Peter Whyte-Venables is a freelance British artist, writer, editor, and fully qualified English teacher and proofreader based in Warsaw, where he lives alone, owned by two cats and a beloved young son.
Widely travelled in Europe and SE Asia, he finally settled in Poland in 2009, after a succession of jobs ranging from road-builder to Special Forces soldier to artist to builder to basecamp manager for Cambridge in central Borneo to parliamentary candidate to novelist to professional proofreader, where he finds himself now, when not teaching English to the president of Poland’s premier bank. His artistic exploits included commissions from Phil Collins and HRH Princess Michael of Kent, and his various meanderings included a four-month overland coast to coast crossing of Borneo with a friend, a tramp right across Transylvania, and a solo four-month motorcycle round Europe.
One of my more unusual commissions. (Two Derwent B9 graphite pencils, one sharp, one flat, on A3 190gm smooth)
Peter’s interests include motorcycles, dinner party conversation, aviation, reading, history, people and current affairs.
His passions – those all-important passions, eh? – are really just writing, the English language, and the above-mentioned son, whereas the cats are neither an interest nor a passion. They are merely a hugely welcome and cuddly adjunct to the chaos.
Contacts made via petevenables@gmail.com will be responded to more or less immediately upon being read.
This post is part of a series of posts following the adventures of a man on a mission to explore 20 countries around Europe on a motorcycle – go to One for the road.
Chapter 6
Being British and therefore having grown up under the dense shadow of football, rugby, football, cricket, golf and football, I’ve never really noticed ice hockey before, and so am captivated now by the blinding speed and astonishing skill of it. The goal’s only as wide as the goal-keeper’s arms, the ball’s invisible, and they play even when the pitch – a quarter of the size of a football pitch yet still crowded with twelve players – is completely frozen over.
I am the only customer, so the chef and the receptionist and I watch the game while the small blonde barmaid chatters in the background like a forgotten telex machine.
After an hour or so, I look over my shoulder, wondering when the bus/tractor/lorry parked outside with its noisy diesel engine running might either switch off or sod off. There is no lorry or bus: it is the cooler of a huge Coco Cola machine immediately behind me.
Bulging IKEA bags
We ride through many kilometres of lush woods and tumbledown houses. The villages are largely deserted, and once we go through a beautiful, secret valley which together with the humidity reminds me of the rolling country of Sabah in northern Borneo. Once again a railway line follows the road almost constantly, and as ever, I wonder what these houses are like inside. Stacks of cut timber are everywhere, as are the wandering dogs. A sign for Tescos 25km, then another at 3km. The entire country, town and village alike, seems to be largely deserted, and most of the people to be seen, traipsing along the roadsides in their lime green and brilliant orange sports kit with their bulging IKEA bags, have very dark skins.
Crumbling red bricks
There are blocks of communist flats in every town and sizable village, to house the people who work in the numberless adjacent factories, with their astonishingly high chimneys, all banded white and red. They surely can’t be a thousand feet high, some of these chimneys, but they certainly look like it. These faded and colourless factories, with their walls sprayed with liquid cement to keep up the crumbling red bricks, look not so much defunct as condemned. To a Westerner travelling on the same continent as, say, Switzerland and Germany, the squalor is startling to say the least, and as for the roads – those bikers I’ve spoken to so far have told me that the roads in Bulgaria and Romania are so bad I’ll need a GS not a road bike.
Wooded hills
Another surprise is the extent of the wooded hills, hour after hour. I constantly twist in the saddle to look all around to appreciate it, and once I can see, all the way to a very far distant horizon, the full 360 degrees. This not-very-main road is excellent, and every so often a castle appears on a distant hilltop.
For hours, this drizzling high cloud doesn’t let the sun through. And then suddenly – sunshine! The road begins to steam.
Trencin
Trencin, just before the Czech border. Although there are dozens of pensions and hotels, I follow signs for a campsite, which take me across the river and onto an island, and through a gaudy area of 1970s recreational facilities, with the concrete and the steel pool and the stadium all painted in faded colours. I check in at the campsite office/shop. There’s a motorcyclist in here, a short, pot-bellied man in his forties wearing a leather jacket with tassels up and down the sleeves and across the shoulders, above a skull and crossed bones and the legend Black Kings. He seems nervous, pointing here and there and glancing round at me. His shopping consists of packets of noodles, twenty Marlboro cigarettes, some cake, some jam, and now a small bottle of vodka, which he slips into a jacket pocket before shooting me a challenging look on his way out.
The campsite lady speaks only speak German, but we sort something out and I’m shown to my cabin, which is clean and small. The facilities are basic but sufficient, and speakers mounted on trees and huts everywhere broadcast constant Country and Western music.
Black Kings
It’s still early, so I sit at the table on my little veranda and watch the bikers who are camped across the way, a band of bikers in black leather jackets with Black Kings logos, whose Japanese easy-rider style bikes, with high bars, backrests for the sisters and forward-mounted footpegs for the brothers, are parked in a neat line. One of them I recognise as a Sportster 883, the baby of Harley Davidson’s range; it is small, slow, heavy, under-powered, but it is a Harley. While the men stand around smoking and discussing the day’s ride and compare the performances of the Virago (550cc) and the CM250TB (250cc) and the Drag Star (650cc), the girls queue for the washrooms.
Uneasy Rider
After a while, tubby Uneasy Rider leaves them and trudges across the grass back to the shop, from where he soon re-emerges and returns to re-join the group, all the while completely ignoring me and the battered old BMW at my side. It doesn’t take many seconds to see that he’s the oldest over there, and when he and several of the others go to the bikes and stand around gazing admiringly at the 883, it becomes equally obvious that he is the Black Kings’ leader.
By evening, he has made another two quick trips to the campsite shop – still not even glancing at the motorcyclist sitting ten yards away, and when I look across and see that he has gathered his expectant flock around him in a circle by their camp fire, it’s not difficult to guess why the two extra trips.
Castle
To reduce the size of his audience by at least one, I walk into town for supper, relishing the sight of the old castle atop the hill. My route takes me between the trees and through the 1970s recreational facilities of the playground, which is constructed almost entirely of steel and concrete, all of which is rusty and painted. Even the attractions in the children’s section are all steel and concrete, from climbing frames to ping pong tables.
Trencin is an attractive university town of 18th and 19th Century buildings and artful modern pedestrian plazas, and when I settle into a cosy restaurant, all shadowy nooks and creaking floorboards, and order supper, I realise I’ve left the guidebook on the table in my cabin, leaving me with nothing to do for an hour but resolutely refuse to watch the pretty and perfectly-formed young barmaid, whose naked body appears to have had a T-shirt and jeans painted onto it, go about her duties.
Uneasy Rider looks pleased this morning, with his saggy belly and thinning hair, when I see him striding across the grass to the shop. He looks older, though, and must have forgotten to buy porridge during his many shopping trips last night. The campsite is otherwise deserted, and I sit in the sun, smoking and writing, for an hour until Mrs Campsite is ready to return my passport.
Czech Republic
At the border, a grim Slovak guard takes my passport into his office, returns after I’ve watched him through the window making various phone calls, points at the back of the bike, barks, “Baggage!”, and points to where he wants me to park. The tank bag, top box and two panniers unlocked and waiting in a row on the pavement for him, I sit on the kerb, smoking and chewing four-day old bread, and watch a hawk hovering high above the neighbouring field. A shiny new Slovakian Mercedes 500SEL is turned back (oddly, since it contained what appeared to be an entire family), then one of the guards comes out with my passport and gestured up the road, towards the wooded hills of the Czech Republic.
But I ignore him, because I’m kicking myself for not bothering to read the guidebook before leaving the campsite.
The site of Trenčín has been occupied since before Roman times, and the town itself was occupied by the Germans and became the regional headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo, but it is the castle that’s really worth seeing . . . a typical medieval fortification situated high on a rock above the city . . . first noted in 1069 when the region was controlled by King Boleslaw I the Brave of Poland . . . as one of the few stone castles in Slovakia it resisted the disastrous invasion of Mongols in 1241 . . . climb the stairs for superb views over the surrounding area . . . towers and palaces . . . However, Trenčín is best known for a Roman inscription carved into a cliff below the castle dating from 179 AD, a soldier’s graffiti celebrating a battle against German tribes: To the victory of the Emperor and the army which, numbering 855 soldiers, resided at Laugaricio, by order of Maximianus, legate of the 2nd auxilliary legion.
This post is part of a series of posts following the adventures of a man on a mission to explore 20 countries around Europe on a motorcycle – go to One for the road.
Chapter 5
We cross the border into Slovakia, riding through a rich area of huge modern villas, neat and tidy old prosperous farms with ancient tractors in yards and glossy horses in fields, and many pokoj for rent in a landscape of hills and woods of many greens beneath a sky which is wide and blue.
Shanty village
We pass through a small town where I see my first gypsies, walking along the dusty verge, very dark skinned, with moustaches, brawny arms and laden with big blue IKEA bags. Then I see where they were walking to: on the very edge of town, just after a huge sign informing motorists that the next branch of Tescos is 64km away, there is a little shanty village of ramshackle huts and lean-toes and decrepit dwellings surrounded by patches of beaten yellow dirt. Dogs wander aimlessly and in a large open area an old man sits alone in a wheelchair.
Levoca
Seeing a sign for somewhere called Levoca, I swing left off the highway; it’s early but the sign has a kind of castle-thingy logo, so it’s probably pretty. Sure enough, I bump through a pretty arched gateway in some ancient-looking town walls, trickle through pretty streets until I find a cheap hotel, where for £30 I can dump all the kit in a spotless, airy, modern room, with bath and shower, air-conditioned, satellite TV, tea and coffee-making facilities and a double bed, and then, on the insistence of the owner, park the bike in the locked garden.
The sun, swallowed by the high white sheet that has been drawing across the sky from the west since I left Zakopane, has gone in by the time I hit the pavement with the camera. I walk around the near-empty streets, but every shot I choose contains at least one traffic sign, a Landcruiser or Mercedes M Class from Austria, and a trio of local teenagers dressed entirely in the ubiquitous brightly-coloured nylon sports kit, the boys staring at me and the girls arm in arm, giggling. I wonder what to do; it’s a bit early to start drinking, or have supper, but the town has a deserted feel about it. I’d guess it positively buzzes as a happening destination in season, but possibly not alone on a fairly chilly pre-season afternoon, with the sun a haloed white disc in a white sky making for very flat light for photography, and a strong wind lifting all the dust.
Mini-Krakow
But considering I turned off the highway on a whim, I’ve chosen well. Lewoca is a kind of mini Krakow, with a beautifully preserved and maintained main square which contains a number of striking buildings which during the late Middle Ages were the residences of the local nobility, which have since been turned into shops, but since they haven’t demolished the fronts and installed vast plate glass windows plastered with adverts for cheap spectacles and mortgages and charity shops, it’s difficult to tell.
Jeepsies
I try one; it is a classic grocery store. The next sells wool, rolls of material and cloth and other sewing materials. Another has an i on a small blue sign outside, so I go inside for information and find that it’s an internet café. The young owner speaks very good English, which he uses to let me know while I’m waiting for a connection that he’s very worried about the gypsies, he would never go to Romania because of them, and that they would ruin any Eastern European itinerary.
Gypsies, he says, are a problem.
“Why?” I ask. “What do they do?”
Nothing, he says, misunderstanding me. “They do not work, can not work, and do not want to work. They are not a big problem here, in Slovakia, but to the east, they are more aggressive. Many problems.”
“How many live here in Levoca?”
He considers for a moment. “Maybe a hundred and fifty.”
“But there’s no problem?”
“Jeepsies are always a problem. You’ll see.”
“Hey!” says the young man sitting at the next console, looking annoyed. “Do you sell headphones for all this noise?”
Main buildings
Out in the main square, I stand and look around. The grass here is a rich green; the sun dapples through the new leaves of the many trees, beneath which townsfolk gradually arrive to sit on benches and chat and idle, and beyond which the three main buildings can be noted: the magnificent Old Town Hall (15th-17th century) and museum, with its frescos high on its wall; the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1837), and the 14th century Roman Catholic Church of St. James, which is currently being re-roofed and contains a beautifully carved and painted wooden Gothic altar, at a sixty feet high the largest in Europe.
Having been three minutes too late for the museum, I try to get in to see this, but arrive at the iron gate of the church just as it clangs shut. “Hello!” a tall, distinguished lady I haven’t noticed calls out to the woman walking rapidly away into the shadows within. The woman keeps going. The lady turns to her husband and shrugs. He produces a tourist map of the town, and they stride off, and after a moment I follow.
Hungary
On a low pedestal of stone set outside the Town Hall is a large wrought iron cage from the 17th century, and the notice explains how ‘miscreants’ were locked in here for periods of public humiliation. For eight hundred years, right up until 1918, this area was part of Hungary, during which time Levoca underwent 23 name changes, including six in 1786 alone (Lewoče, Lőcse, Leutschau, Leuchovia, Leutschovia, Leutsaria), and another four in 1808, though in fact most people here were German. Granted the status of royal town in 1317, and sited conveniently on an intersection of trade routes, Levoca went on to enjoy centuries of successfully exporting iron, copper, furs, leather, corn, and wine, while developing as a noted cultural centre.
Satellite dishes
Although Levoca was largely destroyed twice during the Middle Ages, a respectable number of ancient buildings escaped, to blend nicely with the Renaissance town that emerged. Many of these buildings, which their smart gardens, double garages, window boxes and big clean windows, neat stacks of firewood, have walls that have never been finished. The red hollow brick construction, whose pointing and finish wouldn’t be out of place in a poor Indian village in the Colombian jungle, have been left exposed. Having spent God knows how much building the place, you’d think the owners would spend a few more korunas and get Boris the Builder to whack some rendering over the walls. Satellite television dishes, of course, are everywhere.
Spotless
I wondered what it was, apart from the sun through the new leaves of the trees that kept catching my eye. Now I noticed what it was: a complete absence of litter. No chewing gum, no cigarette cartons or blowing crisp packets. The square grass was a spotless lawn, and the granite pavement was equally spotless.
Pope John Paul II
Nearly all of the ancient walls survive, and I see that the gateway I bumped through earlier was the monumental 15th century Kosice Gate. From a vantage point looking north, the full scale of how picturesquely sited the town is revealed. To the north, a kilometre or so out of town, at the end of a long, tree-lined road, a church sits atop the traditional pilgrim site of Marianska Hill, where in 1995 Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass.
As I look out, the church actually disappears as the cloud finally comes to earth, and a few seconds later it begins to rain, a steady wet rain that carries a powerful argument for an early supper. I had thought of further exploring the town in search of a good restaurant, but when I return to the square, I find lurking in doorways away from the rain groups of swarthy people, peering out. Some are clearly of Indian origin, others merely sun-burned from years of outdoor work, but all wear either only the bleached denim or vivid sports clothes so common here, particularly among the men.
The men, when I do glance at them, are already looking at me: no downcast eyes of the oppressed here, but the direct, challenging start of the angry. Yet I can’t see a way out for them. They themselves generally seem to be uninterested in education.
I pass a sign saying EURO PUB. BEER/DRINKS, but I decide that I might as well go back to the hotel, where I stand waiting at the bar for a while before a movement catches my eye. I look down, and see that the chef – easily recognisable by the internationally-ubiquitous uniform of fat-spattered trainers, checked trousers and an expression of disdain – is scrunched beneath the counter, watching, six inches from my knees, a small television set. A certain synchronicity of sound makes me look up to the television set up on the bar wall; the Russians and Czechs are knocking hell out of each other in a game of ice hockey.
This post is part of a series of posts following the adventures of a man on a mission to explore 20 countries around Europe on a motorcycle – go to One for the road.
Chapter 4
The road between Krakow and Zakopane is undergoing massive works, so it’s endless adverts and diesel fumes and 60km before I can do 80kph. We pass through a patch of cut-grass smell, and then there’s two pretty girls hitch-hiking northwards, something I’ve not seen in Britain for decades.
Alpiney
Mile after mile of green sprinkled and banded by bright yellow dandelions, and roadside stalls selling goatskin and sheepskin rugs begin to appear. A young girl stands in the middle of a field with her cow and blonde ponytail and slim blue jeans. Three hours later, it all becomes alpiney, with log cabins and big advertising hoardings, mostly for rooms.
Getting somewhere
When the Tatry finally appear through the spring haze, an unbroken line that fills the horizon, their sides and cols streaked with snow, I stop for petrol, then climb over a wooden fence to sit on a grassy bank and revel in the sun. A light plane rocks and crabs, swaying in the wind, and I sit and watch some kind of bird of prey rise in broad circles in a thermal, up and up without moving its wings. A thousand metres away, a shepherd descends the slope with a spread of sheep as densely white as spilt milk.
I begin to feel that I am getting somewhere.
Zakopane
It’s not much further on that the houses begin to grow steep roofs, with little wire fences running along the gutter to hold the snow back when it comes, and then we cruise into the outskirts of Zakopane, past a McDonald’s and a Tesco’s. I ride the streets for a while, looking for a suitable room, before remembering that I am a YHA member.
I almost immediately find the sign at the top of a drive, about fifty yards down which a red and white bar bars the way. There’s an intercom machine on a post, and when I lean across and ask it if this is the way to the YHA there is a resounding “NIE!”, but just as I’m wondering what to do next the bar lifts, and we roll on down.
Wellington boots
I park the bike and walk round to the front of a large, newish building, and up the stairs to the reception area, where I ask a young man about rooms. He just looks blankly at me, so look around for help and see another young man, dressed all in black, with heavy-duty Wellington boots. Then I realise they all are, but for some reason this doesn’t stop me asking him if there are any free rooms, and he says no, because this is the Fire Station. The hostel is back up the drive, right by the big sign that says YHA.
Bike problems
The bike starts immediately and just as immediately dies and won’t re-start. Sighing, I take the tank bag off and trudge up to the large hostel, and am given a bed in Room 782, which has four other beds, then go back down to the bike, which now condescends to start, but misses when I turn the handlebars, indicating an electrical problem, which after a lot of pinching and tweaking, I narrow down to a bend in the cable near the steering yoke. I squeeze hard, and the lights come on. I let go. They go out. I slit the sheath and at once see the tiny, fine green of corroded copper.
I take a four-inch length of surplus extra wire (at least I hope it’s surplus) from inside the headlight cowl, splice it in and press the starter button. The engine starts instantly. Now all I need is the insulation tape that has been in the tool box for the last year but strangely now isn’t.
It’s a Kind of Magic
I make a wide detour of a couple of very weathered old men in baseball caps and very loud sweaters, bottle in hand, dancing a jig on the pavement, and go in to a bar, to find all rustic pine and many locals whiling away the lunchtime. Pop music, table football, ancient skis, cowbells, china beer mugs, the sort of lanterns you use on dark snowy nights with your horse-drawn sleigh. The jukebox plays Queen’s It’s a Kind of Magic, while outside farmers sit beneath parasols and drink beer and four goats and a sheep graze.
People clump to and fro across the bare wooden floor. A middle-aged university professor-looking type of bloke wins nothing during the time it takes me to drink two beers. As I leave, he moves onto the next machine and starts again.
It’s only a short walk into town, and as I leave the bar a horse-drawn cart, like a huge cattle trough with a lorry wheel at each corner, rumbles past, identical to the ones still so common in Romania. Although Zakopane is Poland’s premier ski resort and hiking centre, it’s actually quite a small town which has grown from being a very small village which in the 17th century served the local mining and metallergy industries, but now serves the tourists, who, attracted by the unique food, architecture, music, and costume of goral culture, now annually outnumber the inhabitants ten to one.
Krupówki
The town spreads out very clearly from the junction between just two streets, the main one of which, Krupówki, is a steeply sloped thoroughfare lined throughout with souvenirs shops, restaurants, horse-drawn rides in carriages in summer and sleighs in winter, and the street performers found in any European resort.
Bloody Yanks!
I find an internet café and pay some nominal sum for half an hour’s use. The young American couple using the console next to me are absolutely typical of their type; flawless and tanned skin in which frank and friendly eyes and big white teeth shine whitely, and both have heavy, glossy hair. They wear chunky and sensible clothes, and open sandals.
They speak with that penetrating American confidence that truly unaware people have, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. Within five minutes he gets up to go and find the guy who runs the place. “Excuse me,” he drawls audibly from the reception hall, with a voice that glows with the warmth of a Texan evening, “but is it possible to get Windows in English?” Typical brash Yank behaviour, is my inescapable reaction.
I don’t hear the reply, but when he comes back to his seat, sits down and reaches for his mouse, his sleeve falls back, revealing the bright red plastic band round his wrist, one of those things that everybody from presidents to fifteen-year old schoolgirls wears to show how much they care about whatever the current must-have bleeding heart must support.
And I read, repeated all the way round it, interspersed with the shape of a maple leaf, the word CANADA.
Local architecture
Zakopane has a specific style of architecture based on the motifs and traditions of the Carpathian Mountains, which is exploited throughout the town, along the back streets of which I stroll in order to work up an appetite for an early supper. Some could be used by Hollywood for horror films requiring ramshackle timber buildings with steepled towers, flapping shutters, leafless trees and lightning crackling in the background, while others are simply lovely ancient dwellings; the new ones have been built with enormous orange pine logs of a kind you’d never see in Britain, and roofed with sheets of shining tin. Plastic goats, rabbits, gnomes, storks are popular garden ornaments, and everywhere there is the sound of lawn mowers at work.
After a delicious meal as the only customer in a huge and echoingly deserted Chinese restaurant, I return to the hostel, where I find arranging her possessions on one of the beds in Room 782 the most beautiful young lady I have seen for two days: a halo of fine flaxon hair around an open, broad-cheeked face with blue eyes and a smiley mouth.
00ps7
Suzi is Austrian, and when she hears that I’m English, her eyes light up. “Ooh, you’re English! I just love your English accent, and English gentlemen are sooo sexy you’re motorcycling alone through Europe wow that’s so cool I just love James Bond I’ll be here for a few days I’m going out for dinner now but see you tomorrow don’t leave without me byee!”
I go to bed with a light heart.
At some point during the night, I surface briefly and the aloo baingan masala I had for supper blatters forth in the longest and most stentorian fart I have heard in my life, which just goes on and on out into the darkness, before I snuggle back into sleep.
It is six when I wake from my early night, and I remember the conversation with Suzi and my heart lifts again and I raise my head to see if she’s also awake – is it too early to suggest going into town for breakfast?
Her bed is empty. I sit up and look around. Her shelves are empty, her pack gone. I dress and go down to Reception, where I ask the boy on duty if the Austrian girl changed her room last night.
“No,” he says. “Miss Weiss checked out an hour ago.”
“She didn’t say where she was going?”
“No,” he says again. “She seemed to be in a big hurry.”
This post is part of a series of posts following the adventures of a man on a mission to explore 20 countries around Europe on a motorcycle – go to One for the road.
Chapter 2
I stop for a break at a petrol station, and stand beside the bike, sipping coffee and watching motorcycles and cars and lorries roar along the Czech highway. A dog barks in the field behind the trees, while above, very high cloud the colour of sour milk hides the sun. It’s muggy for April. The reality slowly surfaces, and at last I smile.
I am doing what I’ve wanted to do all my adult life.
Socks
The miles and hours of high white cloud have suddenly been swept away, leaving behind a glorious, sunny afternoon. It’s not quite sleeping-out weather yet, though, so after trundling round the pretty little town of Svitavy in a futile search for a cheap pension I book into a hotel just outside town: £30 for a double room, bathroom, TV, tea and coffee-making facilities, breakfast, air conditioning etc. The view is leftover snowdrifts in the car park and some trees that bring to mind the words ‘acid’ and ‘rain’. Still in a bit of a daze from the hours of noise and wind, I look out at it, thinking, Socks. Must wash the socks.
Oskar Schindler
Well, Oskar Schindler might’ve found Moravia pretty, but it hasn’t been what I would call outstanding, although it’s pretty if you’re from Norfolk or Belgium – indeed, positively mountainous if you come from Holland.
Svitavy was where Schindler grew up in the 1930s, before he went into Poland, where he chose the beautiful Krakow as a base in which to establish a business that would, commercially, go nowhere, but would save the lives of more than a thousand human beings, putting Krakow, the Holocaust and Ran Feinnes and Liam Neeson on the map forever. It was strange, last night, to stroll along the main street and picture the teenaged Oskar roaring up and down the cobbles on his motorcycle.
I think my left heel is beginning to rot. Not only are the holes in the sole getting deeper, but this morning, despite hot water and soap last night, I’m sure I smelt Feet.
Brno
Brno (confusingly pronounced ‘Brno’) is sprawling and ugly. The roads are bad and acid rain has killed or damaged most of the trees on the many hills that surround the city. There have been lots of hares and deer in the fields on both sides all morning, and I remember eight deer lying down in the middle of a huge field beside a German motorway yesterday morning.
Slovakia
Slovakia. On the motorway to Zilina, thousands of dead trees stand in deep water for miles. The road surface is still poor, but there’s a fast-emerging middle class in Czech and Slovakia – smart cars are everywhere.
Bratislava
Despite several circuits of Bratislava I can’t break into the centre, where my bed in The Gremlin hostel is waiting for me. Whole streets are being dug up, and others one way or for trams only. When I notice a group of gypsies lurking in a doorway staring at me as I go by for the fourth time, I know I’m not going to leave the bike unattended even while checking accommodation, never mind overnight. So I do the best thing to do in these circumstances: I give up.
Zilina
I point the front wheel at a sign that says, Zilina 189KM, and settle into the saddle for a three-hour ride. It stops raining, and I smile before nearly jumping out of my skin when a few hundred metres away a Boeing 737 roars up above the rooftops and immediately disappears into the cloud.
It begins to rain again.
Castles
The motorway road surface is excellent now, from which I watch as a number of great castles appear on hillsides to left and right, in this ancient landscape scattered, for some reason, with lots of huge signs, amidst some very evident poverty, inviting us to vote for Rowan Atkinson. Is Mr Bean coming to town?
That’s my man!
I stop for petrol, and then smoke a cigarette while stamping my feet and rubbing my hands together. The back door of a nearby parked car opens and a teenaged girl springs out. She’s pretty, very slim and heading straight for me.
“Hello!” she gushes.
“Hello,” I say, taking two steps backwards.
“You are okay?” she asks in a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed way.
“Er, yes, thank you.”
“You are looking for some place to stay?”
So that’s it. Young prostitute, sent across by her pimp to get trade.
“Well, I am, but I’ll be all right. Thank you.”
She is possessed of an energy that would light up a Christmas tree. She’s also very young, possibly no older than sixteen. She gestures towards the car. “My father would like to buy you a drink.”
Ha! Yeah, I bet he would.
“Your father?”
“Yes. Would you like to meet my father?” She’s wearing tight jeans and a thin, cheap windcheater over a tee-shirt beneath which there is very clearly no bra. Trainers. No make-up. Then the driver’s door of the car opens and a thick-set man of about 45 heaves himself out. Here we go. I drop the cigarette and stand on it as the man, unshaven and dressed in bulky, dark old clothing, approaches.
He speaks rapidly and brusquely to the girl, who answers while gesturing at me. He glares at me as he waits for the translation and my answer. I begin to feel annoyance rising in me, and reach for my crash helmet. Hear what she has to say and then move on.
“My father says that if you follow us to our hotel, he will buy you a beer.” Her English is very good indeed. All those German businessmen, I expect. Lots of practise.
“Your ‘hotel’, eh?” The ‘father’ is staring intently at me.
“Yes. My family is booked into a hotel not far from here.”
I almost sneer. “Your family, eh?”
“My father and mother and my baby brother.” And she points towards the car, where a middle-aged woman and a five-year old boy are smiling and waving through the windows.
Three hours later, I lie in bed in a roadside motel and wonder about Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. The gorgeous Jana spent the whole of supper translating for her parents and me as we chatted in the restaurant downstairs. Her father spent much of the time warning me of gypsies in all eastern European countries. When I asked why he’d invited me for supper, she replied, “Because my father hasn’t had a drink for three months.”
“Maybe I was waiting for a friend.”
“No, he knew you were alone. As soon as he saw you he told my mother, ‘That’s my man!’”
Skalite
Outside, the traffic swishes by on the wet road, while the lonely hills sleep on the horizon.
The clouds are more broken and fast-moving than they were yesterday, so there’s hope for a little sun today. I’ll turn right before the Czech border, to see if the railway at Skalite is the right one. The track heading north out of Zilina looked a bit mainline.
Snow and litter lie everywhere on the verges, strips and sheets of plastic hang or flap in the reeds, a fridge has been thrown down a slope; heavy rain which the sun tries to get through and my first stork gazes out from its enormous nest atop a telegraph pole. Four or five mongrels in a car park queue up to gang-bang a mongrel bitch wearing an expression recognisable as a look of ‘here we go again’ resignation.
Did the railway line branch off for Skalite? Or go north? It keeps coming and going across the road, which begins to climb, and it gets colder. Everywhere looks poor, with children waving sticks and streamers providing the first clue that this is Easter Sunday, along with crowds of people coming out of churches wearing their Sunday best. Very few cars in evidence, and snow is everywhere now. We go over the top, and occasional glimpses of the railway appear to the right, and then the road deteriorates badly and the railway line heads off into the forest on the left, and quite unexpectedly we come to the border crossing. It is absolutely brand new and totally deserted, a quite fantastic waste of money. Then we’re in among houses and cottages, separated by rickety old wooden fences, where chickens scratch and peck.
Country folk
The tarmac disappears and we’re onto cobbles. Here and there, folk are doing this and that, as country folk tend to, every single one of whom looks up at me as I go by – then I understand that the snows would have cut off these roads for the entire winter, for the last five months or so. I am possibly the first motorcycle to come through here this year.
Zywiec
I get lost in the small town of Zywiec (home of one of Poland’s most famous beers; a bit like getting lost in Guinness, Ireland, or Budweiser, USA), and I’m just sitting on the bike, examining the map, when a voice says, “May I help you?” I look up. A man in his twenties, dressed as if to play the part of a young Cambridge don in a BBC mini-series, is smiling at me through John Lenin spectacles.
I tell him what I’m looking for.
“It’s sixty kilometres – about forty of those English miles of yours.”
The railway line comes back, but the potholes are so bad my fingers become completely numb, with vibration white finger. We enter a small town, I see signs I’m looking for and follow them, turn right into a complex and stop. A young man comes up and begins to write a ticket. Beyond him I can see faceless windows, watchtowers and barbed wire fences. It’s not a parking ticket for a traffic violation I’m getting, it’s a parking ticket for a museum.
What the Germans would’ve called Koncentrazionlager 1.
This post is part of a series of posts following the adventures of a man on a mission to explore 20 countries around Europe on a motorcycle – go to One for the road.
Chapter 1
Not really aware of entering Holland, after Belgium. Antwerp’s eight-lane highway, with its ugly blocks of flats and McDonald’s every five minutes. Flat, uninteresting countryside – they never really caught on with hedges, did they, the Dutch? Wind turbines, miles and miles of new developments, factories, power stations, car lots. I am cringingly aware of my vulnerability in amongst the roaring, speeding juggernauts on these icy roads. Overtaken by three bikes, all of whom waved. I can’t remember when a Brit biker last waved hello. While I was growing up with bikes throughout the 1970s and 1980s, all motorcyclists would dip a chin or raise a finger. Not anymore. Different people ride bikes now. Then, you did it because it was in your jeans. Now people ride them because they’re, like, you know, cool.
Amsterdam
Amsterdam. Eleven hours’ sleep. I didn’t bother with the Red Light District, not wanting my worst impressions of Western civilisation confirmed. And I was tired on the bike yesterday – Belgian and Dutch drivers give you no space at all. Now, I sit here, still muzzy with diesel fumes, with my breakfast, and contemplate the scene outside, the green, rain-dimpled canal, and the low, flat grey skies.
There were several things I wanted to avoid on this trip: getting mugged, breaking down, the bike being stolen – but most of all, getting wet. And this, on Day Two, it’s been raining since I got off the ferry. I leave the motorway and head south. Hannover and Osnabruck don’t share many letters, and lie in opposite directions, but it’s surprisingly easy to get them confused; as soon as I see the error I decide to go across country rather than head back into the road works and chaos again. And then it begins to rain.
Celle
Immediately on entering Celle, we are all held up by a Volvo. We wait and wait. A van goes round eventually, but the dark-skinned youth from Turkey or Syria or somewhere in the red Golf in front of me stops, leaps out, and runs up to the Volvo, yanks open the driver’s door, screams abuse while pointing up at a nearby NO PARKING sign, jumps back in his Golf and drives away. As I pass, the driver, an old guy, unhurriedly heaves himself out and lifts the Volvo’s bonnet.
A few seconds later, the queue grinds to a halt again, and I swing the bike round the next obstruction, a red hatchback. As I pass it I glance inside and see a dark-skinned youth from Turkey or Syria or somewhere, his face buried in his forearm, turning his ignition key, and I hear a starter motor uselessly grinding.
Celle is very clean and neat and tidy. Six hours on the road. Love it. But exhausted. I didn’t expect it to be this tiring.
In a rut
There’s been a groove, a rut, in the motorway all the way from Holland. It isn’t lethal, but does have to be watched constantly. You can assume nothing when riding at speed. This old bike at anything less than 20mph is like pushing a wheelbarrow full of wet concrete with a flat tyre – not easy between lines of close traffic. And the engine’s noise is worrying: there are variants of grumble/rattle/whine/occasional bumps as if a pebble has passed through some gear wheels. So much for the ‘full service’.
Deserted towns. Freezing wind from the side, but at least it’s dry, and the wind from the side and not behind. When it’s coming from behind, being blown into an oncoming lorry is a very real possibility.
East Germany
East Germany. Entire timber and brick blocks ruined and burnt-out, windows smashed. Coloured tenements, scrubby hills with chimneys and radio towers, a schloss on the hill to the south-east. The icy wind burns my face. Snow on the hills on the horizon. Completely numb fingers. The roads are atrocious. I stop at a McDonald’s for a coffee, and when I look for money in my jacket pocket I find two tubes of sugar from the ferry still in my pocket, and it takes a moment to tell them apart from my frozen bloodless fingers. Three hours we’ve been on the road, and have covered fewer than 90 miles.
Unwashed socks
Sometime in the early afternoon, seven monster Japanese bikes appear suddenly all around me, roaring like fighter jets, their burly middle-aged pilots revving and shouting to one another, leaping between traffic lights and revving in tunnels. They ignore me completely and I’ve wondered why, until just now, when I saw my reflection in a showroom window and understood why: two pairs of unwashed socks tucked under a bungee strap to dry. Not cool.
Triangle of Death
Snow lies beneath the trees on either side, with steep slopes leading to rushing streams amongst the rocks. A small-gauge railway reminds me that a camp was near here. During the war, this area was known as the Triangle of Death.
The others have long gone and I’m sorry to see them go because it means that the worrying clunk of my own bike are now audible again, as well as shaking her head badly at low speeds.
Climbing out of the valley and back into the dangerous gusting wind, hunched behind the screen, one hand on the throttle, the other shoved deep into my crutch, behind the tankbag. The young trees that line the road don’t even twitch in the gale, while I’m like Quasimodo here. It’s coming from the north now, from a sky that could’ve been drawn by a child let loose with a pencil on a sheet of grey paper: smudged, dull, uninteresting.
We pass widely-spaced trees by the road, several of which bear the becoming-familiar barkless scar and a jar or two of mournful flowers. Three graves in a single mile.
Crissing and crossing
Some towns are deserted, canyons of sheer wall. Some villages are very rough indeed. And here’s this single-track railway again, that we’ve been crissing and crossing all afternoon. It’s so cold, as the route demands that the wind swings round from behind to left to right, that my left ear actually hurts, inside the open-faced helmet.
And now it begins to hail, hard and suddenly. I squint at the mountains, as pea-sized hailstones pelt my face. Thank God I’ve got a scarf to hand to protect my exposed face. I do have such a scarf ready to hand – I’m not a fool, you know – so all I’ve got to do is to pull over, stop, get off, dig deep into the rucksack, and there it would be, ready to hand.
Meat and hair
Reminded to check controls every single time you think of it – once a minute. I was very nearly caught out by an 8-Series BMW just now who suddenly appeared not in my mirror but right beside my knee – and going like hell. If I’d drifted a hand’s-width to the left one second beforehand he’d have had a party anecdote, while I’d have been shovelled, all meat and hair, into a sandbag.
I’ve been aware that it’s been quickly getting darker (cue thunder and lightning, for real), but it’s only when I angrily flash an oncoming car and he angrily flashes me back that I realize that I am, in this lowering cloud and light, still wearing my sunnies. What a mighty dickhead I am.
Bad Lausick
In Bad Lausick there are no IH signs anywhere, unless you use bloody good map reading to accidentally take the correct road out and then see a small, lone sign two miles out and even then have to ask someone who waves a vague hand and says, ‘up there somewhere’. It was up there somewhere, but there’s no-one on reception. Tired, buzzing, cold, starving. Bastards.
Beer on the haus
The young man on reception is a pale, overweight personification of everything I think a young man should not be. Bad skin, thinning hair, thick lips. Breasts. He explains that he was away from the desk because he was emailing his mother about his military service. “You still have conscription here?” He pulls a face. “Two thousand troops in Afghanistan, for dying, then one thousand to Zaire for UN election monitoring. After this, I will go into supermarket management”. I tell him he is doing the right thing and he kindly gives me a beer on the haus. We all have our place, and supermarket management is his. Freezing and suffering on my bloody old motorbike is mine.
Hands shaking from nine hours on the road, but I feel good. From my room, one window shows a scene of a tree-lined meadow, blood-tinged with the setting sun, while the other one shows only heavy, dark, serious rain. What was that about supermarket management?
