He Cycled from Czechia – You won’t believe how he crossed the Baltic Sea

While 80% of the attendees at Jamboree Denmark arrived by bus, some took a different path. Pavel Tesařík, “Pat”, a member of Přístav Třináctka Opařany scouts in Czechia, cycled from his hometown, 100km south of Prague, to Hedeland. The journey is some 700km if you travelled in a straight line, but he didn’t.

I attended the World Scout Moot in Portugal last year, and a Danish friend I met there invited me to come to Spejdernes Lejr”, Pat explains, “so I did.” When he decided to come, he researched his transport options, and then he realised: “Looks like a bike-able journey!”.

Having recently been camping in Czechia, Pat headed home from camp, “to wash some things” before undertaking his cyclodyssey. The plan was to cycle over 6 days, without fixed points to sleep in each night. The weather was good enough for him to try ‘cowboy camping’ – sleeping without shelter. 

Along the route, mostly through Germany, he met quite a few people, “mostly because I sometimes looked lost.” he says. They would ask “Do you need help?”, “Where are you going?”, and when he said “Denmark”, they’d say, over that distance, “it doesn’t really matter what route you take”. He wasn’t on his bike for one part of the journey, the ferry from Rostock to Gedser, which is ok because he “can’t cycle underwater”. On the journey back, he will “probably take the train to Jutland.”.

One day, after stopping at 11pm, he “slept in a field behind a building in a village”. “A local man, who must have seen the light or something, came and asked me who I was,” he explains, “but I showed him my i.d., and he said it was private property, and he warned me about tractors coming in the morning. But it was fine in the end”.

Pat used to cycle to school, “15km a day”, and he is “used to long distance trips”, “but this is the biggest one honestly”.

At SL2026, Pat is volunteering at the Byen (City) subcamp InfoTent. “Sometimes people ask me questions in Danish”, he says, “as they don’t want to ask in English. But it’s nice to talk to new people… mostly about Skejser!”. The easiest part of the job is getting mail, as the system is very well organised. “Some kommuns get an entire bagful of mail”, he says.

Having been off the road for a few days, there are still some after-effects from the journey. “My butt hurts, and there’s weird feelings in my fingers,” he admits. His bike also sustained some knocks along the way. “The chain snapped on my journey, but I was able to fix it, because I took all the tools with me”.