tied in with our indicator lights and this whole module here needs to be accessed from the back and that's really difficult. I have to remove the batteries but it's a good opportunity for me to clean up the terminals because it's been 18 months since these were last cleaned and they're showing signs of corrosion so it's time to do that. One massive difference between this combi and our previous combi is that we take much better care of this. We have a regular maintenance schedule and I think that's absolutely essential for anybody that's driving a vintage vehicle anywhere never mind around the world and so we have a document which tells us what we have to do on the van every 3000, 6000, 9000, 15,000, 20,000 up to 50,000 kilometers or miles. The great thing about that is we can just relax and not worry about maintenance for the most part unless something breaks which it doesn't because we're looking after this combi so every 3,000 miles or 5,000 kilometers we do the next set of jobs that we have to do and for the most part so far it's been trouble-free motoring. I know not all of you drive vintage vehicles but some of you do. Some of you have got buses and vannagons and stuff so if you want to see our maintenance document we'll make it available for you. I'll link it below. We've just put it up to the combi crew but I'll make it public for everybody to be able to get so you can see what it takes to drive a vintage vehicle around the world and perhaps improve your own maintenance schedule so you don't get left stranded on the side of the road. Now back to these lights. Back when we were driving from South America to Alaska I removed and rebuilt my engine 10 times on that one road trip. For sure side of the road breakdowns will come on this adventure too and undoubtedly more frequently as we push this combi further into the east. Right now though I'm doing everything I can to make sure that we get there because we sure have a long road ahead. Back on the road we made it to the eastern border of Germany without any trouble. We got out just before the Czech Republic declared a state of emergency and before Germany imposed a mandatory 14-day quarantine on arrivals from the country so as sad as we were to leave so quickly we were relieved that we left when we did. On our next pit stop we're meeting up with some ex combi life travelers who eight years earlier shared some of the hardest times with us in South America. And we're also hitting the autobahn to take advantage of the unlimited speed highways in Germany. We are going to find out just how fast this combi will go. We're doing like our top speed and they're still flying past us. But that is a story for next time.