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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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”.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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)
