A British Comedy of Errors

We were looking forward to an easy day. That was our first mistake. We set out from Eastleigh, in the south of England, where we'd been visiting David's cousin and family (three young sons, all very different, but united in their fascination with insects).

The day's destination was Reading, a few hours away. Easy riding, not too many hills, and more friends to stay with that evening. We dawdled in the morning and met Adar at his office for lunch. We cycled for a while, then passed a sign in Winchester saying "Oldest Bar in England." Of course that demanded stopping for a pint.

The distance for the day was 40 miles, which David's ale-infused brain somehow translated to 40 kilometers. I'd been researching the bicycle routes on the Internet that morning, but the Sustrans site was overrun with traffic--the only map I could print was up to Winchester, which I vaguely remembered as being a halfway point.

After walking around the quaint, cobblestoned town of Winchester, we stopped at a bookstore and finally bought a map of the UK, only to discover that Winchester is not the halfway point. It's maybe the one-fifth point. Back on the bikes. A brief stint along a motorway, being passed by frenzied yuppie commuters speeding home from London, convinced us to take the quieter roads. Quieter, it turns out, also means virtually no road signs.

It was, of course, raining the whole time. Before leaving, our friends John and Amity gave us a compass; I'd joked that this would be useful for navigating when we reached the British Isles and could no longer use the sun for direction. No joke, it turns out. As we biked through the drizzle I thought the sky to the right looked a slightly brighter shade of grey, which would suggest we were heading south, not north. But it's hard to compare shades of grey.

Eventually, as we began to see signs for Winchester once again, we got worried. After consulting a local farmer and our newly purchased map, it transpired that we'd done a perfect circle. We were, in fact, just a few miles from Eastleigh.

So we cycled to the train station and got to Reading barely before dark (lucky for us, darkness doesn't fall until after 10 pm). Helen and Tim, friends from Victoria, had Pimm's and a soul-reviving meal waiting for us in their converted barn. We had a great visit and slept soundly--but we decided not to underestimate the challenges of cycling through charming, rainy, densely populated England.

Close your eyes and think of England

ol' blighty.

The usual mad rush to the ferry. Ever since I met Hannah, I've been rushing to meet ferries. So really, having an indetermined number of kilometers to go, a vauge since of the general direction, the possibility of a strong headwind and a hard deadline, or the ship leaves without us, should be a totally familiar feeling. In fact, it was. So was the mounting stress.

While we promised once again to never make a reservation that needs to be met by bicycle, wandering through the dunes from Haarlem south, even getting lost and having to follow signs through Den Haag, was a fun and nice slice of Dutch life. I suspect the most civilized country we've visited yet. It's even hard to stay lost on bike in Holland. While we tried to follow LD1 (long-distance bike route 1) we had LD 7 and LD 9 to choose from. There's no question who has right of way on the road there.

So, with the usual few minutes to spare we collapsed in our seats, watch a football game with the local chapter of deaf Austrian bikers (why am I always suprised by how friendly Harley riders are?) and had a beer.

We were scooped up by Adar somewhere in the center of London and were able to stay with the whole family for the weekend. Highlights of course, a day in the british "wilds" and a trip to the natural history museum. Once we find a computer that will allow us to upload photos, we'll post a few.

And for biogeeks only--a portrait of Richard Owen

Dutch Treats

It's another "great leap forward" for us--just not enough time to bike across Germany and Holland. While I wish we had more time to bike every inch of the way, looking out the train window for hours and seeing a largely flat, suburban and windy Germany (with beautiful bike paths), I'm a bit pleased that we can blow past the boring bits.

So we've arrived in Holland.




















And oh man, Amsterdam is the bicycle capital of the world.
















Four-story bicycle parking garages, filled to the brim.
















And World Cup street parties ringed by bikes 10 deep against every available vertical surface. The newest craze in Amsterdam bikes is kid carriers. Some fancy ones with a seat in front, a seat between the handlebars and the saddle and TWO rear seats. So you can sit three kids on at once, each with their own miniature handlebars and footpegs.

Speaking of the World Cup.

Can't escape it at all. On the train, they read the scores of the afternoon games in three languages over the loudspeaker. The America-Italy match was fun to watch on the giant screen in downtown Prague. Lots and lots of Americans there, so good enthusiasm, chanting, drunken stupidity, the usual. It's a bit funny to keep meeting Europeans who are sullenly proud of not being interested in football. The poor, suffering minority...

Lucky for me, Hannah's pretty into catching a bit of the games. It's hard to do, actually, only because so much of our day is spent traveling. Still, it's everywhere and the beer is flowing.

Personally, I don't feel I've seen enough to make a prediction--well, besides seeing Germany get stronger and stronger, but no surprise there.

Right now we're staying with my cousin, Vivienne, in the "family mansion." A big, beautiful old house in the city. Long since divided up into an apartment for my cousin, one for her mom and another for income. It overlooks a canal and borders a park, with grand sweeping staircases and tall stained-glass windows. Signs of bygone eras.

We also visited my other cousin, Jimmy, at the family business. Even got to borrow some genuine Amsterdam clunkers to cruise around the city. Finally, we had a sushi dinner with my great aunt Madeleine, who's eighty-eight and reads two newspapers a day. She knew all about our trip because she'd been following it on the blog, though she only learned to use the computer last year. Hi, Madeleine!

Tomorrow we bike past the windy sand dunes, down the coast to catch a ferry to England.

David's first footsteps in Germany

Funny, the things that come to mind while traveling. My dear friends, Jr and Malia, have a beautiful son who's already received a good dose of cycling propaganda. I think of Evan's muscular baby thighs every time I see a department store selling bicycle shorts and jerseys for 5-year-olds (only in Germany).

We biked from the Czech Republic to Dresden. It was hot, muggy and a bit buggy. We stopped for the night at a campground in some town about 30 miles south of the German border. As we rode through, we noticed the place was filled with large, and largely abandoned, buildings. The town itself was ringed by massive walls and a deep moat, and I noticed a cemetery with a towering cross and a large Star of David. A bit unusual, but many towns have some monument to the war and to their extinct Jewish population.

In the morning, we went to the center of town to investigate. It turns out that this town of Terezin, the whole town, was a concentration camp--now preserved as the "Museo Ghetto." Many thousands of people were interned there, to be worked to death, killed by starvation and disease or shipped to the extermination camps in the East. At one point, the Nazi government bowed to international pressure and let the German Red Cross and the International Red Cross visit this "Jewish Resettlement Camp." In preparation for the visit, three quarters of the people in the overcrowded camp were sent off to their deaths, by train to the East. Everything was cleaned, down to scrubbing the rocks. Clothes were mended. Posters of concerts and plays were printed and plastered around the town. As the investigators arrived, the concert halls were filled with people and told to clap. The musicians took a bow as if a concert had just finished, and this is what the investigators saw, without a single note being played. As soon as they left, food was literally taken from the mouths of the prisoners.

I am still stupified by the dedication the Nazi government had to this singular idea, "Solving the Jewish problem." Not the happiest place to wake up to, but an important piece of the history which hangs over Europe like a dark cloud.

Maybe it is important to reflect on the mixed feelings in Europe, as we stayed in Dresden with the four German cyclists we crossed paths with in Turkey. They finished their trip to Damascus and met up for a slide show the night we rolled into town--late, of course, and soaked from a rain shower. Everyone was extremely kind and generous to us both, and we stayed with Hagen (on the far left) for two nights.

Dresden has a beautiful center, remarkably restored after the Anglo-American bombing of the city. Bicycling, beer gardens, and paddle sports. Yet another city where it would be easy to stop for a while longer, or forever.

The Best Vegan-friendly Tiki Bar in Prague

(Note: This is the same post as earlier, we just added a couple photos of Prague at the bottom.)

Things sure have changed around here. Once, we were strange curiosities on our bikes, squeezed on the side of the road, worried we'd end up as a two-dimensional smudge on the side of a Romanian highway. Now we´ve entered the world of Northern European bicycle touring, complete with maps, numbered bicycle highways, and plush Euro campsites.

After leaving Budapest we followed the Danube for 350 kilometers to Vienna. The road was dead flat. In one section, where it follows a canal, it's absolutely straight. We wondered if cyclists ever fall asleep on the wheel.

Still, every journey has its challenges. On the third day we were determined to make it more than 120 km to Vienna by evening. We were pretty pleased with ourselves as we set out, ate lunch in Bratislava, and continued under sunny skies to our second capital city of the day. Sadly, it turns out that cycling in the heat for seven hours is taxing--not so much on the legs, but on the small regions where the legs connect to the rest of the body. It's normal to have friction after two months on the road; but it's usually between the travelers, not between their legs. We spent a day recovering in Vienna. Then we continued on our way, fortified with diaper ointment and KY jelly.

Bicycling north from Vienna through Austria can only be described as idyllic. Small, paved roads over gently rolling hills through the manicured countryside of the wine region. There are many bicycle routes: the winery route, the castle route, the family route, etc. The only accommodation we could find was a winery bed and breakfast. For 50 Euros, which was outside our usual budget, we stayed in luxurious surroundings, drank "fresh" white wine, and ate a simple dinner of thinly sliced ham, local cheese and bread. In the morning, after discussing rural economics, Harley Davidsons and the international wine markets, the owner gave us a bottle of the house red. When David padded into our hotel room sipping his second glass of wine and flipped on the TV to watch the highlights of the Sweden-Paraguay soccer game, he remarked that maybe the bourgeois lifestyle he´d mocked in his youth isn´t quite so bad, after all. (The place is Hotel Burger, highly recommended.)

After briefly losing our way among the bicycle routes of southern Czech Republic (there are so many signed bicycle and hiking routes it can be quite confusing) we caught a bus to Prague. We´re staying with Milan, a reporter at the newspaper in Idaho Falls who´s now working at the Prague Post. Milan and his roommates publish an English-language arts magazine, ProvokatoR, and generally try to keep alternative culture alive in a city that´s slowly being overrun by stag party holidayers. One of Milan´s roommates also works nights at a Prague tiki bar... which we plan to visit tonight.

P.S. Budweiser (the beer from Budvar) is really, really good here! Whodathunk?

P.P.S. We did go to the tiki bar, and sampled soymilk-based orange "cream sickles." Yum!

The Hungary Cyclist

It seems like every time we roll into a new country we feel like we've finally entered Europe. In Bulgaria, it was because there were women on the streets wearing comfortable (and sexy clothes) and people drinking beer in public. In Romania, it was because they spoke a Latin language and ate pizza. But to pass into Hungary is to roll into this dreamy world of smooth roads, bike lanes(!), drivers that know how to brake... it's almost hard to believe. We were cycling along the highway from the border, delighted to have a paved shoulder for the first time in weeks, when we realized there was a bike path parallel to the road. A few minutes later the bike path passed under the highway, with a signed, ramped bicycle underpass. Wow.

This photo is from a small city near the border, where we felt like we'd landed in Amsterdam. Budapest's cycling scene is so huge it would be hard to capture in a photo: bicycle messengers, commuters, young people, everywhere zipping around on bikes. The Budapest Critical Mass ride last Earth Day got 10,000 riders, and in September they had 30,000 cyclists at the rally. It seems bicycle culture is alive and well, and hiding out in Hungary. (Helps that this part of the country is so flat.)

No bicycling for us for a few days. We've totally scored this amazing flat in Budapest. It's in an old building with a central courtyard. It belongs to a friend of a friend, a Japanese gal that Eve met in China and then Berlin, who's now working as a photographer in Budapest. Her Irish friends are back home for a wedding and kindlz offered us their place. The world is turning into one incredibly thick and rich stew. (Fumie's Web site has great photos of Eastern European musicians.)

It's impossible to resist Budapest's charms. Beautiful architecture, plenty of young expats, live jazz, folk, theater every night. The city also has a vibrant interest in the history of its Jews and a living, breathing Jewish community. A very pleasant change from the decrepit and abandoned synagogues to be found in every Romanian town, and no real interest in the Jews who are gone, or in the Gypsies who survived and are begging in the streets. We've happily spent a few days visiting the public baths, drinking beer with Fumie and Bob, and wandering about the city.

So it's kicking and screaming that we're finally leaving Budapest (in the rain, once again). We've met more than one person who came for a summer in the early 1990s and stayed for 15 years. So I guess at three days, we're not doing too badly.

Romancing the Vampire

Trip update: Cycled across the border from Bulgaria and along the Romanian coast north, to Constanta. Then we took a train in and out of Bucharest and spent a rainy week bicycling west on the Transylvanian plateau.

In the city, it's easy to imagine that Romania will join the E.U. as planned in 2007. Foods of choice are pizza, spaghetti and schnitzel. Everyone seems to speak some English, German, Italian, French. Many people have spent time abroad and they've been very kind to us, offering directions or a place to stay. One hostel owner drove us around Bucharest in a personal tour guide. Another teacher offered for us to stay in the gymnasium (by far our largest accommodations!).

On the down side, I got pickpocketed at 9:00 on a Sunday morning in Bucharest. Just your usual drunken thugs bumping into me on the street. Annoying, but didn't suspect a thing at that time of the day. Very professional in that respect. So, spent the day making expensive phone calls to the U.S., cancelling credit cards, bank cards, etc. A real pain in the butt (and I do know about pains in the butt with some authority). Tragic but some consolation that even the Romanians get taken. It's a rough and primitive country, in some respects.

Then into the Transylvanian Mountains. Ahhh... the beautiful mountains. Streaked with snow, shrouded in rain clouds and dark forests. Castles, vampires, beer, did I mention the beer? Lots of beer. And really, really good sausage. More of the 8 AM beer crowd. Not so bad, so long as you don't have to be anywhere real fast.

The total lack of infrastructure, is an uncomfortable reminder of Caecescu's tenure, even if while we were in Bucharest they were holding a beer festival in the park in front of his former castle. The major highways are potholed, single-lane affairs running through small villages, the air foul with exhaust and littered with the bodies of dead animals. Once we got off the highway, though, we had some of the best riding of our lives, through mountain passes, green and marked by outcroppings of pock-marked limestone. Small, red-tiled roofed villages every 10 km selling 30 cent espressos. All following a long and winding road, following a mountain stream swollen with unseasonable rain. (The Danube is still at a 100-year record levels and global warming is on everyone´s lips.)

It seems the countryside didn't change quite so much during the Communist years, and it hasn't changed so much now, either. In the villages everyone was on bikes and the bicycles and horse carts far outnumbered motorized vehicles. It's strange to see a Europe where the horse-drawn cart is alive and well, houses that received electricity in the 21st century, and scythes and pitchforks carved from branches. We imagine bicycling through the villages has the same appeal that bicycling through rural Ireland had in the 1970s.

So it was with mixed feelings, that we headed to the border and bicycled out on to the windy Hungarian plain.

Cyclists We Have Known

By now we've crossed paths with quite a few other bicycle tourists. Two weary Australians pushing the limits of traveling endurance. One was on a solo China-to-England trip and too tired to keep a record of his journey. The other one (we've mentioned him already), a sunburnt, road-hardened traveler heading south towards the African continent, two years on the road and no end in sight. No energy for a blog.

On the other hand, many tourers tend to have a particular expedition in mind and have created an online diary of their schemes. We benefited from reading about other people's experiences while we were planning our trip. Now we'll be following blogs to hear about the path we chose not to take. We hope that as bicycle touring gets more popular, there will more and more information available, and more and more people will be tempted to try it.

• A four-man German machine whizzed by as we were having lunch by the side of the road in Turkey. They were traveling from Dresden to Damascus at the breakneck pace of 150 km a day. (We hope to meet up with them when we reach Dresden, in a few weeks.)

• Last night we camped just outside Sibiu, Romania and met a guy just starting a year-long journey from his home in Marseilles, ending at some yet-to-be-determined location in Asia. You can find the story of his trip here.

• We didn't actually meet this French couple, but we stayed at a couple of the same hostels they'd passed through in Turkey (they must also be using a Lonely Planet guidebook) and heard about their trip. They're embarking on a two-year, round-the-world bicycle tour. Their impressive site (in French) is here.

More details on our own experiences in Romania to come, soon...