This is it!!!!
Hello again blog! It has been a ridiculous amount of time since I last wrote anything here. So fuck it, here we go...
First of all, I guess I should write a little about the cycling trip in the summer. In short, we made it alive (with all our limbs)! In long... well I could write forever about it but I can't be bothered so here's the medium rare version...
A total of 2670km, 10 countries and 25 days of cycling (which included 1 full day of rest in budapest and 2 half days, one in belgrad and one on the coast in turkey). At end I still had 2 full days to visit Istanbul which was great! For those of you who voted "No way!" on the poll I say "Ha!", if you laughed then I fart in your general direction... For those of you who believed in me, you're my new best friends! :) and the one's who don't know me well I feel sorry for you...
So yea, bike trip, probably the best, most epic thing I've done in my life so far, definitely something I would like to do again (more on that later, if I don't forget). I did the trip with Dave (
http://www.tour-de-world.org/) whom I knew from boarding school and Onkardeep Singh his ex-housemate who I met once.
As you can tell I didn't have much internet access (or time!) to write updates on my blog except for that one day in bratislava. On a given day we would cycle at least 100km, sometimes 120km (I think the max we did was around 140km). This is about 6 to 8 hours of cycling per day, as soon as the sun was up so were we (most of the time!) and on some days we even got up before the sunrise (we saw some BEAUTIFUL sunrises, it is incredible how many of these we miss when living the "city life"). As a general rule an hour before sunset we would start looking for a place to camp, an hour wasn't really enough and meant that we had a few dinners eating in the dark (with headtorches on).
We shared a 3 man tent and everyday we would wake up in an almost robotic routine, Onka would be the first up and out of the tent, then dave, then as both of them packed up outside I would be folding the sleeping backs and matts and putting them inside their casings... We never changed this routine because we got pretty good at each of our tasks and this meant we could be out in a flash (more like a broken strobe light flash), we would usually do about 15km to 20km a day before having breakfast, which usually consisted of bread (from the previous day) with jam, chocolate spread, honey, cheese, ham and not much else... Those were the basic staple foods for breakfast and lunch, by lunch time we would usually stock up on food somewhere and maybe buy some milk, yoghurt and other goodies...
On a trip like this you learn how some of the basic human necessities make such an impact on your mood, if any of us was thirsty, hungry, cold, wet, sleepy or in need of the toilet for some time the symptoms on your morale were almost immediate. In contrast, meal times were perhaps one of the most joyful moments of our trip, the simple act of eating gave us so much happiness. At night we would always cook a hot meal (a warm meal makes a lot of difference!), this would usually be pasta (half a kilo between the 3 of us was not enough on some nights!) with vegetables. Onka is a vegetarian and so we would not have meat at night, being quite fond of meat I was a bit worried and the very few times we stopped in a restaurant I would always be excited about eating meat, but, to be honest, I was quite indifferent afterwards and felt that my body couldn't use the fuel as well...
The 10 countries we went through (in order) were:
Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia (then back to Serbia), Bulgaria, Greece and finally Turkey.
I spent about 3 weeks in Germany preparing for the trip with Dave, of the countries we cycled through Serbia was my favourite. This is based on the experience we had on the people, as well as the scenery, cities and countryside. The danube area in Serbia known as the "Iron gate" was one of the most picturesque places we passed through. The highest altitude we climbed was 1430m in the Bulgarian mountains of the Godech region. It took us something like 4 to 5 hours to climb it, on lowest gear with only 1 tiny stop to eat a chocolate bar (major energy boost). You could feel the change in temperature up there, by the time we were at the peak (i.e. the highest point for the road not for the whole mountain!) it was late and we had to look for a place to free camp, of course, being a mountain there weren't many flat places around to set camp... a BIG dark group of clouds was gaining on us and hunger was starting to kick in, somehow we found a path which led us to this flat opening on the back of a hill, from this spot we had the most incredible view which at the same time was completely hidden from the road, it started to chuck down with rain just as we set camp and got the stove going, it eventually cleared up to give us the most beautiful clear starry sky for the whole trip... the first and only time I ever bothered to get my glasses out!
But that was about it for Bulgaria, it didn't score very high in our country list... I should mention that these opinions are all subject to the experiences AND people you meet... It just happens that in Serbia we met some of the sweetest people, like a family who invited us for coffee when they saw us sitting in the rain on a bench in their small town. Or the elderly couple who let us camp in their tiny Utopia of a farm with all kinds of vegetables, herbs and fruits. Maybe its just chance that these good or bad things happen... Anyway.
So what else? Well believe it or not after the 1st day I ditched my socks and shoes into the bottom of my pannier, and swapped them for flip-flops and that is how I rode for the rest of the 2500km... I was so surprised at how comfortable they were, no blisters, and specially no wet socks... just a funny V shaped tanned line haha... you might ask, "but what about when it rained?" Well, the thing is, if it rains, you're gonna get wet, period. And after the rain is gone, i'd rather have my feet dried by the sun, instead of having them in damp socks... bleh just the thought makes me cringe...
Ok I'm starting to turn this into the long version... Need some sleep... tune in for part 2, I'll post a map of our route and a link for the photos... Ah and also some new music will be coming up but that's a surprise so shhh
Ciao,
jc
