Bobbing Around In the Baltic: A Finnish Sailing Trip (July 2015)

Ottawa, October 22, 2015

When I got back to Leysin from my Danube bike trip, I was barely in town for 24 hours before I got back on another airplane with my bicycle, this time on a solo trip to Finland, Sweden and Norway.  Terri had to go back to work for her last term of school during July and August, so I was on my own.  Finland and Sweden were the last countries of Europe (other than the self-declared independent pseudostate of South Ossetia) that I had never visited, so I wanted to visit them before I waved farewell to Europe.  

On July 9^th, I hopped from Geneva to Zurich to Copenhagen to Helsinki, where I found my friend JP waiting for me.  Unfortunately, my bike box didn’t make the same connections, and we arranged for it to be delivered the next morning to JP’s house in Espoo.  We headed off with JP’s mom with two mountain bikes on a bike rack of her nice car.  The plan was to hitch a lift with her 40 km out of Espoo to the small town of Lohja and then JP and I would ride the rest of the way to her house so that we could get some exercise and I could see the southern Finnish countryside.  We pulled up in Lohja, got out of the car, and all stared like stunned mullets at the back end of the car:  there were no bicycles there, and the bike rack itself was gone!  We looked a little more closely, and discovered that the trailer hitch on which the rack had been sitting had fallen right off.  We couldn’t believe we hadn’t noticed this, and were worried that we might have unwittingly caused a serious accident.  We turned around and drove back and found the bikes, rack and trailer hitch safe and miraculously undamaged on the road 100 metres back, where we had driven over a small speed bump entering the downtown area.  We breathed a sigh of relief and set off on our bikes.

Nice view from JP's mom's place.

The bike ride was pleasant, through a rolling countryside that could have been taken from anywhere in the Canadian Shield:  small lakes, birch and spruce forests, occasional farms carved out of the woods, little traffic.  In fact one of the reasons why Finland was so low on my to-visit list for years was that I knew that the countryside was going to look familiar.  In fact Thunder Bay, my home town, has a sizeable population of people with Finnish last names, the result of heavy Finnish immigration over the past hundred years, partly because the area around Thunder Bay is so similar to Finland.  We ended up at the house that JP’s mother and stepfather live in, a summer cottage on a peaceful lake, now converted into a beautiful year-round residence.  We ate a delicious salmon dinner, swam in the chilly lake and then had a few rounds of steaming in the sauna and cooling ourselves in the lake.  I slept like a log.

The next morning JP’s mom, an executive with a big media conglomerate, headed into the office and gave us a lift back to Espoo.  Given the previous day’s debacle, we took the wheels off the bikes and fitted them (barely) into the back of the Volvo!  JP and I managed to get in an hour of tennis before the heavens opened in a Biblical downpour that made us less excited about exploring downtown Helsinki.  We did manage to drop by the harbour, where JP’s brother owns a tall ship, the Swanhild, that he charters to groups over the summer.  A group was just assembling to start a cruise, and we socialized for a bit.  JP often goes along on these cruises as the chef, so I was looking forward to the food on our upcoming sailing trip!

In the mid-afternoon, we crammed a car full of food, my bike box (freshly arrived from the airport), JP, myself and JP’s girlfriend Miia and drove a few hours west, past the previous day’s destination, out to a small yacht harbour on the island of Kirjais.  

Typical archipelago scenery

The south coast of Finland is a cartographer’s nightmare, an intricate pattern of islands, islets, rocks and shallow rocky shoals all emerging slowly from the waters of the Baltic as the land continues its rebound after the most recent Ice Age.  This emergent shoreline makes for thousands of tiny islands and tricky but beautiful sailing, and it was where we would spend the next week exploring.  JP and Miia actually had a two-week timeslot, but I was planning to hop off partway through that period with my bike to catch a ferry to Stockholm. 

Curves and lines in the rigging

JP grew up sailing a lot with his father and has the best of both worlds:  access to a boat without having to be an owner.  His father and three friends bought a 36-foot sailboat, Blondi, years ago and have a timeshare arrangement, rather like a holiday condominium.  As the original owners get older, they don’t always use their full time allotments, and JP’s father lets him use some of his time; in exchange JP does a lot of the maintenance work on the boat over the winter.  Not being an owner frees JP from being the butt of jokes like “What are the two happiest days in a sailboat owner’s life?  The day he buys his boat, and the day he sells it.”  We met the crew who had had the boat for the previous week (the son of one of other co-owners and his friends, two of them professional snowboard photographers and videographers; I wish I had had more time to talk to them), then moved our gear aboard in a steady drizzle, and handed the keys to the car to the other crew to drive back to Helsinki.  (It was actually the other guy’s car which we had driven from Espoo; boat handovers involve a fair amount of co-ordination and logistics.)  By 9 pm we were sailing out into the intricate jigsaw puzzle of the Finnish archipelago, searching for a perfect anchorage as the rain stopped and the skies cleared.  Since JP has sailed so extensively in the area, he knows it like the back of his hand and found us a spot behind the tiny island of Blyglo that was sheltered from any waves or wind.  We anchored, pulled out a portable barbecue grill and JP grilled up a huge feast of veggies, lamb and shrimp/scallop skewers.  We fell asleep at 12:30 with the sky still in twilight; early July in southern Finland has essentially no true night.  I slept exceptionally well in my slightly coffin-like berth in the bow.

The skipper is also a pretty fine chef!

The next morning we were up at 8:20 and JP broke with his usual tradition by switching on the boat’s engine.  We motored to a nearby island in search of freshly smoked fish.  JP knew from bitter past experience that this little fish shop often runs out of fish fairly early in the day, and was determined to be first in line at the counter.  We moored next to a number of sailboats that had spent the night there and walked briskly into the fish shop.  Our alacrity paid off as we had our choice of numerous species of fish, either cold-smoked, warm-smoked or fresh.  We bought a small mountain of fish, loaded it into the tiny onboard refrigerator and went out for a walk around the island.  

The world was a bit tilted that day

Historically these islands have been farmed, although the number of people willing to live in relative isolation, raising a handful of sheep and cows, has been steadily declining.  This island had two farms on it, but only one is really in operation, and its animals had been shuttled over to a neighbouring island, so we had the forests and meadows more or less to ourselves.  A lookout tower provided wonderful views of the surrounding islands, so densely scattered over the sea that it looked impossible to find safe passage through the maze.

Beer o'clock

Back on the boat, we set sail and tacked upwind in quite a strong breeze to the island of Berghamn.  The names of most of the islands of the Finnish coast, along with most of the people living there, are Swedish.  The 7 percent of the Finnish population who are ethnically and linguistically Swedish are concentrated along the coastline and on the offshore islands.  We walked around another pretty hiking trail taking photos, then returned to the boat for a feast of smoked fish, washed down with a fine mojito, JP’s drink of choice.  We carried a large amount of fresh mint for the entire week just for the purposes of making a good mojito.  

Perfect mojitos every evening

At 4 pm we roused ourselves and sailed on an exhilarating run at nearly 7 knots with a howling tailwind.  

Me at the helm with JP charting our course

I took the helm under JP’s watchful gaze and loved the feeling of steering such a big boat, trying to keep a steady course through the rolling waves.  All too soon we tied up in the yacht harbour of Noto, where the village festival was scheduled for the evening.  We walked around the tiny, pretty village and played a wonderful Finnish outdoor game called Mollky, involving throwing wooden blocks around the grass trying to knock down numbered blocks to get a required score.  More mojitos and supper followed before we headed off to the annual village festival, the reason we had come here.  It was a fun evening of dancing, drinking, listening to music and chatting with other yachties.  There was a wedding earlier in the day and at 11 pm the wedding party arrived in force to inject energy into the dancing.  JP and Miia, keen salsa dancers, lit up the dance floor with their moves.  Around 1 in the morning we wandered back to Blondi to catch some sleep.

Miia at the helm 

The next day, July 12^th, we got up late and had a lazy morning, not leaving the harbour until noon.  We sailed a short distance to the island of Bjorko to hike and swim in a large freshwater lake in the interior of the small island.  It had been a dismally cold and grey summer up until that point in Finland, and the lake, like the Baltic, was quite chilly, but we all got in and felt slightly cleaner as a result.  When we got back to the boat, JP decided that since we had sunshine and a favourable wind direction we should head southeast to the island of Uto, the southernmost island in Finland.  It was two and a half hours of beating, tacking upwind in a strong wind and decent swell.  Halfway there, sitting in the open cockpit at the back of the boat while JP steered, I suddenly felt seasick and had to head to my berth to lie down and sleep it off.  I re-emerged as JP steered us into the harbour of Uto, feeling much better but having missed quite a pretty passage between the rocky islands.

The fine art of sailing sideways

Sitting in Uto harbour we took advantage of Finland’s absurdly fast 4G mobile phone data network to connect JP’s computer to the internet and watch the last set of the Federer-Djokovic final at Wimbledon.  As Federer fans, we were both disappointed in the outcome, but I found it amazing that we could watch it so easily over the mobile phone network at the utmost extremity of the country.  We dined on a wonderful sausage and blue cheese omelette that JP whipped up and then went for a stroll around the island.  Uto has always been a key spot, controlling one of the few deepwater shipping channels through the archipelago, and is adorned by a huge lighthouse, old military bunkers, a cemetery for the generations of ship pilots who have lived and worked on Uto, and lots and lots of wild strawberries that we picked and gobbled down by the handful.  Miia was happy that she found a geocache near the cemetery that she had been unable to locate the previous summer.

The next day we woke up to the sound of someone wanting to leave his docking spot; since the harbour was crowded, our boat was in the way, so JP rapidly moved it while I lay in my berth in a slight daze wondering what the noise was all about.  Bacon and eggs followed for breakfast before Miia and I tackled a small mountain of dirty dishes.  

Karlsby harbour, Kokar

At 11:45 we set sail for a longer day of sailing, crossing from the Finnish archipelago to the autonomous Aland archipelago.  As we sailed out of Uto, through a maze of small islands, the wind died and we spent hours floundering and becalmed, watching the Uto lighthouse not getting much smaller astern.  Finally at 5:15 we gave up, turned on the engine and motored for a while until we caught up to some wind to take us into Karlsby harbour on the island of Kokar.  The harbour was small and very pretty and full of yachts.  We put on running attire and went for a 50-minute run halfway across the island.  After four days on the boat, it was a relief to stretch the legs and get some serious exercise.  On our return we took advantage of the harbour’s sauna (Finns build saunas absolutely everywhere, as a basic human need) before taking our grill ashore and having yet another great supper, watching the colourful perpetual twilight of a Northern summer night.

More typical Aland scenery

We took it fairly easy the next morning, doing some much-needed laundry, showering and shaving and then renting bicycles.  It was clear and sunny and perfect weather to explore the island.  We rode out to the island’s church and the ruins of its Franciscan friary, then hiked out to the remains of a Bronze Age sealing camp from 1000 BC, when the island was an amazing 17 metres lower above the Baltic than it is now.  

Kokar church

We next rode out to an apple orchard where we had a lovely fish lunch, bought apple ciders and ate an Aland pancake.  The pancake wasn’t what I was expecting; it more of a savoury Spanish omelette than a pancake, but it was very tasty.  The bicycles we had rented were upright one-speeds, but they were fine for such a flat island.  The roads were full of groups of cycle tourists; by combining cycling and ferry rides, the entire Aland archipelago can be explored by bicycle, and it is probably the most popular cycling tour in all of Finland.  Back at the boat we did dishes, had a shower and finally left at 5 pm.  We sailed west, then north along the west coast of Kokar and finally northwest towards a deserted anchorage near Huso which JP had spotted on his chart.  I took the helm again for a while so that JP could cook, an impressive feat in the rolling boat.  We ate a delicious pasta with tuna and tomatoes, then sailed into the little cove.  All went well until it was time for either Miia or me to jump ashore to tie up the boat.  Miia didn’t like the look of the drop onto the steep rock of the shore, so I volunteered to jump.  I landed perfectly, but the rock had slippery moss on it and I lost my footing and slid down into the Baltic.  I swam around to the stern and I thought that no damage had been done until I realized that my binoculars were around my neck.  Despite valiant attempts to dry them out, that was the end of those binoculars as optical instruments!  JP found an adjacent landing spot and Miia successfully tied us up while I changed into dry clothes.

JP:  the fearless skipper

My Baltic swim aside, the island was beautiful:  completely uninhabited, with a dense forest and the droppings of moose who swim from island to island in search of grazing.  We went for a walk around searching for berries; no blueberries showed up, but there were lots of tiny strawberries instead.  It was an unbelievably peaceful spot to spend the night, with barely a ripple on the sheltered water and the cries of terns and gulls the only sounds as I fell asleep. 

Our next day, July 15^th, was perhaps the best day of sailing of the entire trip.  We woke up at the fashionably late hour of 10 am, breakfasted and then sailed through a succession of dramatic narrow passages between islands before beating upwind to the town of Degerby.  The Alands are far more populated than the Finnish archipelago, and Degerby was the biggest town I had seen since we left the mainland.  I debated hopping off the sailboat there and catching a ferry to Marienhamn, the capital of the Alands, but JP convinced me to stay aboard until we sailed to Marienhamn.  I was very glad that I listened to him, as our late afternoon cruise

The Aland flag

OK; we're not really heeling over that much!

out of Degerby was perfect.  We had sat out a heavy rainstorm while eating lunch on the boat, but the sky cleared and we sailed under sunny skies and good winds, beating upwind at over 6 knots.  I got to take the helm again and loved the feeling of being in control of such a complex machine.  Soon enough we were motoring into a perfect cliff-lined anchorage surrounded by a landscape straight out of a Tom Thompson painting. 

Salsaing up a storm on the granite boulders

We drank mojitos atop a cliff, and then JP and Miia turned on some Latin music and danced salsa on the flat rock while I shot videos of them.  Then we collected dry wood and grilled chicken fajitas, with flambéed crepes for dessert, over an open fire.  It was a perfect ending to a wonderful day of sailing.

The next day, July 16^th, was my last day on Blondi.  We had savoury crepes with smoked fish for breakfast, then lazed around reading, doing dishes and watching JP swim in the chilly Baltic.  He had been disappointed with the weather for the trip, as the previous year in early July it had been 30 degrees and he and his friends had sailed in swimsuits for a week, swimming in the Baltic every day.  I hadn’t swum yet once in the Baltic, aside from my involuntary dunking the day before, and I hadn’t even been tempted, given the air and sea temperatures.  Eventually, around 2:30, we lifted anchor and sailed towards Mariehamn.  It took three hours, most of it in strong winds that had us scudding along at between 6 and 7 knots.  

Another memorable meal

I had my last turn at the helm as we raced up the long sound leading to the capital.  Just as we arrived, a massive rainstorm hit, and we sat indoors, waiting for the squall to blow over.  While JP and Miia went for a run, I took my bicycle out from under the tarp on the foredeck where it had been lashed for the past week and put it together out on the quay.  By the time JP and Miia came back, I was ready to roll.  I felt sad saying goodbye after such a great week together, but it was time to start cycling.  We discussed meeting up in Lappland in a week’s time, as they were planning to go fishing up in another family cottage in the far north and I was headed in that direction too.  One last round of hugs and I was off, riding through the big, bad city in search of a ferry to Stockholm.

The last evening at our perfect anchorage

The Aland islands are a legal oddity.  They’re ethnically Swedish, but were once the westernmost bit of the Russian empire.  When Finland became independent of Russia after World War One, Finland got the islands, and the first case ever decided by the International Court of Justice was between Finland and Sweden over which country could have sovereignty over the archipelago.  Finland won the case, but Aland was granted extensive autonomy, with its own customs, post office and license plates.  The Aland flag with its red cross superimposed over a Swedish yellow-cross-on-blue background flutters proudly on many flagpoles.  The Aland produced a lot of emigrants over the years (including the grandfather of my American friend Cris Lindquist), along with plenty of sailors and quite a few wealthy shipping magnates.  Their turn-of-the-century mansions still line the main street in Marienhamn.

I waited until the wee small hours to catch a Stockholm-bound ferry at 4:30 am.  I was pretty bleary-eyed when I tumbled off the ferry and rode to the train station to see what the scoop was on taking a train north to Swedish Lappland.  The scoop was simple:  no dice.  Swedish trains don’t accept bicycles unless you have a folding bike, which seems like a very retrograde policy for a progressive country like Sweden.  I checked out the possibility of taking a bus north, but that wasn’t a whole lot better, plus there were no tickets to be had for days.  I decided to buy a ferry ticket back to Helsinki (the first one available was for the following afternoon) and then headed off to explore a few sights in town.  I loved the National History Museum for its great prehistoric section, featuring stories of a number of bodies found over the years, and for its Gold Room, full of wonderful gold crowns and coins and reliquaries.  I also stopped in at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to look around the Nobel Prize Museum. 

The Royal Swedish Academy

It’s small but very well done, with lots of video information and a video installation of a number of laureates talking about what is important in life and learning.  The old neighbourhood outside the Academy, Gamla Stan, is Baroque and charming and full of tourists and street musicians.  I had a truly bizarre conversation with a middle-class Iranian tourist.  Was it true, he asked, that if you emigrated to Canada, the government would give you a farm for free and a hunting and fishing area for yourself, again for free?  I assured him that this was definitely not the case, but I wondered whether similar tall tales fuel the current wave of migration, filling people’s heads with pretty unrealistic ideas of how wonderful life will be in the West.  I noticed that there were noticeably more non-European migrants on the streets in Stockholm than I had seen in Finland; Sweden is, along with Germany, the preferred nation of many of this summer’s surge of migrants.

A Nobel Prize winner with whom I went to grad school

I was already suffering from price tag shock (Sweden is far more expensive than Finland), so I decided to ride 12 km to a big campground on the outskirts of the city.  It was an interesting ride, through a gritty hipster area and then through endless low-rise apartment blocks out to a pretty lake.  I put up my tent, cooked up some pasta and then slept for 11 hours, making up for the previous night’s lack of shut-eye.  I woke up to rain which persisted all morning, so I stayed in the tent and read.  I also checked out some Norwegian road maps which I had purchased the previous day; I needed to figure out how far into Norway I was likely to ride, so that I could choose a departure airport.

The rain finished around 1:30 and I packed up the tent and retraced my tracks back to the ferry dock.  I rode onto the massive ferry, parked my bike, brought my sleeping mat and sleeping bag on board and installed myself in the ship’s huge nightclub to get some free wifi.  I bought a ticket for the all-you-can-eat dinner buffet and stuffed myself silly on great food, before having a beer at the pub where a drunk Swedish motorcyclist gave me 700 Swedish crowns (about 70 euros!) for my trip since “it’s better that you use it for your trip than that I buy even more beer!”  I found a somewhat quiet spot in a hallway to sleep (the cabins were booked solid) and tried to sleep, interrupted by late revellers and early risers.  Another all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast and I was back in Helsinki.  In my bleary-eyed state, I managed to lose the 700 crowns that the biker had given me; he should have bought more beer for himself after all!

My priority in Helsinki was to get a train ticket, so I rode straight to the train station and bought a ticket for myself and my bike to Rovaniemi for 6 pm that day.  Finnish trains give cyclists no hassle, as they have a separate luggage carriage with space for lots of bicycles in it.  I had a few hours to spend in Helsinki, so I headed to the national museum (good, although a bit drier and less engaging than the Swedish museum) and then went round to the two big churches (one Orthodox, one Lutheran) that dominate the downtown skyline.  Both were closed to visitors, but I got some good pictures and got to listen to a bell-ringing group giving a free concert outside the Orthodox cathedral.  

Lutheran cathedral in Helsinki

It was cold and windy and grey, threatening rain, so I decided to go back to the history museum to warm up and use their free wi-fi.  I could have gone to the station, but I thought it was a dodgy place to leave my bike.  This was ironic, as when I emerged from the museum at 5:30, I found that someone had stolen the big backpack that I keep strapped across the back of the bike, over the panniers.  That meant I no longer had a tent, sleeping bag or sleeping mat, which was a drawback if I was going to camp up in Lappland.  I was really angry and saddened by the theft, and went off to report it to the cops, only to find the police station closed on a Sunday night.  I rode off to the train station and headed 14 hours north to Rovaniemi (Santa Claus' official hometown) with my bike to start the cycling section of my trip.

Orthodox cathedral, Helsinki

Overall, the sailing and ferries part of my Nordic trip was fantastic.  The scenery in the Finnish archipelago and in the Alands is wonderful, very elemental and boreal.  I can’t thank JP and Miia enough for their amazing hospitality and for showing me such a remote and hard-to-get-to part of Finland.  I think that the Baltic islands and Lappland are the parts of Finland that are most distinctive and are most worthwhile visiting for a Canadian tourist.  I liked what I saw of Stockholm, although I was bummed that the Swedish train company’s policies prevented me from exploring more of the country.  And while I was saddened by the theft in Helsinki, I am pleasantly surprised by how infrequently this sort of thing has happened to me during the years that I have spent on the road with my bicycle.  I’m not sure when I’ll be back in Finland or Sweden, but I enjoyed my time there (much more than I enjoyed, say, Papua New Guinea!!)

Lots of twilit evenings like this

Down the Danube on a Bicycle, June 2015: Part Three--The Balkans

Stage Four—Yugoslavian Yin and Yang

Once across the Hungarian-Croatian border on Monday, June 22nd, where we saw our first border formalities of the trip (Croatia is in the EU but not in the Schengen Zone) we had a few kilometres of unpleasant cycling, along a narrow road with no real shoulder or bike path and some fast-moving trucks.  

Welcome to Croatia!

One of them actually ran Terri right off the road, much to her annoyance.  Luckily our bike path turned left away from the main road soon enough and onto the quiet road we would follow the rest of the day.  The scenery was fairly similar to Hungary:  a flat agricultural plain bordering the river, with small farms and a smattering of vineyards.  Our first village, though, showed that we had crossed a border, as it was half-deserted and partly in ruins, with little economic activity evident.  Banks and ATMs were nowhere to be found, and the only shops we found were tiny mom-and-pop corner grocery stores outside which men gathered to drink beer.  It turned out that we had arrived on a national holiday, which went some way to explaining the somnolence, but this is also the poorest corner of Croatia, still scarred by the 1991-95 war.  We had our biggest luggage-carrying climb of the trip to date, pedalling 100 metres uphill over a bend in the river, past more prosperous-looking country houses set amidst apricot orchards and vineyards.  We had pizza in a slightly larger town after 60 km which finally had an ATM, and then continued another 25 km to a tiny village called Kopacevo.  As had been the case all day, it was a mostly Hungarian-speaking village, thanks to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that sliced away huge chunks of Hungary to give to the new state of Yugoslavia.  We found an almost-deserted campground with a gargantuan kitchen for our use, and cooked up some ravioli to accompany our bottle of Schwabenblut.

The next morning was Terri’s birthday, so I got up early to raid the grocery store for a special breakfast of pancakes in the kitchen.  After that we soon rode into the large provincial capital of Osijek, a sprawling metropolis after the tiny villages of the previous day.  We didn’t pause long, heading out of town on a busy road until we finally were directed onto a less-trafficked parallel road.  At lunchtime we found ourselves in Vukovar, a town still deeply scarred by the 1991-95 war, with its water tower still bearing the marks of the pounding it took from Yugoslav forces.  

Vukovar's emblematic water tower, a war memorial

Looking for a place to eat, we discovered that while there were cafes and bars everywhere, it was almost impossible to find a restaurant serving food.  Eventually we were directed to a lovely spot beside the Danube, where we waited out a passing rainstorm.  After lunch it was a pleasant afternoon of riding through a series of small wine-producing villages, each one down a small, steep incline from the plateau on which we spent most of our time.  Luckily we had fairly strong tailwinds to propel us on our way.  By 5 o’clock we were at the end of the road in Croatia, the border town of Ilok.  

Our view over the Danube from our luxury flat

We splurged on a fancy tourist apartment overlooking the Danube owned by a family who had fled Vukovar from 1991 to 1998 because of the war.  Taking advantage of having a well-equipped kitchen, I cooked up a birthday steak dinner for Terri washed down by some excellent local Slavonian wine.

The chef is in the house!

After only two days in Croatia, we crossed into Serbia the next morning over an imposing bridge.  It was spitting rain as we went through border formalities, and it continued to rain off and on all day.  By the time we reached Novi Sad and had a late lunch, the rain had strengthened into a miserable downpour.  Since the ride into Belgrade from Novi Sad was supposed to be not much fun anyway, we decided on the spur of the moment to take advantage of the rain and take our bikes on the train straight to Belgrade.  It took forever to find the train station, and more time to figure out what platform to get on, but by 6:30 pm we were on the train using Terri’s iPhone to find a place to stay in Belgrade.  We had a long and typically Balkan conversation with a middle-aged Serbian man named Dragan.  He was well-educated and clever, but consumed by a sadness at the tragic history of his country.  He had fought in the war against Croatia and was keen to set us straight about the Serbs being the good guys in the war.  He held up Serbia as the bulwark against the Ottomans, sacrificing their own freedom to save the rest of the continent from the Turks.  It was interesting to talk to him, but his deep-seated blind nationalism was all too drearily familiar to me from my previous trip through the former Yugoslavia.  By 8:30 we were pushing our bicycles through the darkening streets to the ridiculously ornate Baroque furnishings of the apartment we had rented.

Kalemegdan fortress, Belgrade

We had a proper day off in Belgrade the next day, exploring the city on foot and absorbing some of the cultural energy that pulses through the streets.  Our first port of call was the Kalemegdan, the massive fortress at the junction of the Danube and Sava rivers that has been fought over for centuries.  

Transformer statue, central Belgrade

On the way we passed the pedestrian streets of the city centre, decorated by huge Transformer statues made from car parts and featuring more ice cream stands per block than even Italy.  The fortress itself was impressive, with expansive views to the north over the flat Hungarian-speaking plains of Vojvodina and to the west over the sprawling Soviet-era suburbs of the city.  The military museum inside the fortress was left unvisited, although Terri relived her days in military intelligence by identifying some of the tanks parked outside.  We then wandered back through the pedestrian streets of downtown, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere of a capital city in summer.  We had a great lunch at a local joint recommended by our landlady, then hit the grocery store across the street from our flat to restock our panniers and cook up another feast in the kitchen before collapsing in bed early in our aircraft-carrier-sized bed.

Refreshed by our day out of the saddle, we left Belgrade the next morning after an epic 30-minute tussle with the lock that kept our bicycles safe in the depths of the subterranean cellars of the building.  It was raining, and we were glad for frequent EV6 signs that swept us neatly out of town and over the Danube to the left bank.  After crossing our bridge on a dedicated bike lane, we were directed down a muddy track through the grass to another quiet dike-top path that got us away from the heavy truck traffic of the main road.  As we rode along, we passed a surprisingly beautiful landscape beside the river, with quiet marshy backwaters teeming with ducks and other birdlife.  We pushed along, past old grim factory towns to a radler stop in a little pizzeria, and then continued along a busyish road to a small ethnically Hungarian town, Skorenovac (Szekelykeres in Hungarian), where we came across a piece of Serbian history during a late lunch:  a restaurant owned by the family of Zoltan Dani, an officer in the Serbian army who managed to shoot down an American F-117 Stealth fighter in 1999 during the NATO air war against Serbia arising from the Kosovo conflict.  Posters of two different movies connected to the incident adorned the walls.  Afterwards we tossed in the towel a bit early from an uninspiring ride and took a room in a small, unpretentious restaurant with hotel rooms in the back.  The rain had finally fled, and we eschewed the restaurant in favour of a takeout roast chicken, fruit and beer from the market stalls across the road.

Stage Five—Through Romania’s Iron Gates

We rode under brilliant blue skies through a peaceful, bucolic countryside the next morning east towards the Serbian resort town of Bela Crkva.  It was easy riding, although we had small undulations as the road veered inland from the Danube.  Bela Crkva was a town with a pretty setting around a series of small lakes.  There was some sort of festival in town, with lots of girls dressed in traditional costumes and others incongruously wearing cheerleader outfits and twirling batons.  A look at the various churches in town told a story of the various ethnic and religious strands woven through the area:   a Catholic church for the Hungarians and Croatians, a Romanian orthodox church, a Serbian orthodox church and even a Russian orthodox church. We stopped in a café for our daily radler and fries, changed money, met our second French couple on a tandem in as many days, and then pedalled off towards the Romanian frontier.  This involved a bigger hill climb than we were used to, as the road headed up and over into the valley of another tributary of the Danube.  By the time we had freewheeled down to the bridge at the border, we had built up quite an appetite.  Luckily a little restaurant stood just on the Romanian side and we tucked into a hearty and well-earned lunch featuring the local specialty of tripe soup, which was a lot tastier than it sounds! 

We had another climb in front of us, 300 vertical metres uphill to cut a series of meanders in the river and get back to the Danube proper.  Although it was pretty warm and Terri was a bit apprehensive about our first sizeable climb of the trip, it was relatively straightforward (especially fuelled by lunch).  

At the top of the first big climb of the trip, Romania

At the top we read that we had entered the Iron Gates National Park, and we descended for 10 km to the valley of the Danube through a lovely wild forest.  All along the left bank of the river the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains rose up to inviting-looking forests.  We had planned to find some wild camping that evening, but as it got later, we still hadn’t seen any likely-looking spots amidst the farm fields.  We passed through the scruffy-looking town of Moldova Veche, a vision of post-Soviet apocalyptica, and found a surprisingly nice hotel for 70 lev (about 18 euros).  We sat out in the café over good beer and dreadful red wine, eating very meaty stews while a local crowd of single young men got louder and louder as the beer bottles piled up on their table. 

The next day was definitely the scenic highlight of the entire trip.  Our route led along the Danube through the canyon known as the Iron Gates, where the Danube forces its way through the barrier of the Carpathians.  Not far from where we had stayed, the farmland ceased and we rode through a landscape of forests and fishing spots, full of perfect camping spots.  There were Romanian fishermen camped in almost all of these spots, but I’m sure we could have found one to ourselves.  There were towns marked on our map, but these were ghost towns, abandoned Communist concrete monstrosities from the Ceausescu era.  It meant that we had few restaurant options for lunch, and even had problems finding a radler, although a tiny little café eventually came to our rescue.  As dismal as the towns were, the scenery was magnificent, with steep-sided mountain slopes cloaked in dense forests tumbling right down to the river.  The road on the Romanian side was almost deserted, as truck traffic was banned through the heart of the gorges, and surprisingly flat given the terrain.  Looking across the river, the road on the Serbian side looked far less inviting for cycling, with heavy traffic and an endless series of tunnels.  On our side, despite a landslide that had almost blocked the road in one spot, the pavement was in good shape and perfect for riding, as well as being blessedly tunnel-free.

Iron Gates scenery

The Iron Gates are redolent of history, and our first taste of it was a strange-looking structure on the Serbian shore that proved, upon inspection through binoculars, to be a large excavated Bronze Age settlement under a protective roof.  Soon afterwards the swiftly flowing waters started to pool in the huge hydroelectric reservoir of the Iron Gates Dam, and we passed the half-submerged towers of a medieval castle.  Somewhere else along this stretch, Patrick Leigh Fermor (in the course of his epic walk across Europe in 1934) visited a completely Turkish village on an island in the middle of the Danube that has vanished completely below the waterline.  I watched for protruding ruins, perhaps a drowned minaret, but didn’t see anything.  In Roman times, this was where the marauding legions of the Roman Empire crossed north into Dacia to subdue the troublesome tribes on the other side of the Danube.  Although the Romans were in Dacia for less than 100 years, modern Romanian historic mythologizing ascribes a founding role to these soldiers.

We looked for wild camping spots as the day wore on, but instead we were diverted by a vision of beauty.  After a stiff climb up to another half-abandoned industrial wasteland of a town (Dubova), we spotted a sign for an upcoming nearby pensiunea and decided to call it a day.  When we arrived, it looked far too grand for the likes of us, a vision of four-star luxury with BMWs parked outside.  The owners were amenable to negotiating down their 100 euro rack rate, and for a hair under 50 euros, Terri decided to treat us both to a night of luxury.  We swam in the pool, sat sipping red wine (much less awful than the previous evening’s plonk) and absorbed the grand views.  The hotel was located on a wide stretch of the reservoir between two gorges, and we looked across at towering limestone cliffs that lit up as the sun crept towards the horizon.  It was a perfect setting, in the most impressive scenery of the entire day, and we slept the sleep of the dead in our huge king-sized bed.

The next morning we found that after the low traffic and non-existent population of the previous day, we had re-entered modern Romania.  

Terri with Decebalus, Romania

We cycled past dozens of new pensiuneas clustered along the water’s edge, then past the huge sculpted head of the Dacian king Decebalus carved into the cliffs beside the road in the late 1990s by a Romanian business tycoon, Iosif Constantin Dragan.  It was a pretty spot for photos, but it was also another instalment in the myth-making that characterizes so much history in eastern Europe.  We climbed up, up, up away from the hotels and weekend cottages that surround the town of Eselnita, and then descended into the larger city of Orsova where we picked up all the heavy truck and bus traffic that had been diverted around the gorge.  It was an unpleasant 20-km stretch along the river past the dam itself and into the city of Drobeta-Turnu Severin.  

Camping on a grassland that once was a collective farm

Here we stopped to recover from the head-down survival riding over perhaps the slowest lunch of the trip, with an old-school waitress prone to disappearing for half an hour at a stretch.  We followed quieter roads out of town along the river and ended up camping wild in an abandoned collective farm that has returned to nature.  There we gorged ourselves on the most delicious peaches we had ever eaten, plucked lovingly by old man from his own garden and sat watching the sun set the savannah alight in a scene oddly reminiscent of East Africa.

Southwestern Romanian countryside

Our last day in Romania ended up being the longest day of the entire trip, the only time we went over 100 km for the day.  We awoke in our abandoned farm field and spent much of the day rolling through tiny villages where horse carts outnumbered cars, on roads that varied from perfect new EU-funded asphalt to rutted cart tracks across the fields. 

The bit of the road that wasn't paved

We kept almost exact pace with the local beer delivery truck, passing them as they unloaded crates at cafes and shops, and then being passed halfway to the next village with friendly waves from the delivery guys.  We eventually popped out on a main road and had a fairly terrifying 10 km of dodging speeding trucks before the traffic calmed down and we approached the last border of the trip.  We had planned to sleep one last night on the Romanian side of the river, but Terri decided we could do another 10 km to get us across the new bridge and into Bulgaria.  

Sunflowers, southwest Romania

As we trundled along a back road into town from the bridge, my rear hub, which had made strange sounds earlier in the day, suddenly seized up and made a very unpromising and very loud crunch.  I realized that I had broken a bearing, and that the wheel was going to have to be rebuilt.  We made it another kilometre to the first truck stop we could find and took a surprisingly nice room.  I demolished a huge plate of the local specialty, satch (a giant meat and veg stirfry), but Terri, normally ravenous after a long day in the saddle, barely touched hers. 

Stage Six:  Bulgarian Beauty

It was the start of 24 hours of severe intestinal distress for Terri; luckily we were already planning to take the day off to get my wheel fixed, so she could have a bit of rest.  We got a lift into the Soviet-era concrete of downtown Vidin and, with the help of our driver, a local guy who had lived for 20 years in Italy and with whom I spoke in my pidgin Italian, we located a bicycle repair specialist whose shop was in his garden shed.  He took a look at my wheel, told me to follow him on one of his bikes and took me to a bike shop to buy a new hub (for all of 12 euros).  Then he told us to come back in an hour and a half and set to work stripping the spokes and rim off the old, destroyed hub and rebuilding the wheel on the new hub.  Terri found a hairdresser and had a haircut, pedicure and scalp massage while I wandered the streets eating.  The bike mechanic was done the wheel by the time we got back; he reminded me of similar gifted mechanics who had fixed my bikes over the years in places like Tbilisi and Baku and Sochi.  Armed with the new wheel, we caught a cab back to the hotel where Terri went back to bed feeling very unwell.

At this point, wondering what to do next, I got a message from a former student, Victor, who lived in the area.  When he heard that Terri was ill and that we were kicking around in Vidin, he hopped into his truck and drove us the 20 km out to the commercial farm that he runs in the village of Tsar Petrovo.  

Teachers-student reunion with Victor

He installed us in his guest cottage and we sat outside drinking good local wine, eating a great meal that his housekeeper had prepared and hearing about how a 21-year-old who had failed out of university through sheer apathy had been transformed into a keen farmer who had won the Bulgarian Farmer of the Year award the year before.  It was great to see a young man who had found his passion in life and become so successful.

We spent the next day touring around the farm with Victor, playing with the drone that he uses to survey his fields, checking out the irrigation system, riding in combine harvesters (one of Terri’s life-long dreams) and racing around on a quad bike.  

Flying drones on the farm

It was a wonderful day, and we finished with another great meal and more stories from Victor.  It’s always a welcome development in a long trip when for a little while you cease being a tourist and fit into the life of someone who lives in the country, and see the country in a completely different way.  

Storks following the combine harvester

Through Victor we learned a lot about the poverty and unemployment that blight this corner of Bulgaria; about corruption and gangsters; about trying to get his workforce out of their Communist-era apathy; about how cheap land and houses were around Tsar Petrovo; about the enormous depopulation of the villages. 

Seriously happy looking shotgun passenger!

The next morning Victor gave us a lift about 20 km out of town to shorten what promised to be a long day.  We waved goodbye on the side of the road, grateful for his hospitality and ready for the last three days of our ride.  That day proved to be a long one, both in terms of distance (93 km) and in terms of time.  Terri found it challenging, as it was by far the hilliest day we’d had so far, climbing away from the Danube and then undulating from valley to plateau all day.  It wasn’t terribly hot, but it was still sweaty work climbing up the escarpments, and when we came into a village looking for a restaurant that wasn’t there and Terri saw the next climb rising in front of her, she almost lost it.  I quickly directed us off the road to a riverside meadow and we had a picnic and a swim which restored spirits.  The afternoon continued to be hilly, and we decided to look for a spot to camp wild, but could not find any running water.  

Northwest Bulgarian traffic

Eventually, nearing dusk, the road took a final dip and led us down, down, down into the city of Montana.  I parked Terri in a café where she wolfed down a plate of hot fries and quaffed a beer in no time flat while I cycled around looking for a hotel.  It took a while, but I found quite a nice little hotel for a decent price.  We went back to the café for a huge dinner, and then collapsed tired into bed to sleep deeply for over 10 hours.

The next morning I had to make time for a medical issue.  I had, it seemed, been bitten by a tick the day we camped on the abandoned farm in Romania, and an expanding bulls-eye target of red had been expanding around the bite day by day.  Concerned by the prospect of getting Lyme disease, I went to the pharmacist who suggested a few days of doxycycline and an injection of something mysterious whose identity I never really figured out.  I had to go across the street and pay a nurse to do the injection.  The total cost for the antibiotics, the vaccine and the injection was 3 euros, a definite bargain. 

Petrohan Pass, the highest point of the trip

Once that was out of the way, Terri found a taxi driver willing to drive her and her bike up to the top of the Petrohan Pass, the 1400-metre barrier between us and Sofia.  Her legs were tired after the previous day’s exertions, and she was still feeling a bit dicey after her illness, so she left the climbing to me.  I love climbing passes on bicycles, and I had a great time rolling up into the Balkan range, through a series of small villages and then up through a lovely hardwood forest.  I left town just before noon, and it took about four hours in total from Montana to the top of the pass, where I found Terri sitting in a snug little restaurant reading and eating a delectable stew.  It was noticeably cooler at the top, and we sat inside beside the fire as I had some stew as well, having built up a tremendous hunger since breakfast.  Eventually we both climbed onto our bikes and started rolling down the other side of the pass, looking for a place to camp, but instead we ended up staying at Andreev Khan, a lovely fake-old caravansarai  set in a big garden beside the road, with a series of fish ponds.  It was not very expensive (20 euros) and it was a very pretty setting to sit and sip wine and eat as dusk fell.  We slept very well again.  

Andreev Han

Now that we were over the pass, not much stood between us and Sofia, about 60 km away.  We rolled downhill, took a short climb over a secondary pass, and then coasted downhill most of the way into the city.  We had a pizza and sausage lunch in the city of XXXXXXX which marked the end of the downhill.  It was hot as we trundled across the flat valley floor and into the bustle of the capital.  By dumb luck we chose a route into and through the city that had bike lanes, and then climbed up towards the leafy suburb of XXXXXX where Victor’s father’s house was.  Victor’s brother Igor was going to be staying there that evening (his father was on the Black Sea coast) and we looked forward to another reunion with a former student.  As we got closer to where Google Maps said the house was, the streets got steeper and steeper and narrower and narrower and Terri ended up pushing her bike and voicing her displeasure at the steepness.  We couldn’t find the house and settled down to wait for Igor’s arrival, which was in about half an hour at the wheel of his father’s convertible.  It turned out that Google Maps, and most other city maps, don’t have the street’s location correct.  Maybe this is a security precaution, as the Gatsbyesque mansion that Igor led us to was once the personal home of Todor Zhivkov, the long-serving Communist boss of the country from 1954 to the downfall of Communism in 1989.

Olympian feast in Sofia with Xander and Igor

Our last two days on the road were spent in the lap of luxury, eating like kings in a couple of beautiful restaurants, swimming in the pool, packing our bicycles into boxes and swapping stories with Igor, now an engineering student in Sydney, and his friend Xander, with whom he had just finished a high-speed road trip around Bulgaria.  

Igor and I atop Vitosha

We went for a drive and hike up the Vitosha mountain range that rises directly behind the house, and after a month of lots of cycling and little walking, our legs were sore for several days afterwards.  Sofia seemed a world away from the grinding poverty of the northwest of the country, and made a fine spot to end our month-long cycling odyssey that had started in Vienna. 

Our oasis of luxury in Sofia

I was pleased with the route we took.  Although it was very flat most days, we had interesting historical, cultural and natural sights to look at, and the heat and winds gave us some challenge.  I particularly liked going back to Hungary, but the two countries that I think I would most want to explore further are Romania and Bulgaria.  They will have to wait for my return to Europe, and I don’t know when that will be.  As we took our flight from Sofia back to Geneva so that Terri could return to Leysin for the last summer term of her career, I was already looking forward to my trip to Scandinavia, due to start only 48 hours later.  No rest for the cycle tourist!!