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!!

Down the Danube on a Bicycle, June 2015: Part Two--Hungary

Ottawa, October 19, 2015

Stage Three—Hungarian Homecoming

Since both Slovakia and Hungary are in the EU and in the Schengen Zone, there were no border formalities on Sunday, June 14 as we rode over the road bridge into Hungary, very unlike the situation in 1988 when crossing the border required a visa and lengthy formalities with stern border guards; I still remember my friend Jeremy getting turfed off the train back to Budapest after a weekend in Prague because his Hungarian visa wasn’t multiple-entry; we didn’t see him again for several days.  The main difference between the two sides of the border is currency; unlike Slovakia, Hungary still uses its own money, the forint.  At about 300 forints to the euro, there are a lot of zeroes involved, and when we went to an ATM to draw out some forints, these zeroes were Terri’s downfall.  It was my turn to take out money, but the ATM didn’t like my Swiss bank card, so Terri used her New Zealand bank card instead and took out 300,000 forints, thinking it was about 100 euros; instead, it was worth about 1000 euros.  Terri ended up bankrolling our entire trip through Hungary for both of us and still having most of the forints left over at the end.  She was not amused!

Riding through Hungary on a sultry Sunday afternoon, there was little traffic and, since Hungary has strict Sunday closing laws, we rolled through ghost towns.  We stopped off for radlers a couple of times, fortifying this with soup the second time, before arriving at the historic town of Esztergom around 4:30.  

Wild boar stew in Esztergom

The campground there featured a swimming pool, and Terri, hearing that it closed at 6 pm, raced off immediately to leap in.  It felt indescribably soothing to dive into the cool water and re-equilibrate our bodies after the sapping heat of the day.  The campground had a restaurant serving wild boar in red wine sauce, and we tucked into that, washed down with some fine Hungarian red wine.  Restored to life, we went for a walk after sundown across the bridge into Slovakia to admire Esztergom Cathedral from the other bank, lit up and looking grand.  The church is the centre of Catholicism in Hungary and looks the part, with a huge neo-classical dome rising high above the town like St. Peter’s in Rome. 

Esztergom by night

After the previous day’s exertions, we had an easier time getting from Esztergom to Vac.  On our way out of town, we found a EuroVelo 6 sign for the first time in a long while, directing us down to the Danube where a ferry crossing took us across to the left bank.  Talking to other cyclists waiting for the same ferry, I had a good look at the detailed EV 6 route atlas that they had, and we decided that we had to get the next volume, leading from Budapest to Belgrade.  It was wonderfully detailed, and looking at it, we saw that our route into Budapest shouldn’t be as grim as it had looked on my road map.  

Our unexpected ferry ride across the Danube

The ferry put us ashore and we had an easy, pretty ride along bike paths to the village opposite Visegrad, where we stopped and had langos, those deep-fried flaps of dough that I used to love in my Budapest days, and fagylalt, the ice cream that Hungarians consume in vast quantities in the summer.  We briefly contemplated taking the ferry across to see Visegrad up close, but decided that it was prettier from a distance.  I remember hiking up to the top of the old hill-top fort in 1988; it was a wild and desolate place in mid-November with great views in all directions.  This stretch of the Danube from Esztergom through Visegrad and Vac to Szentendre is called the Danube Bend (the river moves from being an east-west river to a north-south one) and played a key role in Hungarian history, especially during the time when the Ottoman Turks dominated most of the country and the Danube Bend was one of the regions still free of Turkish rule. 

Vac, city of churches

We rolled easily into Vac, arriving in early afternoon and, in view of the gathering rain clouds, keen to sleep indoors.  We tried finding a private room to rent through the tourist office, but they were overpriced.  I spotted a sign for a cheaper option and so we found ourselves staying as guests in a museum that had had its government funding cut and had turned some of its rooms into hostel accommodation; 4400 forints (about 15 euros, less than an Austrian campground) got us our own room.  We checked in and then went out for a poke around the town.  I had never been to Vac before, and was pleasantly surprised by its Baroque loveliness.  It abounds in churches, and its main square is a very pretty spot, full of families eating ice cream and watching small children play peacefully.  We demolished a pizza of truly monstrous size and lamented that the biggest attraction in Vac, the Mummy Museum, was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.  

Seriously hungry in Vac

I had seen a presentation years before about the DNA analysis of the bodies of hundreds of people buried in a crypt of the Dominican church in the 1700s and then forgotten until renovation work knocked a hole in the crypt wall.  The pine coffins and microclimate in the crypt almost perfectly preserved the bodies from decay, and scientists were able to figure out a lot of interesting information about diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis.  I was keen to see them, but the schedule conspired against us.  Instead, on a suggestion by the museum curator, we went for a walk into the nature preserve along the bank of the river, where a forested swamp sheltered lots of birdlife.  On our brief exploration, we spotted two different types of woodpeckers, lots of nightingales and (sadly) hordes of biting insects.  Despite the mosquitoes, however, it ended up being a real highlight of the trip, standing silently on the boardwalks leading through the marsh, listening to the cacophony of birdsong.

Birdwatching outside Vac

Our ride into Budapest from Vac the next day was a tale of two halves.  With only 50 km to cover, we thought it would take under 3 hours to get to the tourist flat we had booked over the internet.  It all started promisingly, with a ferry at 9 am leading us back to the right bank.  We rolled across an agricultural island that provided us with a fruit feast (cherries and more watermelon), then followed EV 6 signs along a bike path that degenerated into a rough forest track and a serious mudhole before suddenly spilling us out into Szentendre, the artists’ colony just north of Budapest.  We left the bikes and wandered around the atmospheric streets, very much cleaned up and gentrified since I was last there in 1988.  More bike paths led us into the far northern suburbs of Buda, where radlers and ice cream revived us for what should have been a simple trundle through the streets to our apartment.

Riding along the bike paths from Vac to Budapest

Instead it ended up taking us well over two hours to find our way the 14 km or so that separated us from our destination.  We lost the EV 6 signs, spent a lot of time looking for them, then tried to improvise a route along the Pest bank of the Danube (very, very unsuccessfully).  We finally ended up slowly rolling along side streets, trying to keep out of the crazy traffic of the main avenues, and when we got to our apartment building, we couldn’t find the door or figure out how to get in.  A bit of re-reading e-mails and we figured it out.  It was a small apartment (a larger flat had been cut in half) but a decent price for central Pest.  We had a late lunch of kebabs and then headed into Buda to meet a friend of my friend Kent, Peter.  He works in a graphic design firm and was having a wine and cheese evening with some friends.  We hit it off immediately and sat around eating fine cheese and sipping lovely wine and discussing the state of current-day Hungary.   Eventually tiredness, the curse of the bike tourist, hit and we said our goodbyes to catch a bus back to our flat.

Nighttime along the Danube in Budapest

We took a proper day off the bikes in Budapest the next day.  Since Terri and I had both explored the city in the past, we went in for strolling the streets rather than a series of museums, although I had to visit the Terror Haz, the brilliant museum occupying 60 Andrassy Ut, the former headquarters of both the Nazi-era and Communist secret police forces.  We walked through the chic streets of central Pest, went looking (unsuccessfully) for a new seat for Terri’s bike (her gel seat was starting to hurt a lot by the end of every day in the saddle), bought the map book for the Budapest-Belgrade leg of our journey, searched for my old favourite pub, the Fregatt (sadly closed during the day), looked in at the wild urban-ruin-themed Szilta Kert club, and ended up lunching late at the Khao San Road-esque food court outside Szilta Kert.  We then walked through the Terror Haz and both of us found it very moving.  Having visited similar museums in the three Baltic capitals, I would have to rate this one as being the top of those 4 in terms of humanizing the victims and explaining the larger picture.  While Terri went back to the apartment, I stopped in at the hospital to get my hand X-rayed.  Luckily there were no broken bones, although now (3 months later) it’s still sore and doesn’t close properly. We ate takeout kebabs, then went downtown with a bottle of wine to walk over the Danube bridges and along the river bank, enjoying the lit-up castle and parliament buildings and scouting our escape route for the next morning.  It was a fitting farewell to one of Europe’s most beautiful capital cities.

Szechenyi Chain Bridge with Buda Castle

In contrast to our agonizing entrance to the city, leaving Budapest was a piece of cake, with lots of EV6 signs and our new route atlas to fill in the occasional gap.  We meandered down the left bank of the river, past areas that had been completely rebuilt since my last visit.  Csepel Island, once a hotbed of heavy industry, was peaceful, with decaying factories separated by pleasant green stretches and lots of rowing and canoeing clubs.  As we got further from downtown, the houses got a bit fancier, as people renovated old places that were both within commuting distance of the city and perfectly located on one of the channels of the Danube.  Our progress was marked by a radler and peanut stop after 28 km in Szigetszentmiklos, and lunch (“gipsy-style pork”) in an upmarket pizza restaurant after 51 km in Rackeves.  We left Csepel island finally and crossed to the true left bank of the river, where we rode partly on quiet back roads and partly, propelled by a strong tailwind, along the main Route 51 from Budapest to the Serbian border.  We were looking for a spot to camp wild, but then saw camping signs near Szardszentmarton and followed them towards the Danube bank.  There was no campground to be seen, but there was an artificial lake with what looked like the burnt-out remnants of a campground reception building.  It took us a while to figure out how to get in, but once we did it was a perfect spot to sleep, with cooling breezes off the lake, no traffic noise and lots of space to spread out.  We cracked out the little toaster rack that I had been carrying and made toasted grilled cheese sandwiches and soup, and slept well in our tent after a pleasant 84 km from Budapest.

Toasted grilled cheese sandwiches

The next day we made more toast for breakfast to accompany our muesli, then rolled off southwards.  We took the main highway for a while as far as Dunavecse, then took a series of back roads and dirt tracks to Dunaegyhaza and on into Solt.  Along the way we spotted numerous stork nests atop telephone poles, some with two or three juvenile storks in them, and occasionally a parent as well.  Storks ended up being a recurring leitmotif throughout our Danube journey.  We took a lovely diketop cycle path as far as the town of Harta, where we ducked into a restaurant to avoid an oncoming rain squall.  The pork paprikas hit the spot and we used the restaurant wi-fi to book return plane tickets to Geneva from Sofia, Bulgaria, which we decided was a realistic ending point for our ride.  On our way out of town we met up with two fifty-something Liverpudlians who were on the fifth year of a six-year, 9-days-a-year mission to ride the entire length of the EV6 from the Atlantic to the Black Sea.  We raced along another dike-top cycle path, then parted ways with the Scousers as we took quiet back roads to Fokto and into Kalocsa, the paprika capital of the world.  Sadly we arrived too late for the paprika museum, and had problems finding a place to stay indoors, with more rain threatening.  Eventually we put up in a downtown hotel where 5000 forints (roughly 17 euros) bought us a comfortable double bed and an exquisite shower. 

Some of the dirt tracks we followed south of Budapest

The next morning, with the rain having cleared out the skies, we raced out of town in the direction of an off-beat, off-the-Danube attraction mentioned in our guidebook:  the wine-press village of Hajos.  With a stiff tailwind, we averaged 23 km/h all the way to Hajos Pincsek under clear skies; this doesn’t sound like much if you’re on a racing bike, but on a fully-loaded touring bike with more than 20 kg of luggage it was the best hour’s speed of the entire trip.  Strangely enough, we passed barely a single vineyard all the way.  It was only after we rolled through the actual village of Hajos and into the strange historical capsule that is Hajos Pincek that we started to see vineyards stretching away in front of us. 

Storks, symbol of central Europe

Hajos Pincek consists of hundreds of tiny houses that aren’t really houses, at least not for living in.  Instead, every Hobbit-sized building contains a wine press and a cellar carved out of the soft rock for storing the product of the wine press.  This huge concentration of tiny wineries is one of the many results of the Danube Schwabians, German-speaking farmers invited in by the Austrian Emperors to repopulate deserted areas after the reconquest of Ottoman-held lands in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  

In Hajos Pincek, with a few of the tiny wine press houses 

The Schwabians were famous for their hard work and business acumen, and Hajos Pincsek was the site of many a successful small business over the centuries.  Although the wineries fell into disuse after the upheavals of the Second World War and the deportation of many of the descendants of the Schwabians by the new Communist regime in the late 1940s, recently people have been reviving the wineries, often as a hobby or as a profitable sideline from their full-time jobs.  We saw a few folks working away in their wine houses, but only one house was really open, so we stopped in there to sample some wine with the old lady running the place.  The white wine was pleasant (more of the Gruner Veldtliner that we had so enjoyed in Austria), and the red was light but drinkable.  We peeked down into the cellar, full of past years’ vintages cloaked in a thick layer of mould.  We bought a bottle for all of 1100 forints (about $3.50) and then found a larger, more commercial outfit outside the village to sample a bit more.  We ended up finding a very pleasant red called Schwabenlblut (Schwabian Blood) to put into my panniers for later consumption. 

Wine tasting in Hajos Pincek

We cut back southwestward along an undulating road (the least flat road we’d followed since Krems) past more vineyards, and eventually out onto route 51 again.  Traffic wasn’t too bad and we zipped along to an early stop in the town of Baja, a pleasant town on a sidestream of the Danube that our guidebook told us was another centre of Schwabian life.  Our campground was right beside the water, and was full of triathletes taking part in a series of races right beside us.  We watched for a while, then put up our tent and set off carrying only cameras and water to explore a national park.

Exploring the national park close to Baja

Across the river from Baja is a park that is supposed to help preserve the swampy, riverine forest beside the Danube.  We crossed to the right bank and immediately left the narrow, busy main road in favour of the dirt tracks that run through the forest.  It was an enjoyable place to explore, full of birds (or at least birdsong; the birds themselves were hard to spot), fish, snakes and even wild boars that left us a bit nervous, given their fearsome reputations and the fact that they had young with them.  Less welcome were the swarms of mosquitoes that plagued us; I guess they help feed the fish, though, so they’re not completely without merit, although it certainly seemed so as we swatted away at them.  As in Vac, it was a glimpse of the rich natural world that once stretched the length of the Danube before population growth and industrialization took their toll.

We slept reasonably well despite the triathletes’ party going on in the campground that evening, and arose ready to have a short, easy ride followed by a cultural interlude.  Our target for the day was Mohacs, the border town only 38 km south of Baja.  We started out with a spectacular route-finding error on my part that left us pushing our bikes through waist-deep grass on a path that hadn’t been used in years.  Eventually Terri convinced me to turn around, and we backtracked to where we had gone wrong several kilometres earlier.  Once we got onto the right road, we raced along easily along tiny farm roads and some dike-top paths all the way to the Mohacs ferry crossing.  The campground we had been counting on turned out not to exist anymore, and with time ticking away, we decided to take a room indoors somewhere.  It took much longer than it should have, but we finally found a little oasis of genteel tranquility at a little private zimmer for 25 euros.  We quickmarched back into town to the bus station and caught a bus to Pecs to spend an afternoon poking around a city that I fell in love with back in 1988. 

Szent Istvan Ter, Pecs

It felt strange racing along in a bus, covering in an hour and a half what it would have taken most of the day to pedal.  We got to town and walked into the centre of Pecs, popping out in the lovely Baroque town square, Szent Istvan Ter, before continuing to the Csontvary Museum.  I had discovered Csontvary, a brilliant and eccentric Hungarian painter of the late 19^th century, back in 1988 and I wanted to introduce Terri to his dramatic huge canvases.  As I had hoped, she was completely entranced by his work, and we spent an hour and a half contemplating his paintings.  Afterwards we went in search of some very early Christian churches that have been unearthed (the town was an important Roman frontier post and Christianity flourished here in the late Empire), but couldn’t find them as that entire part of town had been taken over by a huge music festival.  We ambled back to Szent Istvan Ter and ordered wine and ice cream, lingering over the view of the neatly restored facades and the Ottoman mosque that is now the main church in town.  

Elegant afternoon refreshments in Pecs

When we got back to Mohacs, we had an unforgettable rooftop meal at the Szent Janos Hotel, watching the sunset paint the Danube all the colours of the rainbow.

Rooftop sunset over the river in Mohacs

The next morning, Monday, June 22^nd, we left Hungary after an unforgettable week of reigniting my affection for the country and its culture and people.  On the way to the Croatian border, only 15 km south of town, we stopped briefly at the memorial to the Battle of Mohacs, the 1526 debacle in which the Hungarian army was cut to pieces by the Ottomans and the inept King Lajos drowned in a swamp while running away from the battle.  The battle left the road to Budapest wide open, and the Turks duly occupied the capital for the next 160 years, a dark period in Hungarian history, at least from the modern Hungarian perspective.  Unfortunately, since we had just changed all of our forints into euros, we didn’t have any money to pay the admission fee, so we contented ourselves with a picture outside and then pedalled into Croatia.

Memorial to the Battle of Mohacs, 1526

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)