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Chapter 6 – Trencin, Black Knights & a castle

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 18^th and 19^th 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.

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polandtravel

January 30, 2023

Chapter 5 – Levoco, Jeepsies & fat-spattered trainers

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.

Go to Chapter 6

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polandtravel

January 30, 2023

Chapter 2 – Must wash the socks

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.