Down the Danube on a Bicycle, June 2015: Part One--Austria and Slovakia

Ottawa, October 19, 2015

Three months after finishing the trip, and with several other trips (to Scandinavia, the Pyrenees, Corsica and Sardinia) intervening, it seems like it’s about time to summarize the 1800-km bike trip that Terri and I took in June and early July before it fades from my mind.  It was a great trip down the Danube and through the historical threads of central and eastern Europe, and was a month well spent having fun, eating well, learning lots about history, getting back into shape and unwinding from too many consecutive years of work.

Listening to my eulogy at the end of year party

Our trip began on Sunday, June 7, the day after my final end-of-year LAS staff party.  Terri and I rendezvoused at 8 am for a 9 am train, in my case after about 3 hours of sleep as I tried to get everything packed, put away, saved electronically and otherwise dealt with as I closed the book on five long years of my life. 

Terri saying goodbye to our good friend Avery

The train journey was long and made longer by a Swiss train being cancelled between Lausanne and Bern; we were re-routed through Biel and missed our Zurich-Vienna express train.  Every change of trains involved a painful lugging of boxed-up bicycles down from one platform, along an underpass and up another set of stairs to our train.  The bonus was that in Zurich we found that the next train was fully booked in second class, and we were put into first class.  It made the long train ride along the full length of Austria much more bearable, as we were in a nearly empty carriage and sat sipping Gruner Veldtliner white wine and looking out at the passing Alps.  We got into Vienna Westbahnhof at 10 pm, put our bikes together on the platform, abandoned our boxes and slowly rolled through the darkness to our Air BnB apartment, a piece of Hong Kong translated into Vienna.  Our guesthouse, which cost 40 euros, was one of a series of small bedrooms in a single apartment, and it reminded me of some of the cheap guesthouses in Mirador Mansions and Chungking Mansions in Kowloon, obligatory Hong Kong stops on the Asian backpacker trail.  The fact that it was run by an expatriate Hong Konger, Damian, added to the impression.

Stage One—The Melk Run

The first turns of the pedals in Vienna

The next morning we got underway.  It took quite some time to wake up and get our baggage loaded into our bike panniers and adjust our bikes after their disassembly for travel, and a bit more to get into downtown Vienna and have an expensive but tasty breakfast at a café.  Vienna has a well-developed bike path system, and we were able to get through the city and out onto the Danube canal quickly.  Ten kilometres on we crossed the Danube for the first time on the trip and headed upstream along the north bank (the left bank).  Not far along the river, we ran out of the built-up area of Vienna and started riding through a fairly undeveloped area of riverside forests and flood-control dikes. 

Welcome to Tulln; here's your beer!

It was a hot, sunny day and by the time we got to the town of Tulln (birthplace of Egon Schiele) Terri was running on empty.  

Terri revived by beer in Tulln

We had a late lunch of goulash and beer that nearly brought tears of joy to Terri’s eyes, and then continued to a tiny campground in Rohrendorf, just outside Krems.  It was a strange little campground, in the backyard of a small vineyard, and the owners didn’t seem at all concerned with making any money.  They never opened the office, and when we looked for them the next morning to pay, they were nowhere to be found.

Terri sweating her way up the Rhine towards Wachau

 

After a well-earned sleep, we set off the next morning, leaving our tent standing and our heavy luggage behind, for a quick run up to Gottweig Monastery.  The region of the Danube valley extending upstream from here, hemmed in by steep hills on both banks, is known as the Wachau and is noted for its wine production and (not coincidentally) its ancient monasteries and picturesque castles.  

Terri outside Gottweig

Gottweig is one of the oldest and grandest of the monasteries and I was keen to take a look.  It’s located on the right bank of the river, atop a hill, and it took longer to reach than the map had led us to believe.  It was a very steep climb up the back side of the escarpment, and Terri was glad that we had left our heavy baggage behind.  When we got to the top, we were rewarded with a sweeping view and an impressive structure.  Like so many monasteries, churches and castles, the original structure was lost long ago to fire and the current complex is a Baroque masterpiece, complete with painted ceiling featuring the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI as Zeus, a slightly heterodox image to find in an arch-Catholic empire like the Habsburgs.  We wandered through the exhibition, had a glass of Gruner Veldtliner from the monastery’s own vineyards, and then raced back downhill and across the river to our tents.

The owners were still nowhere to be found at the campground.  We packed up our tents, had some lunch, had one last look for the owners, and finally cycled off, mystified why they didn’t seem to want to be paid.  We had asked for directions to the campground the day before from a villager, and he had seemed dubious that the campground was still in operation, so maybe it was no longer commercially viable, but the facilities were still there.  Or maybe it wasn’t yet peak tourist season and they only bothered operating the campground in July and August.  Very mysterious.  We cycled off upstream into the heart of the Wachau still slightly baffled. 

Riding through Durrnstein

The ride from Krems to Melk was wonderful, along the river on the left bank, through pretty little villages like Durrnstein, where King Richard the Lionheart spent months being held hostage by the Austrians on the way home from the Crusades.  (Allegedly he brought this on himself by throwing an Austrian flag into a sewer while on campaign in Palestine.  Remember the image of Bad Prince John in Robin Hood, imposing taxes on the people while Good King Richard was away?  A lot of those taxes were to pay the ransom to get Richard out of Durrnstein castle.)  The town was crowded with tour buses and cycle tourists, and in fact the entire Wachau was bursting at the seams with cyclists.  

Wachau vineyards

It’s one of the most picturesque stretches of the entire Danube, and forms the centrepiece of the EuroVelo 6 bike route that runs from the Loire to the Black Sea.  Here in Austria the cycling is all on separate bike routes, out of traffic, and is dead flat, making it perfectly suited for an introductory bike tour.  At a conservative estimate, there must be several thousand cycle tourists a day on the bike paths; in July and August, it’s said to be uncomfortably crowded, with traffic jams on the paths.  I was glad we were there in June. 

We rode past a couple of lovely castles and ruins (Spitz and Aggstein), surrounded by neatly tended vineyards, and around a stumpy old church (St. Michael) that is the oldest surviving one in the region.  Just as we were getting serious about heading towards Melk, I heard a strange noise as I changed gears and, looking down, realized that my front derailleur had snapped in two.  In all my years of cycle touring, I thought I had broken more or less everything breakable on my bikes, but this was a new one.  We crawled into the nearest village, Spitz, found out that the nearest bike shop was in Melk, and then crawled on a few more kilometres to Aggsbach Markt to camp beside the Danube in a lovely, if windswept, campground, opposite an imposing castle ruin high on the opposite bank.

The impressive facade of Melk Abbey

The next day was one of those slightly annoying ones that happen from time to time on bike trips, with lots of time spent waiting for repairs.  We rode across the Danube into Melk and then up, up, up to the top of the hill on which Melk Monastery perches.  We parked the bikes and walked into the monastery, another impressive Baroque structure.  Melk is firmly on the tour bus circuit, far more than Gottweig, and the parking lot was crammed with dozens of buses.  We decided not to pay to go inside the monastery, but we could wander around the grounds for free and peek into the corner of the church reserved for worshippers.  I knew Melk as the setting for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, but it had a very impressive non-fictional history too, and ended up as perhaps the richest and most powerful monastery in the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire.  It made for a stroll redolent of bygone glories.

It was then time to deal with my derailleur.  I found a bike shop near the castle, but the mechanic there, a grumpy old guy if ever there was one, said that he was too busy to help us.  We rode out into the suburbs, found another bike shop and were able to convince the mechanic there to fix it.  However he said he was too busy to adjust Terri’s front derailleur, which wasn’t shifting down into her lowest register when climbing, making for difficulties on steep slopes.  Terri was annoyed, and I almost had to frogmarch her back to the first bike shop and plead with the grumpy old guy to take five minutes to adjust it.  Rather grudgingly, he fitted it in, fixed it expertly (why is it that many a good bike mechanic becomes a notorious grouch?), and then, to our surprise, refused payment for it.  We devoured an entire roast chicken at a kebab-and-chicken van in the parking lot, and then contemplated our further options. 

We had set out on the trip with no fixed plans, with various ideas, including riding to Slovenia, rolling along the Dalmatian coast, through the mountainous Bosnian interior, or perhaps up into Slovakia and through the Carpathians in Romania.  After the first two days, though, with Terri’s legs in shock from pedalling a fully-loaded touring bike for the first time in two years, and her body demanding vast quantities of meat to replace the leg muscles being shredded with every turn of the pedal, we decided that riding a mountainous route into Slovenia probably wasn’t the wisest option.  We returned to our original plan, of riding down the Danube at least as far as Belgrade, and then seeing how much time we had left and what we felt like doing next.  I like this sort of travel, making it up as you go along, not buying return tickets at first in order to leave your options free, what my friend Kent Foster, The Dromomaniac, calls “the philosophy of one-way travel”.

Spitz castle

So with bikes repaired and Terri full of roast chicken, we turned around and headed back downstream, this time on the right bank, trying to see both banks of the river.  It was a pleasant, easy ride, helped by tailwinds, past a few more castles and ending up in a huge campground in Rossatz, opposite Durrnstein, which looked very pretty lit up at night.  It’s surrounded by the apricot orchards that are another of the Wachau’s attractions, and we demolished a large bag of apricots while sitting beside the river enjoying the views.

Durrnstein castle by night from Rossatz

On the fourth day we headed almost to Vienna, passing the huge hydro dam at Altenworth which we had crossed on our way upstream and ending up twenty kilometres from Vienna in the pretty town of Klosterneuburg.  There we stayed in another vast campground almost entirely populated by Dutch people and went for the first time to a key Austrian institution, the heuriger.  These are small, unofficial wine bars that are operated part of the year by vineyards to sell their own wine and some typically hearty Austrian food.  Every heuriger operates on a different yearly schedule, and we had to decipher an intricate grid on the local tourist office pamphlet to figure out which ones would be open for us.  On the way I stopped in at a local hospital to have stitches removed from my left shin, the results of a mountain bike crash a week before our departure, which was done quickly and (surprisingly, given the strange Swiss medical insurance system) for free.  The heuriger, almost unmarked outside except for a tell-tale sprig of juniper outside, was packed, and made for a great evening sitting outside in a courtyard, quaffing various wines (of various qualities; the local bubbly was almost undrinkable) and stuffing ourselves on pork knuckle, sauerkraut, sausages and some token salad.  It was a fun evening, and made us wish we had started looking for heurigers earlier.

Living it up in a heuriger in Klosterneuburg

Our last day in Austria was a longish one, as we rode into the outskirts of Vienna and then stayed on the Danube through the sprawling residential and industrial suburbs of the city.  It was a scorching day and the river banks were thronged with sunbathers.  As we headed out of town into the national park flanking the river, it became clear that this was the nudist zone, with thousands of naked bodies sunning themselves.  The only giveaway that this was a clothing-optional zone, strangely, was the sign “No Dogs Allowed”.  Somehow everyone seemed to know that this was a code for “No Clothing Necessary”.  As we rode along, the temperature increased into the mid-thirties and fierce, hot headwinds made cycling difficult.  We pushed along with Terri trying to draft behind me, through the grounds of a huge oil refinery and finally out into real countryside.  We crossed back to the right bank eventually and found ourselves, late in the afternoon, on a stretch of road leading across open fields into Slovakia that Terri and I had walked 18 months earlier after a serious error of train timetable reading.  It was much easier rolling across it on bicycles, and we were soon in the Soviet-style suburbs of Bratislava.  We crossed the river into the pretty old town and made our way uphill to the Film Hotel, an old hotel whose walls were plastered with posters of film stars both past and present.   A massive feed in a lovely pub In the Old Town, prominently featuring my favourite Slovakian staple, the doughy fried noodles known as halusky, and we were ready to enjoy our first night in a real bed in several days.

Stage Two—Scooting through Slovakia

Sweating our way through Slovakia

Having thoroughly explored Bratislava not long before, Terri and I didn’t feel the urge to linger, and we rode out of town the next morning with the weather promising another hot day.  The Slovaks have done a good job of laying out a network of bike trails in and around Bratislava, and that Saturday morning they were clogged with people out for a morning ride or a morning rollerblade outing.  I don’t think I’ve seen that many rollerbladers in any one place in Europe; it must be related to the Slovak obsession with hockey.  We crawled out of town, with headwinds an issue once again, and made periodic stops at little riverside kiosks to buy the elixir that we had discovered over the first few days in Austria:  radler, or shandy, a fifty-fifty mix of beer and fizzy lemonade that gave the perfect combination of thirst-quenching (from the beer) and energy (from the sugary lemonade) to keep us going.  

Rehydrating on a hot, hot day in Slovakia

The name is a giveaway:  radler means “cyclist” in German, and generations of Central European cyclists have slaked their parched gullets with the stuff.  We ended up drinking a radler or two a day almost the entire way to Sofia, making it our first stop of the morning, before a late lunch.  After a while we ended up right on the bank of a canal in which the Danube was channeled towards a huge hydro dam at Gabcikovo, another ill-conceived Stalinist mega-project.  In the course of riding across the dam to the left bank, I tried to ride along the pedestrian path rather than down the road.  As it was barely wider than the luggage on my bike, this was a stupid idea and the stupidity was revealed soon enough as I caught the luggage on the railing, spun sideways and slammed my handlebars and my left hand into the opposite railing.  It hurt a lot, and I was convinced that I had probably broken a bone.  For days I had a badly swollen hand and was unable to close my hand into a fist.  I backtracked, got onto the road and cursed my stupidity. 

My diary records the day as a series of stops to escape the heat and headwinds.  “Halusky and beer at 38 km (Vajka); fruit at Gabcikovo Dam (57 km); radler and ice cream at Narad in a fancy little panszio (72 km)”.  It was perhaps the hottest day of the trip, and with Terri visibly wilting as the day’s kilometre total topped 80 , no campground appeared despite a promising tent symbol on our map. We asked about a place to stay in the tiny village of Cicov.  To our surprise, there was a place, completely unmarked, where an elderly couple charged us 12 euros for a big room with a shower and kitchen.  We were too late for real food at the one local restaurant, so we supped on fried cheese and French fries before crawling into bed. 

Cicov, like most of the villages along the river in Slovakia, was a Hungarian-speaking village.  The signs were all bilingual, but the only language I heard being spoken was Hungarian, the result of map redrawing in the aftermath of World War One.  Hearing the language reawakened long-dormant memories of actually speaking some Hungarian back in the mists of time in 1988, when I spent four months living in Budapest and taking part in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics.  I had visited Hungary very briefly since then twice, in 1990 and again in 2011, but this trip promised to be the longest time spent in my one-time home for 26 years.  I was looking forward to the ride along the length of the Hungarian Danube.

Poppy field in Slovakia

We rode that morning through huge poppy fields, their blossoms white and their centres bulging with the resin that could be harvested and turned into opium.  I didn’t realize until later that the poppyseed so beloved of Central European bakers is from the same plant that produces opium.  I wondered if there was much oversight of the fields, or whether a few plants here and there might get surreptitiously lanced to make a more lucrative crop on the side.  Our path led us along rutted dirt tracks atop flood control dikes, and after a while we bailed out, ignored the EuroVelo 6 signs and took the main road into Komarno.  It was another scorching day and we were glad to find a stand selling watermelons beside the road.  We demolished large quantities of melon to rehydrate, then stopped off for a kebab in town before riding over the bridge into Hungary.  

(To Be Continued)