European Statues Condemned by the Daily Mail No.1: The Mannequin Pis

Memories are funny things. The last time I visited Brussels, back in 1990, the weather was being very English. I remember it as a miserable, grey, corporate world. The old buildings were grand but dour; the new were indentikit office blocks. But the Brussels I see today is a world away. In fact, it doesn't feel like the same place at all. That can't just be that the sun's shining, can it?

With the help of an A-Z map of Brussels, I found a beautiful, and beautifully quiet, route in via cycle lanes and leafy suburbs. I must have been only a kilometre or two from the centre before the traffic kicked in. And so like any normal bloke I hunted out a small statue of a little boy having a piss. And boy, is it small? The statue, that is. The Mannequin Pis apparently has hundreds of different outfits - a sort of urinating stone Barbie - including an Elvis one, but today he seemed to be decked out in the attire of a medieval Japanese warrior, although I'm not sure why.

Me and the pisser

My big problem was accommodation. Brussels was full up, full of humans and full of fish. Some international festival of seafood had taken all the rooms, even those in the normally cheap and cheerful hostels. I'd suspected this beforehand when, three days earlier, TripAdvisor's best deal was €230 per night - no, thanks - but it was confirmed by the tourist office. I had to get an internet connection and fast. Before I'd left Luxembourg I'd Facebooked a couple of the people I was meeting here to see if they had friends in Brussels with gardens in which I might be able to camp. It was a long shot. So I asked the tourist office about the nearest WiFi connection. "Out of the office, turn left, down the street, turn right after 100 metres, then turn right and there's a place that usually has internet." OK, I said. There's nowhere closer? "Oh yes, you can use WiFi here." What, here in the tourist office? "Yes." Mmm, yes, here seems closer. So, I did. No one knew anyone with a garden. My only option was to cycle out of the city and hope that there was space in a campsite an hour and a half away. But I'd already cycled for eight hours and my legs were pooped.

Just in case the campsite was full and I couldn't make it back to the city, I contacted Jo, fellow OU student, to see if I could pop around and pick up the replacement tent pole that Hilleberg had sent to her address for me. I don't know if I looked like I was dying when I arrived at her place but she immediately said that if I didn't mind the floor I could crash there. My saviour! After the possibility of a long and fruitless ride on weary legs, a floor, the very luxury of it!

So I had found another star. Jo's a cheerful soul and good company, and she's doing a lot of the same courses as I am, maths and astronomy. And she's been living here for fourteen years and so she knows a bar or two. We went out and grabbed something to eat and I got a chance to sample a few more Belgian beers - a top evening! Thanks Jo, you really helped me out.

Jo and a beer

So now I'm sat in a park typing this and awaiting another appointment, with another OU student, Mike, in a couple of hours. Like London and Paris and Luxembourg, Brussels really is worth a visit. I suspect I'm going to be saying that for everywhere I go on this ride. Just make sure the sun is shining when you visit.

Happy Days in the Land of the Gummi Bears

People always tell you how wonderful Paris is, or how magnificent is the architecture of Rome, or about the many splendours of Basingstoke, sorry, I mean Barcelona. But I've never heard anyone talk of Luxembourg City. Why not? It's a little gem.

Luxembourg proves that you don't need to be massive to be a great city. She has the same population as Blackburn, the town into which I was first shat upon this earth, but the simularity ends there. The old and the new work in harmony, with the fortified walls gazing down upon the old town with its winding, slow-paced river, while efficient, uptight, modern Europe, with a European Parliament and shiny, modern office blocks sit up on the hill counting its cash. You can guess which is the prettier, but the new stuff doesn't look bad either.

Unlike in London and Paris, the locals seem relaxed and happy, and again unlike London and Paris, there are no swarms of tourists buzzing from one site to the next. There's just a handful of wandering folk taking the occasional snap. Maybe there's a connection. Or maybe the tourists in Luxembourg just don't know where they're supposed to go buzzing to next.

Other reasons to visit Luxembourg:

1) It's the perfect size to walk around in a few hours.

2) It has an excellent cyclepath system and (almost) city-wide WiFi.

3) It has a shop that sells nothing but Gummi Bears. I'm not sure why but, to me, that seems like A Good Thing.

4) Since crossing the French border, beer has returned to affordable prices.

5) I was told that the official languages are French and German but a third language (is it Flemish?) is used in shop windows, which seems to be a cross between the two. This lends an air of mystery or makes you feel you're going slightly mad. You choose. (Or maybe these are just words my rubbish French and German haven't come across yet.)

6) There's a tranquil park beneath the viaduct if you want to escape the noise, but there isn't really that much noise.

7) It's not Blackburn.

You should come here, and I should stay longer. But I've got to leave in the morning and head towards Brussels, where I have three - count 'em, three! - people to meet and a date with a fully functioning tent pole from Hilleberg. Oh, and Belgian beer. Can't forget Belgian beer. So farewell, Luxembourg. It's been a pleasure.

Are You 1) Pale, 2) Ugly, 3) Heavily Tattooed? Then You Might Be British.

Some days things go well, and other days things go so perfectly that even the things that go wrong actually cause better things to happen.

A couple of days ago (25th), I'd arrived at my campsite in Juniville to discover that it had closed down five years earlier. I was told about another site, 20 kilometres away, in Attigny. I'd already done 80 kilometres that day but it seemed like the easiest option. But it all worked out. The campsite was lovely and so I stayed an extra day and studied under a tree, managing to get two weeks' worth of MST209 done in one day. And by starting from Attigny yesterday (27th), I had a lovely rural hour and a half's ride, by the side of a little river, and then through villages too small to have shops. It was gorgeous, absolutely flawless cycling.

For the rest of the day, the sun was shining and it felt like the perfect end when I arrived in Montmedy, up a huge hill on the way to its famous citadel, to find the campsite gates open. Perfect! But looking at its notice board the site didn't open until the 1st of May. The gates were only open because the gardeners were in giving it a once over before the season started. They directed me to the tourist office even farther up the hill, inside the walls of the citadel itself.

At the office it became clear that I wasn't the only person looking for a campsite. Also there was a Dutch cyclist whose partner was halfway back down the hill. They couldn't let us camp but instead they would open a gite especially for us. It was my first time in a gite. It's like an independent youth hostel, where you usually sleep in shared dorms, but this time I had a dorm entirely to myself. It was like staying in a hotel, in the shadow of the citadel, with a fridge, freezer and a fully equiped kitchen, and all for only €10.

The Dutch cyclist, Joris, was reunited with his girlfriend, Joëlle, and they decided to head back into town to see a doctor. Only four or five days into their ride, she had developed a knee problem that was stopping her doing much more than 20 kilometres per day. I went into town too, to find some food, and we eventually bumped into each other and decided that the best option, given that we had a kitchen at our disposal, was to cook something together.

Joris and Joëlle had started from their home town, Nÿmegen, and were hoping over the next four months to reach Timbuktu in Mali. The knee problem was putting a serious cloud over that project but they seemed determined to get there by any means, even if it meant occasionally putting the bikes on a train. Joris had just completed his PhD thesis in human geography and so had time to spare before returning to his university in September as a doctor and as a lecturer. Joëlle had chucked her job and was hoping for the best when she got back. As with everyone on this trip so far they were fantastically lovely, interesting people. They were both fizzing with energy.

I helped to make a salad while Joris created a vegetable couscous. They had an amazing collection of store cupboard ingredients, whereas all I had to offer from my bag was a jar of chilli powder. But it helped. We finished off with a selection of stinky cheeses and some tasty Leffe beer. Topics of conversation varied greatly, but it was amusing to learn what the Dutch stereotypical view of the British is (cover those sensitive ears): pale, ugly, loud, heavily tattooed and always in a football shirt. Well, it was my fault for asking, and there aren't too many surprises there.

As I've said before, the best bits of this trip are the people I meet. It was a rare coincidence that we were both looking for the same closed campsite on the same day, but staying at home I doubt I would ever have met people on their way to Mali. It's not the travelling that makes the trip but the people you find while you are out there.

Good luck Joris and Joëlle! Here's to Timbuktu!

Celebrating St Patrick's Day in April in the Middle of France

I'm not weird, right? My mum thinks I'm weird because I never wanted kids. And even The Lovely Nina sometimes says that I'm eccentric. I'm not. I'm very normal. Very, very normal indeed. And the talking gerbils that live in my hair agree. No, I'm not odd, but I met a man today who is.

I was cycling through the Champagne region of France and hit the town of Thierry Chateau. Walking with a drunken gait at the side of the road in mid-afternoon was an older bloke wearing what appeared to be a giant, Guiness-sponsored, St Patrick's Day comedy hat. That's unusual, I thought. You only normally see such hats on drunken idiots on St. Paddy's night. I know, I've worn one.

A minute or two later I decided to stop at a junction and check which way I should be going. While sat on the grass having a minute off the bike, hat man approached me and in an accent that sounded heavily French asked me if I was cycle touring. Oui, I replied. He then gave some sort of indication that he was doing the same thing. Really? I asked if he was French and he said, "Non, anglais". Right, so we were both English.

I know that I'm a bit of a porker but Andrew really didn't look like a cyclist. A packet of loose tobacco bulging from his shirt pocket isn't a definite sign of a non-cyclist but it's not that common. He spoke with a strong Norfolk accent and muttered to himself under his breath. Andrew was cycling from East Anglia to Palermo on an electric bike, towing a little trailer. If you're unaware, an electric bike charges up when you pedal so that it can give you a helping hand when climbing up the hills. The trailer was attached to the bike with the loosest, wobbliest fitting you could imagine. It was like the sort of handiwork I'd do, and then pay someone to put right.

It had taken him three weeks to get from Dieppe to here, and it's not that far. He'd wasted a lot of time getting lost in Dieppe until the early hours of the morning when he'd been picked up by the police and decided he would overnight in the cop shop until they got sick of him and told him where the nearest hotel was. And why did he get lost? He refuses to carry maps. No, he's not a modern cyclist using the latest spunky SatNav. He has simply used Google Earth to write down all the names of the towns that he will pass through from Norwich to Palermo so he always knows where to head next. Foolproof! Unless there's one of France's frequent Route Barrée signs blocking your way. Or the village you need isn't signposted. Or you take a wrong turning. Or, or, or a million different reasons. Get a map, you chump! They're cheap, especially if you're doing the daily distance he's doing.

Oh yes, and how far are you travelling each day? About twenty miles, he replied. And how long have you planned to get to Palermo? Well, the money will last for three months, he said. Something told me he possibly hadn't done the maths. Ninety days at twenty miles per day, especially when during the first twenty of those days he'd moved about one hundred and forty miles, isn't going to get him to Palermo.

Anyway, mad though he was, good luck to him. However far he gets, he'll have an adventure. And if you're one of the lovely people somewhere across Europe who has agreed to meet me later in the trip, keep your eyes out for him. He's bound to end up near one of you. My money's on St. Petersburg. The first thing you will notice is the hat. The second thing will probably be the trailer overtaking him on the downhills.

The City of the Dead

Paris is for lovers. I was hoping so. Remember that James Bond nonsense in the other blog? A transmission was decoded that seemed to indicate that Nina, my sexy agent, would intercept me in the French capital, a few weeks ahead of our scheduled rendez-vous in Berlin. Unfortunately, that wasn't to be. That was a great shame. I was looking forward to seeing her Pussy Galore. Y'know, her impression of a secret agent. What did you...? Oh, stop it.

I doubt I would have been up to much loving anyway. Yesterday my body developed a curious new ailment. Although wearing the big rucksack while cycling doesn't cause any pain (it causes backache in other cyclists) I've developed a strange spinal affliction whenever I'm walking about without the thing. And then my right leg goes weird and tingly. I trudged around the Parisian streets for a while, having to sit down every few minutes and then realised that the best remedy in any pain-based scenario is to sit down for lots of minutes and have some beer.

Now, beer in France in stupidly expensive and, as you've probably guessed by now, I'm a cheap sod. I managed to find a tiny place in the middle of happy hour (actually happy four hours) where beer was just slightly more expensive than any normal, miserable hour in Britain. So I sat there and had a few. If I was normally going out to do this type of thing on purpose I'd take something to read but, because of my new condition, I'd been caught unawares. All I had in my bag was the Paris A to Z and there's only so many times you can look up rude-sounding street names. So I just sat and people watched. Several thoughts occurred to me based upon the things I saw.

I discovered that a Muslim head scarf, far from being the instrument of oppression many in the West believe it to be, is actually fantastically useful. I saw a young woman walking down the street pushing a pram with both hands while her mobile phone was tucked into the side of her scarf as she had a conversion. She was hands free and in a totally Islamic way. Brilliant!

I also saw pure unadulterated joy. Across the road from where I was sitting seemed to be a students' hall of residence. Given the weather, some of them were sat outside catching a few evening rays. A new student appeared and two of her girlfriends positively bounced to greet her, and kept bouncing. Like Tigger, they bounded on top of her and covered her in kisses, ending in a Mexican jumping bean-style embrace. Do you have any friends you really love? If so, the next time you meet them in town, bounce up and down with excitement. See what they do. That's what I'm planning to do. I bet it makes us all feel good. Or sick.

So today I thought I'd cure my backache by forcing myself to walk hundreds of miles around Paris. And so that's what I did. I saw the Palace of Luxembourg in the 6th arrondissement, Notre Dame in the 4th, from there I headed through the 3rd and the 11th to reach my main target for the day in the 20th, the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise. It's massive, more like a city of the dead. It's the only cemetery I've been to that has its own streets. And it's stuffed full of household names in enormous tombs. Buried there are musicians such as Rossini, Bizet and Chopin, writers such as Balzac, Proust and our own Oscar Wilde and scientists, philosophers, politicians, actors and even a clown. But, possibly most famous of all, and the reason I was there, was to fulfil a Nina challenge and take a photo of Jim Morrison's grave while singing a line from "Light My Fire" (given where I was "...and our love become a funeral pyre" seemed most appropriate). From the graves I trudged back through the 11th and 12th arrondissements to my hotel home in the 13th. I'd walked nearly every street in Paris at least three times but my back was cured.

So, what to do now that I have a pain-free spine? Maybe go and have a beer.

How to Cook a Poo Sausage

Yesterday I was 100% Englishman. Today a tiny part of me is French. I ate an andouillette and I survived!

So far I've been in France for five days. She has treated me kindly. The weather has been great, the roads have been quiet and the people have been as friendly as it's possible to be. This is not the place The Sun would have us believe it is. It's a land full of smiles and bonjours.

Yesterday I arrived in Quessigny. You won't have heard of it because less than a hundred people live here. It doesn't even have a shop. But here in this village is my cousin Sarah who, until yesterday, I hadn't seen since the early 1990s. And she lives in a fantastic house with French husband Cyril, who loves to cook, two lovely children, a couple of fluffy cats and a guest bed that soothed away the pains in my legs and derriere. And it was Cyril who prepared the andouillette.

If you've been following this blog you'll know that I'm hunting out something I've never eaten before in each country I visit. Andouillette had an automatic attraction because all reports I'd heard told of its horror. Y'see, andouillette is a tripe sausage stuffed with intensines. Or is it the other way around? I'm not sure it matters.

The meal itself was a lesson in French butchery. Before I was allowed to sample the legendary andouillette I had to try out andouille de Vire, a cold aperitif snack consisting of concentric tripe and fat circles. At first, like the eels the other day, it tastes quite bland but after a piece or six, there's a not unpleasant subtle meatiness. I don't think you'll be finding it in Tesco's any time soon but it went very well with the dark beer I was drinking. But this is only a distant cousin of the real andouillette that I'd heard talk of, the Peter Sutcliffe of pork surprises.

Andouille - it also means 'idiot' in French

So here it was in front of me. The main course. Two enormous, misshapen appendages in a creamy mustard sauce served with fried potatoes and salad. The andouillettes had been frazzed on the barbecue, giving them a smokiness cunningly disguising their usual scent. It's been said that they give off an air of urine and faeces and while that might be pushing it a bit, there was certainly something wrong in their odour. We've evolved to avoid bad meat instinctively and yet here came the first bite. Thanks to the charcoal grilling, the first sensation is that of your normal, crispy, non-entirely-offal-based sausage and the consistency is chewy and coarsely textured. But then there's an unpleasant bit. As you chew it - and you have to chew it - a hint of the slaughterhouse sewer wafts up and attacks the back of the nose. Thankfully, Cyril knows what he's doing, and the mustard sauce almost entirely masked the poo sensation, making it an interesting experience, if not one I ever want to repeat. But if Cyril can weave an almost entirely enjoyable episode from the evil andouillette, just think what he could do with a chicken.

Andouillette - the devil's own penis

You'd think that with all this eating, and the daily Snickers bars and litres of fizzy orange pop I've been guzzling, I'd be piling on the pounds. But yesterday I weighed myself for the first time since setting off and, in eighteen days, I've lost eight kilos. At this rate, I will be completely weightless by the time I reach my astronomy residential in Majorca in September. I won't even need a telescope. I'll just be able to float up and look at the stars without the atmosphere getting in the way.

Tomorrow I leave here and head towards Paris. I should arrive there on the 20th. The route map into the city is terrifying, looking not dissimilar to my old grandma's varicosed legs, only more infected. I've given myself a full day there to explore, but one thing I definitely won't be doing is hunting out restaurants serving andouillette.

Steven and the Hedgerows of Doom

After ten hours on a ferry I arrived in Jersey yesterday evening with just enough time not to find my campsite before it turned pitch black. By rights I should have been there in glorious sunshine but the Jersey government had invested all its money in this beautifully well stocked library that I'm now sat in (with free WiFi) and not one penny at all on road signage.

I wonder if Jersey still lives under the shadow of its former Nazi occupation. During the war there was a campaign in Britain to remove all road signs so as to confuse any incoming spies. Jersey still operates this policy. One hundred metres from the ferry terminal and they dry up. You might as well navigate by magic crystal.

From the ferry terminal I headed out boldly in what seemed like the right direction, ignored the road I felt was probably right because it had no sign (it was!) and spent the next hour and a half biking around country lanes six feet wide and with ten foot-high hedgerows. It was like cycling around Hampton Court Maze.

I asked several blokes, who all looked strangely similar and who all had a very laid back, slightly hippyish demeanour ("Yeah, not sure, man!"), and though local no one could tell me the name of the road I was on, or had even heard of there being a campsite, except one on the other side of the island. Eventually, with the sun long set, I lucked out and ran into a fellow cyclist whose map was considerably better than mine, in that it was printed rather than drawn in crayon. The campsite was just around the corner. By now the headtorch was on full blast and all my bike lights were blinking. Anyone looking out of their window would have thought it was another Close Encounter. Except they wouldn't have been able to see me at all for the soddin' hedgerows, that is.

So today I've been exploring, only St. Helier so far but it's a start. I've found my thing to eat I've never eaten before - Black Butter - I've done my Nina challenge, I have my Action for Animals photo, I've managed to get a map of France and I know roughly where I'll be staying for the next four nights - three campsites and my cousin Sarah's, who I haven't seen since 1376.

It's a pity I hadn't planned longer in Jersey. It seems like a place worth exploring. Given enough time I could have hired a set of step ladders to peer over the hedgerows and have a look at the view. I haven't seen any Jersey cattle yet, but the place is covered in Jersey potatoes. It makes the cycling challenging.

So it's France first thing tomorrow, where the traffic reduces and communication difficulty increases. But armed with my French 'O' level, I'll be fine. So, au revoir, madames et monsieurs! I'll seethee on t'continent!