Author: megan

After a last minute decision to jump on a train to Prague, we sat down and made a rough route plan. It looks like our path from Prague to Paris is going to trace out a line on a map of Europe that will look remarkably similar to the tracks of a drunk staggering home from an overlong day at the races. First the steps backwards into Slovakia, then a quick trip forwards into Munich, via the dog-leg of river valley. Then another stagger off route, down across the Alps and into Italy. And finally a loop up through Switzerland and into the Black Forest, around into Germany, and back through Luxembourg to Paris.

It was 7.30am as we sat on the station platform in Prague and hooked our panniers back onto the bikes. A little odd at first to be cycling again, we spent the morning wandering around Prague, a lovely little city filled with old and beautiful and characterful buildings and churches and synagogues and clocks and giant metronomes and rivers and bridges and such. And a golem. Maybe. And definitely cobbled streets. My posterior has vivid memories of the cobbled streets.

 

The doors next to the astronomical clock, Prague

 

 

The steps up to the attic of the synagogue where the golem of Prague is reputedly kept

 

 

Prague

 

It was afternoon by the time we started cycling out of town, having acquired some food, a map, and some Kroner, as well as looking at an awful lot of things (including popping by to see Franz Kafka’s grave). The suburbs seemed endless, as they often do, and there wasn’t much in the way of bike lanes, although the footpath generally seemed fairly hospitable for bikes.

 

Leaving Prague and heading out into the countryside

 

The countryside we were entering was rolling and picturesque, and much more interesting than the plains of Poland (sorry Poland, I’m sure you have your good points, I just didn’t happen to run into any of them). The last of the summer crops were being harvested, silage was being heaped and covered, land was being ploughed, shiny new tractors were rampaging around – the farming technology has certainly leaped forward as we’ve come further south, just a few hundred kilometres north of here we saw a man ploughing a field with a horse just a few days ago. The trees were turning, and there was a chill in the air as night fell – much earlier than it did a few weeks ago. Autumn was on the way.

 

Czech countryside

 

The rolling terrain seemed to become steeper as the days passed, and the hills became a lot more like hard work. At the end of the day we’d have notched up around 1000m of climbing, without having got any higher. There were a few wildlife sightings: a group of pigs wandering around in the undergrowth by the side of the road, and a deer trying to hide behind a leaf. The terrain was lovely, forrested and rolling, and we travelled through a succession of nice little towns, on good roads, with scenic mist hovering in the distance, but no precipitation landing on us directly. Life was good. There were even lots of open wireless networks! And we hit 7000km.

 

7000km

 

 

In the town square of Pelhrimov, Czech Republic

 

Cycling through Jihlava, we found our first non-charming Czech town. It was just a bit too noisy – although it does have fort walls. Brtnice was nice and conveniently unpronounceable, and had statues of men with moustaches. We arrived in TÅ™ebíč later that day and experienced our first Czech campground; after a few nights wild camping in patches of forest. The manager seemed to have about the same grasp on German as I did, so we got along fine. The following morning we had the pleasure of cycling up a nice steep hill to get into town, and then some more cycling up and down steep cobbled streets all morning as we wandered around the Jewish Quarter and Old Town.

 

Looking out over the roofs of Trebic, Czech Republic

 

Leaving town in the afternoon, the roads were getting even steeper. Thanks to a headwind (or perhaps it was a sidewind), we only managed to cover 35km before giving in for the day. Thanks to the steep roads we’d still gained over 900 metres altitude (while losing the same amount in downhill coasting that didn’t even coast fast thanks to the wind).

 

Fields of drying sunflowers – we cycled past quite a few

 

Rain the following morning prompted a sleep-in, but eventually we rose and discovered the land was beginning to flatten out again, making cycling a much saner proposition. As we drew near the border with Austria and Slovakia the terrain became even more interesting, lots of lakes, rivers, castles, grapes and holidaying Czechs. The area is apparently included in the UNESCO list for world cultural and natural heritage.

Later that day we ended up passing by a roadside stall with large containers of suspiciously red liquids. The sign on his stall proclaimed that the liquid was burcak. We ended up camped opposite the stall, and after seeing some other people in the campground wander past with some, we found out that burcak is a type of young wine brew, legal to be sold on the roadside due to tradition. We purchased a bottle (it comes in plastic softdrink bottles) for the sake of experimentation, and found it to be quite tasty, like a mix between wine and ginger beer.

 

A tasty cylinder of goodness, purchased at the last town before the Slovakian border. It unravelled from the bag for eating, and was delicious and we never found them for sale anywhere else… UPDATED – It was Trdelník

 

The next morning as we were cycling towards Slovakia Alex got a front flat (to be followed up by another one later in the day, and then one from me as well). Once in Slovakia we stumbled across the Iron Curtain Greenway, and decided it was a much more pleasant option for cycling than the horribly busy narrow road we’ve been on.

 

Slovakia, yay?

 

The Iron Curtain Greenway proved to be lovely and quiet, and filled with interesting bunkers. Come afternoon we attempted to cross over into Dürnkrut in Austria. According to our map there should have been a bridge. According to reality there was no bridge. According to the drunken Slovakians Alex went to talk to, it’s a long-weekend this weekend, he should drink beer with them, and there is no bridge (and the map-makers were drunk).

 

Along the Iron Curtain Greenway (the demilitarised zone), Slovakia

 

Unimpressed with the lack of a bridge, we decided we were happy to call it a day. A brief hunt along the Greenway turned up a spot to camp and relax for the evening, undecided about whether to return north or head on south to Bratislava.

 

Greenway camp, Slovakia

 

Distance cycled: 428km
Average cycled per day: 65km
Rest days: None, but the cycling was following two weeks of enforced rest
Food highlights: Trdelník!
Flagginess: Low?
Sleeping arrangements: Wild camping and a couple of campgrounds
Days of rain: 3/7 (nothing very heavy though)
Public toilets: Available
Bike friendliness: Quiet country roads were nice
Free wifi availability: Pretty good

Well, the Poland plan started well. On arriving in Vilnius we got the rental car returned and walked to the bus station, queued for 40 minutes, then bought a ticket with Ecolines to Krakow for the following evening.

We spent the next day traipsing about the city tracking down extra things we needed (such as the bike boxes the ticket lady assured us we would have to pack our bikes in) and cleaning our bikes. Come 8pm we set off to the train station with the assistance of a couple of others from the hostel to help carry the bike boxes (they were catching an earlier bus, and it made life easier to go with them so we could help carry each others gear).

8.20pm and we were at the bus station, busily packing our bikes away. 9pm and everything was neatly packed and taped up. We sat and waited. The bus was supposed to come at 10.30pm. It didn’t.

On the plus side a group of salsa dancing friends turned up with a boombox to farewell one of their number, so we had a salsa dancing circle going on in full force in front of us. The security guard was baffled, but let them be.

Some time after 11pm the bus turned up. They took one look at the bike boxes, and said “No”. Pointing at our other luggage, they said “This yes. The other, no. Bus full, no room.” It was an enormous double decker thing, packed with people and with very little luggage room. We were told there might be some hope if the bikes weren’t in boxes, but even then probably not, and that they would write on our tickets that we’d cancelled our trip so we might be able to get 50% back at the office the next day.

We muttered quite a lot, confirmed that none of the other buses leaving that night were going anywhere we had visas for (mostly Russia) or wanted to go (northern Lithuania) reassembled the bikes, and went back to sleep in the hostel courtyard, where we proceeded to get rained on and not sleep much.

Come 6am we set off back to the bus station to check out our options. We had no desire to buy another ticket for a bus that might not take our bikes – despite the fact most of the buses seemed to have heaps of luggage space. There was one at 11am for Warsaw, so we went to check out the train station in the meantime. We’d avoided it initially as it seemed like there was a lot of train changing involved, and trains tend to be more expensive. But there was a 12pm train to Warsaw that was cheaper than the bus, and the cost was conveniently covered by our bus ticket refund, with enough money leftover to buy us some food (handy, as we’d spent all of our Lithuanian money the day before in anticipation of leaving the country).

The train was a breeze – the first one had bike hooks opposite our seats, the second (a gauge change from broad to narrow before leaving Lithuania) had an entire carriage full of bike hooks, and Harry Potter type cabins (a novelty for us). And we didn’t need the damn bike boxes.

 

On the Hogwarts Express from Lithuania to Poland

 

We arrived in Warsaw at 8.30pm, determined to jump on the first train we could find. Which ended up being the 9pm to Prague. Fine, we said, Prague would do, please give us tickets for ourselves and our bikes for the Prague train.

When the train turned up, we were thrown onto the non-sleeper Prague section of the train, and told there was nowhere to put our bikes. Well, actually, the conductor just waved us towards a cabin with seats and went back to the sleeper carriage. After sitting with bikes and luggage piled up outside the bathroom at the far end of the carriage, we eventually managed to get a free cabin to ourselves, wheeled the bikes in, and had a row of seats each to sleep on. Brilliant! Many thanks to the one lady occupying the cabin who happily moved when she saw the bikes. I’m not sure how we would have spent the night otherwise.

 

I spent about half an hour staring at this sign, trapped under a pile of bikes and luggage.

 

We ended up changing our cycling plans for the next section of the trip, as Alex’s father had 10 days to waste and wanted to spend them with us. So we ended up in a hire car again, our bikes were locked to the hostel balcony, and we spent time wandering around, first in Vilnius…

 

Hot-air balloons over Vilnius

 

 

Math-based graffiti

 

 

Vilnius cathedral

 

 

Polar bear – there’s a lot of street art in Vilnius, and a lot of hippy arts students floating around

 

 

Traditional Lithuanian food: Cold borscht (beet soup), eaten with sour cream and dill. As tasty as it is brightly coloured.

 

Then in Lithuania, travelling up to Rokiskis to visit ancestors (not my ancestors, but definitely someone’s ancestors).

Then across Poland, through small country towns, on huge highways, bumpy roads, past billboards and flashing lights and McDonalds and Coca Cola and skyscrapers. I’m terribly glad we didn’t try to ride across Poland – we weren’t planning to cycle the whole way, but until we reached Vilnius we hadn’t worked out exactly where we would cycle.

We ended up in Berlin, where we spent a couple of days trying to see as much as we could – even a couple of weeks wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.

 

Old segment of the Berlin wall

 

 

Deutsche Demokratische Republik

 

 

The Brandenburg Gate

 

 

Hippos in the sun at Berlin Zoo

 

Then down to Dresden…

 

Kreuzkirche, Dresden

 

 

The Elbe, Dresden

 

And back across the border into Poland, and through Lodz and Warsaw, where old buildings fought for sky space with high-rises, and advertising covered everything. Both seemed fairly charmless cities, but maybe that’s the car travel talking. It was lovely and sunny, so it can’t be the rain colouring my opinions this time.

Then finally back to Vilnius (via Stalin World) to pick up the bikes and hop on a bus back to Poland (yes, a ridiculous way of doing things).

 

At Grutas Park (a.k.a. Stalin World) – a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and relics collected from around Lithuania

 

Arriving in Tallinn, I almost immediately decide it’s a lovely city. I’m not sure how much of this is because it’s not raining. We cycle along the foreshore to the Piriti Caravan Camping – a small patch of land surrounded by boats and harbour. It has grass, power, and picnic tables, and is wonderfully cheap. It even comes with a free bonus sunset over the ocean.

 

Tallinn at sunset

 

My affection for Tallinn only grows as we get up to clear sunny skies the following morning. We try to get away early, and wander gradually into town, looking at sculptures and sights along the way, and then slowly meandering around the city, though the statues and plaques and old buildings and cobbled streets. Spending all this time in Europe has led me to realise that although cobbled streets are quaint, they are not the most fantastic riding surface for a fully loaded touring bike.

 

Around Tallinn

 

We head out west from Tallinn, sticking close to the coast, on what is Estonia’s Cycle Route 1. There are bike lanes, wide shoulders, and the roads are in good condition. The day is sunny and there’s not much traffic, and when we get near the sea it sparkles and looks blue and tempting. Gradually the roads deteriorate in quality – there are obviously lots of new roads being laid though (lots of EU funds at work). There are occasional patches of headwind, but on the whole the traffic is light and roads are fine.

 

Riding west out of Tallinn, along the coast – and an Estonian moose?

 

 

Bird is watching

 

The first night we camp wild, in the midst of some sort of insect infestation; for the second I put up the tent it gets covered in: ants, ticks, spiders, lady bugs, stink bugs, grasshoppers, flies, mosquitos and midges. Gah!

The following day the roads are a little worse, the terrain is flat, and there’s an irritating head-breeze. The population of Estonia is only 1.3 million, and it’s apparent that not many of those people are living out where we’re riding. There are lots of abandoned looking buildings, with cement peeling off bricks, stones patching holes in brickwork, weathered and rotting wood and obvious ex-Soviet structures. Some of the old decrepit looking buildings are obviously still being used though.

 

Old manor house at Lihula (it had been taken over by the Soviets to be a collective farming centre, but since been returned to the original owners, who gave it to a non-profit organisation who are turning it into an info centre/cafe/museum/gallery)

 

After wasting some time researching transport options between Riga and Vilnius (there’s no train, only buses), we head on to the coast, and find a campground by the sea.

 

Sunset from the shore of the campground

 

 

Bikes by the Baltic Sea

 

Another front flat for Alex the next morning is leading to contemplation of the next round of tyre purchasing when we hit Schwalbe country again. After lunch at Lindi Bog (which is not being cut up and burnt, unlike the Irish bogs) we cycle on to Pärnu. Heading onwards we end up stuck on the main Tallinn-Riga road – yes, this is where the Route 1 has taken us. Whoosh whoosh! We concentrate on balancing on our small strip of shoulder, and thankfully relax when we finally find a spot to camp for the night. We’re just near the coast, but the beach here looks more like a swamp.

Thanks to a temporary parallel road, we have a quiet morning cycle, before crossing the border into Latvia at Ainaži. Some grocery shopping and admiring the old border control paraphernalia, then we continue, and the boredom kicks in again. We’re back on the main Tallinn-Riga road, and sit balanced on a generally small shoulder, with a slight headwind and constant traffic whooshing past at almighty speeds. Occasionally we get a break, on an old bit of road or bike path. But most of the day is tedious and noisy, and we stop fairly often to avoid descending into madness.

 

Into Latvia

 

 

Hurrying the direct way through some unexciting terrain – this was a brief reprieve from cycling on the main road, an old section of road, temporarily paralleling our course

 

It’s on one of these forest stops that we find some chanterelle mushrooms in the forest and collect them for dinner (cooked not long afterwards in a pleasantly located campground by a lake outside of Carnikava, just north of Riga – we pay for the location, and not the facilities, which are a bit on the primitive side. The mushrooms are tasty though).

 

Chantarelles!

 

The terrible alarm clock wakes us at 6am, and after a quick wash in the lake we pack and leave. Cycling along the highway WHOOSH WHOOSH, then into Riga we hit bike paths which inexplicably disappear, then onto the patched pavements and streets of Riga. Beat-up old electric buses shuffle around, and we bump bump gradually to the bus station, admiring the sights as we go (including hoards of kids in their best clothes carrying armfuls of flowers – it’s International Students Day).

 

Into Riga

 

Arriving at the bus station we plan to inquire about buses to Vilnius. There’s one in 15 minutes, and we should ask the driver what he wants done with the bikes. We race over, and he tells us to just put them underneath. We realise there are only going to be five of us on the bus, so we basically have the luggage compartment to ourselves. On the downside, our lunch is going to be whatever we can scavenge from the bus station in the next 5 minutes. But we’re on the bus! And looking at the scenery as we drive through it, we’re not terribly depressed about missing the cycle to Vilnius.

Distance: 581km
Flaginess levels: Moderate
Wifi availability: Good
Days of rain: 3/6
Mooses: Our time in Estonia and Latvia was entirely moose-free, despite the signs advising of their presence.
Random fact: The Baltic Way (a.k.a. Baltic Chain or Chain of Freedom) was a peaceful political demonstration that occurred on August 23, 1989. Approximately two million people joined their hands to form a human chain spanning over 600 kilometres across the three Baltic states, then republics of the Soviet Union. It marked the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The pact and its secret protocols divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and led to the occupation of the Baltic states in 1940.

A groggy awakening on the ferry was followed by a ravenous descent upon the breakfast buffet. It’s amazing how much you can eat while cycle touring. A few hours were spent wandering around Turku, bikes everywhere, and a different sort of feel to the city – we’re not in Scandinavia anymore.

 

Arriving in Finland

 

We ended up on the 110 road, heading towards Helsinki in the rain. It didn’t take long to reach the conclusion that the Fins really need to hire a new animator. It felt like we were constantly scrolling through the same set of hill… valley with farmhouse… hill with forest… with a few random crops and a roadsign or two thrown in to spice things up. It didn’t help that the sky was miserable, grey and overcast, and we were being consistently mizzled and drizzled on. Add to that the fact that the only people we saw glared at us, and it was a fairly uninspiring experience.

 

The Finnish moose sign, and one of the well-known segments of road – this would be followed by a descent into an open area with a farmhouse and some crops, then you’d cycle up the same hill with forest and a roadsign again.

 

 

More repetitive road

 

This continued on the second day in Finland (with a big thunderstorm thrown in overnight), and we finally made it to Helsinki with some relief – at least the scenery was different. Some sight-seeing, and then tickets were purchased for the 5.30pm ferry to Tallinn: finally, escape from this miserable, grey place (yes, it’s possible that the weather really does colour your judgement of a place).

 

The Sibelius monument, Helsinki (created in honour of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius)

 

Distance: 194km
Flaginess levels: Moderate
Wifi availability: I don’t think we actually checked for any, due to the rain (although the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn had free wifi, so that was handy)
Days of rain: 2/2
Mooses: Our time in Finland was entirely moose-free, despite the signs advising of their presence.
Random fact: All terrestrial life in Finland was completely wiped out during the last ice age that ended some 10,000 years ago, following the retreat of the glaciers and the appearance of vegetation.