The Slovenian woman’s face seemed to have a sad agony etched into it. The lines betrayed some inner pain. Yet she was happy. Happy in a celebratory way.
She and her sons were derisory about Yugoslav leaders Tito, Tujmann and Milosevic. They took joy in their derision. The fact that they could openly deride them was a treble joy — a joy in freedom of expression; a joy in having the yoke of communism lifted and a the joy in having escaped from Yugoslavia without a hellish war.
It was an unplanned, unscheduled meeting. My brother, nephew and I were cycling along a country road after just crossing the border from Croatia. We were passing a cornfield when we heard a “”Hoy.”
The woman, her son and his friend called us over, waving a plastic soft-drink bottle full of red liquid. It was not soft-drink. It was their home-made wine. They wanted to know what three people on flash mountain bikes with panniers were doing on their country road.
Well this was a disorganised tour of (mainly eastern) Europe. We just bumped into people and things. As we did, Europe’s onion of history unfolded. Slovenia seems still palpably relieved to have ended 45 years of communism and escaped Yugoslavia fairly painlessly. The Slovenes have until independence in the past decade always been under someone’s else’s yoke.
We had some more wine.
They were celebrating a bumper harvest in an unusually sunny autumn.
Western Europe, meanwhile, was not having such a season of mellow fruitfulness.
In our six weeks of cycling in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic via Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Venice, we had just four days of rain, and three of them were while we were off the bikes looking a Budapest.
(Incidentally, this story requires just a few We’s and I’s, and I’m not going to actively lapse into the passive voice just to appease the chap who winged to Editor Jack Waterford last week about too many personal opinions and personal pronouns in the CT.)
Our trip began in Copenhagen. We got of the plane and picked up our bike from the over-size luggage rack.
A couple of Australian girls wandered past and one said to the other: “”Imagine that. Getting off the plane on to your bike and off. Wow.”
Well, yes, “”Wow”. We just pointed the compass south and cycled to Venice. 2034km in six weeks. No accommodation or transport booked. Carrying all our own gear. No precise route. The only scheduled element of the disorganised tour was the aim to cycle from the Baltic to the Adriatic with a flight out of Venice booked. If it looked like we would miss the flight we would hop on a train, which we did between Budapest and Zagreb (a story in itself to be told on these pages later) and briefly either side of Berlin to avoid traffic.
I’d cycle again in Europe. Indeed, once you see a few busloads of retired American tourists, it is the only way.
This tight-packed continent with the bulk of the world’s culture and achievements had to been seen on the ground slowly.
From the start of human history Europe has had all the advantages. The easy grains: wheat, barley, rye, millet. The easily domesticated animals: cows, sheep, goats. The easy similarity of climate on roughly the same latitude from the fertile crescent across. No deserts or tropics to leap. They could build their cities and feed their soldiers and scholars on the easy surplus and generally build immunity to infectious diseases. There was no innate superiority. Just luck. In Africa the Americas and Australia, there were no such advantages. None of their animals and precious few of their plants have even now been domesticated. With such natural advantages, small wonder Europeans conquered the world. And what a belligerent lot they were, and still are.
A history of Europe is a history of its wars. On our disorganised tour we came across wars all the time. Different wars for the same things: territory and the power over it and nationalism. The wars studded the Lonely Planet guidebook “”Things to See”. Museums full of wars. And even now war just finished and another threatened in Yugoslavia.
Only now is there an icing of hope over these layers of wars: the European Union. And yet in Austria there were the election posters of the far right FPO preaching nationalism with some success it appeared later. At least some Austrians saw the danger. Every poster of the two leaders had been adorned with black marker pen Hitler moustaches.
Bicycles have an enormous advantage in Europe. Take Cesky Krumlov in the south of the Czech Republic, for example. This is an astonishingly beautiful medieval town built around two horseshoe bends in the Vltava River. A strategic place. They don’t make places as pretty as this in model train sets. It was built before the infernal combustion engine first sparked. They don’t even attempt to give access to cars. So you park well outside the town and walk. In other places cars are faced with a nightmare of one-way streets and no-left-turn, no-right-turn, no U-turn, no stopping combinations. A door-to-door search for accommodation is hopeless.
On bikes we could move, with all our gear, fairly effortlessly through cobbled streets.
You have to have a mountain bike with front suspension. A road bike would not have low enough gears or be robust enough. It would get smashed up on the cobbles.
Incidentally, quite near Cesky Krumlov our disorganised tour went past a former Soviet air base. Near Austria where they could spy. Same theme different technology.
Perhaps it was just as well the Europeans were such a belligerent lot. It provided a romantic castle every day on our trip.
You see we stuck to the rivers, where the roads are flatter. If they go up or down it is at least steady. And the rivers are strategic requiring a fort or a castle within canonshot range of the river.
If the Europeans had followed the advice of the rebellious Bohemian Hus who in the 15th century recommended a council of Europe to resolve differences by talk rather than war, there would be much less for tourists to see. The Hus monument in Prague is now itself a tourist Big Ticket Item.
We travelled up the Elbe in Germany; up the Vltava in the Czech Republic; down the Danube in Austria, Slovakia and Hungary; and up the Sava in Slovenia.
The bikes were fabulous in the cities. Take Berlin. We did 40kms in a day with plenty of time to see inside museums etc. You can stop anywhere. Smack next to the Brandenburg Gate. If you did it in a car you’d be jailed. If you did it on foot you’d still be there.
But there are drawbacks. Pushing on to the next town or going to a beautiful little hotel just 30kms down the road are not options. You sleep where you fall. And a tailwind or headwind could double or half the distance travelled in a day.
Then all the signs are designed for cars. They point to the freeway. We needed secondary roads.
Lesson: get your maps in Europe. Go for 1: 200,000. Very much smaller scale requires too many maps for convenience and cost. Larger scale is useless because small roads are not shown.
A GPS is handy.
There are no signs for bikes. They are all for cars. If a cycle path comes out on a road, even in spoilt Canberra, is there a sign to tell the cyclist what the name of the road is, no.
The ability to go anywhere but without the signs to tell you where you are going can prove awkward.
With bikes you are closer to things and people. They are a talking point, even in bike-mad Europe because these are snazzy bikes with panniers. You see things and talk to people not on the bus route or available to the hire-car driver, shut off from the world.
The Big Ticket Items are there for all. Prague Cathedral, the Bratislava Clock Museum, the palace of mirrors when Napoleon signed a treaty and so on. On bikes, the modern layer is exposed.
Cycling through the countryside the horrors of communism are laid bare. They just walked away from collective farms and inefficient, polluting factories, especially in east Germany. The empty factories and collective farm buildings — not worth using, not worth demolishing — are testament to its failure.
In the cities and towns there are cranes everywhere, renewing and rebuilding.
“”But we in the east are paying for reunification, too,” a man in 40s tells us. “”We have lost jobs and social security”.
But he would not have it any other way.
We did an average of 65kms a day, so there was plenty of time to see things. Europe is closely enough settled to make finding accommodation fairly easy, but in the former communist countries accommodation can be scarce, especially outside main centres. Before 1989 internal travelling and tourism were rare, so you tend to get the remnant of state-owned slab hotels built in the 1960s. But the entrepreneurial spirit is taking on and more people are putting up rooms for rent.
Drivers behave themselves in Europe. By far the most dangerous stretch in our trip was the 15km from my daughter’s place in Bondi Junction to Sydney Airport. In Europe, they treat bicycles like vehicles. They wait behind for a safe time to overtake, rather than forcing cyclists into the gravel on blind corners and crests. They give way to cyclists on roundabouts and at T junctions as if they were cars. It is almost unnerving after cycling in Canberra where you have to expect that no car will give way to you ever under any circumstances, even if the car is facing a Stop sign or coming on to a roundabout.
The most charming towns and cities in Europe are those that have refused to surrender to the car. Bratislava has shut off the whole of the centre of the city to cars. Other towns force cars to park on the outskirts. Copenhagen, which is smaller than Canberra in size, with more than four times its population, actively encourages cycling and public transport. Cycles are stacked at railway stations. If each were a car, the parking lots would be immense.
The medieval town planners very wisely foreshadowed the car and laid out streets impossibly narrow for them.
The more you build freeways and parking lots the more cars you get and the more freeways and parking lots you have to build. The more clogged the city gets. Sydney is like this.
The peer pressure in Australia is for cars. Bicycles are sissy. The cities are too spread out. It is too hot. So a tonne of metal is used to take less than 100kgs of flesh around the town.
The other drawback of bicycles is the farnarkeling.
It began on Day 1 and became a morning ritual. We’d pack our bikes and make adjustments.
On a bad day, a bystander would hear something like this:
“”Why does that gizzmo always go UNDER the whatdyacallit, when I want it to go OVER it.”
“”Shit, I didn’t fix that thing then. We should leave the bikes in the hotel rooms to fix overnight.”
“”Where’s that ocky strap.”
(Struggle to bottom of the pack.)
“”It’s back in the bloody room.”
(Storms off. Comes back, fuming.)
“”Where’s the key to the room?”
(Storms off again. Returns)
“”Found it. Why is this Ocky strap just 2 centimetres too short.
Twang!
“”You bitch!”
“”Come on, aren’t you ready yet?”
“”Ready?”
“”Ready.”
“”Hang on. Where’s the Allen keys? Why is it that it’s the last Allen key you try that fits.”
“”Get through there, you bastard. Got it! No the whole bloody lot has got to come off.”
“”Swiss Army Knife. Where’s the Swiss Army knife. I always put it back in the same pocket, but it’s not there. Okay, who’s taken my Swiss Army Knife.”
Silence.
“”It’s Ok. Found it.”
(The Swiss Army Knife and Allen Keys have lives of their own. They get up in the night and jump pockets.)
Slowly the theory and practice of serial and parallel farnarkeling develops. Parallel is when you do something while someone else has already stopped progress to fix something, have a pee etc. Serial farnarkeling is when you have to fix something after everyone else is ready even though you said you were ready some time ago. Parallel farnarkeling is a way of shifting the blame for delay. Serial farnarkeling invites opprobrium, groans and blame-throwing.
Fortunately the farnarkeling faded as the trip went on as jury-rigging things became more successful.
The capitals were obvious places to go. Between them, we just dipped into Lonely Planet or other guide books or got advice from locals and other travellers about what was nearby and worth seeing and doing. Or just found things by serendipity or getting lost. Getting lost and asking locals are thing you do often on bikes.
That way, you come away with the European puzzle.
How can the same people build St Vitus Cathedral and the Berlin Wall? How can the same people compose the great music, write Death in Venice and yet kill thousands of Jewish children at Terezin or drop incendiary bombs on Dresden or send V2’s to Britain?
Is it because they don’t have enough space. It forces them to create or kill.
In the Basilica of St George at Prague Castle (construction began in the 10th century and is still continuing) we heard Zuzana Kocinova lead the Archi Di Praga Chamber Orchestra. They do the popular classics to get the masses in. Musicians have to live, too. Not even the overplaying and muzakisation of Vivaldi could spoil the confident joy that Zuzana put into the Four Seasons.
I thought that if Vivaldi could put a harmonious theme through the diversity of the seasons, the destructive winter and the pushy new life of spring, then surely the European Union could do that politically for Europe.
And we cycled out into the European autumn.