A long stretch to Slovakia

Kosice, Slovakia, July 18th I'm sitting in an e-mail cafe (hard to find recently along my route) here in the pretty town square of Slovakia's second city Kosice. I arrived in town early yesterday afternoon (for once!), did some laundry, devoured a huge lunch, and am now taking a full day off here today while a bike shop does some maintenance on the bike. Since I last wrote, in Chisanau, 11 days of cycling and a day of rest and wine-tasting in Hungary, along with nearly 1200 km, have passed by, so I need to do a brief summary to bring this blog up to date. Meandering through Moldova I left Chisanau fairly early on July 6th, full of the usual Intourist hotel breakfast buffet spread, headed towards Moldova's only real non-wine tourist attraction, the old monastery at Orheiul Vecchiul. I rode well in the morning, past the vineyards of Cricova and the other Moldovan wine producers, then took an unexpectedly hilly route east towards Transdniestria. The countryside was pretty, full of sunflower fields and little villages. Suddenly, as I crested a rise, an apparition appeared to my right. A hairpin bend in a tiny meandering river, the Raut, has been deeply etched into the soft limestone plateau, and on top of the narrow ridge between the two channels is perched a beautiful church. It dominates the huge amphitheatre of limestone left by the river's erosion. It sits on top of an old cave monastery and church, but after the wonders of Uplistsikhe a few weeks ago, the underground stuff didn't do too much for me. I did like the setting immensely, though, which was good as it cost me lots of time and backtracking to the main road. I then set off into the setting sun on a side road, across the grain of the land, with a series of ups and downs that finally petered out in an appalling dirt track that had once been paved. I found an orchard, pitched a tent out of sight of the road, and called it a day after 114 kilometres. The next day turned into an unexpectedly epic day. I had intended to cross the Romanian border and camp immediately, making for 100 km or so. It all started out well, with the dirt road turning back into pavement, and the pretty villages and orchards continuing. Moldovan villages all seem to have wells beside the road, dipping into the aquifer that lies not too deep into the porous limestone. It's a boon for a thirsty cyclist! The villages I passed through, even though they were only 60 km or so from the capital, were poor and depressed-looking, although not as bad as what we saw in eastern Crimea. It was hard, hilly riding until lunch, when I dropped down onto one of the main roads leading out of Chisanau that follows a river, rather than angling between valleys as I had been doing for a day and a half. I made good time up the valley and then down the other side to the Romanian border at Ungheni. It was a very hot day, and I was looking forward to getting off the bike soon. Instead, a gas station owner broke the bad news to me: the border is only open to train passengers, and everyone else, including me, has to head 23 km north to the road crossing. I gritted my teeth, polished off some more chocolate and cookies, and rode north along a very flat road. At the border, everything went smoothly in terms of immigration formalities as I entered my 100th country, but there were (very unusually for Moldova) no money-changers at the border. On the Romanian side, I asked about moneychangers or ATMs and was told that I would have to backtrack south another 24 km to the city of Iasi. More tooth-gritting, more hard cycling, and suddenly I was in Romania's second-largest city, a prosperous university town. A huge electricity blackout left my hotel in darkness and (of course) most of the ATMs to be out of action. The sixth one I tried finally disgorged some Romanian lei, and I went out to feed myself before an early night, tired out by 140 km, much of them unwanted. Monastic Masterpieces July 8th was a long, extremely hot but fairly flat day. I rode north, retracing my path into Iasi for 12 km, and then parallelling the Moldovan border for most of the day. It must be the poorest corner of Romania, poorer than much of Moldova, reportedly Europe's least prosperous country. For 80 km I saw no banks, no restaurants and almost no shops. This is an area of largely subsistence agriculture, with an almost continuous string of villages along the low limestone hills that line the flat, broad river valley that marks the Moldovan border. There was little vehicular traffic, with horse carts outnumbering cars at least three to one. I saw a small clan of Roma (Gypsies) collecting scrap metal into a small fleet of horse carts; three of them were trying to wrestle the rusty carcass of an ancient car into their cart, which I thought was an apt metaphor for the direction of economic change in this part of the world. Eventually the road turned away from the border and up into the hills, where I camped in a little forest for some privacy. It was a bad idea in terms of comfort, as the trees prevented any cooling breezes from hitting the tent, and I sweltered all night in rainforest conditions. The next day was a shortish ride as I climbed over a series of parallel plateaus into parallel river valleys (Moldova all over again), passed through the town of Botosani (tens of thousands of inhabitants, fairly prosperous, exactly one open restaurant that I could find) and then pushed on towards the regional capital of Suceava. I bypassed the city and camped in a little campsite across the road from the Orthodox monastery of Dragomirna. Romania's plague of stray dogs did their best to keep me up at night; aside from Burma, I can't remember seeing so many feral dogs in one country before. Orthodox monasteries are the main draw in this part of northern Romania (Southern Bucovina), and I spent the next two days exploring the best of them. Collectively, these 15th and 16th century monasteries, painted all over, inside and out, with extraordinarily vivid frescoes, have made it onto the UNESCO World Heritage list, and I visited five of these masterpieces. First up was the little-known Patrauti, the oldest of the Bucovina churches. It is so little-visited that it was locked up, and two fellow visitors had to go find the keeper of the keys. I loved the interior of the tiny church, its walls and arched ceilings completely covered by a maze of paintings. This church was full of military saints, as it was established by King Stefan the Great in a time of great military danger from Ottoman Turkish invaders. I found the 360-degree visual stimulation almost too much, but our guide pointed out a number of the details and stories that I might otherwise have overlooked. I staggered outside, saddled up, and set off on the long trek to Sucevita monastery, past a string of dozens of Roma horse carts, as they came back on this Sunday morning from the Catholic church in a nearby town. Sucevita, when I finally reached it after a ride through tremendous heat, was a different story entirely. It's firmly on the tour bus circuit, and makes a popular weekend excursion for Romanian families. A wedding was shooting photos outside the walls, and the crowds were quite unlike Patrauti. The paintings were amazing, however, well worth the effort of getting to them. The most famous of them is a huge ladder that is supposed to show the genealogy of Jesus from the time of Jesse, father of King David. One of the rooms of the church is covered with gory martyrdom scenes, big on beheadings, being burnt alive and being stabbed in various grim ways. The artwork in the paintings is fine, typical of the late Byzantine style that had captivated me on previous trips to places like Ohrid (Macedonia), Bulgaria and the mountains of Cyprus. The colours, particularly the blue, are wonderful, and hard to capture on a photograph. Sadly, photography is forbidden inside most of the churches (aside from Patrauti), but I did manage a few clandestine snaps. I also loved the monastery enclosure around this and other churches, a haven of peace from the tourist frenzy outside, planted with splendid rose gardens and dotted with nuns reading Bibles on shaded benches. I had planned to camp in Sucevita, but the campgrounds looked pretty grim, so I headed up the valley, towards a pass over the first range of the Carpathian mountains. Eventually I found a secluded logging road and camped in a clearing in the forest. My bad luck in choosing good tent sites continued. I had a lovely cool breeze, but it did nothing to keep away the clouds of supersized horseflies that plagued me all evening until I finished eating and crawled into my tent to sleep the sleep of the dead. The next morning, I left very early to complete my climb over the pass in the cool of the morning. There was almost no traffic, and the gradient of the road stayed gentle, making for a pleasant, quick ride to the top. There were pleasant, if not spectacular, views from the crest of the pass. I spent the rest of the day pedalling down a long valley, with short side trips to more painted monasteries. Moldovita was pretty, in a quiet little village, although the two huge tour buses that arrived made it rather less quiet than I would have liked. It went a little too heavily for the death and dismemberment of saints in its frescoes, but I liked its monastery courtyard and the frescoes on the outside. I returned to the bike and flew along a newly-paved highway to Guru Humorolui, where I turned off for Humor monastery. The Lonely Planet raves about the frescoes of Humor being the best in Bucovina, but most of them, sadly, were under scaffolding when I was there. What little I did see, though, looked as though they were painted by a more skilled brush than some of the other monasteries. I emerged into the relentless heat (38 degrees by my thermometer) and rolled back to Guru Humorolui in search of lunch. Half a chicken and a plate of fries later, I was ready to complete my hat trick of monasteries at nearby Voronet. Despite the inevitable mass of souvenir stands outside, it wasn't very busy inside the churchyard, and I had time and space to contemplate the wonderful artwork, particularly the daunting Last Judgment on the outer wall above the entrance. Their take on the genealogy of Christ was much harder to follow and less pleasing to the eye than the Sucevita painting. Art historians make much of the famous Voronet blue pigment used on the church, but to my untrained eye, it looked much the same as the vivid blues I'd seen on other churches. I staggered out, completely saturated with visual imagery, and found a little pension. I was feeling very tired from the heat and the hills, and decided that a long night of sleep in a real bed was called for. The little hotel that I found, the Valeria, was wonderful, with spotless rooms, an extra-long bed and delicious, filling, calorie-rich food, and an English-speaking waitress. Across the Carpathians My ride the next day, July 12th, was longer and harder than I had anticipated. I had seen two passes on the map, and had decided that I would probably camp somewhere between the two. However, I had a very good morning, refreshed by a wonderfully deep sleep, and charged over the first pass, an 1100-metre job, by 1:00 pm. The road was in great shape, with gentle gradients the whole way, and I felt strong on the climb. A precipitous descent through a village of haymaking led to a turnoff for the secondary road to Sighetu Marmatiei. Although the road surface deteriorated noticeably, there was hardly any traffic and the black thunderclouds massing behind me kept me pushing hard up the valley. I realized that I had enough energy and time to make it up the second pass that afternoon, and decided to go for it. I pedalled past a series of little logging towns, separated by long stretches of spruce forests that brought back, by sight and by smell, the great boreal forests of northern Ontario. Before I knew it, I was on the last climb to the 1400-metre pass, as thunderclaps echoed ominously around the valley. At the summit, a vision straight out of the pages of Bram Stoker: a church with soaring turrets was silhouetted against the inky blackness of the stormclouds. I resisted the urge to stay there, even if we weren't in Transylvania, and hurtled downhill, trying in vain to outrun the torrential rain at my back. Soaked and wet, I decided on the soft option, eschewing the tent in favour of a hotel at a ski resort (in Romania? Who would have known?) where I ate a huge dinner and slept like a log, worn out by 130 hard-won kilometres. It was only the next day, rolling down the Izu Valley, that I got my first really good look at the higher bits of the Carpathians. They're not enormously high, only about 2500 metres or so at their highest in Romania, but they're very pretty, with good forest cover in a lot of places and hay-making villages in other spots. The valleys are full of pretty wooden houses, and this valley, the Izu, is known for its ancient wooden churches and elaborately carved wooden gateways. I detoured off the main road a couple of times to see these churches, and was greatly taken with their soaring spires and wooden shingled roofs. There's a new monastery being built at Barsana in the old wooden style, and it's quite atmospheric and very popular among the Romanian devout (ie, almost the entire population), as well as making the cover of my map of Romania. I blew through Sighetu Maratiei without stopping; it was too late to visit the house where Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel was born, and I had a cemetery to visit. 20 km down the road, following the Tisza river along the Ukrainian border, the Laughing (or Merry) Cemetery is a big drawing card to the village of Sapanta. There a local wood carver spent a lifetime creating beautiful, vivid wooden memorials to the dead buried there, showing them in key moments in their lives (occasionally getting run over by trains or cars; more often working on farms or in shops) and commemorating them in what are apparently quite humorous poetic epitaphs in Romanian. I loved it; I felt that the art captured far more of the lives and characters of these villagers than any conventional cemetery every could have. I'd love to be buried in a similar style whenever I shuffle off this mortal coil. I found the best campsite of the trip, in a field just outside Sapanta, and settled in for a wonderful night's sleep. Roasting on the Alfold The heat seemed to grow more oppressive day by day, and July 14th, my three-country day, was the hottest yet. I set off a bit late after a lazy breakfast, and boiled as I crossed a low, forested pass over the last gasp of the Carpathians. Coming down the other side, I had technically entered Transylvania, and definitely entered the Alfold, the Great Hungarian Plain that lies inside a semi-circular arc of the Carpathians. Although I was still in Romania, suddenly the village road signs were bi- or tri-lingual, with Hungarian and occasional Ukrainian names. I could hear people listening to Hungarian TV and music, and speaking Hungarian on the street. I descended very slowly from the pass across the endless flat expanse that had once been the pastures for invading Magyar marauders from Central Asia before they settled down to become agricultural Hungarians. The towns seemed noticeably more prosperous and bustling than further east; I felt as though I had been travelling along a steady upward growth in economic well-being since that first day in Romania where there were no banks or restaurants at all. The thermometer topped 40 degrees for the first time that afternoon, and I took frequent shade breaks to avoid overheating, aided by the occasional ice-cold beer. Eventually I made it to the Ukrainian border at Halmeu, in plenty of time to cut a 20-kilometre corner of the Ukraine on my way to Hungary. This turned out to be a strategic error; this was the shortest route to Tokaj, Hungary, but not in terms of time. The border was a caricature of old Communist-era frontiers, with fat, corrupt Ukrainian border officials studiously ignoring the motorists in front of them in a display of power that would (they hoped) result in more bribes being offered. I was loaded into a minivan (no bicycles or pedestrians allowed) and spent two long, hot hours waiting for the passport and car registration folks to recognize our existence, despite the Romanian banknotes tucked into my driver's passport. Finally I made it through, said goodbye to my saviour/driver and headed rapidly for Hungary, through a bilingual landscape which seemed to be a tiny corner of Hungary sliced off and added to the Ukraine. At the border I couldn't find either moneychangers or an ATM, and rode deep into the dusk across the Alfold, lit up by a rising full moon over an African-like savannah, before setting up my tent by headlamp and sleeping well after 130 roasting kilometres. The ride the next day to Tokaj was another 130-kilometre marathon, although it was across a plain that would have made the Netherlands look mountainous. I trundled along through 41-degree heat, following little tertiary roads past little meandering rivers and prosperous, tiny towns, trying to remember what little Hungarian I once knew. I spent 4 memorable months studying math in Budapest in 1988, went back for a brief visit in 1990 and hadn't set foot in the country for 21 years. I found it strange how completely my knowledge of Hungarian had been eradicated from my brain, although individual words came bubbling up now and again, particularly in the supermarket. I found an ATM in the city of Fehergyarmat, and tried to change my leftover Romanian lei, only to be told that Hungarian banks wouldn't touch them. The teller, however, offered to change them herself (at a discounted rate, of course), and I was able to get most of the value of the lei back. Money issues at borders has been a theme this year; I need to get better information in the future about where to change money or find ATMs at upcoming crossings. I liked my day of cycling, despite the risk of sunstroke. Every town seemed to have a few stork nests on top of telephone poles, and for once I was not the only crazy cyclist on the road, as dozens of locals zipped around on bikes (another echo of the Netherlands). I made it to Tokaj, a sleepy little wine-producing town, at 6 pm only to find that it had been taken over by thousands of music-festival attendees. Given that it was a festival of heavy metal bands, the number of motorbikes, tattoos, beer bellies and black T-shirts came as no surprise. The campground where I was staying was a sea of tents, and sleeping was difficult with the noise from the bands and the fans. I did, however, stick to my plan to take a day off after 10 straight days on the bike, and go wine-tasting. After a long, leisurely, massive breakfast, I made my way into town to the Tokaji wine museum, where I learned of the illustrious history of Tokaji wines (the first AOC in the world, dating from 1723, and praised by such luminaries as Schubert and Voltaire). I then went for a more hands-on approach to my oenophilic education by going winetasting at the lovely Rakoczi Cellars. I tried various of the sweet dessert wines that have made Tokaj famous, and found that they were even more wonderful than I had remembered from 1988, as privatization has led to a great increase in quality. Made sweeter by adding quantities of grapes that have molded and rotted on the vine, the 5-puttonyos wine was my favourite, with a taste like fine honey. I bought a bottle for later consumption, and retired to my tent for more noise-interrupted sleep. Into Slovakia I got an early start yesterday and had perhaps the nicest single day of riding of the trip. I left Tokaj, but not its vineyards, as I circled around the foot of the ancient hills that produce Tokaji Aszu. It was a Sunday morning, and I had the road almost to myself all day, as I followed a small local route through the various wine villages. A few castles topped the hills to my right, and eventually the vines gave way to the sunflowers and corn that have been my cycling companions since Odessa. I watched storks doing their beak-chattering mating dance atop the roof of a house, and stopped to pluck ripe sour cherries from roadside trees. Before I knew it, I was at the Slovak border, where (predictably) there was nowhere to change my leftover forints. This time, at least, I knew what to do: buy more wine!! Three bottles of red Egri Bikaver weighed down my already groaning bike, and then I was off across the unmanned border into my 101st country. The road was flat, new and wide, and I absolutely flew along the 20 kilometres to Kosice, Slovakia's second city. It took longer to find my campground than to get to the city from the border. I wandered around yesterday afternoon, absorbing the lovely Central European central square, dominated by a huge Gothic cathedral (the easternmost Gothic church in Europe, I'm told) and eating ridiculous quantities of dumplings, sauerkraut and sausages. Today is another day off; my wheel hubs have worked their way loose, and I don't know how to fix them myself. I also have been hearing ominous noises from my bottom bracket, and so I'm having it replaced, since there's a good bike shop here. Then it's off to the High Tatra mountains, to go hiking, before cutting back across the Carpathians, and a corner of southeast Poland, to Lvov. I'm running out of days on this trip; in exactly a month, I need to be back in Switzerland, so I'm having a bit of a check of the maps to see that I don't bite off more than I can chew. I think I will have to sacrifice my tentative plan to ride through Kaliningrad in favour of a straighter route through Lithuania. Thanks for reading all the way through, and I hope to post a little more frequently in future, assuming I can find enough Internet cafes to do this. Peace and Tailwinds Graydon

A couple of curious small countries

Chisanau, July 5 After a day of exploring Odessa, Terri and I spent a couple of easy days of cycling from Odessa to Chisanau, through the curious semi-state of Transdniestria. It was Terri's last 2 days of cycling, and I was relieved that finally she had a couple of relaxed, easy days to enjoy the landscape and the cycling. The ride out of Odessa was pretty flat, and there was, for the first time since Abkhazia, very little traffic on the road. It was a rather dull landscape of sunflowers (not in bloom), wheat and pastureland, and the grey skies didn't help make it look more cheerful. As we approached the border with Transdniestria, it started to rain, and we had lunch in a little cafe on the Ukrainian side of the border while it poured down outside. Terri has gotten me hooked on french fries as the perfect cycling lunch food, and we had a particularly good lunch that day: variniki (Ukrainian dumplings), fries, meat cutlets and beer. Cycle touring burns a lot of calories, and it takes a lot of effort to keep myself from getting too thin; luckily this is generally a rather enjoyable effort! Crossing the Transdniestrian border lived up to the hype. It's not an internationally recognized country, although it does have its own army, currency and border guards. The border guards live up to all the old stereotypes of Communist borders: big hats and outstretched hands. As we approached the border, we met a German cyclist coming the other way who had only been allowed into the country on the payment of 40 euros for the dubious offence of not having a Romanian exit stamp in his passport. Our offence was the fact that Terri had a Moldovan visa in her passport (as a Kiwi, she needs many more visas than I do). We had a long palaver, dodging the loaded question of "how much cash do you have on you?" by pulling out bank cards. The original bribe request was for 100 euros; we ignored this and sat there, trying to outwait the guards and their mutterings of "problem; BIG problem!" Eventually, one guard gave us back our passports, having entered our details into the border computer, and told us to go "to the police post". We wandered back to our bikes, looked in vain for any police, went through the last custom post and were into the country. We stopped to change 35 dollars (which Terri had set aside for paying bribes) into Transdniestrian rubles, and as we cycled away, congratulating ourselves on getting in for free, a car pulled up and a border guard ordered us back to the border. This time the border guards had a new offence to fine us about: entering the country without filling in the entry card. This time the bribe request was for 300 euros. Terri pulled out the 380 Transdniestrian rubles and they settled for that. We were given 24 hours to transit the country, and this time nobody called us back as we rode off. The last custom officer asked us why we were crossing a second time, and when I explained that we hadn't filled out the entry form the first time, a huge corrupt grin crossed his face and he asked "How much did THAT cost you?" In fact, 35 dollars for 2 people is cheaper than Russian or Belarussian legitimate visas, and much cheaper than Terri's visas for the Ukraine or Moldova, so it wasn't too horrible. According to everyone we've met, no matter what country you're from (even Transdniestria itself), the guards won't let you go without a good shakedown for cash. Once through the border, the cycling was great. The highway was wide and almost empty, and we rode side by side most of the way to the capital, Tiraspol. Tiraspol is one of the more surreal places in Europe, capital of a breakaway country which still proudly displays the Communist hammer and sickle and feels stuck in the Brezhnev era. The city is surrounded by the standard Stalinist apartment blocks that disfigure so many Soviet cities, but the construction cranes that we saw here and there were engaged in building more of the same: new Stalinist blocks! The streets were eerily deserted, devoid of cars and people to such an extent that we thought we'd veered into Day of the Triffids or an episode of the Twilight Zone. Compared to Russia or Ukraine, the streets and sidewalks were spotless; in fact, it was a cleaner city than most Swiss towns. There were almost none of the frenetic capitalism that characterizes both Russia and Ukraine; only a few shops and almost none of the ubiquitous Communist kiosks that we had gotten used to further east. We met up with Lena, the woman whose tourist apartment we were to stay at, then rode off to a Stalinist block where we schlepped our luggage and bikes five storeys up a scary staircase before setting off to see the sights. The city has enormously wide main streets almost empty of traffic (I hear that Pyongyang and Burma's Naypyidaw are similar in this respect), lined by memorials to the 1992 war that saw Transdniestria win its independence from Moldova. Transdniestria has been Russian for 2 centuries, far longer than the rest of Moldova, and identifies itself as a Russian-speaking Soviet state. Big billboards talked about the importance of allying Transdniestria with Russia, and about the glories of the Red Army's victory in World War Two. People on the streets seemed more sedate and content than in, say, Ukraine. We saw plenty of young couples walking their dogs or pushing prams, and none of the public drunkenness and restless undertone of aggression that characterizes so many ex-Soviet states. We passed a curious sight in the form of the only embassies in Tiraspol: those of the equally fictitious countries of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We had a few conversations with curious locals (tourists are a bit of a rarity in Tiraspol) and then left the Brezhnev era by walking through the doors of Andy's Pizza, an exemplary fast-food chain that fed us tasty, massive meals at ridiculously cheap prices. A stroll back along the Dniestr River, with a tiny sliver of new moon in the sky, and it was time for a well-earned sleep. Leaving Transdniestria was far easier than getting in. We rode ten kilometres (TD is a very long, thin sliver of country) to the border outside Bendery and got ready for the inevitable bribe requests. This time our offence was overstaying our visa (our 24 hours was suddenly retroactively changed to 10 hours) and not registring with the police. This time I calmly stated our case in Russian, again and again, and eventually the guard got bored and decided there were easier pickings to be had from Moldovan BMWs waiting in line behind us. We got out for free, and were very glad to be across the Moldovan checkpoints where the border guards just wanted to chat about bike touring, rather than asking for hundreds of euros. The ride to Chisanau was relatively easy, although traffic got pretty heavy as we approached the capital. The countryside got a bit more interesting: vineyards, lavender and steep riverbanks lined the road. After a delightful picnic in a watermelon patch, we rolled into the endless urban sprawl of Chisanau around 4 pm. The hotel that Terri had had to book to get her visa turned out to be excellent, a renovated ex-Intourist concrete monstrosity, and we settled in for 24 hours of hedonism: microbreweries, a wine tour to the outstanding Cricova winery (120 km of underground wine cellars and a collection of antique wines to die for, many of them confiscated from Hermann Goehring) and an afternoon sipping fine Cricova champagne and putting Terri's bike into a box for flying. Terri headed back to Switzerland at 5:30 on a night train to Bucharest, leaving me alone to catch up on my blog and contemplate the next leg of my journey, a swing north and west through Romania, eastern Hungary and eastern Slovakia. After my recent bout of relaxation, I'm hoping that my legs are ready for two weeks of non-stop cycling! I'm also excited about the fact that Romania will be the hundredth country I've visited in my travels; I'm about half the way to visiting every country on earth, but I think I've done the easy half first. Peace and Tailwinds Graydon

Rushin' Through Russia, Crawling Through Crimea

Odessa, July 2nd Terri and I are in Odessa, a very European-feeling cosmopolitan city, after a long night bus journey from Yalta. I ordinarily avoid all encounters with public transport, but the ferry that we thought would take us from Yalta to Odessa didn't exist, so we were reduced to the ignominy of a night bus. Since I last wrote, Terri and I rode eight days from Sochi to Yalta, along the northeast coast of the Black Sea. It was a lot harder going than I had expected, for a number of reasons: extreme hilliness, heavy traffic and a day and a half of crazy winds. We were quite relieved to make it to Yalta when we had planned to, and also quite happy to take a couple of days off the bike before heading off towards Moldova tomorrow. Terri and I were quite happy to have a leisurely couple of days off in Sochi. I was able to find a local bike mechanic to rebuild my back wheel with a new rim, and we were able to enjoy the wonderful sets, great lighting and fabulous voices of the local opera company performing Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades. By coincidence I had just read the Pushkin short story on which the opera is based, so I could follow the story. Terri was entranced by her first-ever opera. On the second day, we were able to lounge by the pool at our swanky hotel, getting ourselves psyched up for the road ahead. Our first day out of Sochi was perhaps the least enjoyable of the eight days. The traffic was relentless, with endless trucks grinding by noisily, covering us with diesel fumes. The road was a constant roller-coaster, climbing up hills and then diving steeply downward to cross rivers. We had hoped to make it to Tuapse, or perhaps beyond, but we had to stop at the small beach town of Shepsi, after 103 hard-fought kilometres and 2300 vertical metres. Terri snapped a spoke within an hour of starting cycling, and I was lucky to be able to fix it, as she had no spare spokes. Luckily, it was the spoke nipple that snapped, and not the spoke itself, and my spare nipples fit. In Shepsi, we enjoyed the cultural anthropology of watching the Russians at play on the beach: it was like every carnival sideshow strip in the world rolled together into one. People were firing BB guns at tin cans, trying to win stuffed animals; punching electronic punching bags; having their hair done in cornrows; barbecuing kebabs on the rocky shore; posing in the waves for sunset photos; being fired into the air by bungee catapults; having their fortunes read; buying hideous souvenirs. The next day began with more of the same: heat, hills and hideous traffic, as far as the important road junction of Djugba. Towards the end of the day, the hills relented a bit, but we only covered 80 km and climbed 1500 metres. We stayed in a small tourist apartment run by a cheerful local family, had a dip on the local beach, and went out to a local nightclub to dance to Russian pop tunes. One of the songs had the chorus line of "Dolce e Gabbana", appropriate given the Russian love of name brand consumer items. I tried a Dagestani brandy that tasted rather like distilled sweet sherry. On the third morning, much of the heavy truck traffic and some of the tourist car traffic vanished as we passed the road junction to Krasnodar and the cities of central Russia. The road flattened a bit as well, and we made good progress through a prosperous-looking countryside full of fruit orchards and roadside fruit stands. We had a lovely lunch stop beside a pretty waterfall, swam in the swimming hole below and enjoyed being out of traffic and in nature. The ride along the coast to Novorossiysk was pleasant and gave great coastal views. We stopped for a beer at a cafe run by a very personable Ukrainian named Stepan, who regaled us with tall tales. A few minutes later, a former professional cyclist named Edvard, a very well-preserved 72-year-old, stopped us to ask Terri if she would sell him her bicycle. He wasn't impressed with Terri's touring setup, or my cycling style (seat too high, not perfectly level). We rode through the immense industrial sprawl of Novorossiysk looking for a place to stay and for a bike shop to buy Terri some spokes. We struck out on spokes, but found a pleasant hotel in a forest behind a soccer stadium to sleep the sleep of the dead after 115 km. The last day in Russia was an absolute marathon. We climbed up over a hill to get out of Novorossiysk and entered a landscape transformed. Gone were the Caucasus, my constant companion since Gori, replaced by the great Eurasian steppe: rolling treeless plains stretching off to Manchuria in the east and Hungary in the west. The advantage of the steppe for cycling is that it's pretty flat; the disadvantage is that there's no shelter from the wind. We had several episodes of tough headwinds, but they were compensated by long stretches of tailwind that allowed us to rack up an impressive 145 km to the very end of the road in Russia, a 10-km sand spit leading to Port Kavkaz, a ferry port leading to the Crimea. We were shattered after nearly 9 hours in the saddle, especially as the last 10 km were into a ferocious headwind. We caught a late ferry and slept on the Ukrainian side in the "VIP lounge" at the ferry terminal, on some very comfortable couches. We awoke to a howling gale, and were told that this was pretty usual for this corner of the world. The difference in temperature between the Black Sea (to the south) and the Sea of Azov (to the north) creates constant screaming southerly winds that rake this barren, treeless corner of the Crimea. We battled gale-force crosswinds all day, finally giving up the fight after 73 hard-fought kilometres in which Terri (whose lightly loaded bike cut through the wind better than my heavy bike with its big front panniers) spent a lot of time trying to break the wind for me. We searched for a place to stay, but in this bleak Mongolian landscape, there were few people living and no hotels. We searched a nearby village for a place to put up our tent, and were shocked by the bleak, grinding rural poverty evident in the houses. We were relieved to find a nearby Uzbek chaikhana open, and slurped down lots of mutton and potatoes before putting up our tent in the shelter of their rose garden. We awoke to more howling winds and cold, grey skies. It took more hours of struggle to finally reach the coast near Feodosiya, where it was a shock to the system to find vast holiday hotel complexes; it was a world away from the Hungry Steppe we had just crossed. We had a lavish lunch at a posh restaurant, watching dolphins frolic offshore, and enjoyed being out of the fury of the tempest. We rode along, in calm air, past Feodosiya and over a hill to the small, pretty bay of Koktebel, surrounded by the vineyards that produce its excellent brandy (a huge step up from the Dagestani stuff). Although we had only done 60 km, we stopped early to let ourselves recover from the wind. We wandered the boardwalk, eating pizza and shashlik and (thanks to my mistranslation of a menu) chicken livers before turning in, hoping that the next day would be easier. It wasn't. We had a day equally vertical (2300 m) as the first day out of Sochi, although with much nicer views and far fewer cars. The hills were ridiculously steep, and we spent a lot of time far above the coast, in a landscape that seemed out of the Greek islands: limestone, vineyards, sparse savanna, golden grass. Occasionally we would dip to the coast, where Russians and Ukrainians were camping on the nicest beaches we'd seen yet. The day ended with Terri almost mutinous at the thought of yet another climb, but we set off and found a lovely beach at Ribache waiting for us on the other side. We devoured huge quantities of noodles, dumplings and shashlik before collapsing into bed in a fancy tourist apartment with wonderful sea views. The last day into Yalta had another fantastically vertical morning, but then, after fortifying ourselves in the town of Alushta for more of the same, the afternoon featured only one big climb and then a more-or-less level traverse, looking down on pretty bays and up at high coastal mountains. We dropped into Yalta, found a place to stay, and set about trying to find the ferry that was going to take us to Odessa. We quickly found that it didn't exist, so we changed plans and, after an enjoyable evening taking in the atmosphere of the boardwalk, yesterday morning we got bus tickets and then set off on foot to visit Yalta's most famous attraction, Tsar Nicholas II's summer home at the Great Livadia Palace. It is more famous as the site of the Yalta Conference, where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt decided the fate of post-war Europe. After a long walk through the post-Soviet concrete disaster zone that is southern Yalta, we came out at the beautiful palace and enjoyed the views. By complete coincidence, a month ago I was at the site of the last great WWII Allied leaders' conference, at Potsdam, outside Berlin, where I kayaked past the houses used by Stalin, Trumana and Attlee during those talks. And a couple of weeks ago, in Gori, I walked through the rail car that Stalin took from Moscow to Yalta (well, to Simferopol) for the Yalta Conference. World War Two is dogging my footsteps, and will continue to do so as I cycle onwards this summer across what historian Timothy Snyder has dubbed the Bloodlands. We had a lovely day off in Odessa today, walking the streets, checking out the Pushkin Museum (he was exiled here for a year early in his career) and the famous Potemkin Steps and soaking up the lovely atmosphere. Tomorrow, it's back to the bikes, and an early start towards Trans-Dniestria (another slightly fictional ex-Soviet pseudo-state) and then Moldova, where Terri will head back to work, leaving me to continue northwest into Romania, Hungary and Slovakia before coming back to the Ukraine.

Cracking Up in Sochi

Sochi, June 20th

I have been pretty lax about updating my blog since the beginning of the trip, but now that I have a few days off the bike, here in the Russian Riviera, it's a good chance for me to bring myself up to date.

I last wrote from Gori. After my day off there with Stalin (and the disturbing mementos: Stalin beer glasses? Busts? Wine? We've got them!) and the medieval cave city of Uplistsikhe, I rode for nine consecutive days, heading west, then looping north through the wonderful tower-studded valleys of Svaneti, before returning to the lowlands to head across the breakaway republic of Abkhazia and into Russia.

The two days I spent riding to Kutaisi, along the main east-west Georgian highway, were fairly dreadful in terms of cycling. The traffic was intense, full of aggressive lunatics in Ladas, the scenery was indifferent, and it spent much of both days raining. On the first night, I found myself staying in a room in a holiday dacha in an old Soviet spa town called Sorami, surrounded by quite lovely pine forests. I was glad to be indoors, as most of the afternoon and night saw an enormous downpour hammering down. The second night, in Kutaisi, I stayed with a cheerful Georgian family in their homestay near the cathedral of Kutaisi, which looked lovely from a distance but proved to be a ruin under scaffolding when I got closer.

From this point onwards, cycling got a lot harder. Two years ago, when I was last in Georgia, I rode up the three main roads leading into the Caucasus in eastern Georgia, but didn't have time to explore the most famous area in the Georgian mountains, the remote region of Svaneti. This year's swing through Georgia was largely planned in order to remedy this omission. I set off from Kutaisi on a four-day blitzkrieg mission to get to Svaneti and back. I chose to take a back road, up through the town of Lentekhi and Lower Svaneti, then up over the 2620-metre-high Zagar Pass and into Upper Svaneti. Most tourists skip this route, as few jeeps take this remote and poorly-maintained track, and I thought it would be good to take advantage of having my own wheels to explore it.

The ride to Lentekhi was remarkably easy, with pavement most of the way, despite reports to the contrary. I started out passing through the grand old sanatorium town of Tskaltubo, where the local police kindly escorted me through the unsigned maze of roads that made up the town. The road did not climb as much as I would have hoped in elevation, despite lots of annoying ups and downs over foothills to get into the right valley (the delightfully unpronounceable Tskhenistkali). There were beautiful sections of deep gorge, with walls of rock and forests of oak and hornbeam soaring overhead. Eventually the valley relented and a broad basin of agricultural villages flanked the road, with prosperous-looking orchards not yet bearing fruit. I got more attention from the police in Tsageri, and then, as the day ended and I found a secluded riverside campsite, another group of police showed up to make sure I was OK. I appreciated the concern, but not the fact that they returned at midnight and 5 am to wake me up and make sure I was OK. It was not a restful night!

The next day was brutally hard, as the road deteriorated into little more than a mudslide and I fought my way uphill past the zone of permanent settlement. I passed a deserted village (nobody had moved uphill for the summer grazing season yet) and camped at the head of a magnificent valley, with a huge peak soaring into the (rain)clouds and an immense glacier providing the start of a rushing mountain river. Unfortunately, this idyllic spot's charms were dampened by the unrelenting rain that had dogged me all afternoon, the horrific state of the jeep track (a pass by a bulldozer had only made it worse; I pushed the bike for a couple of hours, unable to ride) and the view just downstream. There, in the midst of this majestic scenery, the Soviets had put some sort of industrial operation, perhaps related to road construction, perhaps related to the military. It lay in ruins, surrounded by thousands of rusting metal barrels which coloured the soil and water. I have no idea what was in them, but it didn't look at all healthy. I stayed well uphill of this zone of poison and slept well on a bed of grass and spectacular wildflowers.

The next morning I awoke to yet more rain, and spent the morning pushing my bike up over the last few hundred vertical metres of the Zagar Pass, a wonderful area of pristine meadows, birds, frogs and wildflowers. There was still a lot of snow around, but luckily the bulldozer had cleared a path through the patches that had covered the road until a few days previously. When I finally reached the top, the descent proved to be almost as hard as the ascent, trying to keep my bike under control on the rockfall that was the road surface. The track would disappear periodically into bomb-crater-sized mud puddles that were remarkably hard to ride. Eventually, brakes locked, I slithered into Ushguli, the highest village in Svaneti, bristling with the medieval-looking defensive towers that make Svaneti legendary. The towers were there, but it was raining so hard it was hard to take out my camera and try to capture them. Eventually I gave up the struggle and headed down a narrow, gloomy gorge where the Ingur river starts its long march to the Black Sea. I bottomed out at another pretty, rainy village, then climbed up over a small pass to a tributary valley where it stopped raining for the first time in over 24 hours. The view down into this valley was enchanting, a series of villages, each boasting a half-dozen or more Svan towers, under the green slopes of the valley's forests and meadows, adorned with yellow rhododendron blooms. I took my share of photos, then bumped down to find a place to stay in Mestia, the region's capital.

Refreshed by some wonderful cooking at Nino's homestay, I set off early the next morning for what I hoped would be an epic day. The road down to Zugdidi had been described to me by locals as "normalno", but it was an endless morass of mud and construction for the first 90 km. The first few dozen kilometres gave me great views, as the sun had come out to reveal the high peaks of the Caucasus. I was particularly taken by the view of Ushba, the emblematic Svan summmit. After this, the road dropped into the deep gorge of the Ingur that swallowed up all expansive vistas. I kept soldiering on grimly, and eventually, halfway around a huge hydroelectric reservoir, I saw the first real pavement I'd seen in three days. Heartened by this, as well as by a couple of cups of wine and some food that were forced on me by a merry birthday party beside the road, I dug deep and rode hard until 9 pm, through the richest, lushest part of Georgia, getting to Zugdidi at dusk. I ate an enormous meal and slept like the dead after ten and a half hours and 140 km over terrible roads.

I awoke feeling surprisingly fresh and rode off to the Abkhaz border the next morning. I had waited months to get my permission to enter this self-declared independent state (it broke away from Georgia during a bloody 1992-93 war that saw 70% of the population flee to Georgia), and I was slightly nervous about the various visa and border-crossing problems that could arise. I needn't have worried. After a rather gruff interrogation from the Georgians, I made my way across my companion for the past two days, the Ingur River, and entered Abkhazia, unsure what to expect.

Southern Abkhazia, or at least what I could see of it through the steady rain, was a largely depopulated wasteland, with nature reclaiming hundreds of abandoned houses and overgrown orchards. I rode along, hoping to get to Sukhumi before 6 pm in order to get my visa at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I showed up at 5, but was told that the bank at which I had to pay my fee was closed, and could I come back on Monday? I gritted my teeth, found an overpriced hotel, and settled in for the best sleep I'd had since the beginning of the trip.

I decided to try my luck at the northern border without a visa, and so set off to Gagra the next morning, after finding the only money-changer open on a Saturday. Abkhazia is off the world banking grid, so no ATMs and credit cards work there, and there are no private moneychangers. It added up to a late departure, but the ride to Gagra was short and easy, even with a stop to see the impressive Russian Orthodox monastery in Novy Afon (New Athos, as in Mt. Athos in Greece). Gagra was throbbing with Russian tourists, and I found a little homestay, went for a slightly disappointing swim, a satisfying supper and a beer at a nightclub that was full of Russian families dancing away with their children until the power went out all over town and we all went home to sleep at 10:30.

Yesterday I set off from Gagra for the border somewhat apprehensive. Would I be sent back to Sukhumi to collect my visa? Would I be told that I couldn't cross the border at all? (When I applied for my visa, I was told that it was forbidden to use Abkhazia to cross between Georgia and Russia.) As it turned out, after a pleasant seaside ride, with lovely vistas of forested mountains dropping into the Black Sea, the Abkhaz never even looked at me as I followed a line of Russian cars leading to the Russian passport post. A quick stamp, and I was into Russia.

Sochi is hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, and the road leading from the border to Sochi is an endless construction zone that made riding very unpleasant. I was pleased to make it into town unscathed. Terri is joining me tomorrow for the next leg of this ride, so I will have a couple of days off the bike, good for letting tired muscles rebuild. Sochi so far seems like an overpriced, underwhelming beach resort full of the Russian nouveaux-riches. I am told that the coastline improves as you head northwest along the coast, so I'm hoping for better things soon.

More worryingly, I found a series of cracks in my rear wheel rim yesterday. This means that the wheel will have to be rebuilt with a new rim. I have to find the local bike mechanic this afternoon and make sure that he can do the job. This is the second rim that I have trashed on this bike; the first one was probably a freak flaw in the rim, but this wheel was never as robust as it should have been, and I'm a bit unhappy at the Swiss mechanics who looked it over and declared it fine a few weeks ago.

So from here, the plan is to ride through the Russian Riviera to the Crimea, crossing into the Ukraine, and then taking a ferry from Yalta to Odessa before riding into Trans-Dniestria, Moldova and Romania. I'm reading ahead in my Lonely Planet, getting excited about upcoming destinations. I can't wait!

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon