The Danube

The Danube
Bulgaria
Against the odds, in my wet clothes and my bike loaded, I set off into the snow.
I leave Turkey as I arrived in it; in utterly dismal weather book-ending a month of sunshine in between. Well rather that than it be the other way round.
I have 18kms left to be in what is technically Turkey, though really I could just as easily be in Bulgaria, Siberia or Alaska…
Once I’m moving a while, the high energy breakfast starts doing its job and miraculously my fingers are no longer agonisingly cold… I had ditched my gloves ages ago finding them to be bulky useless things that never kept my hands warm anyway, only trapping ice cold rain. Quality gloves were not available in shops in the last places I’d needed them.
The road is empty as I climb toward the border pass. The road winds along the contour. The forest has changed. Tall formidible eastern beeches and pines intermingle, dropping great accumulated dollops of snow in their own tree rythym in between the more rapidly falling snow all around.
This feels like wilderness.
Exit from Turkey and entry to Bulgaria is perfunctory. The Bulgarian officials smiley.
Blue and yellow starred signs of the European Union scripted in cyrillic. Thirty years ago such a thing would have been science fiction and even now it seems rather improbable…
Money changed, and I start a mirror image freewheeled descent toward the first signs of inhabited civilisation; Malko Tornovo.
I have keep stopping. To soak up where I am. The view is stunning, just an endless sea of mountainous forest. The snow has turned to gentle rain and again it feels as if climate has decided the natural border between countries.
There are numerous signs giving information about the forest. Apparently this forest reserve is home to wild boars, wolves and jackals. That’s nice.
Further along and lower down the forest flora looks and feels like the best of unmolested English woodlands. What’s different is that there’s virtually no cars.
I cycle until 4pm and only five cars come past me. Three of those were police cars (old style landrover defenders).
I could carry on downhill to the coast but I want to spend the night in the forest and enjoy its nocturnity.
Weds April 19th
A second fairly sleepless night wrestling with dampness and condensation. Wolves howl nearby. Maybe they were jackals. Certainly not dogs. Very weird dream in the night which I am not going to repeat here. Get me drunk and I might tell you.
Two policemen investigate me in the morning asking to see my passport. Satisfied with that they leave.
The sun is out. At last. I spend an hour or two taking the chance to dry stuff out properly and re-pack it. Back to normal… I wonder how long it will stay sunny and dry? At least I get a break.
The 15kms descent down to the coastal town of Tsarevo continues to be gorgeous. In town I buy silicone sealant and rub it into my near useless non-waterpoof jacket. Now it has a shiny ‘wet-look’. It looks tacky. In every sense of the word.
Once when I lived in north wales I got on a bus after visiting a friend. Then when started hammering it down with rain I realised I had left my waterproof coat at my friends house. At my stop I was faced with the prospect of getting completely soaked in seconds or… removing the black bin bag from a rubbish bin by the bus stop, emptying its few contents back into the naked bin and then tearing three strategic holes in it and then wearing it. After I had hitch-hiked the rest of the way home, I was met at the front door with a housemate declaring ‘You look like a complete fucking idiot.’
To which my response was ‘Yes, but a dry fucking idiot.’ It was still lashing down.
So naff tacky wet-look or otherwise; I don’t care.
Tsarevo is a tourist town and seems to be shut; along with the few others I pass through as I head further north.
The beautiful 99.99 percent unspoilt natural surroundings continues… wow the Turks could really learn something from the Bulgarians. I have only been here two days but so far I have seen almost zero litter.
I stop for lunch (a large bag of crisps- finding a real shop with real food was too hard/ too much effort). I am next to a small bay with clear turquoise waters and a beautiful clean sandy beach. It’s strange to think this is the same sea that runs for hundreds of kilometres along the north of Turkey. In Turkey the sea was darker, I saw no coves or bays west of Samsun, there was litter everywhere (the only country with more litter I have ever seen is India).
So here is still gorgeous. I have seen a few groups of people out tidying stuff up ready for when the tourist season starts in may. Very probably the tourists make a rubbish tip of the place. They do every other place I have ever been.
Finally at Budzhaka I find a magazin (convenience store) and load up on chocolate, bread, a jar of what I hope is tomato paste, a fine solid looking salami sausage (cheap sausage can often just seem to be yucky jellified fat that tastes grim) and a tin of something unidentified that might be scallops.
I camp under a hazel near some pines surrounded by a ground cover of herb robert, cleavers, brambles and brown fallen oak leaves. It’s all so familiar. I have had a very happy day today. So far, Bulgaria is shaping up to be my favourite country.

In the morning it’s raining. Body memory speaks to me first and a total reluctance to ‘do’ rain overwhelms me. I haven’t had a free day since Istanbul, and even that time was full of activity. I’m definitely due a film- watching hiding in my sleeping bag kind of day. Perfect time to watch a three hour long film about Stalin and do a spot of route-planning. My horizontal day passes surprisingly quickly but I end up having something of a restless night as a result of so much inaction.
Following the coast, the D9 is not the best of roads as it has no road margin. Fortunately drivers are quite decent… if this road was in Kyrgyzstan, I would be forced to take a mashrutka or get hedgehogged.
Speaking of which; I’ve seen several of the little bumbly things pancaked into the tarmac. Very sad; they are happy little things and the least deserving.
I am realising what Europe is; it’s a massive bio-region. Temperate forest familiar to Britain and matching critters and plants. There are differences – I keep seeing what I reckon must be either arctic foxes in dull brown garb (no flashy markings like an English fox) and a messy bushy stubby tail.
In a park I meet a well- trained squirrel doing ‘cute’ for edible gain. Dark brown, almost black with massive feathery donkeys ears. The proportions of; same size as a donkeys ears would clearly be a very short evolutionary cul-de-sac.
The surroundings certainly look and feel familiar. My first re-encounters with actual green grass in Georgia was unexpectedly sublime and my European forest experience draws me even further into a connection deep in my bones.
But it isn’t identical; there are still plants I have never seen before and birds that make calls that distinguish them from anything I have heard before. I camp one night in a field behind another field that’s down a farm track. It could so easily be Hampshire. Except for one or two slight anomolies. It’s slightly surreal.
Along with the change in natures brands on offer is also the change in the shops. I know Asia has finished because the numerous tea houses, cafes, bakeries and kebab barbies are totally non-existent. I am even having trouble just finding a tap to fill my water bottles. The only bread I can get comes sliced in plastic bags. Thankfully it’s still considerably better than the crap that passes for bread in England.
The coast is full of hotels, wannabe hotels and great concrete shells that never quite got there. I have turned up two weeks before the start of the tourist season. Which means the roads are relatively empty… I really wouldn’t want to be on the D9 coast road in high summer. Be bloody hot too.
Maintenance people scurry about; gangs of lesser-skilled people busy litter-picking with sacks and radios. On building sites workmen presumably trying to finish building hotels before the first punters turn up.
I could pass through Bulgaria entirely skirting its coast but instead I head inland at Balchik. Unfortunately this means that I miss out on the chance to pass through the indelicately named village of ‘Sveti Nikola’… I must check the map to see if there’s a place called ‘Sveti Betti’.
Heading north west into the countryside I make my usual glib landscape comparisons; ah yes, this is just like where Norfolk meets the fens. Which at first it sort of is, but then the black fields become vast and defined by great strips of wind-breaking copses, and all about are huge white wind- turbines whirring away quietly. There’s a side-wind which if I follow up this disintegrated road for four kilometres will put me onto another flat road that will effectively re-orient my side-wind into a tailwind… it’s 6pm and I’ve already done 60kms already today so I’m pushing it a little bit. I am thinking ahead; these coastal winds are very variable, and cycling on wide open flat country like this, it’s better that I make the most of a helping wind today. Tomorrow it will probably have changed its mind.
Back in Kyrgyzstan I remember inventing a cyclists saying; ‘Never eat your lunch in a tailwind’.
Fortunately my new direction is on a proper road again and also slightly downhill. And with a tailwind. Well that makes a nice change.
Tuesday 25th April.
I am camped in a peaceful woodland spot. In the morning the birds are singing and the sun is shining warmly through the young willows. I don’t want to live in a house ever again.
I have 30kms left to be in Bulgaria (not including possibly re-entry at some point along the Danube). In about a week I should be in Tulcea, the point at which the Danube forks into numerous branches and becomes the Danube delta. Trying to find a cycle-able route that will take me all the way by land to the black sea coast is, it seems, impossible. At each fork the land becomes less and less like solid ground and more like marshes and lagoons… not the place for bikes! There’s a Delta tourism place in Tulcea where I can get some advice. I may end up at my desired Danube start point in Sulina travelling by boat. But that comes later.

Tuesday 25th April.
Another beautiful day. Straight empty well-behaved country road, glorious bird song, a magnificent panorama of young green wheat shoots and great long copses and wind turbines. The is shining warmly, I have the wind most solidly to my back. The road mostly glides gently downhill. I think for a moment how lucky I am. And then I remember how much effort I have put into earning the funds to do this and some of the lesser moments I have put up with on the way. The shite weather coming in and out of Turkey, the dogs in Azerbaijan, the super-freezing Qarakalpak Desert in Uzbekistan. No, I’m not lucky. I’ve earned this. I get a few days with perfect conditions but not many. Maybe more as we head back into summer again.
Passing through tiny villages, nodes along the road links. Belgium, Bilo… actually part of my route to Bilo becomes a compacted tractor track running along a field edge. This is where it could all go to shit. It doesn’t. I stop halfway across, wondering at the sound of breeze brushing through a billion blades of wheatgrass, skylarks warbling like crazy sun guages. My GPS chose this route and I merely followed it. And I find myself here; in the middle of a field on a late spring day in northern Bulgaria. Wow.
Heading into Bilo all I can see is trees and scrub. A village of about thirty bungalows, all have been abandoned except two. Weirdly, it still seems to have some sort of operational government office in its middle. I resist the urge to poke around inside. Bungalows in varying states of decreptitude; one or two with caved in roofs, some with shattered windows. Mostly they just have a blank ghostly look. These days I wouldn’t want to put anyones nose out of joint. Anyway I have a tailwind that’s too good to waste.
Exiting to the north, more farm track then some more occupied houses and a dog doing its duty at me (barking).
‘Come away now Bobby! Leave the poor fella alone!’
Good lord. English!
This I can’t pass up. There might be a free cup of tea in it.
‘Hello! I don’t usually go inviting myself up peoples driveways, but can I come and have a chat?’
I spend the next hour sitting drinking tea on the patio with two sisters (Helen and Linda) originally from Grimsby Yorkshire but who have been living here for 11 and 3 years respectively.
We have a lovely chat, mostly about dogs whilst astonishingly we none of us mention anything about either Brexit, Marmite, chips or immigrants.
Cycling off, back on a solid road surface again, wind still at my back and newly gee-ed up with two cups of tea. I’m back to my mission, ticking off the last few kilometres as I head for another new country Romania.
At the border a small bored but snarly black dog jumps from dozey curled up thing to shouty bitey teeth thing. Most uncalled for. He gets a long dose of the Dog Dazer. I have to cycle back round to his patch and he just looks at me most apologetically. Yeah I should think so too you twit.
Apart from grumpy dog, all the border checkpoints for Bulgaria are shut and crumbling. Seems to be a post-soviet theme.
I liked Bulgaria very much. It was cleaner than most countries I’ve visited and seemed very proud to be part of the European Union. After the state communism left most places in this is not surprising.
300 yards of (currently) irrelevant derelict ex-duty-free shops and then the Romanian border control. Aha! This is where I find the Bulgarian border chap. In a little booth right next to the Romanian passport check. Maybe it seemed like the sensible thing to do, put the two lone guards next to each other for company.

ROMANIA
As soon as I enter the country I am blessed with a cycle path! Yeah. I wonder how long that runs for… I try it for a few hundred metres. It’s concrete and not a flat enough surface for my liking. Back to the road. It’s mostly empty anyway.
Heading downhill along the top of the coast, ahead the seaside town of ‘Mai 2’ (further up is ‘August 27’).
Beyond that a stonkingly huge shipyard with vast orange cranes towering impossibly above me. A partnership between the local Mangalia shipyard and Daewoo.
Heading through nearby Limanu I am aiming to go see Limanu cave as marked on my map. What an anti-climax. A barred-off cave covered with minor graffiti. The surrounding acres look like a helicopter has spent a day religiously re-allocating the contents of a landfill site by picking it all up with a grab and dropping it all over the area. This is disgusting. I really don’t understand how anyone could be prepared to live amongst this. A herd of cows, from a distance, appear to be collectively grazing on plastic bags and dead fridges.
I side-step the grotty grotto and continue my route.
Back in Limanu, my exit from the village, marked as an actual road with a number and everything (the DJ393 I think) appears as a churned up wet muddy track strewn with the now signature piles of rubbish.
Is this my road? Have I made a mistake? Three small dogs look up at me somewhat forlornly. Perhaps they are hoping I’ve come to sort out the horrible mess.
Nope. This really is my road. My heart sinks. I knew my good fortune had to falter at some point.
The further I get out of Limanu, the less rubbish there is, until I am left following two parallel tracks of compressed brown dirt in thankfully clean arable countryside. The ride is astonishingly good with pretty much no bumpiness or awkward ruts apart from having to dodge round one or two impromptu dew-ponds.
For the rest of the day is all dirt road and surprisingly lovely it is too. Absolutely no traffic whatsoever and the filth of Limanu thankfully seems to have been a one-off.
The villages are grids of compressed gravel roads, with small bungalows and the assortments of rural life; chickens, vegetable patches, goats, washing, elderly women planting things or cropping something for supper.
Horse and carts are more prevalent. And so far Romania reminds me a lot of Mongolia with its lack of interest in tarmac, rolling open country with very few trees and an on-going commitment to having horses about the place. Maybe it’s the necessity of poverty. Maybe they just love horses.
There’s still lots of cars about, but also gypsy culture still seems to be alive (and probably kicking too).
Wednesday April 26th.
I wake and almost immediately have an encounter with a shepherd and his flock of a hundred goats. He has three very scruffy Dulux-style Old English Sheepdogs with slightly punk haircuts. They do their bit and bark at me until they decide that I’m alright really. Nice dogs. They demonstrate their ease by variously lying down, yawning or licking their testicles. Or combinations thereof.
The old fella looks like Lemmy from Motorhead. Instead of black leathers and cowboy boots he’s wearing wellies and a boiler suit topped off with a crazy battered rabbit skin hat. We have the most basic of exchanges given our mutually exclusive languages and shepherds seeming nearly always to be a mixture of welcoming curiosity but men of few words anyway.
It’s no coincidence that Paulo Coehlo’s ‘The Alchemist’ centres round the adventures of a shepherd boy. Apart from strolling the wide open landscape calling to their dogs and their herds in loud grunts and ullulations that mean nothing to the human ear and everything to their animals, they certainly get plenty of mind-space to stare into the hills and figure out the universe… also makes me think of the blurring of the distinction in the nativity scene where Jesus is welcomed into the world either by ‘three wise men’ or ‘three shepherds’. Probably the same thing. Sleep out with your sheep and learn the ways of the stars.
After a wash in a shallow stream and cycling on over the grassland, I spot weird shadows passing me on the ground like high speed grey mackeral clouds. When I look up I see a huge swirling mass of gathering geese looping about each other collecting strands of more geese, like so much candy floss. Entirely white but for large black bars from mid-wing to their tips, a mesmerising spectacle of motion backlit by the morning sun.
Moving north as they go, other groups off in the distance heading northward too. Happy lazy honking, as if they are feeling relieved by the final onset of summer and warm sun.
Maybe it’s not lazy. Maybe they are tired. Where would have flown from? Egypt? Further south? Where are they heading? The Danube Delta? The vast complex of Russian/Finnish Ozero lakes in East Karelia? Who knows. Not me. I could look it up on the internet at some point but I prefer the sense of mystery.
Still rolling easily I have a picnic lunch overlooking Constanţa’s vast shipyard. Something bizarre must have happened to me somewhere along the line because I find it utterly beautiful. Visually, the entire landscape is crammed with intricate repetative forms; tall yellow cranes hang like giant angle lamps over the quayside, like so many awkward elbows raised in unison. Great steel ribbons of freight cars rope in from outside in long parallel lengths, hanging in the picture like weighty necklaces. Ships, black, pin everything in place. The sky vivid blue, cirrus clouds skud thinly above, a pair of jackdaws cluck flintilly to the air, declaring the great emptiness of the sky. At the forefront and between the shipyard in the distance and the lush new summer herbage where I sit on a cliff, below lay gardeners shacks with newly tilled soil and lines of new sowings and leek transplants ready to grow. Tiny lorries weave through the middle of the picture. A blue train moves slowly amongst the other rust-coloured carriages. A dog barks. There’s always a dog barking…
I deliberately dither my way through Constance taking things easy. The city is nothing new to report but it feel like a nice place; intact, modern enough but not brash. A vast and impressive lake at the north end of the city next to an equally nice park.
Past the inevitable complex of hotels along the pristine white sanded beach and out past a huge oil refinery. Also curiously beautiful, in its complicated tangling forms of multi-coloured pipework running between odd steel structures that could just as easily be rusting Venusian spacecraft. I must be happy.
Well out of the city I pass back into prairie-sized agriculture. Oilseed rape (margarine plants) and wheat. No woodland anywhere. Isolated lone trees seem stranded in an endless sea of regulated man-made greenery. It’s even hard to find somewhere to camp. The area is strewn with mounds in the fields, which if it was England, would definitely be ancient burial mounds. There’s lots of them.
I camp in the lee of one… it will keep me that bit warmer should the wind decide to get frisky again.

Thursday 27th April.
I got all the way to Tulcea! 99kms! Powered by three bars of Milka chocolate (local chocolate is a bit rubbish). Got robbed whilst I was eating my lunch under a tree with my eyes closed and my earphones in listening to Round The Horne. Nicked my Dog Dazer my solar charger and about fifty quid. I was just outside a cute little village basically in the middle of nowhere. Lots of gypsys rolling past in horse and carts. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. That’ll teach me not to be so blasé with my stuff. Next to a field though. That’s just bollocks.
Now I’m in Tulcea… a port town and a little scummy to boot. I daresay I’m seeing the world through distrustful eyes right now. A young lad comes to assist me when there seems to be no-one home at the hostel I turn up at. I thank him when the landlady turns up. Then he asks me for money to buy drink. He looks about 14. No you can’t have any money.
The landlady is a very sweet lady in her 60s. She feels very trustable and nice. Just what my mind requires.
My abode is very old-fashioned in style. It’s like visiting my grandma’s when I was little. Fantastic shower though. And a washing machine. Now I am cleeeeeeeean!
So… I am sort of at the start of the Danube. I have two possible branches I could follow in order to get somewhere closer to the Black Sea to ‘officially’ start my Danube bike ride. Sorry can’t think of a better word than officially. The route I end up taking will be decided after I visit the tourist information tomorrow morning. In many ways I would prefer to go down the Chillia Branch to the north, but this is complicated by the possible lack of a Ukranian border crossing; the Chillia Branch is the border. The Sulina Branch to the south is entirely within Romania but it seems more like a canal than actual river. I’m so fussy… it looks like I could take a ferry all the way down to Sulina right on the ‘coast’ (if you could call it that) but I would want dropping off half way along to join the first bit of actual joined-up road back to proper solid ground again. I suspect this may involve paying for an individual boat at some point.
Friday April 28?
Spotted on the way to the ferry in a small bookstore: a Paul Mckenna book (he of the ‘I Can Make You.. Slim/ Stop Smoking/ Stop Having Sex With Goats… hypnotism fame.) On sale here is his best-selling slimming book. Unfortunately ‘I Can Make You’ in Romanian is ‘Te Pot Face’… ‘Paul Mckenna Te Pot Face’ in the same typeface. Hilarious.
A leisurely day spent on the ‘Moldova’ chugging down the last/ first stretch of the caramel-coloured ooze of the Danarii. At its end, Sulina a slightly touristy village geared towards bird-watchers. Getting off the boat, a crewman points out to me that a road on the map I was planning to return on doesn’t really exist. Trying to ride a bike through ‘maybe’ solid ground that is inevitably going to vaporise to reedy swamp sounds like the shittest idea ever. Fortunately there’s a route up to the Chillia northern branch where I can fill a non-bikeable gap by catching a ferry on Sunday. And the road marked from Chillia back to Tulcea really really does exist. The delta really is a maze.
I cycle out towards the tip of the canal where by way of reinforcing banks of artificially placed massive rocks, the canal manages to extend 3kms right into the black sea.
I don’t get to the end…following the track out to it I get halfway and I am dissuaded by a sea of rubbish. What does a village at sea level and surrounded by water do with its rubbish? It dumps it next to a nature reserve at the very tip of the Danube. Anti-climax doesn’t even begin to describe. I would still rather encounter this at the beginning than at my end. That really would be depressing. Fortunately I have camped at Gravsend at Hoek a long time ago, and I know it will be fine. I find a less grotty spot to pitch camp for the night. It’s a new moon.
Saturday April 29th.
In the morning I decide to brave the rubbish dump. I cycle through it, following the speculative?? Path that runs through it and several black puddles a foot deep with plastic detritus and used nappies floating in it.
At least its only the crap of one village and I’m soon out from it. A lone dump scavenger spots me and probably wonders what kind of idiot rides a bike through all that…
I am at the very edge of the delta now and it’s a case of finding ridges of ground to follow to get to the very tip of the canal. A herd of young shiny dark chestnut horses and some short-horned dun cows share the spot with me. The horses are wary. What kind of horse am i?
The end forms a horn; mostly of what seems to be loose peat washed up on a curved shoreline to the sea. It’s spongey and weird to push my bike on. At the tip I hoik my bike up onto the ridge of boulders that holds the final couple of kilometres of canal that juts out into the sea… I push the bike as far as I can sensibly go along this 4 metre wide bumpy strip, and that’s it; my new beginning. I meet some friendly dogs that belong to the lighthouse further down and also a real live snake. First time I have ever seen one in the wild and alive. Cool.
So. The final leg. Here goes…
I dodge wide of the rubbish dump and its yucky mud and follow a maze of shallow-rutted horse tracks through the surrounding scrub. Horses know better.
I find a ferry in the village to carry me across to the other bank 200 metres away and head off up a long straight peaceful road lined with reedbeds and another channel of water. I say peaceful but it was far from quiet. Unseen birds whooped continuously and a trillion billion fist-sized frogs cackled at each other in a bid for sex. I presume.
I pass through Cardon and C.A. Rossetti tiny villages en route. Who was C.A. Rossetti? An Italian canal engineer who fell in love with a local girl and decided to stay?
An international inter-faith cemetary in Sulina would suggest something like this. Who would guess that this sleepy little village was a majorly important gateway into Europe? In the cemetary are buried Bulgarians, Russians, Armenians, French, Germans, English, Turks, muslims, jews, Christians and possibly an Italian called Rossetti. I don’t know. I didn’t stop to count the gravestones.
The villages inevitably use much reed for thatch and walls on some of the humbler abodes and for walls to shield stockaded animals from the frequently driving wind.
I had been talking to a chap on a short holiday from Bucharest who had come here in the winter when it was -40, ice-breakers cracking their way through the frozen canal.
You’d really REALLY have to be hardcore to live here.
As it is, we are here the day before May 1st the beginning of summer and it feels lovely.
My routes tarmac evaporates and becomes a sand track which is something of an effort and after 15kms of that, my map is WRONG and would have me ride my bike into a bog… well bollocks to that, and I use my nouse to follow a made up direction. Bit worrying. This is the sort of country where things look fine and dandy one moment then you turn a corner and it’s show-stopping bog. And my map is vague as wotsits.
A track follows through beautiful oak forest that borders wetland. Gorgeous. Cuckoos and wood pigeons hoot. The track seems well used, compressed by many car tyre tracks. It seems definite and purposeful. I had seen three pick up trucks full of local guys earlier. They must have come from here.
Eventually I reach Periprava the last Romanian village on the Chillia Branch. Opposite is Vylkova in not-so-far-away Ukraine.
I learn that my necessary ferry upstream to Chillia Veche (New Chillia; old Chillia or ‘Kiiliya’ is on the other bank in Ukraine) leaves tomorrow morning. I am told to be on the boat for 5.30am. Wahhhh! That means decamping at about 4am. Yoiks. Okay. I pitch more-or-less next to the ferry on some firmish mud at the waters edge maybe an inch or two above the waterline and beneath some magnificent wizened old willows.

April 30th. The beginning of summer. Practically.
Decamped and on board, I blearily slump next to my bike and doze, listening to the music of early morning Romanian men chatting dozily to each other in warm and subdued mumbly tones, sipping coffee. The ships engine throbs and hums quietly and away we go.
Disembarking an hour later I am on my bike and ready to go. It’s 7.30am. Usually I’m not on the road til nearly 10.30 or 11.
60 kilometres and several gazillion Sid James impersonating frogs later and I am back in Tulcea by midday and eating the best ice cream ever. So creamy it’s chewy. Pistacio, tiramisu, lemon ripple and vanilla. I couldn’t decide which to have so I had all of them.
I feed some pigeons. Always entertaining; bobbing their heads non-stop and randomly spinning round changing direction. They look like some tiny tiny sliver of self-importance in their little pea-brains still knows that somehow they were once related to Tyrannosaurus Rex. And 99.99 percent of the rest of their tiny brains has absolutely no idea about anything at all, leaving them spinning and dithering manically in confusion. A bit like me really. That’s probably why I like them.
Cats and dogs though. I encounter a lot of both. If only dogs knew how to occupy themselves like cats can. Ninety percent of dogs need to bark their stupid little heads off as often as possible presumably to tell human beings just how bored they are. If only domestic dogs were capable of self reliance.
A cat on the other hand will just sit and stare at nothing, rebuild the Roman Empire in its imagination but from a cat’s perspective and then lick its paws and wash its face some more.

Bumbling out of town a wide-eyed guy flags me down. Here we go… what does he want?
Julian (spelt Iulian) is a marathon runner. He wants me to carry his back pack whilst he runs home 37kms to Isaccea where I also am going.
Huh? Takes me a minute to process what kind of scam this might potentially be. He has given me his bag. What kind of scamster gangster would claim to be a marathon runner? That’s way too imaginative. Nope. can’t see a scam. Okay I will carry your bag for you. ‘We shall be in Isaccea in 3 and half hours’ he promises me.
I follow his scraggy middle-aged lycra-clad backside as he trots along at the roads edge. This would be so much more entertaining for me if he was a lovely fit woman. Why do I always seem to get the crazy people instead?
Julian has some physical difficulties along the way (he had just come back from running a marathon in Belgrade) and after some some deal of him cursing himself quietly along the way, we finally arrive at his house 5 hours later. He is not happy about it. He has run 38 of these long runs. I’m amazed. Unfortunately he is the kind of person that drives himself by beating himself.
I stay at his cottage home that he shares with his mother. After 30 minutes of us arriving they seem to be rowing. Because he’s bought some random stranger back to the house? Probably. They seem like a classic scenario of a middle-aged man still living with his mother and who can’t quite fully escape from being a kid. He tells me that his father, now dead, was a policeman under Ceaucestceu and would regularly get beaten up by the dictators henchmen for minor things like not going to work for a day if he was ill.
I eventually end up sleeping in his mothers bed whilst she sleeps somewhere else. I am fast asleep as soon as I get in it. I have cycled 108kms today beating my previous personal best of 105 that I did on my way to Bukhara in Uzbekistan. I wonder if being at the riverside is going to lead to higher daily averages?
In the morning everyone seems happier. I fix a kitchen knife because they don’t have any glue and I attempt to fix Iulians rear derailleur mechanism on a racer that somebody had given him.
His mother tries to sell her chicken eggs in town but somehow people would rather buy them from a supermarket. Trying to raise the money for daily life is difficult. Trying to register on the internet for marathons and to juggle the organising for that is harder still.
His mother offers me two hard-boiled eggs for breakfast one painted bright yellow and the other bright red. Left over from ‘Pashte’; Easter.

Setting off down the road I engage with a long series of irritating road hills. Only low height things, but alongside me everything is flat as a pancake. Hopefully once I am on the ‘official’ EV6 it might be more convenient? Hmm. Dunno.
Do I go to Moldova and Ukraine? Do I backtrack eastwards at Galati, use up more time for mere idiotic ‘country bagging’?
Well it’s in my mind, and I am here and Ukraine is only 30kms away. Okay I will go.
From Romanian Galati the Moldovan border is 15kms away.

MOLDOVA
15.28 I get my Moldovan border stamp.
I cycle 1km to the Ukrainian border in ten minutes.
15.46 I get stamped into Ukraine.

UKRAINE
Wow. Blink and you’ll miss it. Moldova used to be part of Romania and strategically dips one tiny toe in the waters of the Dunarii. Hence my world record breakingly short visit to the country.
4kms into Ukraine and I am at the first habitation Reni. Reni turns out to be a spotlessly clean sleepy small town that has a vibe that makes it feel like its occupants are mostly pensioners. Warm and friendly and safe.
I find a hotel that can store my bike (much kerfuffle with mutual incomprehension of each other) and then proceed to get drunk with two fat guys who ply me with ‘Green Day’ branded vodka and orange Fanta, a potato pie with chicken and delicious lumps of smoked pork fat and salami. I find the Green Day branding amusing; they are an American punk band that have a fabulous song called ‘Don’t Want To Be An American Idiot’.
In my now fuggledness my bike goes into nearby storeroom. I hope it’s really as safe as they assure me. Ukraine has a terrible reputation for thievery.
In the morning I board a mashrutka to the city of Izmail 40kms away and immediately regret drinking a pint of milk for breakfast. As we bump up and down in the worst roads I have encountered since Tajikistan, I am doing a major act of willpower to not piss myself. It’s horrible.
Jumping off the mashrutka just as we enter the city, I pee the longest pee I ever did. Positively Niagara Falls.
Boarding another rather more plush mashrukta heading to Odessa 300kms away I remember not to make the same mistake. Instead, I am dehydrated, am nursing a hangover and the vehicle is dead stuffy and sweaty. When I open the roof hatch to let some fresh air in, the weedy young woman sitting next to me promptly shuts it again. Thanks. Screw you. Now I’m annoyed and on another endurance trip.
The journey across Odessa Oblast is not in the least bit interesting. The entire journey is excruciatingly dull and uncomfortable. Bloody hangover.
Getting off the mashrutka upon arrival in Odessa, a young chap jumps to my assistance from out of nowhere when it’s clear I have no idea how to go about buying a train ticket to Kiev. I like it when the train station angels appear. Vassily (for that is his name) is a young man of about 23 and is a sailor. He went to university for five years to train as an accountant. As accountants get paid about 150 to 200 US dollars a month, he jacked it in to become a sailor where the money is much better. What’s worse is that the cost of food is almost as much as Western Europe.
Vassily studied in Odessa and happily shows me its best bits whilst filling me in on some of the city’s history. Apart from the city being part founded by Queen Elizabeth the Second of Russia (not the German but allegedly English one) there’s a statue of another founding father who whilst actually clutching a rolled up manuscript, from a certain angle just looks like he is having a wank.
Whats most curious about this for me is that I encountered an almost identical statue in Havana Cuba. Now I am left wondering how many other sculptures in the world feature this seruptitious wanking feature. Maybe it’s a special sculptors code that indicates a disrespect for the subject… not so far-fetched when you consider that there is a symbolism in statues of horses; the number of feet on the ground indicate whether the horses rider was a valiant victor, defeated or a peaceful ruler. Yes that’s only three options but I have yet to see a sculpture of a horse with all its feet off the ground. It would either be of a racehorse leaping a fence or a dead horse on its back with legs in the air.
None of which has anything to do with the price of fish.
Vassily has managed to turn my ‘what the heck did I come to Odessa for?’ into a very entertaining and informative evening, all whilst waiting for the midnight sleeper train to Kiev. Or Kyev as the Ukranians prefer. The other version is Russian.
The train is lovely. It’s clean, orderly and peaceful. Nothing like Indian or Chinese trains. It’s also really cheap. Four quid to go 750kms.
I have no idea what’s in Kyev. All I know is that it’s supposed to be very nice. I find the Old City on my map and head for it. Always a good bet if your bent on being a tourist. The first place I find is a tenth century cathedral dedicated to Saint Sofia. It’s an elegant building with creamy white walls and pale green roofs and towers and three golden onion domes as well. It’s lovely. Inside is jaw-dropping. It’s totally covered in original and nearly entirely intact frescoes for all the way back. Numerous hawkish middle-aged women spy on every one making sure that they don’t take photos. I feel sure that they would crowd round me and peck me to pieces if I did. I am glad they are there though… mobile technology blasts its way obliviously through the sanctity of many things. People seeing this cathedral through their phone and taking selfies would be bloody awful. So hats off to ’em.
I wonder off and investigate a similar more modern church about 500 metres down the road and then sit in a nearby park listening to two chaps playing a piano beautifully. I soak up some dappled park sunlight, make a video of twenty pigeons goofing about playing pigeon football with a chunk of bread I threw their way. For all my lack of understanding of football, I imagine the pigeons are playing some game where they all trying to catch the bits of bread that fly everywhere as they toss it randomly upwards… now a crow you see, stands on its food and holds it down before pecking at it. That way a crow gets to eat rather than run around trying to find out where that lump of bread just went every single time it pecks it. I wonder if the crows hold opinions about pigeons.
Right. I’ve had a sufficient taste of Kyev. Really I should of course of had taste of Chicken Kyev, but A) I can’t be bothered and B) I have eaten way too much ice cream and the thought of chicken is revolting.
I read a thing somewhere that said Ukranian ice cream is stunningly good, and so it is. For a country that seems to be massively rural I would expect its ice cream to be good.

Date??
The night train is plush and comfy and seems like my carriage is brand new. In the first half of the journey I share with a chap heading for Odessa. When he gets off he is replaced by a woman with phenomenonally ginger long curly hair.
In the morning I disembark and hop onto a waiting mashrukta and we all play babooshka sardines… just how many head-scarved old women can you get in a minibus? The legally required seating numbers plate states 21 seated and 35 standing! It wouldn’t be allowed in the European Union. Desperately unsafe. I should know, being an ex-bus driver as I am.
The sardines bus thankfully is only going a couple of miles to the city centre where I transfer again to a considerably more spacious mashrutka for the 70km run back to border town Reni.
Is my bike still there? Will there be anyone there to get it out of the lockup? Potentially I could waste a day just waiting. Thankfully someone is there and I re-unite with my bike again. I pretend to kiss the bike saddle to demonstrate to its keeper my happiness to see my bike again. In retrospect this might not have sent out the right signals…
A quick skip out of Reni and I attempt to break my previous personal world record for shortest time in a country. I am through Moldova in a stunning 5 minutes, but the whole attempt gets bollocksed by having to sit waiting in a queue of cars waiting to enter Romanian border control. Darn.
I know I am back in Romania because there are frequent dead snakes in the road in varying states of dessication. With enough forethought I could have collected enough to make snakeskin shoes, a wallet, a waistcoat and trousers. And wouldn’t I have looked even more of a mess than I already do.
I make it to just beyond Galati the Romanian city on the border, but the next day I clock up my best mileage ever of 130kms.
I have changed my day pattern to see if I can get some extra mileage in. Instead of meditating in the morning and leaving between 10.30 and 11am, I have decided to do my first sit as my lunch break rest period. That way I can leave an hour and half earlier and by the time I get to midday I have done nearly all the mileage that I would have done usually for the whole day. Also if I keep cycling til 7.30 – 8pm that helps too. I have been doing it for three successive days with runs of 130, 96 and 94kms. Whether I can sustain it is another matter.
I am eager to cross into Bulgaria having decided that I have seen enough of Romania already. By the time I have cycled one day in northern Bulgaria I have had enough of that too and want to go back into Romania…
As I have said before, national borders often seem to be naturally formed by matters of geology. On the north bank of the Dunarii/ Dunarea is southern Romania which is flat and low-lying, much of it either chalky or sandy. On the other side is slightly hilly northern Bulgaria, which judging from the clag that screwed up two of my attempts at staying close to the river whilst there, seems to involve a lot of sticky clay. This is significant for two reasons:
The first is that damp clay completely jams up my bike. I would rather ride on soft sand. At least my wheels still go round.
The thing that is significant is (i am guessing now) that the presence of the massive wodge of hundred metre high clay that seems to be northern Bulgaria is the reason why the Dunarii/ Dunarea/ Danube is where it is.
Either way, my attempts at hugging the river by forest track routing in Bulgaria was crap. I was forced back up to main road. Which was a shame cuz the forest was beautiful. On the main road I don’t see the river at all in a hundred kilometres, just vast arable fields, sometimes gently rolling hills and distant stands of woodland. Some of it is nice but really I could be anywhere and I feel no sense of connection to the river.
So tomorrow I will cross back at Ruse in Bulgaria to Giurgiu in Romania. At least on the Romanian side if I am not right next to the river I will know where it is by the forested ridge of Bulgaria standing above the reedbeds, canals and lakes that scatter the Romanian riverside. It’s the sense of place that I’m after.
Tonight still in Bulgaria it’s almost a full moon and I find myself under the bluelit woodland call and response of two songful night birds. The ground is carpeted in wild Tarragon… a wonderful sweet exotic smell like bathroom licorice.

Monday May 8th.
Just down the road at Ruse I crossed a big steel girder bridge back into Romania which instinctively felt like the right thing to do. For a start I didnt have to bend my brain around cyrillic all the time.
I briefly met a young woman outside a shop who had just come back from England where she had been living and working around manchester and Sheffield. No wonder her English was so good. She was planning to go back in a month where she had got a contract working for Western Union earning 1300 quid a month. Pretty good going as I had just just about worked out the cost of living in Romania is about 30 percent of what it is in the uk. She was leaving her kids with her mum.
The going was flat and the countryside plains of young wheat, sunflowers-to-be and yellow rapeseed. Not very interesting but at least I could see where the river was, usually about two kilometres away, the escarped hills of Bulgaria and trees defining its location.
It was flat and I had a non-stop headwind for 50kms. Which was very very tedious. I was knackered and stopped for an ice cream break somewhere and when I went to get on the bike the rear tyre was utterly flatted.
Sometimes mending a flat happens easily, all the constituent parts know how it’s supposed to go and behave themselves. This one wasn’t one of those. This one got mended, tucked away back into the wheel, went flat, removed leaky patch, pin prick hole becomes 1.5cm gash. Put on enormous patch, it holds, more air, okay, nope. Bang. Bollocks. Then a blue-overalled auto mechanic comes along; removes patch, rubs clean with emery cloth, uses motorbike patch and special glue. Evidently this glue is special in that it has no qualities of adherence whatsoever. Stunning. A second person comes to assist. Different glue. My patch. Wheel re-assembled. Tube still crap. New tube from shop. Lovely. Except the valve is a normal length and too short for my deep double rim. The two chaps strain and gurn and twist and push to get the mechanics compressor nozzle to attach to the 1 millimetre of valve that’s peeking through the rim. By now a drunk bloke drinking cider and talking to me in bollocksy German is ‘helping’ too. Somehow I finally have a happy wheel with a happy slightly Mickey Mouse tube in it. Then I have to remove a brake block cuz the inflated tyre is too fat to squeeze in…
Well this is lovely for now, but if I get a flat again, I will be royally screwed unless it happens next to some car mechanic with a compressor and half a ton of willpower. I have read of people stuffing tyres with grass, newspaper… I read once that during the second world war when there was a rubber shortage, people used to put rope on the rim. Desperate.
Mulchy-mesc’s and goodbyes and I’m back on the road again, with an extra ice cream on board just for good measure.
The wind has stopped but I can hear and see what it has brought. Ahead of me by some 4 to 6 kilometres is a vast dark grey cloud streaming curtains of rain. The sky rumbles and explodes as lightening arcs across the dark cloud.
I sit calmly eating my tub of raspberry ice cream listening to the thunder. I love the sound of thunder. Right. Waterproofs on, batten down the hatches on the bike and off we go.
Passing through villages in dense rain, men sit sensibly under cover outside bars clutching bottles of beer and hooting varying welcomes… some of it is the same indistinct hollers I have been hearing all along the way from Kyrgyzstan. Funny that.
Generally,everyone seems to say ‘ola’ for hello, ‘merci’ for thank you and ‘ciao’ for goodbye. What an international lot these people are.
Using my remarkably helpful maps.me thingy I have found three bike shops in Craiova a city to the north which, with a bit of luck I’m hoping I can get a train there from Corabia which I shall pass through in 80kms. The bike shops there all have promisingly sporty names so I hope at least one of them will have a sufficiently macho inner tube with nice big long valve on it. Phwoar! Eh? Know what I mean? Oh dear it’s been a long day.
Tuesday 9th may.
After a full moonlit night sleeping next to a grassed-over railway track and breathing in the disconcerting scent of either chemical fertiliser or pesticide all night, my morning begins with an urgent re-patching of my extremely worn out zip-off trousers. A patch over another patch on the backside. No more will everyone get to enjoy the view of my stinky blue underpants peeking through several three inch holes. Terrible.
The train station at Zimnicea near where I had camped seems like it shut up shop many years past. Another disused soviet relic. Closer inspection shows a tiny hand-scrawled note with the times of the two daily trains to Craiova. Hmm. I’m not waiting til 4.50pm for the next one…
A few clicks down the road, on my way towards my next train connection possibility some 55kms away, I spot on the horizon a tell-tale slightly wobbling silhoette of a bulky pannier-packed pair of bicycles with two heads wearing silly-looking alien ant helmets Is this a pair of cycle tourists I see before me?
The two bikes turns out to be a tandem and tag-along trailer. English Mark and Jenny must have lots of fun getting that lot onto trains and into hostels…
We all gabble together excitedly for half an hour; the gabbling the result of none of us not having any other Brits to talk to for ages. My last Brit was a strangely insipid thin-lipped looking chap from Manchester I met in Istanbul. Being immersed in Asia, Europeans often have a habit of looking like they are somehow on the edge of death.
Anyway we chat excitedly and most definitely alive for quite some time… swapping cyclist tips Mark informs me that there is a ‘real’ cycle shop in Turnu Magurele 50kms away where my next train station is. Eventually Jenny reminds Mark that they have a plane to catch tomorrow in 60kms at Ruse. And today is the day the winds have decided to swap directions and me and the fellow cycling couple have exchanged headwinds and tailwinds. Great for me, slightly worrying for them.
On through the would-be sunflower forests (they stand all of 6 inches high at the moment but will be looking incredible come August.)
Passing through a number of lovely and increasingly friendly villages.. Is it because I am reaching the edges of more tourist cyclist-populated country? Is it because they all said hello to Mark and Jenny earlier this morning and now they are all geared up for waving at tourists? Is it because people no longer have to look at my stinky underpants?
I reach Turnu Magurele having had an unusually friendly encounter with a pair of happy scruff-dogs at a Petrom service station. Having done their duty of barking at me, they responded with curiosity to my friendly congratulations to them for having done their job so well. Now one of them is doing a spinning in a circle trick and smiling at me in order to blag food. It works and I give them both half of my bread. I am definitely getting better at dogs, through I doubt I will ever ever be able to enjoy the sound of a village-ful of dogs barking endlessly through the night.
At the start of the town I ask a likely chap who is sitting outside his house attempting to sell an array of electrical items that your grandad might have kept stored in a shed somewhere.
I ask if there is a bike shop and where it might be. He calls to his rather buxom wife who speaks good-enough English and she tells me there’s a bike shop some way off nowhere near where Mark had said I would find it. Hmm. don’t think I will bother with her suggestion on that one. Then the pair of them ask if there is anything I might need.. food? Clothes? Money?
Yes please. I would really like a wash. Today I had been riding feeling liked I had been smeared all over with goose grease fit to swim the English channel. I had even tried washing my grotty slimy socks in an extremely brown roadside puddle. ‘Now That’s What I Call Desperate 17’.
Oh wow fantastic! A shower! It’s missing its showerhead but who cares! Clean!
My alarming underpants get a good seeing to, my socks a much needed apology, my shirt de-salted. It had soaked up so much sweat since it was last washed it must have been slowly transforming into a wearable salt-lick.
Clean!! (Gibber gibber).
When I surface transformed, mister husband offers me some clothes to take, which I refuse as I already have enough to carry as it is. Outside I am summonsed to sit at a table next to a tiny kids pool table two feet long.
A carrier bag appears which I gather is lunch for me; a fresh loaf, a pot of smetana (half yoghurt half cream) slices of salami, cheese and a can of coke. It reminds me of Central Asia (except this bread isn’t stale).
In between eating, two of her young sons of about 8 and 10 challenge me to a game of pool which I lose at completely.
Mrs. Wife is a Christian and asks if I believe in God to which my slightly squirmy reply is ‘not really’… she tells me how she had gone away to Italy for work and she has learned reasonably good English from watching TV shows with subtitles. She had been hoping to work in England but nobody knows any more how possible that might be. she tells me Romania is corrupt and broken. There is no work. Mr. Husband waves some money at me which I absolutely refuse.. I say my goodbyes in as many languages as I can think of.
I am so happy to have met them and riding off waving behind me I go in search again for this mythical bike shop. A chap on a ‘real’ mountain bike heads past me and waving google translate at him I ask if there is a good bike shop here. He in return waves to me to follow him and after some intriguing little shortcuts between blocks of flats, there it is; The Bike Shop. It’s not called that. These are my capitals to emphasise how important this bike shop is to me right now.
My stomach churns half out of digesting lunch and half out of slight nervousness. Will the shop have inner tubes with the extra manly valves? I stick my exploded one under the shopkeepers nose and he goes ‘Ah yes!’ in comprehension, raising a finger to signal that he remembers where he keeps them.
He produces one. Oh wow. I tell him that he has saved me from a lot of problems. He laughs.
Inside my jaw drops. It’s an Aladdin’s Den of esoteric cycling goodies. Yum yum yum. Now; whilst I am here and I have this rare opportunity, is there anything else I require? Yes. An extra tube. And some rubber solution. No, make that three. Ooh and can you see if my bottom bracket needs sorting out at all?
No my bottom bracket is fine but my rear cassette and chain are going to need replacing soon. Hmm. I’ll just wait until it’s closer to its demise and get maximum use out of it. Well.. how much would replacing it all cost? 25 quid! Oh wow go ahead and replace it now!
After some effort manouvering the bulky bike into the small dark oily bike cave and hoiking the bike arielly on a sturdy chain, there is a wangling of spanners, the sacred utterances of minor cussing to summons the right combination of bits and a smoking of cigarettes and a supping of coffee…
And then… new bikey bits! Yaay!
I take a photo of the shops team outside so I can direct any oncoming struggling cycle tourist at them. One of the things I love about being a cyclist is that it is such a pleasure to get my bike taken care of by bike shop owners who are also passionate about bicycles. I’m sure it must be the same for motorbike fans too.
Cycling off again; What a day! Tailwinds! English tourist chat! Nice dogs! Fabulous lunch! New bikey bits! Not having to fart about going on trains to other places! More nice chat! More tailwind!
I am a bit dubious that my gear ratios have been massively reduced, but actually it’s just that I have a fabulous tailwind, nice clean new everythings and unbeknownst to me, for once I actually have the right amount of air in my now hard-as-you-like tyres.
Thirty kilometres of beautiful country passes. Woodland copses, young wheat, cows and shepherds…. zzzziiiippp!
I am aiming for Corabia which when I get there will have meant I have done 80kms. Pretty good considering everything else that I’ve fitted in.
I stop in a shop to buy an evening meal of bread, bananas, yoghurt and chocolate. The lady shopkeeper tries to engage with me in Italian but no comprende.
Her friend wants me to go into her kitchen for food. I tell her that I don’t want to leave my bike in case somebody tries to take stuff.
So she brings a chair outside and using the outside ice cream cabinet as a table she brings me a bowl of wonderful pork chop and potato stew, a loaf of bread, cheese, a jar of pickled peppers with nettles in it (very very good) and an enormous glass of wine.
Sitting on the pavement eating happily as a couple of smiling locals watch, it starts to rain so she gets one the onlookers to hastily put up a pub beer garden type parasol which proves a bit fiddly cuz the catch on it is jammed. I eat my gourmet meal in my green waterproof coat whilst the two of them wrestle with the parasol in the rain. Oh what fun!
More heartfelt goodbyes and I’m off again, squeezing the last available use out of the now fading day. I have an hour until 8.30pm to get my tent up.
Amazingly to me, I manage another 20kms and I don’t feel tired. I really should do hot bowls of stew more often. I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate a hot meal.
I find a nice spot amongst some fields just after the wonderfully named Grojdibodu. Try saying it out loud.
Full moon. About twenty dogs bark non-stop.
Goodnight.

New
30 28 24 21 19 17 15 11
Old
32 26 21 18 16 14 12 11
Oh that’s the teeth numbers for my rear cassette. If you’re reading it it’s because I forgot to remove it.

Wednesday 10th may.
Yesterday was a day of marvelous good fortune, and of course the pendulum of fortune is ever swinging. Today I feel exhausted, I have non-stop headwind and get to the ferry at Bechet 30kms down the road by 2pm. I am hoping that I have ages to wait for the ferry so that I have a legitimate excuse to be unable to keep pushing for that 100kms a day thing.
The ferry will arrive at 3pm. Excellent. I attempt of change my Romanian money into Bulgarian but no-one is in the change office. I crash out in some long willow fluff filled grass instead.
The ferry comes. The crossing, laden with twelve artic trucks is a twenty minute chug. I try to change my 50 quids worth of Romanian. The woman behind the counter will only change Euros and dollars. Bollocks. Is there anywhere in town that will change this money? No. A guard suggests I ask lorry drivers, which results in ten Euros, thirty Bulgarian doo-dahs and an amount of can’t help you shrugged shoulders.
Piss arse bollocks bum crap. I hastily buy a return ticket to Romania where I am hoping that the change desk on the other side might be open for all these truck drivers. I dash for the ferry only to see its arse disappearing away from shore. Chug chug bleeding chug.
I wait an hour for its return during which time it dawns on me that all this messing about is just natures sneaky way to make me take some time out. So rather than getting wound up (which is worse because I’m tired) , really I should just chill out. Aaaahhhh…
The ferry returns. I board it. Chug chug chug. The change desk is still closed. OH FOR FUCKS SAKE! A guard enquires as to my difficulty. He says this is how the system works…. ITS NOT A SYSTEM, AND IT DOESNT BLOODY WORK! I’ve been here for four hours and I’m stuck with 40 Euros worth of useless money. It then occurs to me that maybe I just stay in Romania until the next available border crossing by which time I would have spent the Romanian money. But no! A-ha! Second guard appears, a swaggering figure in the fading sun clutching a fistful of Euros…. thank you thank you dribble dribble gibber gibber. I do pathetic gratitude very well you know. It’s because it’s real.
I dash for the ferry again back to Bulgaria only to find it’s just me, a truck driver smoking a fag, a car and two possibly stray dogs that have claimed this spot for its nosh-blagging potential. It works.
They are surprised to see me arriving a second time in Bulgaria, which is fun. I am happy now. I have had my difficulty resolved. I am still knackered though. I wheel myself 8kms down the road and uptent somewhere charming by the river.
Thursday 11th may
My Bulgarian road experience is considerably nicer than my previous attempt from Silistra to Ruse. It’s flat, I feel like I am by the river, mostly.
Villages are full of empty houses again. What the heck happened to Bulgaria? It plainly came to a much worse deal than Romania whatever it was. The effects of Stalinism maybe? Or something else? I should find out.
Friday 12th may.
Without really trying I clock up 99kms, enough to get me over the Serbian border.
At the Bulgarian side a young guard in American Cop mirror shades says to me ‘You do know that you are about to enter Serbia don’t you?’
Oh crap. Has the war not really finished? Why do you say this strange remark?
‘Oh it’s just that sometimes people think that because there is a small river here that they are crossing into Romania.’
Woah. Maybe these people should try using a map?
That’s what he thinks too.
400 metres of no-mans stream and I am met by a pert young female border guard with spikey short peroxide blond hair. A certain kind of chaps sexual fantasy but not mine. She gives me short shrift as I am clearly not hers either…
Saturday 13th may.
I stayed at Hotel Olimp in Negotin, chiefly for the purpose of recharging battery packs overnight, but a shower is a bonus.
I can’t quite work out whether this part of Serbia is full of holiday homes or whether the Serbians are just plain wealthier. Lots of extremely ostentatious large houses brightly coloured and smothered in concrete cake decorations. Weird.
By contrast, the flat arable countryside is dotted frequently by what in current western groovy parlance is known as ‘tiny homes’; lots of dwellings little bigger than sheds but architecturally like an actual house. Most lovely. I want one.
Finally I am cycling great chunks of my route today actually on the riverbank. Just what I always wanted. Lots of weekend cabins/houses/caravans here. Many countries in Europe (i first encountered the concept in Norway) it is thoroughly usual for people to work in town through the week and spend the weekend in a country spot in your own little holiday home. How sane is that? Personally I think caravans should be the size limit; depriving locals of their own housing stock should be made a criminal offence (I am thinking specifically of britain here).

Later I meet Bee and Butch, English and Australian going the other way to Odessa on their bikes and we chat for ages. That’s nice.

Monday 16th may.
Is a strange day.
Having camped near a particularly wiggly detour bypassing a tiny tunnel that just so happened to drop dramatically into an equally tiny but none-the-less spectacular gorge, the following morning whilst uptenting I encounter my first cycle tourist of the day; a bespectacled middle-aged German chap of a demeanor which suggested that he was a slightly submissive office worker. In tow, he was being followed by a cheery little dark brown doglet. An amusing sight.
Has he come with you from Germany?
‘No I just found him some minutes ago.’
All is well. The dog now has a dilemma. Does he carry on tagging along with the nice German fella or hang out with me, who with all this stuff strewn about, maybe might just give him breakfast? Doglet decides to stay, I oblige him with a slice of the rubbish factory-made sliced brown bread I had had to buy yesterday. Doglet doesn’t think much of it either.
Ten minutes later the German chap returns, looking concerned. ‘I think this is not the correct way.’
Clearly he’s been put off by the two unexpected minor bits of stream fording the gorge entails. I found it slightly tricky too and he seems like a beginner in this department.
I tell him that yes it really is the route and that that the ‘detour’ is actually very short. Just put yourself into bottom gear when riding through the water, or take your boots off and get off and push. Or just turn round and go back up onto the road.
Looking a little more determined he sets off back towards the stream with doglet now back with him having decided my breakfasts are rubbish.
Off he goes, weaving wildly as he fiddles about to change his gears. He is even wearing his waterproof trousers (its already sunny and hot). There goes a man prepared for the worst…
Continuing along the sheer rock walls of the narrow gorge, the road undulates easily and offers stunning value for money views-wise. Traffics pretty sensible. Fine.
At Golubac I chat with Toby and Stefan from Stuttgart; seems all the cyclists I am meeting are German or Austrian apart from Bee and Butch.
After Golubac things start to go weird. A crossroads I am sure I am supposed to change course at has no signposts where really there should be some. Instead a woman comes up to me, pawing at my arm slightly. Oh she wants money. I don’t feel like giving her any and away I go.
From now (Usije) the signage gets a bit mysterious; the kind where you see the direction sign but it’s almost impossible to tell which of the three narrowly converging dirt tracks you’re supposed to follow. Well I guess it’s the most used looking one or the one that veers nearest towards the river. I suppose.
I follow an 8.6km scenic route to Ram Fortress, where the Danube becomes Serbian on both banks and Hungary goes home for its tea. The route dissolves to a shoddy uphill sand dune trudging event for a while (very tedious) but soon regains the semblances of solid dirt again, throwing me humpitty-bumpitty between overgrown verges that couldn’t get any closer to the river bank if it tried. There are no tyre marks here and clearly none of the cyclist I have met so far came this way. I bet they are all following the German route guide book; ‘Well there is a scenic route marked just here, you can go down if you like but it is bollocks.’
That’s what it says, I am sure. Word for word.
Emerging from the shrubbery finally I am in another little holiday village and it even has a ferry. The signs are still being a bit weird and this would have been a very good moment for me to check my route against the ‘official’ route that I took screenshots off from the interweb.
Then I would have discovered that waiting for the ferry might have been a smart move and then continuing on the other bank. But I didnt.
The route starts innocently enough, along the top of a dead straight dyke, nice view and all that. Bit of tailwind too. Super. Just what you need toward the end of day. A track fork. Which way? Consult map. Either; arrives at same point in Klicevic.
Big noisy fair going on in middle village. On I go. Up a minor hill.
And then…. yuck. A freaking super-quarry. After weeks of idyllic countryside suddenly the twenty first century comes and smacks me round the face.
Ugly ugly view, spontainous rubbish dumps at the side of the road but perfect tarmac and a tailwind. Yikes I’m getting out of here. Over the horizon I go, past some woodland to find… a big gurning churning clunking super industrial processing plant. Starting to get dark. I don’t want to camp here. I’d never sleep. I’d have horrible dreams.
Another roadside rubbish dump. A small white cat mews imploringly. I offer it an enormous lump of cheese but it runs away. Maybe it will find again by smell. Maybe it won’t. This place stinks. A hundred metres away a small black puppy barks at me, a companion dog lays alongside him.
Fuck. People do my head in sometimes.
A car hoots its horn and swerves round two older dogs investigating something in the middle of the road. When I get there it’s another dog, clearly one their mates. The two see me and guess that I must be trouble and rapidly run off down the road. Poor fellas not been gone long. His face smashed on one side. Grabbing his rear feet I drag him over to a verge-side where his buddies can come back and say their goodbyes in safety. From what I have seen previously at roadsides, they will probably eat him.
In the same area, a square of woodland clings like an old mans last remaining tooth. Packed with roosting rooks whirling and cawing, I hope they go all Alfred Hitchcock on any bugger greedy enough to want to put his dozer through this bit too.
An EV6 sign to some Roman artifact. Incongruous in the middle of this mess. Each sign has a little words of wisdom thing that goes with it. This one says ‘Some people have fun being tortured and some people find having fun a torture’.
Earlier in the day I had been whinging loudly to myself about the kinds of people that I don’t like; moan moan whinge. And then all this lot comes along. Somehow, my internal neg-headedness followed this sudden influx of worldly rot feels connected. That’s karma that is. Or as my mum or dad would have said: ‘Don’t you worry, he’ll get his come-uppance’.
On past the hissing clunking industrial thing, a great mass with an aura of degradation emanating all around it. Through Selo Kostelac where a man mowing his lawn wants to talk but no; I’ve got to get out of here.
Up over a hill and… another set of chimneys and conveyer-belts. Bugger. A large sign. Processing plant owned by a Chinese/Serbian consortium. The Chinese really are taking over the world. They get away with by means of trading, which is legitimate in the eyes of the ‘democratic’ West. It really really is a shame that wherever they go, the Chinese powers have absolutely no sense of style or grace.
In Kostelac it’s 10pm, it’s pretty much dark and what the heck am I still doing on my bike? Out the other side, I nose my way into some fields and find a spot for camping. Rich smelling herbiage. Thank heavens.

Tuesday 16th may.
I think ‘vulcanizer’ must be my favourite word since leaving Tbilisi. Advertised at roadsides, always painted onto a truck tyre and usually nailed to a tree, I like the thought of walking into one of these shabby little workshops and coming out half hour later with pointy ears and looking like Mr. Spock’s long lost big-nosed brother; looking bemused a lot and declaring everything to be illogical. Which it is. There you go, I’m halfway there already.

Snakes, lizards and Charley Boorman.
Snakes are supposed to be cunning aren’t they? Then why do they insist on sunbathing on the road? That’s not cunning, that’s suicidal.
I saw my first lizard in the European bit of Turkey a day after heading west out of Istanbul, and there are still loads of them in Serbia. In Romania and Bulgaria they were all a vivid lime green colour with turquoise heads and throats. The biggest I saw was about two feet long but most I see ones about ten inches, all dashing off the road when they see me coming at them, back into the roadside verge scurrying through the grass. One not having that option ran alongside my front wheel until a verge appeared for him to dive into, super high speed waddling for all his worth.
Having watched all the motorbike stuff with Charley Boorman and Ewan Mcgregor, whenever I’m dancing my wheels through muddy pot-holed dirt tracks, I pretend that I’m on a training weekend in Wales with the lads. Nearest I’ll ever get to being famous. I.e, not at all.

Friday 19th may.
Novi Sad was a groovy little city preceded and followed by an huge great length of dyke surfing, surfaces varying from perfect asphalt to wading through long grass and everything in between.
Crossing at Backa Palanka into Croatia at Ilok by evening, Croatia feels different but the same. Every country nudges itself just a little each time into a slightly more west version than the last country.
Serbia’s modern arable landscape was studded regularly with small roadside plots of a hundred metre length usually of grapevines or cherry trees and within these plots of often standing in the middle of vast fields of some monotonous crop would be these tiny houses. I could never quite work out if they were farm workers houses, places for old folk to live or what exactly. I never saw anyone in one. Either way, Croatia seems to have almost entirely lost the habit.
In Croatia the old style mudbrick and limewash walls of previous countries declines noticeably.
All along the country roads in both countries stand crucifixes. I have passed so many of them now, and as they all look pretty similar they are starting to have a peculiar mesmerising effect on me; it always seems to me that Jesus is perpetually sniffing his right armpit.
From Bulgaria to here though the midsummer air is filled with regular wafts of warm elderflower perfume. Men with plastic carrier bags or large buckets crane their necks upwards looking for the best umbellifer clumps to pick, moped or bicycle standing nearby. Methinks they are making elderflower wine. I pick a few, to eat the flowers… they are quite edible.
The travelling beekeepers are here in Croatia too, sometimes with their multi-coloured lorries of bee-hives on board.
The most significant difference between Serbia and Croatia is that you can still see the bullet holes in some buildings and concrete structures that suffered mortar attacks. This isn’t the wholesale degradation that Georgia has not managed to lift itself out of, this is deliberate memorial. All around Croatia has done a successful job of re-building and patching up. Croatia is the first country I have been to that not only has litter bins but actual recycling facilities next to supermarkets. This might not seem so amazing, but almost every farm track off a main road in Bulgaria was a sponteinious fly-tipping spot. A side effect of this was that it made finding a camping spot a sometimes depressing process.

Croatia on the other hand, certainly the areas that I am passing through, is spotlessly clean and tidy.
In Serbia in the last town I had passed through, it had big rubbish bins with stickers on them announcing that the bins had been donated by the town of Naroda in Japan.
Croatia also seems to be free of stray dogs. I saw none excepting for two ten week old black labrador pups who seemed thoroughly engaged in playing rough and tumble in the long roadside grass. Either they had wandered off from the nearest farmhouse a kilometre off the road or they had been freshly dumped and they hadn’t cottoned on to their new situation yet.
Just before Osijek at Nemetin, a memorial to the events of 1992. The only things I can work out from the inscription is the number 714 and the word ‘concentration’. Until I can make a proper translation of it I think I can just guess what happened.
Croatia has much more provision for cyclists with cycle paths and bike racks. The lovely town of Osijek was busy with cyclists and it’s old-fashioned blue and white trams. Nice vibes.
The EV6 route barely follows the Danube but I don’t really care. It’s a balmy day and the going is almost completely flat.
After Osijek a policeman on a motorbike comes to check that I’m not an illegal immigrant. He tells me that the bit of dyke I am currently riding on is a popular route for people trying to cross into Serbia and Hungary via the rivers. Oh yeah by the way, don’t go off the top of this dyke here for camping or a poo as the whole area is still full of mines left over from the war…
I don’t even pretend to understand the whys and wherefores of the collapse of Yugoslavia, but what is distinct is Croatia’s will to remember it whilst in Serbia I saw nothing. I can only guess that the Serbs were the perpetrators.
I am camped in a wood only 40kms from my crossing into Hungary at Udvar.
In the night apart from the occasional sound of thundering hooves coming at me and then veering away, I get visited by no less than four policemen (all together) tooled-up with very bright flashlights and pistols in waist holsters, wanting to see my documents amd asking me where I’m going. No malice, just checking. I go back to sleep.

Tuesday 28th may.
Passing easily into Hungary the first thing I encounter is Hungary’s new refugee repellant, their new iron curtain… a great chainlink fence with steel posts and topped with two rows of razor wire stretch off over the horizon. Apart from that, I get no sense of twitchy suspicion around me. I guess being on a bike fairly squarely advertises my raison d’etre.
Villages and towns are spick and span, sometimes the EV6 signage is great and sometimes it’s utterly abysmal. I spend an entire day chugging away into a non-stop headwind moving along a rather dull raised dyke with a hundred metres of long grass either side and then strips of mostly poplar trees. It’s a man-made environment and goes on for ages. Boring boring boring. Occasional villages are a welcome relief.
A string of Austrian and German cyclists pass me through the day zipping past as if on e-bikes. Bastards.
Heading towards Budapest, right on the edges of the city area about a kilometre before I reach an alleged campsite, it starts to hail lumps of ice a centimetre across. Then the most incredible amount of rain just dumps out of the sky with pretty much no warning; no welcoming wind, nothing. There is flash flooding and I immediately get utterly soaked before I have a chance to get waterproofed. Everyone ducks for cover.
I head for the alleged campsite. Maps.me screws up again. Its routes are generally pretty good, but the accomodation marked has a habit of being somewhat ephemeral.
There’s a ‘Boatel Hotel’ nearby. I’m staying there. Don’t care how much it costs. I’ve just ridden 103kms, I’m knackered, I’m soaked, it’s 9.30pm and I am not about to bollocks about in a rampaging thunderstorm looking for a good deal. Boatel Hotel is 35 Euros (eek!) but it’s comfy and has a lovely hot shower. Sometimes you have to pay for your sanity.

Phone and battery packs recharged, but I spent half the night awake downloading twenty episodes of ‘The Good Life’ onto my phone. I knew I was going to have to take it steady during the next day.

Budapest is beautiful. Gorgeous old architecture, being on the big ol’ river, totally sensical cyclepaths. (For indeed there do exist many urban cyclepaths that are utterly nonsensical.) Some friends had recommended seeing the city from the top of Gellert Hill slap bang in the middle of the city. Currently, even just looking at the 200 metre high peak gives me the collywobbles… getting through and out of the city is easy and fun; passing a whole variety of neighbourhoods on the way. Like Josie Dew says; it’s the details of the ordinary day which fascinate more than the museums.
To the north I pass through the district of ‘Göd’. Nearby not wanting to be left out is ‘Alsogöd’. And just north of there, its hedonistic neighbours ‘Felsogöd’. Yes indeed. Now I have been to Hell (in Norway), Paradise (Newfoundland and Gloucestershire), Richard (southern France). Now I’ve been to God. Hallelujah.
I’m knackered. I put the tent up just in time to duck out of another rambunctious thunderstorm. I have no idea what rambunctious means, but I am willing to take a chance. Will leave it there even if completely the wrong word. Ha!
Just looked it up and am disappointed to find it is completely the right word. I was hoping it meant something like ‘a person who likes to hide paperclips in cream buns’ or something.
Wednesday 24th May.
The ride up from Budapest was safe, quiet, beautiful and engaging… but it had one major drawback: fluff.
The Danube is lined both sides with copious lush stands of willow and poplar. Lovely as they all are, the time of year combined with the busy headwinds conspire to cause a never-ending ejaculation of fluffy seeds into the air. From indoors it probably looks lovely- nature doing its thing. Except, and I hasten to add this is not an exaggeration, approximately every 30 seconds I get some bit of airborne fluff in my eyes. Not possessing cycling goggles and being so vain as to not want to look like Bono, I suffer. Eventually it occurs to me to put my glasses on, and my view of the world is narrowed to a slit looking over the top of my reading glasses and under the peak of my baseball cap. When I finally cross the bridge at Esztergom swapping Hungary for Slovakia, I find myself cycling on the upwind side of the trees and the snowy fluff invasion ceases to be an issue.
Earlier in the day at Szob I had been talking to a Swiss couple who fancied heading for Kyrgyzstan. I had told them that it’s easily achievable and to take advice from other cyclists in the area. I had forewarned them not to take too much notice of some of the amateur dramatists on the road; the ones that turn molehills into mountains and mountains into tales of woe…
At Esztergom, not knowing anything about the Slovakian cycle route, I had asked three New Zealander middle-aged ladies who had just come through there what it was like…
They recommended that I stay on the Hungarian side, as Slovakia was really really dangerous with fast trucks and lorries and ‘some cars going at 200mph’.
That last bit was the definite giveaway. I arrived in Slovakia, got some shopping, cycled on the main road (pretty normal experience), found a likely looking riverside cyclepath and haven’t left it for two days except to buy provisions in the tiddly villages it passes through.
I think often people find a situation they don’t enjoy, and then just stay stuck to it. I really don’t get how three grown women were capable of apparently having had such an all round dreadful time when they could have quite easily chosen a different route and had a nice time. And Kiwis too… they of all people should know how to go exploring the outdoors in an appropriate manner… I dunno, some people eh? So endeth todays parable , amen.

Friday 26th May.
Lots of very monotonous identical dyke surfing. The EV6 really knows how to pick safe but dull routing. I guess it’s great if you are coming the other way with the tailwind pushing you along.
Today: I raced a cruise ship that was about a kilometre in front of me. It took about ten kilometres to catch up. You do the maths; I’m knackered.
A lovely lovely chat with a lovely young couple from Dorset who are heading for the Pamirs by September. Blimey they better get a shift on! Still, they can practically freewheel to at least Bulgaria. Did I mention something about there being a near permanent west wind?
They give me bananas. Best friends forever for that.
Bratislava, capital of Slovakia. Passed through it without stopping. Looks like an averagely nice place. Very grateful to have stuff to look at though after endless boring dyke surfing.
Seamlessly into Austria which pretty much starts at the end of Bratislava. No customs checks. No nothing.
Into Austria. A long chat with Karl from Germany, cycling to Ukraine to meet his new girlfriend he found on the internet. Very very cheery and wins the prize for the most completely overloaded bike. I hope he sees his new girlfriend before his wheels cave in.
Over a bridge and…. more blasted dyke surfing. This one is an inland flood defence and passes through a forest nature reserve.
Stop for banana break in the early evening and chat with nice old couple on bikes from Vienna. They tell me that I cant go to Vienna without trying ‘spargel’… which when I stick it through the translator it comes out as… asparagus. I couldn’t stop laughing; possibly not the response they were hoping I would have. I was expecting it to be some fantastic regional cake or a sausage or something.
Leaving them, I fit in just enough clicks to coincidentally make my daily distance 100kms. I camp not far from a small lake anticipating having a wash in it.
After tenting up and watching four episodes of ‘The Good Life’, I surface for a midnight wash in the lake.
Passing a few green glowing fireflies there is some splashing going on in the lake: beavers! Someone earlier in the day had said that they knew there was beavers in the forest because you could see their scratch marks on trees. There’s a couple of noses out of the water swimming about wondering who this naked human is, washing his bits and pieces on the bank. They thwack their tails a few times in the water. Either they are like dolphins and want to snuggle up and get cosy or they want me to bugger off and stop cramping their style. I presume the latter and leave them to it.
Bonkers bird singing, almost as much variety as a blackbird.it sounds like this: brrrrrrrp-brrrrrrrrp tweep tweep tweep boo-ip boo-ip skwoooooork currargh currargh wee-ip wee-ip etc. Is this a Nightjar? I don’t know. Do you? Answers on a postcard please.

Saturday 27th May.
Im not really much of a tourist and museums I tend to give a miss. Once you realise that the inevitable wall display of neolithic locals hairliy splodging around in mud followed by a load of cracked earthenware jars it’s pretty much identical everywhere. Okay I admit every museum has its own history which varies from ‘very interesting’ down to ‘at least I’m out of the rain.’
Vienna though I hope will be different… lots of lovely art stuff to see.

Saturday 27th May.
I love Vienna. It’selegant, clean and tidy. Because it’s Saturday ( I am told) the thronging working masses are elsewhere so the city feels spacious.
By bike I visit the Hundertwasser Village; a number of buildings artistically modified by him all in roughly the same area.
His ethos was one of bringing nature back into architecture. Effectively, he was a proto-hippy. As a child during the second world war he was witness to 69 of his family on his Jewish mothers side being killed. He joined the Hitler Youth to avoid being suspected of being Jewish himself. As an adult and as an artist he saw the modern urban world as effectively dehumanising and all his life sought ways to rectify this. One of his strongest ideas was that straight lines (even the predictable curve of a circle) are soul-destroying. So in turn his architectural modifications included things like bumpy floors that emulate a forest floor lifted by tree roots, non-repetative pillars, irregular shaped windows. The antithesis of Albert Speer I suppose.
I imagine him and Antoni Gaudi would have had some interesting conversations had they existed in the same era.
At a completely different part of the city I went to visit the studio of Gustav Klimt. Interesting but definitely not worth ten Euros to see. It took me all of ten minutes to have a good look at the minimal amount of things to see. Disappointing.
The city is crossed in all directions by a web of cycle paths and getting about is relatively safe though it all went a bit pants when my GPS decided to die.
I accidently pass through an area that seems to be dense with little houses with burgeoning gardens. Allotments? Social housing? Both? Whatever it is it’s very funky.
A day of semi-random pootling, looking at art stuff, gandering through parks and enjoying 17th century buildings with mega Baroque stylings. Who’s here? Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Goethe, Klimt, Hundertwasser, Egon Scheile and many many more as it says on the record box. Bit of a happening place is yer old Vienna.
Finally, having run out of mental stamina I leg it out to the river and escape and knock off an extra 30kms to untangle my mangled mind.
Sunday 28th May.
Having reached a point where looking at the same view of river/path/dyke/trees is really starting to do my head in, at Krems finally it turns into what I prefer and the EV6 now very generously passes through dozens of sweet quirky old villages. It’s Sunday and it seems like half of Austria is out for a bike ride.
The river passes through rising hills and the surroundings become more dramatic and varied. Ruined castles and onion domed churches sit high up overseeing it all.

Wednesday May 31st. Prague.
Outside McDonalds at the top of Wenceslas Square, where revolutions have peacefully turned and Czech history been made, tourists flock and take photos of themselves and the saint himself astride a huge bronze horse.
A man wearing a spray-painted ‘stone’ suit and bowler hat with matching face paint stands on a small box and proceeds to do not very much. Some people take photos of him. Why take a photo of statue man? A video would be better surely? Except that he’s not very good. He keeps fidgeting and acknowledging people. His girlfriend sits on a low stone wall and looks after their dog. After an unconvincing half hour and no donations they upsticks and go somewhere else.

Written June 14th….
June began with me having arrived in Prague.
After having spent so long in Asia where half-finished crumbly concrete seems to be an actual architectural style, my easing out from Eastern Europe finds me in Austria, a country where all the buildings are Perfect, the roads are Perfect, there’s no stray litter and certainly no stray dogs. I have become just another European face in a sea of European faces and the fact that I am riding a bike no longer singles me out for curiosity.

Just before Linz I take a step sideways from the Danube and take a train to visit an old friend who now lives in Czech north of Prague.
Prague is a stunningly beautiful city. Almost certainly the loveliest city I have ever visited.
It knocks the socks off Vienna. Makes the best of London look just plain grey. Everywhere I look; enormous grand baroque architecture all painted lovely friendly colours; statues, beautiful frescoes painted on old hotel walls depicting religiosity, the grand bergers of the day, wine, women and song… oh what magnificent colour!
And cobbles! Bloody everywhere! And lots of trams! And no cyclepaths! You have to be a psychopath to ride a bike here! Heh heh!
Okay. Step away from the coffee now.
Prague is truly lovely and I need a non-biking break. I am down-to-the-bone knackered. Three weeks of 90/100km days non-stop fuelled largely by ice cream and sausage is paying its toll. I have stopped, and I am clearly what is known as ‘a gibbering wreck’.
I attempt to remedy this by doing yet more exercise by walking all over the city visiting museums; the Museum of Communism: small and very interesting, the Alfonz Mucha Museum: the man who practically invented Art Neuveau and the Museum of Alchemists and Magicians, a ‘London Dungeons’ style place which amongst other things has William Shakespeare out to be an international spy colluding with powerful occultists…
In between the Museum of Alchemists and Magicians and the Museum of the KGB sits weirdly the United States Embassy, heavily guarded. I resist the urge to shout ‘Down With Trump!’ as I walk past. The same as many others no doubt.
Taking the train up to Bohemia; Liberec and then a tiny place called Lvova only 4kms from both the Polish and the German border.
*DD1

 

It’s great to see Andy again after several years. I am plied with beer and the lovely food of his wife Monica.
I ‘rest’ by engaging in lots of gardening. Doh. Still knackered by the end of it all. And then I go on a walk up a hill designed for skiing down, and then decide to run down it. What am I thinking? For the next three days I can barely walk and have the social skills of a potato. Double doh.

 

Back in Austria, back on the Danube and back on my bike. I need to take things easy as my legs still hurt a little. I have space to detox! No more beer! No more sugary cake and chocolate… I need get my balance back.

Mentally I find myself obsessing about my ‘stuff’; I have put many of my personal possessions back in England on Freecycle. In some ways ‘de-tatting’ feels healthy but I suspect that possibly I may be somewhat OCD about it… I fantasise about owning almost nothing, as if this will make me happier. The irony is that I really do find myself thinking about it much of the time. I have set myself on the route to being an ultralight camper with the view to being able to do long distance walks without it being a strain on my shoulders and feet.
I had been carrying the slightly duff fake samsung phone that I had paid 50 dollars for in kashgar in Western China. I imagined that it would come in handy as a spare should my main one break or get nicked: “Just In Case”. Fair enough, Central Asia is a little thin on resources but really, when it boils down to it, if my phone had gone out of action I could have coped. Carrying the extra weight of a spare phone actually is something of an encumberance. So finally, not really knowing what else to do with it, I left it on a bench in a park in Prague with a note attached explaining that I was giving it away.
I have several such objects I don’t really need, that I am carrying “Just In Case”… the sleeping mat that is too big for my tent, the spare rear derailleur cassette, the spare wheel axles (a sensible idea at the time when carrying heavy panniers through mega-bumpy Tajikistan, but now I know I know my bike can handle it).
Lots of weight. I had a bluetooth keyboard that another long distance cyclist gave me in Bishkek. He never used it either. That got posted back to England along with my sexy Victorinox penknife with sawblade, tin opener, bottle opener, screwdrivers and corkscrew.
Sexy as my little penknife is, when I really thought about it, half the things on it I never use. I have a tiny tiny tin opener I can use (less than an inch long) and I put a knife edge on the flat side of a piece of broken hacksaw blade and gave it a handle and sheath made of duct tape. Weighs almost nothing and it does what I need it to.
On a website an ‘ultralight thru-hiker’, that is, an american that walks the long distance trails across his country all in one go and has minimised his gear load to make it easier to happen, says ‘sweat the small stuff’. So at least I know that there is a whole community of probably OCD hikers and bikers out there with me. Somewhere.

Thursday 15th June.
Germany is boring. Okay… by all accounts thats just another way of saying that I am boring. Either way, why are all the supermarkets shut? I decided that it must be Sunday, and now that I am writing this, I find out that it’s actually Thursday. Our survey asked a panel of experts; ‘What the fuck?’
Anyway, all the shops being shut is definitely boring, regardless of where my imaginary tat-fiddling mind might have disappeared to. (*’tat’ is a slang word for one’s personal possesions.)
Not speaking eine word of Deutsch and not feeling inclined to resusitate my collapsing stomach walls in probably expensive cafes und biergartens, I am discovering that finding sources of water harder now that no-one feels the need for communally shared stand-pipes, wells and springs. Something else I miss from the East.
The landscape is one of endless wheat and potato fields, lovely easy cycleways and Perfect little villages that seem to have been pasteurised to render them character-free. It’slike passing through a life-size model railway set but with almost no trains.
Okay I’m being a bit harsh. German rye bread is fabulous. I do like Germany really. Actually I am feeling like I am on the home run now after a year and a half of continual otherness and several thousand kilometres covered.
Coming back stirs anxiety in me. What to do next? The money will run out soon. Real life beckons… Eek!
Now I am just another small fish in an enormous cycling pond (okay it’s a river), and I feel anonymous. When I started out a year and a half ago after quitting my job, I passed from being a participating member of society to being a continual outsider which at the time I regarded as a form of anonymity. But my otherness was a ticket to a thousand smiley friendly enquiries as to what I was about. Yes it was a little repetitive at times, but I felt included. Now, hundreds of cycling Western Europeans pass me all day long but I speak to almost no-one at all… I could do with some friendly chat on the road really.

It’s funny how places just arrive at me, just because I am wiggling my knees about.
I glance up after a bout of staring at the tarmac rushing along under me (probably obsessing about camping gear) and suddenly out of nowhere; Passau.
Sitting on a fork that halves the Donau into the River Inn which heads south forming the western border of Austria, mighty cathedral onion-domed towers soar above all else in this closely-clustered old town. Dinky bridges link the spur of Passau to the ‘mainland’. Tourist coaches have emptied themselves of ice cream licking beer gurgling sunnies wearing hordes, all happily idling about enjoying the towns picturesque buildings and some crazy narrow cobbled streets. Between times presumably, judging by the shops they are shopping for clothes. I don’t quite understand why people go on holiday, visit nice places, and then buy stuff. But then I’m just me, an OCD tat minimalist.
The central cathedral of St Stephan’s is a plain white plastered building from the outside, nothing especially interesting to look at. But inside… my goodness! A Baroque enthusiast’s wet dream! Many churches in the east have fabulously decorated churches. I didnt go into very many but every one I did visit was gorgeous. This one, St. Stephan’s, is ripe with flying marble cherubs and saints, grand meticulous depictions from the bible on every wall and ceiling. St. Stephan has a massive organ-wahey! The biggest organ ever, all done out in bright shiny gold. These guys invented bling. Wow.
Outside again, in my mind I am hazily wandering across Germany’s unfortunate heritage. It occurs to me that it’s a miracle that the cathedral still stands, considering Passau’s brutal nazi and soviet past. Further east there are many (largely broken) reminders of an occupied past; no such thing remains here. It occurs to me how precious these grand cathedrals would be to the Church itself, and maybe had some bearing on why the Catholic church at the time did not oppose the nazis. Maybe if they had, these great cathedrals would have been no more? My mind skips again, imagining the ghosts of the local Jewry… hounded out of their shops and homes, huddled fearfully together in the now peaceful cobbled sunlit square.
If there are any memorials they aren’t obvious.
And so I move on, further; further… down tracks through villages fields and forest…

Friday 16th June.
In the morning I soon arrive at Regensberg; ‘Rain mountain’. The country is hot sweaty and flat so how the town got its name is anyones guess. Perhaps in winter the skies open and the earth screws up its face?
Roggenbrot. The best most nutritious bread ever. Cycling Germans must weep when they eat Tajiki bread. I know I did. Now I get why German bakerys in India exist. I could live off roggenbrot. Or possibly build a house out of it. It’sa heavy brown loaf with a wonderful sweet tangy taste and crusts that really know what being a crust is all about. Phwooar.
Out of modern Regensberg and back into more twiddly little nowhere in particular villages.
Just as I was apparently finding the inside of my own head more fascinating than my immediate surroundings, the Donau decides to go all maximum green and wobbly on me.
At Kelheim I am suddenly surprised to find myself in an olde worlde small town with four grand entrance turrets at each cardinal point. Every building seems to be painted a different colour and many roof gables feature cute baroque stylings The town itself sits between the forking of the Donau and the Altmuhl which the Donau gives up half its breadth for the third time since Passau. On the west side a high rocky escarpment with what looks like a massive grand observatory reaching out through the beech forest and up toward the sky.
From here, the small town busyness evaporates. Finding the western gate tower exit from Kelheim I just about find the path that squeezes between the high cliffy rocky forest and the river as it now gorges itself from further west.
The car sounds disappear and suddenly I am in a vast dell of tree-breeze and water song. Kids are kayaking through late afternoon glinting sunlight. Another group of pre-teen school kids with their teachers wave a giggly hello to me as they sit on a tiny beach under some tree shade having a picnic.
The increasing sheer gorge first obliges the path to undercut the rocks in a half-tunnel and later the path is diverted up into a forest so alive and still that it seems to ring like a whispering bell. Hmmmmm…
It’sa steep sweaty climb but what goes up must come down again. When I finally emerge at the river again at Frauenberg, a huge orange sand coloured building of some age sits formidably on a great looping bend of water looking magnificent with the towering gorge all around.
It’s difficult to completely leave the past behind, and I wonder what strategic use this vast imposing building had during the nazi era. A headquarters? A hospital? Something else?
My mind superimposes images of swastikas and uniformed men over the present serenity. It must be strange to have such a history.
Having halved its width three times at Passau, Regensberg and Kelheim, the body of water is no more the vast ooze of the Romanian delta. Much of the eastern end from eastern Austria was more or less flat or thereabouts. There was no watershed to speak of and thus the river maintains its bulk. It’sonly once in the more hilly terrain of Bavaria that river subdivides into the surrounding watersheds. From its original 1.5 to 2 km width I now find it to be about 200 metres wide. As far as the Danube goes, I am on the home run. Only four more days to go.

Saturday 17th June.
This morning I am heading for Bad Gogging. I don’t quite what I have done to deserve it but there you go.
I have over the course of the last year and a half enjoyed some splendid linguistic collisions of English. Some proper gems. Germany though is a veritable treasure trove.
A great chunk of English comes from the Germanic region anyway and many German place names end in ‘ing’: what I have always understood to be a Skandinavian suffix (perhaps it’s Saxon?) connoting ‘place belonging to x’s people, where x is the part in front… so ‘Reading’ (my home town) means ‘the place of Redda’s people’.
All this means is that German is absolutely riddled with silly place names. There’s ‘Fucking’ for a start.
‘Kicking’ , ‘Aich’ and ‘Wibling’, all next to each other not too far from here; ‘Starz’, ‘Fatting’, ‘Peterfecking’, ‘Pfatter’, ‘Sinzing’, ‘Rain’, ‘Sand’, ‘Mimming’, ‘Bad Fussing’, ‘Pocking’, ‘Zilling’, ‘Ruckasing’, ‘Anger’, ‘Lobsang’, ‘Arresting’, ‘Lapperding’, ‘Gern’, ‘Trasham’, ‘Minsing’, ‘Pupping’, ‘Rockerfing’, ‘Ruderting’, ‘Egg’, ‘Windegg’, ‘Rottenegg’. My favourite so far is ‘Muckenwinkling’…
Rottenegg is close to Linz in Austria. I have some notion, possibly fanciful, that it’s where Hitler came from and the residents felt the need to change the name of their village in his memory.
‘Munster’, ‘Munchmunster’, ‘Moos’, ‘Unteresternberg’; a town so boring they couldn’t be bothered to spell it right.
‘Grinzing’, ‘Hacking’, ‘Glotzing’ ,’Au’ and ‘Sicking’ for those not feeling too well.
And when you’ve had enough there’s always ‘Pfarrhof’…
And thats just around the area I am currently in. There must be thousands.
And on top of that, may I wish you a ‘Gute fahrt!’ which features on many signs announcing your exit from any particular village. It means ‘Good Journey’ in case you hadn’t worked it out.

Having got bored of re-inventing tents and bikes in my head, I declare it International Kraftwerk Day which I celebrate by listening to Radioactivity, The Man Machine and Trans Europe Express. Halfway through the first album I pass a duck-filled nature reserve with an amazing looking powerstation right next to it; its three equally spaced tall red and white striped chimneys jutting way up and the aluminium looking building covered in mysterious giant tubing doing some kind of digital spaghetti business. I pass many Kraftwerk every day, all of them being of the hydro-electric variety. Their prescence result in the river becoming a regularly recurring series of lakes. Their slow moving waters become great spots for swans coots and other bird life.
I spend the latter end of my day passing through much forest. After uptenting and the eventual onset of actual darkness I am treated to something I have never seen before. Around a hundred fireflies are hovering about around my tent and between the trees. They move like mayflies, in a relaxed and dithery sort of way, their green lights blinking slowly on and off. It’s an utterly silent spectacle and full of magic.
It’s nice to be reminded of how lucky I am. It occurs to me that living in my tent is my favourite thing to do, and being in my tent and in the woods is even better. And having got there after riding a bike all day is even more better. Thank you life.
With my head poking out of my tent I sit and watch the fireflies some more until it really is time for sleep.

Monday 19th June.
I remember somebody telling me that the Danube cycle route is something of a messy affair the closer you get to its start and it certainly seems to be the case. I end up just making up my own route and then I keep finding myself back on the designated route. And then when I decide to follow it, half the time I keep wondering where the heck it’s taking me. Miles from the river a lot of the time. So bollocks to that then.
On a long stretch of simple dyke surfing I practice focussing on only my breathing for as long as it takes me to get to the next bridge, however far that is. It feels weird. Like exercising a psychological muscle. I stop after two bridges. It’s a bit intense. I stop and watch ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ in some shade. Lazy day today. Anyway refraing from cycling in the midday sun is quite a sensible idea.
Afterwards I feel like my consciousness has moved to somewhere serene, a state I rarely occupy. It’s a state I sometimes feel in my favourite places like Avebury or West Kennet Long Barrow or somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland. Do you ever find yourself sitting somewhere very lovely and becoming so absorbed in being where you are that you become almost mesmerised and don’twant to leave?
All the other stuff that has been whirring around endlessly in my head seems irrelevant to actually feeling contented. A moments peace.

Later I visit Ulm, having a faint recollection that it is somewhere worth visiting. Inside the old city boundary I see many buildings and one or two with fabulous frescoes with religious and folklore paintings and wonderful floral decoration all over the walls. It’s like pre-Art Neauveau.
At the towns heart is Munster Cathedral. It’s vast. Maybe 400 metres long. Inside the central vaulting must be about 200 metres high. You could get a whole village inside here. Cor.
More perplexing routing and finally at Gamershwang (as opposed to Dontwannashwang) I camp by the actual river itself which currently stands at about 80 metres across.. A large flock of ducks mooch about nearby waiting for something exciting to happen. A herd of ducks. Murder of ducks? A Donald of ducks. A fuck of ducks. A got any cake? of ducks.

Tuesday June 20th.
Lawnmower robot. Absolutely crap routing.
Not so far to go now. I am on my pen-penultimate day of arriving at the head of the river.
This morning in the beautifully named village of Rottenacker I spot a weird contraption in someones garden. A device that looks like an old fashioned hoover but without the upright bit is shambling about in the grass. Because the grass is all very short anyway it is trying to find some bits that still need cutting. It has the demeanor of a hedgehog. Curious. I wonder what a Tajiki goat herder would make of it.
The routing signs are taking me well away from the river whilst the local paths have all become very piecemeal and complicated. Somehow I end up in a pine forest on a steep hill. And I’m getting annoyed and lost. I have almost no battery left for map reading.
The forest has that ambience that friendly pine forests have (as opposed to unfriendly ones). Dark blue butterflys flitter. Rooks caw. In beautiful contrast thunder rumbles. It begins to rain. Heavily.
Eventually, after taking a most circuitous route, in Riedlingen I duck into a Mcdonalds. I spend four hours there charging batterys and leaving a puddle of rainwater under my chair. On the overhead TV screen, an announcement that Kraftwerk are performing in Dusseldorf on July 1st. I must go! Because 1) I like Kraftwerk, 2) Dusseldorf is twinned with the town I was born in (Reading Berkshire), 3) Kraftwerk like cycling and so do I and 4) the gig coincides with this years Grand Depart of the Tour de France which starts in Dusseldorf.
A ticket-selling website tells me that there’s almost no tickets left! I must buy one now! Okay! Mysteriously, the advertised 40 quid ticket by the time I have clicked through all the ‘continue’ buttons, the price has magically doubled. But this is my only chance! I must buy!
And so I do. I am now going to see Kraftwerk in Dusseldorf. Apparently. It’s only when I look at where Dusseldorf actually is that I discover I will be a thousand kilometres away. Bugger. Germany really is huge.
The rain has stopped and the EV6 routing has got a grip on itself finally. From Sigmaringendorf onwards the river and the route disappear into a gorge that is the most beautiful part of the danube yet.
A sleepless night brings me to the conclusion that I cant easily fit in the Dusseldorf trip without it costing a whole load more money and seriously messing with the continuity of my ride. I am going to have to sell the ticket. Kraftwerk don’t do anything anyway. They just stand there behind their little podiums barely moving. It’s odd that Kraftwerk is still around since they first began in the late 1960’s.
Wednesday 21st June.
Midsummer.
Sweaty. Even in the shade it’s sweaty. Knackered. I stop after 35kms just short of Tuttlingen. I don’t want to get to my end point feeling grubby and horrible. That would be rubbish.
Thursday 22nd June. Day 108.
108 is a significant number in certain parts of Asia which denotes infinity. Or something like that.
I pass fresh-faced riders most of whom look like they’re not going far. Other riders loaded up to their chins in foam rollmats look like they are going the whole way. I ‘connichiwa!’ enthusiastically to two Japanese riders. Easy to spot in their facemasks and big floppy hats. They really are an unusual lot the Japs. I bet they had teddy bears somewhere on their bikes too.
Having previously passed through a fantastic gorge, the final stretch to Donaushwingen is relatively flattish rolling Alpine fields and pine forest.
I arrive and have sausage and chips and a beer to acknowledge my achievement. Except I haven’t finished yet. Although the Donauradweg ends here, as does the Donau (now a mere 10 metres wide), it forks off, becoming the Breg and the Brigach.
I follow the Brigach a further 20 or so winding kilometres up through lovely pine forest and significantly different country.
Vast pointy roofed farmhouses on the steep hillsides store their tractors where the attic becomes a barn. Brown cows clank noisily with bells on their necks.
The Brigach wonders through fields, barely a ditch, more a wandering line of Meadowsweet and Cow Parsley than anything else.
Just beyond the small village of Brigach, a beaver dam turns the small ditch into a large pond. Beyond that, a track leads to a pool that is the head of the Brigach.
The pool is outside a farmhouse where a group of people are having a barbeque. I have just cycled 3000 kilometres to be specifically here. No-one even says hello to me. I take a couple of photos. A big dog wanders over to investigate me. The nearest the people come to acknowledging me is to repeatedly call their dog away from me. The dog ignores them, growls slightly and comes and sniffs my hand. He’s a big old slow thing. He gives me a baleful and beleaguered look, and then finally decides that perhaps he better give me a big woof. Hello dog, nice to meet you. Just like the old days eh?
The people still ignoring me, I cycle off to find a camping spot. I miss the little exchanges I had with people from Romania and eastwards. Much of the world is a friendly place, but now unfortunately I feel invisible.
Tomorrow; to the head of the Breg and then south about 50kms to Switzerland.

Friday 23rd June.
Having camped in nearby pine forest, the rising sun doesn’t get to wake me up before i want to for a change. My ride out takes me to Furtwangen where the head of the Breg is some 15kms south. Then, my southerly trail takes me through magnificent Alpine meadow and pine forest landscape; this is the southern edge of the Swartzewold; the Black Forest. Cyclepaths well away from the road wind gracefully to Neustadt, Lenzkirch and Bonndorf. Ex-railway lines make great cycing routes as they more-or-less follow the contours no matter how dramatic the hills.
On road again and I freewheel very very slowly for 20kms all the way to Stuhlingen where I find myself unexpectedly at the Swiss border. This is not where i want to cross though; too hilly. I deviate instead heading southwest along the River Wutach which forms the borderline and camp at Eberfingen. Tomorrow I head for Zurich.