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 r
ight. 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 fe
llow 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
