day fourteen: lessons

Hello!

Well, the holiday didn't end quite as I imagined. I was supposed to be back in L'viv tonight, but instead I'm staying here in Przemysl, 'cause all the buses have gone and Ukrainian trains refuse to take bicycles. You can buy your ticket and gamble on the possibility that the conductor might accept a bribe, but if he won't, you've just blown your fare. So I'm spending one more night in Poland.

(At this point, I'm furiously resisting the urge to rant about how this no-bicycles-on-trains thing just underscores the degree to which Ukraine is not mentally/culturally ready to join Europe. If I were to give in to these urges, I'd probably go on to specify – family reunions aside – how much I'm not looking forward to rejoining a culture which is so thoroughly geared towards making sure that anything a person may wish to do is against the rules and/or practically impossible. I may also mention how, as a result, contact with said culture makes many of those unfortunate enough to have it feel miserable, frustrated, and ready to kick things and swear at people.

But you see, I'm just far too controlled and restrained to mention any of that ;-)

In the end, though, I guess it's not a big problem. It gives me some time to reflect on the journey. I've learned a lot in the last two weeks, and in a few cases, it's been the kind of learning that may actually have concrete, life-enhancing results. Which can hardly be a bad thing, I reck'n.

Before I elaborate on that, however, there are threads to be tied up.

First of all, I mentioned in the previous entry that Scott and I were heading to Wrocław (which, in case I'm not the only one who's always wondered, is pronounced "Vrotswav"). It was actually my second visit, the first having been a week earlier, while I was on my way to the German border. And yet, so far I've failed to give it even a passing review.

Of course this trip hasn't primarily been about taking pics of cities I haven't visited before and commenting on them. Even so, Wrocław is such an impressive place that I feel I should say something.

I still know virtually nothing about how these Polish cities came into being and at whose behest. Whatever the history may be, though, it's clear that early Polish urban planners really knew how to lay out a central square. Even the German woman I met in Krakow last week commented on the grandness and spaciousness of the Polish rynek. (I say "even" because her country can definitely hold its own in this regard – I mean, aside from anything else, it contains the fabulous Erfurt, whose town square is the largest in Europe.)

A common planning strategy for Polish cities and towns is to put the town hall dead centre, with the rynek / main square around it. In Wrocław's case, the hall is so huge that it has three streets running through the middle of it! And the vast area around that is packed with exquisite architectural detail.

Of course the rynek is wall-to-wall cafes and restaurants, and not the place to go if you want to eat lunch at bargain basement prices (though Germany is at least three or four times as expensive, if not more so). But it's also strangely lacking in swarms of tourists – unlike Krakow's Old Town at the height of summer – and those who are there mostly seem to be Polish. So that's kind of a bonus.

Can't say that I really got any insights into the 'soul' of Wrocław at all ... I basically just walked around the touristy bits going "wow". But still, the "wow"s were frequent and heartfelt :-)

Getting back to our 'mission', though: by the time Scott and I got to Wrocław's rynek on the night in question, it was after 1am. This had already compromised his plan – which, you may remember, was to find a Polish woman who was prepared to participate in a 'screen kiss' with him. The ideal version of the plan had him kissing the Polish lass at midnight on his last full day in the country ... but y'know, sometimes one's dreams are unavoidably subject to the vagaries of rail timetables. So 1am or later would have to do.

I must admit that this little sortee did raise a couple of questions in my mind. Specifically, I wondered where exactly one draws the line between the innocent schemes of a couple of silly travellers and the parasitic behaviour of sleazy old men chasing younger women through Eastern Europe. But y'know, it was only a kiss that Scott was after, so I decided that it was innocent enough :-)

And so we set about finding the girl.

It didn't take long, either. She was ideal – friendly and chatty, attractive, no doubt rather photogenic. The only problem is that she had followed us down the street because she'd confused us with two other English-speakers who'd threatened to beat up one of her friends a few minutes earlier. Why had they done this? Well, apparently their explanation was quite simple: they had decided to attack him upon noticing that he was black.

Delightful.

This bizarre little occurrence got the conversation off on an awkward note, and the first part of it mainly consisted of us dissociating ourselves from the wish to hurt people whose melanin production was superior to our own. From there, as charming as our interlocutor was, it was rather difficult to move the conversation in the direction we needed.

(The road from "I thought you two were the racist fuckheads who came by earlier" to "Would you mind just kissing my friend while I film you?" is a long and difficult road indeed.)

The next woman we met also seemed like the 'right' one. We had her almost undivided attention (even though she was working), and again, she was open, chatty and attractive. The only problem was, she was also our waitress at the pub where we had settled in for the night.

It isn't that she was too busy to spend time with us – in fact we chatted for a couple of hours. It was just that ... well, between 'real drinks' (beer for Scott, red wine for me), we were having wisniowka shots. Wisniowka is a delicious cherry-flavoured vodka which I indulge in at least once on every visit to Poland, and since this was our last night, I bought numerous rounds of it.

The inherent difficulty here is that wisniowka is in fact evil. It's one of those drinks with the power to lull you into thinking you're completely fine, concealing under its veneer of fruity sweetness a 40%-proof kick. It's like sangria squared, then squared again.

So yes ... a long chat and five or six wisniowkas later, the moment had well and truly come for Scott to explain the mission to this woman and lean in for the kiss ... except that by this time, the whole idea had completely slipped our minds!

So that's how the mission ended: killed by several shots to the stomach. Damn that Polish firewater!

The following morning we stumbled out of bed, rode rather sluggishly to the rynek for strong coffee and dumplings, then parted in the square. I rushed for my train to Krakow, while Scott stayed behind and sought out the best, most eye-catching place to park his bike (which he was planning to sell before flying back to England).

And now, here I am a day later, back in the town where I started.

So what, if anything, have I learned from all this? Well, quite a few things, actually.

Firstly, I've learned that my suspicions about Poland were right, and that it is a really, really great country. I'm looking forward to deepening my acquaintance with it in the future.

I've also picked up a few ideas about cycling holidays, and about how the next one can be better. There's a bunch of stuff in my head now about what to do, what to take, how to plan and so on.

More importantly, I know that there will be a next one. 'Cause this has been, without a doubt, one of the most enjoyable holidays of my life.

I think I mentioned once before on The Manor that, in 2000, I spent three months travelling with Natalie (my ex-partner and one of my favourite humans) through Germany and Western Scandinavia. We started and ended that trip in Koblenz – an elegant and quite romantic German city, brilliantly located at the confluence of the Rhein and Mosel rivers.

Our initial arrival in Koblenz was in the first week of September, and from there we struck out in pretty much all directions, staying in a couple of dozen different places from big capitals like Berlin and Stockholm to obscure villages, arctic settlements and log cabins in the Norwegian fjords. In every way, it was just an incredible holiday.

By the time we got back to Koblenz in the dying days of November, it was difficult to remember what either of us actually did with our lives before the trip had started. And that, I have to tell you, is one of the best feelings I've ever had. The sensation that you've been on the road forever, that the earliest days of your journey are distant memories, and that everything beforehand seems a lifetime removed from where you are now, is just amazing. I think everyone should experience it at least once in their lifetimes if possible.

I'm telling you this because I got some of the same feeling from this holiday, even though it was only two weeks long. As the train took me back through south-eastern Poland towards Przemysl, it passed through a lot of towns that I'd cycled through ten days or a fortnight earlier. And it seemed like an age had passed since then. Finally, back at my starting point, it was as if I was seeing Przemysl for the first time in months or years, and I'd been on the road  for that whole intervening period. For me, this = major, major result.

So the next cycling holiday will

a) undoubtedly happen, and
b) be planned and executed better than this one.
 
On a less positive note, this trip was kind of the 'culmination' of a habit I've developed over the last few years of taking work and study with me on holiday. Up till now it had been unconscious or only semi-deliberate – I'd just pack some uni notes or whatever, so that if I had downtime, I could make use of it. Or I'd go on holidays near exam time, and therefore find it necessary to book an exam in one of the countries which I was passing through. (My university, unlikely though it may seem, allows you to do that.)

This time, as you might remember, I knowingly set out to combine the exploration of a physical place with the exploration of an academic subject – my 'On the road with Muhammad' idea.

I now understand that this was a mistake. Once you start allowing the non-travelling part of your life to impinge on the travelling part, it gets worse every time, until you wind up looking for places where you can conduct lessons and submit essays instead of doing what you should do, i.e. letting go and committing yourself to the journey.

So next time I'll do whatever's academically or professionally necessary first, then close all books, cancel all lessons and disappear, immersing completely in the travel experience (which, after all, is one of my main reasons for being). No other approach makes sense.

I think that's all I wanted to say. Hope you enjoyed this series of rants. Thanks to those who commented ... I always savour reading what people have to say about my little wanderings and ramblings.


I'm leaving you with my pic of a lake in far southwestern Poland, somewhere between Jelenia Gora and Karpacz. It's taken through a bus window at dusk, hence dark, blurry and a little indistinct. But it's still one of my favourite images from the trip, and it seems to me a nicely atmospheric 'parting wave' from the country I'm about to leave. Hope you like it.

Bye :-)

day twelve: fun with anomalies

So our bus did eventually pull out of the field, and after winding along some excruciatingly narrow streets through a series of excruciatingly cute villages, it deposited us at a decaying railway station about half-way to Jelenia Gora. We went the rest of the way on a super-modern Silesian* train. We then went off to find our accommodation, which you can see below.

Yep, that's right: with Scott's assent/ encouragement, I booked us a trailer outside of town. It was awesome – kinda fun for its novelty value, comfier than some of the hotels I'd stayed in, and at 35 złoty (a little less than nine Euros) each, a fabulous bargain.

I said right at the start of this journey that Poland is a country full of pleasant surprises, and today held two of them. The first was the city of Jelenia Gora itself. We certainly hadn't come here because of the city's reputation for being a great tourist destination – I mean, as far as I know it doesn't have one. We came solely because it's the closest regional centre to a place called Karpacz, which I've begun to fixate on over the past four or five days. That was our real destination, about which I'll say more later.

Having said all that, we obviously couldn't leave without having a look around – and besides, we needed coffee and breakfast! So we headed into the centre, where we found a very elegant stare miasto (old town). The main square was dotted with craft stalls, cafes radiated out in every direction, and in the centre was a sound stage where people were learning to folk dance. It was the whole nine yards, basically – and, of course, the kind of 'unexpected bonus' which Poland excels at.

Looking beyond breakfast and the joys of źurek (the soup I mentioned a while ago, made on a fermented rye flour base), the plan for the day was basically this:

1. Ride 20kms to Karpacz and back.
2. Get a train to Wrocław, to fulfil our last mission for the journey.

Actually point two was Scott's mission, and I was just meant to be the cameraman/wingman. He's been making a little documentary about his/our trip, and since the book he's reading now is called Emotional Intelligence, this has sort of become the theme. Somehow, he's taken these ingredients – cycling through Poland, Emotional Intelligence, making an amateur film – and concluded that the best way for his doco to end would be with a big romantic 'screen kiss'. So the mission: find a friendly and charming Polish woman (not difficult to do), explain the project to her, ask her if she would mind kissing Scott for the big finale, and film it – preferably on the rynek in Wrocław, since it's both quite a romantic place and an ideal 'symbolic end point' for the journey.

First, though, we had a mountain to climb ... which was the other surprise for the day. See, we'd been told in Zgorzelec that the road to Karpacz was "not so flat", but that was all. I don't know whether Polish people are considered to have a talent for understatement, but if the comment about not-so-flatness was at all typical, then they really ought to be famous for this.

And so, we went there. And it was hard, let me tell you. I mean, 20kms is not such a long way to cycle when you're on relatively flat territory, but when the last 8 or 9kms are up a mountain, it becomes quite a different undertaking. On the way up, we were passed by two groups of mountain bikers, fitted out with all the latest equipment and looking like this was no effort for them at all. For us ... well, put it this way: I didn't shoot any dirty looks at the mountain bikers, or make any obscene gestures at them, but only because it would've required more energy than I had at that point!

But why make all the effort to get to Karpacz? Why had I become so fixated on this place? Well, you'll be relieved to know that I can answer that using just two words – two Polish words, in fact. The answer is "Anomalia Grawitacji".

Turns out there are certain places on Earth where the force of gravity doesn't behave in quite the same way as it does everywhere else, and odd things happen as a result. At least, that's what some people believe. Others say it's bunk, and that the strange phenomena observed in these places can be explained as optical illusions.

In the case of Karpacz, the town (a lively ski / outdoor adventure resort, and also a surprisingly picturesque place to put a natural mystery) snakes most of the way up one side of the mountain, and just above it you reach a gentle peak. Slightly beyond that, going down the other side, there's a short stretch of road where the weirdness is concentrated. Here things appear to go into reverse: water flows upwards rather than downwards, and if you stop your car on the hillside (as many drivers do), it will roll up towards the top.

The real nature of what's going on in Karpacz is disputed; you've got your 'gravitational anomalists' on one side of the argument, and your 'optical illusionists' on the other. So obviously, as soon as I heard that such a place existed in southwestern Poland – towards which I was headed at the time – there was no question at all of not going there to check it out for myself. It simply had to be done.

We reached the top of the mountain cold, wet and exhausted, and found the location of the alleged anomaly. Visually, it was definitely one of the weirder places I've been. From the 'top end' of the road (nearest to the peak), it looks unquestionably like a downhill stretch, but as you go along, you notice that the gradient seems to change. If you go to the bottom end and look back, it looks as though you've just come up a hill, whereas before you started moving it seemed that you were at the top and going down. And in the middle, it looks downhill in both directions.

Is this just an optical illusion, though? Well, the visual oddities tend to support that theory, but they don't explain the other stuff that happens on this road. Rolling uphill on a bicycle is a bizarre feeling, and watching cars do the same is quite captivating. The cars always roll towards the peak, no matter what point they start from, forcing your brain to try and reconcile previously learned facts about the world with new information that doesn't 'fit'.

(Btw, the driver of this car says "pięć złoty" – five złoty, 

indicating that he wanted me to pay for filming. 

He was just kidding.)

And there's one more thing I should mention: the physiological effects that I experienced in this place were very unusual. Every time I crossed the road at the point where the 'anomaly' seems to be centred, my head would go a bit scrambled-eggs. Either it would start spinning, or it would tell my body to go right for no apparent reason, and I'd start turning and walking up the road before 'catching' myself. There was also an occasional sensation somewhere between 'lightness' and a feeling of disconnection from the world. And lastly, if I turned my head suddenly or bent down on the spot, I would immediately feel nauseous.

Scott had none of these effects – in fact, he had great fun filming me while I experienced them, and hamming it up for the documentary.

So, then ... what the Hell is happening up there on that mountain?

"D'know", is the short answer. After subjecting the theory to various carefully designed and rigorously scientific tests (see photo), we formed no conclusions either way. But in the end, it really didn't matter. The point was to savour being in a place like that and having the chance to 'investigate' such an oddity in person. If Fox Mulder had suddenly leapt out of the woods with an oversized torch (or "flashlight", as he would call it) and an alien abduction theory, I wouldn't have been overly surprised. At least, not much more than Poland already surprises me on a regular basis =)

Our encounter with the gravitational anomaly concluded, we rushed back to Jelenia Gora and boarded a train. We're now on our way to Wrocław, to see if we can find a young lady who will kiss Scott on camera. I'll let you know how that turns out.

Wish us luck!
Anthony.


* Silesia = the south and southwestern part of Poland.   

day eleven: escape from luban

Well, there's good news and there's bad news. Also some weird news.

Let's start with the good: my bike is still here! The owners put it into their garage overnight. When I saw it this morning, I could've hugged it :-)

So ... our little odyssey continues. Maybe.

Now bad news #1: Scott bought a new axle and tried to install it himself, but it was an impossible dream. After watching every available Youtube video on the subject (full of wiry young American guys boasting about their awesome bicycle accessories), and despite the able assistance of a Polish gentleman called Czeszek (whose name I'm almost certainly misspelling), we gave up and put it into the repair shop. There was a queue of several jobs and only one repair guy, which meant that the bike might be fixed in time to get the last train out of Luban this evening ... or it might not.

Bad news #2: Of all the places where we could've found ourselves stranded, we seemed to have chosen the most offline town in Poland! This normally wouldn't be such a big issue, but I have a uni assignment to submit today ... in fact, the deadline for submission is flying past even as I write this*. We had wi-fi in our hotel (sort of), but once we'd checked out, that was obviously no use to us. So we walked around town for ages, and couldn't find a single place with a working connection. In one bar we walked into (tempting the Joke Gods to make a punchline of us), the question "Czy maj pan vee-fee?" ("Do you have wi-fi, sir?") was met with the kind of incredulous look you'd expect if you went into a pet shop and asked whether the puppies came with fries or baked potatoes. It was weird.

The wi-fi drought finally ended when we ventured a little way outside of Luban, where we found a large roadside bar/restaurant. The place was slightly disturbing, with its flavour-free food sprinkled with cold greasy breadcrumbs, and its overly made-up female clientele (reminiscent of Ukraine, you might say if you were feeling bitchy). But still, it had what we needed.

Only problem: there was less than an hour before the last train for Jelenia Gora pulled out of the station. That left just enough time for us both to down a coffee, and Scott to grab a snack while I started surveying the accommodation options for tonight. Scott then raced back into town to see whether his bike was ready, while I booked our accommodation and tried to work out how we would get there from the railway station in Jelenia Gora**. He turned up 20 minutes later with a bicycle in good working order, and we ran to the hotel to grab our luggage, then to the station.

We made it with about three minutes to spare, hastily buying our tickets and congratulating ourselves on being out of this place. I mean, it was a pleasant enough town really, but after all that had happened (and failed to happen) since we arrived, we definitely didn't want to spend another night in Luban!

Then, as we were standing on the platform and every teenager within a 30m radius was asking me one-by-one if they could have a cigarette, a middle-aged woman came up and told us something in Polish that the ticket-selling lady had totally failed to mention. Being linguistically ignorant Western tourists we didn't catch all the details, but her message was basically this: "You can't go to Jelenia Gora by train." 

Our hearts sank, as Don Henley's voice rang through (I dare say) both of our heads at once. Of course, you know the line he was singing: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave".

Then the woman continued: "You have to take the bus."

"From where?", I asked, knowing that in Eastern European towns, the bus station and railway station aren't always in the same neighbourhood.

"Over there", she said, pointing to a bus standing directly outside the station entrance, with about four passengers on it.

So we race over, have a quick word with the driver to confirm the destination, then start trying to cram our bicycles through the back door. Meanwhile, a train rolls into the platform, with the words "Jelenia Gora" written on the front. A "wtf?" moment ensues, and we wonder if we've been misdirected, but then everyone gets off the train and starts heading towards us. Suddenly our bus is packed. We figure there must be track maintenance or something like that going on.

A minute later, the bus leaves the station, winding its way through Luban's outskirts and onto a highway. We're outta here at last!

A minute after that, our driver suddenly pulls off the road and into a field.

Yep: a field. I mean, there was a road there, of course. But also lots of grass. And crops. And no sign of this being a bus stop whatsoever.

The driver turns the bus around so that it's facing the main road, has a brief and seemingly angry phone conversation, then turns off the engine, gets out of the bus, and stands on the road smoking a cigarette. All of this without a word to the passengers.

So this is where we are now: sitting on a stationary bus in a field of green grasses, yellow wildflowers, and patches of (I d'know, some crop or other), watching the sun get lower in the sky, with absolutely no idea of what's going on.

And we still haven't managed to get out of Luban.

Nevertheless, looking around me at the serene landscape, I'm thinking that if you're gonna be mysteriously stranded somewhere, it could certainly happen in worse places than this.

Bye!


(* More often than not I don't write directly onto the blog, 'cause I'm in a place where internet access isn't available. I tend to write first drafts on the back of whatever paper I can find – worksheets from my lessons, uni notes, train/bus/airline tickets, receipts – and then assemble and type up my scribblings later.)

** We would never have been able to do this holiday without Google Maps, which (along with, obviously, maps) gives you detailed road directions between pretty much any two points on Earth. A couple of times it has led us astray, but generally it's a brilliant resource, especially if you can print out the info and carry it with you. We now return you to your regular programming. 

day ten: schrodinger's cat vs. the little frog

So, after flummoxing about last night, trying to find the border in total darkness, this morning we made one of those "Hmmnuuuuh!" discoveries (where "hmmnuuuuh!" roughly translates as "What a pair of dumbass tourists!"). Cycling about 20m to the end of the road from our pensjon, we found ... wait for it ... a bridge! It was about 50m long and it went straight over the river and into the centre of Görlitz.

So we cycled over to Germany for coffee (I don't think I'll ever get sick of saying that*) in a brilliantly decorated, slightly rundown and cavernous cafe restaurant. What a life, eh?

On the way into town, we discovered a rather curious fact: namely, that the endlessly entertaining Jesus of Nazareth is alive and well, and has been baking bread and cakes in a German town this whole time. Either that, or he did die and then bugger off to heaven for a while, but now (much in the manner of, say, Jason the Texas Chainsaw Guy), he's back.

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how Christendom reacts when this news gets out. Also makes the whole Rennes-le-Chateau cult look a bit silly, when you've got the 'missing' Christ advertising himself above the doorway of a bakery ;-)  

Anyway, we took off in the direction of a city called Jelenia Gora, which is about 65km from Zgorzelec. Didn't expect to get all the way there, because it's a long way and we'd started quite late. But there were a number of towns on the way where we could stop and find accommodation for the night if we needed to.

The first 24km were awesome: wide panoramas of spacious open fields, a couple of quirky villages (including one which contained a post office that seemed to have its own tomato patch), and a zippy downhill ride through lush green valleys which were among the most beautiful I've seen in this generally rather picturesque country. 

We then approached the little town of Luban, and this, sadly, was where the smooth run ended. Just before the turn-off into the town centre, Scott's rear wheel axle snapped in two, rendering his bike pretty much useless as anything other than a poor man's ginko** machine. Luckily there was a bike repair shop in the centre of Luban, but it was closed. So we found a cute, cheap little hotel on the town's outskirts and settled in.

I taught a Skype lesson at 8pm, and then decided to go into the centre to try and grab some food, since we'd sort of forgotten about dinner with all the other stuff that was going on. When I got there, everything was closed except the Źabka (it means "little frog", and it's a convenience store chain that's all over the country), so it was dinner from plastic packets for the second night in a row. 

(Btw, I'm posting the Źabka photo here mainly because I think the little frog is really cute :-)

Much worse than that, though, I had to make the journey on foot, because earlier I'd left my bicycle in the back yard of the hotel, and when I went into the yard to get it, it had disappeared. I looked around for ages, thinking the bike had been moved to make way for an incoming car, but nope: completely gone.

So now it's 11pm, there's no light in the locked reception area (i.e. no-one to ask about missing bikes), and I've got a big ol' Schrödinger's cat on my lap. Either the owners have put the bike into their garage to make sure it isn't stolen (they mentioned something about a garage when we arrived, but they were speaking Polish so I didn't understand much), or it already has been stolen. If it's the second one, it means we've gone from having two more or less working bikes to having one broken one between us, in the space of a single day. And that, of course, means our cycling trip is over. 

At this point, I just hope I can sleep. 

Good night!

** Not sure why borders fascinate me so much. Maybe because I was born in Australia, where there basically aren't any. (Well, there is one, but it's, y'know, The Pacific Ocean. Kind of a different thing.) Or maybe it's because I've spent most of the last seven years in 'visa countries', where crossing a border is a big deal and often involves quite a bit of bureaucracy, or at least a lot of suspicious looks from armed guards. D'know. 
 
** ginko = a Japanese form of gambling which involves big yellow machines full of silver balls that rattle and roll around madly, before some of them are spat out into a plastic cup – much like the ball-bearings inside a broken bicycle wheel, which rattle and roll around madly before spitting themselves out onto the road. The major difference is that it's quite possible to understand the bicycle ball-bearing system without being Japanese, whereas the principles underlying ginko are – at least to me – utterly beyond  a foreigner's comprehension.

day nine: frontiersmanship

"Your bike looks much better than mine", says a voice from behind me.

Turning around I see Scott, rolling slowly along on a blue-grey bicycle that looks as if it had been handed down through at least two generations of German owners before he bought it in Leipzig on Monday.

We're on the platform of Zgorzelec railway station, which turns out to be one of the weirder railway stations I've seen. The platforms are cut into a hillside, and they look quite new, shiny and evenly paved. The station building is an entirely different story. Standing on top of the hill, completely unconnected to the platforms, and utterly shapeless in its decrepitude, it's both strangely attractive (if you like a bit of decrepitude) and just the tiniest bit creepy. Neither of us can locate an entrance door, though there are numerous broken windows that you could use to gain entry – assuming you were, say, either homeless and freezing to death, or slightly mad.

So as I mentioned, Scott has ridden most of the way here from Leipzig, and I've come from Krakow. But why here, specifically? Well, because this is where Poland runs out and Germany begins, so it just seemed like a fun place to meet. We even had a vague plan to rendezvous Cold War novel-style on the bridge which links the two countries, and make a clandestine exchange. Just couldn't quite figure what we could exchange – given that neither of us had taken any prisoners or was in possession of sensitive information – so the plan never quite worked out.

Anyway, Zgorzelec itself didn't impress us very much at first glance (my Polish friend Basia tells me that the town's name means "gangrene", so perhaps that's not surprising!). We were a lot more taken with Görlitz, though, which is about a 2km ride from the opposite river bank. We rode into town as the light was fading, and found a cozy little Altstadt with a nice laidback feel to it. So we decided to stay for a quick coffee and a catch-up, before heading off to find our accommodation back in Zgorzelec. Thing is, though, a "quick coffee" can easily turn into a two-hour chat with Scott, so by the time we got back on the bikes, it was absolutely pitch black.

Needless to say, we didn't find the border on our first attempt, and we got thoroughly lost a couple of times before finally getting back across the river and locating our pensjon*.

All that remained, then, was to drink and smoke and eat peanuts (in lieu of dinner) until two in the morning on the street outside our pensjon, thus guaranteeing a late start to the cycling the following day ... but hey, this is what one must do when catching up with an old friend in a small Polish frontier town.

I'm sure the oversized hedgehog who lives in the long grass near the pensjon was very glad when we finally called it a night. Not only could he have some piece and quiet at last, but he was also free of the annoying Australian who kept coming up and trying to pat him.

"Why can't those Australians leave us hogs of the hedge alone?"
Because you're just too damn cute, that's why.

Good night :-)


* A kind of budget hotel, often family-run, with a sort of 'homey' atmosphere (at least in the good ones).

day eight: adaptability

So the plan changed a bit. Or some might say "a lot".

Yesterday morning I was in a cafe in Krakow, writing my 'Clash of Civilisations' essay, when I got a message from my friend Scott. The message was basically this: "I'm in Leipzig, and I'm going to see a man about a bike. Riding to the Polish border after that – can you meet me in Gorlitz on Wednesday?"

To put that in perspective: the distance between Krakow and Gorlitz by road is 428km. In my first five days, making my way slowly by bicycle and super-slow regional trains,  I'd managed to cover a little over 200kms.

I'd actually determined some rules of thumb before leaving Lviv, which were these:  if you can get there in a day on the bike, do it. If you can't, get a train. If it costs more than 10 Euros to get to the next destination by train (paying for myself and for the bike), you're going too fast.

So yeah ... this was a bit of a change.

Meanwhile, Muhammad had caught up with me. I'd more or less done the research for the essay, but hadn't started writing. The plan was to stay put in Krakow for two nights and one full day, and write it there. (It's due today, btw.) As it turned out, my full day in Krakow was taken up with other stuff, so yesterday I had a mountainous task before me: write 2,500 words in a single day, and get to the next city, Katowice. That meant either a 2.5 hour train journey or a full day's bike ride.

My decision: "Alright, then, let's do this thing. I'll start the essay in Krakow, get myself to Katowice and finish writing there. Then I'll race over and join Scott."

So I sat in Krakow and wrote for as long as I could, then grabbed a train. At 7pm, having just arrived in Katowice, I had a little over 1,000 words written. So I wandered into the centre, chose a cosy-looking cafe as my venue to finish off the work, and sat down to coffee and Greek salad and Islam.

Six hours later I was still at the cafe, and I'd been befriended by the Moldovan family who run it. This was great on the one hand - they were extremely warm and friendly, and even gave me a lift back to my hostel afterwards - but it meant that I hadn't quite finished writing when I got back at about 1:30am.

I finally submitted the essay just before 4am, and collapsed on the bed to be woken five hours later by my alarm. Some helpful advice from the receptionist got me to my next destination, which was Gliwice, and from there I travelled to the low-key, moderately cute town of Opole, where I am now. So far today I've done two 'short hops' by regional train and 33kms of cycling, but there's more to come. I'm booked at a hotel in Wroclaw tonight, and that's another 100kms from here. So we'll see how long my 'rules of thumb' can last!

One of these days, I'll have a 'normal' holiday ... you know, the kind that are advertised with phrases like "Relax, unwind and recharge your batteries in beautiful xxxx" and "Put your feet up and forget the cares of everyday life in xxxx".

Right now, though, this holiday seems pretty close to perfect )))

day four: the joy of place names

Covered about 80kms today, which is the minimum pace I'll have to keep if I want to get to Zgorzelec (i.e. the German border) in a reasonable time. About 45 of those were by train, and then, after waiting out a fairly ferocious downpour that started the moment I left the railway station, I did the other 35 by bike.

I ended up in the small town of Ladna, and if you speak Russian, you'll understand immediately why I had to stay there. There are just so many terrible comic possibilities ;-)

See, in Russian, the word "ladna" (spelled with an "o" on the end, but pronounced with an [a] sound) literally translates as "ok". However, the meaning really depends on your tone. It can be used in a friendly or neutral way, but with the right intonation it signals something else – something more like the American English "what-ever" of frustration/exasperation. Altogether, then, it can mean anything from "Yep, no problem" to "I'm completely over this, can we move on please?" to "You're talking bullshit, but I can't be bothered arguing 'cause there's clearly no way to penetrate your stupidity". Such a versatile little word )))

So as I rode past the amusing signs saying "Glass Factory: Ladna", "Supermarket: Ladna" and so on – as if every signwriter in the town was just horribly, terminally bored – I imagined various silly dialogues, beginning with one person asking "So where are you staying at the moment?" and the other replying "Ladna", then another question answered with "Ladna" etc. etc. until a fight resulted. Ah, the joy of place names that translate badly!

Incidentally, two days ago there was a town called "Lazy" about 10kms off my route. I considered going there just to get my photo taken next to the town sign, but in the end I couldn't be bothered.

(Next time you see me, you can slap me for that joke if you like.)

The scenery today was more dramatic than yesterday. My cycling route skirted around the edge of a low mountain range (actually I'm not sure if you'd call them low mountains or tall hills, but ladna, doesn't matter), so there were some valleys of splendour and the like.

I particularly appreciated the wildflowers on this part of the journey. At this time of year, Poland essentially becomes a sea of wildflowers. On every square metre of land not otherwise occupied, they spring up in their millions, adding bold, broad strokes of yellow and occasional purple or white pointillist dots to nature's canvas. If there's so much as a vacant lot between two houses, the wildflowers will claim it and thrive on it. They look especially vivid late in the day or after rain, which were exactly the conditions in which I saw them yesterday ... hence the appreciation, I guess.

You know, while I was cycling today, I had a moment when I suddenly thought "This should be my life". I mean, it is my life, in the sense that I'm doing it now and I appear to be breathing (sometimes very heavily!). And there are obviously good reasons why it can't be a full-time thing – super-important reasons like family, the need to make a living etc. etc.

The thing is, though, other than the factors I just mentioned, most of the stuff that generally keeps us stationary seems kinda empty to me when I get 'on the road'. I don't need a nice house or even a 'place to call home'; don't want a car; couldn't care less about flat-screen TVs or a private vege garden or the familiar faces of neighbours or any of that palaver. The world is ridiculously large (as you realise only too well when you try to traverse a little bit of it by bicycle!), and so varied and interesting, and life is way too finite for my liking! So I ask myself: what the Hell are we all doing, missing out on so much by staying in one place? Why don't we all just gather together our loved ones, get rid of all our unnecessary stuff, work out a way to earn money while mobile, and disappear into the blue?

I know that's a horribly flawed and idealistic argument, and the lifestyle it recommends is virtually impossible to sustain (especially on an English teacher's salary!). Still, those were my thoughts last night and I'm recording them faithfully here, cos y'know, I sometimes do that.

Meanwhile, to the guy who makes those insanely delicious fruit-and-spice-infused vodkas in Kazimierz (the 'Bohemian Quarter' of Krakow): I'll see you tomorrow night, my friend!

Take care everyone :-)
Anthony.

day three: sleepy rural jihad

A much easier ride today; I had 50kms to cover, but still feeling a bit sore from yesterday, I did the first 30 by train. I disembarked near the small, rather sleepy and relaxed town of Lancut, and cycled into the centre.

 On the way in, while passing a completely nondescript-looking building, I got a timely reminder that my other mission – Islam, civilisational clashes etc. – is still a topical one, and that I'm not the only person with these issues on my mind.

When I finally got out onto the highway, the roads were much better than yesterday. For most of the way I was riding on a pedestrian/bike path, separated from the highway by a deep ditch. Hooray for that! The worst thing about riding long-distance is that you get those moments when an enormous truck passes you less than a metre away, displacing enough air to knock you off course and remind you of how vulnerable you are out there. The fewer of those moments I have, the happier I'll be :-)

I also invented something today called the "handlebar clothesline", for the purpose of drying clothes while on the move. Obviously this was intended for highway use only – I'm not that much of an exhibitionist that I want to ride around town with my underwear flying like a flag on my bike! Sadly, though, I have to report that it wasn't quite the success story I'd hoped for. You need to tie your clothes firmly to the bars, and that means relatively little of their surface area is exposed to sun and wind.

Oh well ... maybe I'll find a way to improve on the first version.

I'm in Rzeszow now – a very pleasant, smallish city in Podkarpatskie (literally "beneath the Carpathians") province.

I've actually been here once before, and it was only about a month ago. I came to see off my friend Scott when he returned to England after living in Ukraine for four years. (Wizzair, the UK budget airline, flies to and from Rzeszow, so you can sometimes get ridiculously cheap tickets to London from here.) On that occasion, half the town turned up in the rynek* to watch the final of Euro 2012. This time it's a bit quieter, which I certainly don't mind ... in fact, the laidback atmosphere is far preferable to the throng of sports fans.

Ok ... that's about it.

Tomorrow I'm out of Podkarpackie, and into the neighbouring Malopolskie province, of which Krakow is the capital. Woo-hoo! Krakow, here I come (yet) again!

Good night )))


* I used this word in the first entry too. It literally means "market" (in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and probably a few other languages), and it often serves as a label for the main square of a town. Stick with me, and your Polish will improve every day :-)

day two: deceived

It lied to me! The bastard lied! How could it do that?

By “it”, I mean the internet of course. Our beloved information superhighway lavishly embroidered the truth, mercilessly stretching credibility on the rack of deceit in order to fashion the kind of spurious tale that you expect from grandparents when they tell you how they spent their youth. In the middle of its fish-that-got-away story, this so-called "internet" (if that's even its real name) turned dramatically to its audience, held its hands as far apart as they could go, and said “No kidding, it was THIS BIG!”

Whoever would’ve thought it could do that? I mean, it’s the internet, right – the medium of our times, domain of scrupulously tested and verifiable fact, a pristine beacon of unbiased truth in an otherwise compromised world. I’m shocked, appalled and disappointed. 

Well ok .. not really.

The thing is, when I looked up the distance from Przemsyl to Jaroslaw, the first answer I got was 23km, but that was as the crow flies*. I looked for actual road distance, and found first a site that said the distance was 27km, then later another which said it was 33.

Being an optimist, I added 27 and 33 together, divided by two and came up with a probable distance of 30kms. And that was what I thought I’d have to cycle today … that, along with the 10km from Krasiczyn to Przemsyl. 

Wrong!

After riding for about seven or eight kilometres out of Przemysl, I saw a sign that said “Jaroslaw 34kms”. So it seemed the further I rode, the further away my destination was :-( 

Two years ago I cycled 55kms through southern Finland, and it was a great day. Quite difficult and strenuous in places, to be sure, but really, really cool. I’d finished by about 2 or 3pm, and then I could just relax and say a fond and somewhat sad farewell to one of my favourite corners of the Earth. (I was due to fly out the following day.) 

As I mentioned before, I'm not in such good shape now as I was then, and today that was obvious. However, I was also carrying a lot more stuff on my back than I had in Finland – dragging a laptop and a couple of uni textbooks along with you really makes a difference when you’re on a bike.

Anyway, about 8kms out of Jaroslaw, I was so exhausted, and so many bits of me were in pain, that I really didn’t think I’d be able to make it. I walked beside the bike for a couple of kilometres, and even that was an immense effort. Seriously … I was screwed. 

.

Eventually I found a roadside service station and rested there for a while, drinking canned iced coffee and trying to forget that I had to get on the bike again in a few minutes. It revived me a little, and in the end I made it to Jaroslaw, shattered but more or less alive.

And after all that, guess what? The town is completely uninspiring! Really. Maybe I missed the good bit (always possible), but unlike the places I left behind today, and unlike Rzeszow (where I’ll be tomorrow), I see no charm here at all … it’s basically a collection of shopping malls, interspersed with some car repair places and petrol stations. 

Still, what a brilliant problem to have, eh? While so much of the world is struggling to get rid of horrible impurities in their water supply, my big issue is “Hey! I had to cycle further than I thought!” 

Damn privileged is what I am, no question.

Tomorrow will be a lot easier. I need to have a less intense day, or I’m never gonna get this essay written.

Will let you know how things go. Until then, stay well and happy )))

Anthony.

* (If English is not your native language and you haven't heard this expression before, it means "in a perfectly straight line".)