#bikelife vs #vanlife

Last year, researching my latest book, I cycled 6,000 miles from southern Spain to Nagorno-Karabakh, the war-ravaged and disputed region of the Caucasus. Despite government warnings not to go anywhere near the place, you should have a look at Nagorno-Karabakh if you get a chance. It's truly gorgeous. But conflict zones are not what this post is about, unless we're talking about the one that was inside my head.

During the majority of my five months on the road, I suffered truly awful weather. I would've been better off on a jetski. During yet another abandoned day on a sodden French campsite I downloaded an e-book about #vanlife, y'know, the concept of converting a van into something habitable and then living on the road. The idea suddenly appealed, having all the freedom of cycling but with the ability to remain dry even in the worst of weathers. In the weeks that followed, every time I sheltered drippily in a shop doorway, which is to say several times each and every day, a van would pass by as if to mock me. "Ditch the bike, son," its engine seemed to purr. "Get yourself a nice, dry van."

So this year I did, a Transit. I used plastic storage boxes and sheets of wood to create a very modular bed and seat arrangement, and I covered the whole lot with cushions. It was very comfortable. I even hung a photo of my girlfriend's dog on the wall to make it feel like home.

I decided to tour around Britain in my new mobile home. Things started well. The first time it rained, I smiled to myself. Ah-ha! This was better than cycling. The raindrops bounced off my windscreen rather than my forehead. The ends of my fingers remained entirely unwrinkled. Van 1, Bicycle 0.

But over the coming weeks, I learnt some other stuff.

Somewhere in England's south-west, I came to the top of a steep hill. I slowed and looked down the slope. Something was missing from this situation, I thought. Ah, yes. The exhilaration! When you reach the top of a hill on a bicycle, there's a sense of achievement but also the expectation of a fast and joyous descent. On this occasion, however, I drove down the hill feeling dead inside.

Of course, I might have been glad of the engine at the bottom of the next hill, but over time I realised the van robbed my journey of its highs and lows. Yes, I could drive sixty miles in a single hour whereas on my bike the same distance would take me all day, but it would be a day full of challenging ups and delicious downs, of country smells, of feeling the wind in my ever-thinning hair, of rain showers and sunshine but mostly rain showers and, importantly, of being able to guiltlessly fill my face with pizza, cake and beer at the end of it all. In short, on a bike, it would have been a day full of adventure. The most adventurous thing I did in my van was attempt to listen to Radio One.

To be honest, in my van I still guiltlessly filled my face with pizza, cake and beer but without the expended calories I just got fat.

But that wasn't all. Often in end-of-tour blog posts, cyclists write about what they learned on their voyages. One typical conclusion is that the world is full of kind and wonderful people. I wrote the same thing after my 22,000-mile European capital tour six years ago. When you're on a bicycle, the other people you meet show their best side. Perhaps because they see you as adventurous or eccentric or penniless or, at the very least, unthreatening - after all, cycle-by shootings are rare - they open up to you with smiles, warmth and generosity. Well, let me tell you, that's not what they bloody well do if you travel in a van in the UK. In a van, they look at you suspiciously, ask why you parked near their house and are thirty seconds from calling the Paedo Hotline. After some of the looks I received, I wondered if my new, fuller beard had them mistaking me for Charles Manson. I started to get worried. Maybe I was a monster. Perhaps my mind had blacked out that time I'd shanked a pensioner or kicked a puppy to death.

Maybe it doesn't matter what other people think of you. Still, I'd rather someone see me as an eccentric, unthreatening peasant than a highly punchable pariah. Life is better from a bicycle seat. This is just a roundabout way of saying my van is back on the market and next year I'll return to touring slowly and damply on a bicycle. It's only water after all. Lots and lots of water. #rainlife

Long-Distance Foraging by Bicycle

Last summer, three complete strangers and I set off on an experiment. We wanted to see whether it would be possible to cycle the 3,500 miles from the north of England to the Mediterranean along the west coast of Europe. Oh, but I've missed the most important bit: We wanted to see whether we could do it on a budget of £1 a day (approximately US$1.50 or €1.40 at the time we set off). Obviously, £1 doesn't buy very much food and so we'd supplement our groceries by foraging and fishing.

The biggest problem we had was that only one of us had extensive foraging knowledge and he had to quit the ride after two weeks when his knee exploded. Another problem we had was that none of us knew much, or in fact anything, about fishing. Ever optimistic, we figured we'd pick up this knowledge as we progressed.

Originally I'd planned the journey to be entirely supported by foraged food and with a budget of zero. But then I did some research and the only similar bike ride I could find was a much shorter one – eight or nine days – by Vin Cox, a very keen and knowledgeable forager, who'd had to cheat after two days and buy a packet of biscuits and who gave up entirely after a week when some dodgy road-kill made him sick. So I decided, inexperienced as we were, we'd definitely need that one pound. And I was right.

That said, we did forage some really quite lovely stuff. As we were already into summer, many of the common leaves – the dandelion and nettles – were past their best, but the fruit was on its way. In Britain we found cherries, plums and wild strawberries. In France, this list was supplemented with blackberries, wild raspberries, grapes and pears. In addition to nectarines and peaches, Spain gave us so many apples we could have started a cider factory. And then there were the sweet, sweet figs. Loads of them. We ate so many that their rough, abrasive skins burnt our tongues and our digestive systems were tested to the limit, and occasionally beyond.

It wasn't all fruit. Other highlights included a delicious tea made from elderflower blossom, and the not-so-delicious wine I tried to make out of the same. It got tipped into the corner of a field that will remain forever barren. Other good stuff included ramsons (wild garlic), wild horseradish, huge bags of gorgeous marsh samphire and the ever-so-slightly gnarly but tangy sea purslane.

If our foraging was successful, our fishing wasn't. We ran a little competition to see who could catch the most. I came joint first and I only caught two fish, and I'm not entirely sure they weren't too small to legally keep. I would have put our small haul down to our lack of fishing knowledge but wherever others were fishing – people who knew what they were doing, with loads of expensive-looking equipment – they weren't catching anything either. Maybe there just aren't any fish left to catch.

Did we achieve our aim? We did. Just. It wasn't easy but we had a great time, trying to find new species – I had a copy of the classic Food For Free with me – and moving southwards through Europe with its ever-changing culinary offerings. If you ever fancy a cheap holiday, it's something to bear in mind, although I'd recommend a larger budget than £1. And I'd also recommend knowing more about foraging and fishing than we did. Much, much more.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has ever attempted anything remotely like this.

Dave strips a plum tree

A selection of seaweed

Fishing unsuccessfully in France

No, I'm Sorry, You Can't Cycle-Tour for Free

I've read a couple of blog posts recently whose titles have suggested it's possible to cycle-tour entirely for free. When you read the blog's content, however, you realise it isn't actually possible, or you can only get close to free by behaving like a selfish arse, taking advantage of people, sometimes people with a lot less than you have. I don't want to be a selfish arse.

That said, you can cycle-tour for very, very little. Last summer three complete strangers and I tried an experiment. We wanted to see whether, on an extremely small budget, it was possible to cycle a long distance: approximately 3,500 miles along Europe's western coast from Liverpool in the UK to Gibraltar on the Mediterranean. Our budget had to cover everything except travel tickets (in our case, one ferry ticket) and major repairs to bikes, and so our minimal funds had to include all food, fuel to cook the food, drinks, accommodation, bike consumables like inner tubes and spokes, and anything else we might need along the way. It would also have to cover bottles of single malt whisky, diamond tiaras and trips to the opera, but you won't be surprised to learn that we didn't spend money on any of those.

Importantly, we wanted to do this in a sustainable way. This meant not stealing stuff or raiding bins, since one day the supermarket bins might be locked for good, or – who knows? – people might stop throwing so much food away. It also meant not using sites like Warm Showers or Couchsurfing. I know that I move around too much to offer a future bed to a fellow cyclist and so it would be unfair to take advantage of this free service without returning the favour. Sheets have to be washed. Water has to be heated. That would just be passing the cost on to someone else, and we didn't want to do it like that.

We set the daily budget at just £1 for each cyclist, which at the time was approximately US$1.50 or €1.40. It's not much, but when you shop carefully and supplement your food by foraging and fishing, it's just about doable. Oddly, it's easier to get by on so little in a relatively expensive country like the UK than it is in generally cheaper places like Spain and Portugal. Britain's huge, ubiquitous supermarkets each carry a massive range of budget lines – a large sliced loaf of bread for 40p ($0.60, €0.56), a pot of strawberry jam (that's jelly for US cyclists) for 27p ($0.40, €0.38) and a tub of peanut butter for 60p ($0.90, €0.84) – whereas in Spain, the big supermarkets tended to be on cycle-unfriendly roads and their cheapest lines aren't that cheap anyway, and so we usually ended up buying from less economical, tiny village supermarkets. Luckily, Spain was abundant in free, roadside fruit, especially figs, and these are great once your digestive system has worked out how to cope with the onslaught.

Usually in France, Spain and Portugal we wild-camped. Wild-camping is fine but, for peace of mind, it's better to stay legal. For this reason, throughout England and Wales, we asked farmers if we could stick our tents in the far corner of an unloved field. Of the twenty or so people we asked, only two refused and they were tenant farmers; our staying there would have caused problems if the landowner had found out. Sleeping at the farms was great. Unlike when wild-camping, we could set up early, wake up when our bodies wanted to and get a comfortable night's sleep in a field with no nasty surprises, although we did share one with fifteen curious bullocks who looked like they wanted to kick our heads in.

Did we manage it? Yes, we did. Just. It can be done for very little and without taking advantage of anyone. That said, I can't recommend it unless it's your only option. Wild-camping and frugal dining hides you away from hotels, camp sites, restaurants, bars and all those other places where you're likely to meet people and, for me, it is finding interesting and inspiring, or wacky and weird, people that makes a bike tour special. And, for that reason alone, I won't be touring again on a budget of £1. But if my finances deteriorate in future, it's reassuring to know I can always afford a nice, long bike ride. I'll just need to get used to the figs again.

Europe's Most Dangerous Roads for Cyclists

I came across an interesting report this morning. It provides statistics for European bicycle-based death rates. Oh, happy day.
 
Don't worry, I'm not a monster. I'd wanted to write about Europe's most dangerous roads for cyclists. From my gut feeling, having cycled throughout most of Europe, the countries that felt scariest to me were Romania, Ukraine, Russia and the UK, the first three because of terrible roads and bad driving, and the latter because there are just too many people in a small space and the roads are badly designed for cyclists (yes, I know they aren't designed for cyclists at all). Anyway, I wanted to put together something a little more objective.

The best road in Ukraine.

Despite the report describing how many people died on the roads, it missed context. The death statistics mean nothing without bicycle usage data. So I had to go elsewhere for that. In the end I divided the percentage-of-road-deaths-that-were-cyclists from the first document by the percentage-of-people-for-whom-cycling-is-the-main-mode-of-transport from the second. (It would have been better to divide by the total number of kilometres cycled but I don't have that.) The result gives the Danger Level, the higher the number, the more dangerous the country is for cyclists. So – ta-daaah! – I present to you...

The Cyclist's Top Ten Most Dangerous European Countries 
(Danger Level in brackets)

1. Portugal (2.15)
2. United Kingdom (1.43)
3. Czech Republic (1.37)
4. Romania (1.26)
=5. Ireland (1.2)
=5. Italy (1.2)
7. France (1.1)
8. Spain (1.0)
9. Slovakia (0.92)
10. Slovenia (0.90)

(I also had data for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Sweden.)
 
Both documents give information for Poland and Finland but both countries' bike usage is listed as 0%, which is unlikely for Poland and definitely not true of Finland – they have a well-developed cycle path network – and so maybe the source data is dodgy. I didn't see anyone else cycling in Poland and so if we give Poland a low percentage usage but higher than zero – you can't divide by zero – then Poland leaps to the top of the Danger List. From what I've read on cycling forums, quite a few would agree with that. Congratulations, Poland!
 
But at least my hunch about the UK seems right, which, as a Briton, is no consolation. Get on your bikes and cycle to mainland Europe. Almost everywhere else is safer.

The European death document also tells us the most dangerous day of the week to cycle. It's Saturday in Slovenia, Tuesday in Greece and Monday in France. But in Denmark, the Netherlands, Romania and the UK, as well as overall in Europe, the day to stay indoors is Friday. So, it's maybe better to sleep at your desk on Thursday night and cycle home again on Saturday. Or just stay at home and plan your next cycle tour.
 
Safe pedalling,
Steven

Europe's Top 46 Touring Destinations

To kick off this reworked blog, I figured I'd write something to which I could add a sexy clickbait title, like "The 7 Most Delicious Ways To Cook Your Cat" or "The World's 13 Largest Penises (You Won't Believe Number 4. I Was Shocked!)" - y'know, that kind of nonsense.

Usually, these types of article don't provide any justification for their ordering, but I will. There's a very popular website called Crazy Guy On A Bike, where nearly 10,000 cycle touring blogs are collected. If you type something into its search engine, you get told how many of its pages contain that word. So I figured that by typing in the countries of Europe, it would provide a measure of their popularity.

Now, I'm aware that this is slightly flawed. For example, if someone cycling through Grimsby mentions a particularly lovely turkey sandwich then obviously Turkey scores an extra point. Likewise, if someone in Scunthorpe waxes lyrical about her love of the Wombles, and in particular Uncle Bulgaria, again we get a skewed result.

There are other problems too. Some countries have several names - United Kingdom might be Britain, or England, or Scotland, or Poundland - and Ireland could be north or south. Let's not get Sinn Fein involved. Also, these results apply only to English language blogs and so really it should be "Europe's Top 44 Touring Destinations For People Who Write In English", but that would have been as crap as Abu Hamza on Bullseye.

But forget that. Just like those adverts for expensive shampoo, let's pretend it's scientific.

So, here's the list with the hits in brackets.

1. France (66670)
2. Germany (41052)
3. Turkey (27918)
4. Italy (26355)
5. Netherlands (21629)
6. UK (21067)
7. Austria (20148)
8. Switzerland (20039)
9. Spain (17679)
10. Belgium (14752)
11. Ireland (14462)
12. Hungary (13650)
13. Croatia (13261)
14. Greece (10833)
15. Bulgaria (10405)
16. Slovakia (9648)
17. Romania (9229)
18. Slovenia (9142)
19. Czech Republic (8873)
20. Denmark (8700)
21. Serbia (7964)
22. Poland (7402)
23. Portugal (6883)
24. Luxembourg (6112)
25. Norway (5667)
26. Iceland (4744)
27. Sweden (4431)
28. Montenegro (4035)
29. Russia (3966)
30. Bosnia & Herzegovina (3446)
31. Albania (3440)
32. Liechtenstein (3172)
33. Finland (2783)
34. Estonia (2473)
35. Lithuania (2275)
36. Latvia (2264)
37. Monaco (2009)
38. Ukraine (1702)
39. Malta (1566)
40. Macedonia (1537)
41. Andorra (1269)
42. Cyprus (944)
43. Moldova (657)
44. San Marino (606)
45. Belarus (594)
46. Kosovo (466)

It's fairly obvious that France would get the number one spot, but what surprises me is how popular Turkey is (or maybe how popular turkey sandwiches are in Grimsby). That said, maybe Turkey really just means "everywhere else in Asia", as it's the easiest way to get to everywhere else in Asia. I'm discounting the idea that it's loads of people writing, "You'll never get me going to Turkey!"

What also surprises me is how high Liechtenstein is. I've been there. It's rubbish. And it beats all the Baltic States and some of Europe's other gems. What's going on?

Anyway, there you go. What do you reckon? Are there any countries in this list that deserve to be higher or lower?

Happy pedalling,
Steven

PS. In case you were wondering, that shocking number 4 was David Cameron. I thought he would've been higher. He is a massive penis.

A New Start

It's time to breathe life back into this blog. It's no longer "Getting There By Degrees" (the diary of my 22,000 mile ride) and is now "The European Cycling Blog".

From now on, it will be a more generalised cycle touring blog, not solely concentrating on my adventures, but hopefully with as much nonsense as before.

Bring it on!

The Giant Hogweeds of Destiny

Let's start off with some drama. Today it was only down to pure luck that I wasn't killed. But let's come back to that in a bit.

So I'm in Russia. I'd been told all sorts of horror stories about Russia and so let's explode a few myths:

Myth 1. The Border is Bad: I'd been told border formalities can take up to three hours and include a full bag search - yikes! I have self-labelled blood pressure pill bottles. My crossing involved no search whatsoever and took less than ten minutes. Next!

Myth 2. The People are Bad: You'd think that Russians were demonic if you believed what I've heard. They aren't. Yesterday, due to reasons that I'll explain later, I had another spoke go pop. Although I was only halfway through my day, luckily I was just a few kilometres from Ostrov, a town of about 20,000, which around these parts is massive. I figured it'd have a bike shop. In the past, most bike malfunctions have resulted in some serendipitous interaction with the locals. Given Russia's monstrous reputation I doubted it this time.

I saw a man with a bike. He had his head down. So I asked him, in my finest Russian (which isn't fine at all) where  the bike shop was. He looked up, pissed as pint glass full of newts, with food - or vomit - all around his mouth and slurred, 'Da!'. OK, maybe he misunderstood and so I tried again. But no. I got another 'da!' And then another. Maybe his sense of the absurd lead him to an extremely literal form of dadaism. Or perhaps, as I suspect, he'd had one bottle of vodka too many. Not a good start, Russia.

But the next cyclist I asked, Alex, spoke about ten words of English, took me to the bike shop, waited outside with me until it reopened after lunch, purloined a spoke and a spoke key - at least I saw no money changing hands - took me to his garden, introduced me to Valya, his retired English teacher wife, gave me lunch, attempted to fix my bike with less knowledge than I have (the bike shop only sold spares, it didn't repair), gave up and, as time was getting on, helped me find a room for the evening at a place for Russian army officers. I don't want to sound ungrateful but the hotel - which, by the way, is too grand a word - had hints of Patarei Prison, the scary one I'd seen in Tallinn the other day. But on the plus side it was cheap, and cheap is good. Alex and Valya were a great couple and if the entirety of this country is filled with Ian Huntleys, their loveliness still balances out Russians on the niceness scale pretty damn well.

Alex and Valya

Myth 3. The Roads are Bad: Ha! They aren't bad. They are fucking atrocious. They would make the transport minister of a banana republic blush with shame.

I'd been lulled into a false sense of security. From the Estonian border to Pskov, the road was fine - nice tidy tarmac, a little hard shoulder, and no traffic. Only the nasty Giant Hogweeds standing sentry along the roadside gave a hint of the horrors to come. After Pskov, the hard shoulder becomes a sand and gravel pit, alluringly rideable at times, when the intimacy of a speeding juggernaut three inches from your left-hand cheek gets too much. The road surface itself became Ukrainian in its shitness, which was another reason why the sandpit was alluring. For the quality of ride, these roads may as well have been made of cobbles, and that was the coroner's verdict for yesterday's spoke death.

Today things just got worse. The trucks got closer and so the sandpit became even more alluring and, like all sandpits, you never know how deep they are. And then your front wheel goes in and your handlebars go somewhere else and you fall into the road on to the tarmac, skinning both knees, praying, "Please, please, please let there be no cars coming from behind." I got up as quickly as I could and spun around. Phew, an oddly clear bit of road. Not wanting the shock of a dismount to unnerve me, I continued immediately, with a racing heart and stiffening, bloody knees. It was a few kilometres before I stopped and took stock of what had happened. Then I carried on and the same thing very nearly happened again, this time with a juicy truck hovering just close enough behind to squish my head. Luckily I caught the bike before it threw me from it.
Roads in Russia are scarce. There's no alternative to the route I've been taking. It took the rest of the day to come to a big decision.

That this is stupid.

Myth 4. Moscow is Rubbish: Apparently, Red Square aside, there's very little worth seeing. This is one myth that I won't be able to explode, because my decision is that I'm not going to go there. I've checked on Google StreetView, and with the information available, I would be encountering these types of roads every day for the next three weeks. I just don't think that my luck could hold out that long. Besides, I have a lovely girlfriend and a doting mum (and a dad, but dad's don't get factored into these equations for some reason) and I'd like not to die just yet. I'm not missing out on much. Russia is just a massive forest. There are few settlements of any size. There are only so many times you can look at a tree and go, "Oo, it's a tree!" But boredom isn't the reason for avoiding Moscow. Death: That's the reason for avoiding Moscow. Even the stupidly expensive visa isn't enough to make me want to carry on.

Opuchka, the town I'm in right now, is my last chance to escape Russia relatively easily. It's only 70 kilometres to the Latvian border. The rest of my trip will carry on as planned but I'll get to see both Latvia and Estonia again, which is nice. I liked both of those countries. Neither of them tried to kill me.

So has my challenge failed? In a way, yes. But in another way, hell no. I started off with a plan to see 50 capitals. But then I decided to include Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh. So even by dropping Moscow, I will still have done 52 capitals. Turn a negative into a positive.

UniCycle52 - it's the future, baby! And I'd quite like to have a future.

To Russia With...Fear

Yes, I know, I know. Just over a month ago I promised you the second part of a blog about Belarus and I didn't deliver. I've seen four more countries since then too. I could have told you about Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, but I haven't. One excuse was the exam I had in Riga whose revision took up all my time, but even that was two weeks ago. But look at it this way: Why would you buy my book at the end of this ride if you knew everything that had already happened? You wouldn't, would you? Oh, and the things I've seen! That woman in Warsaw giving birth to a live monkey! That velociraptor on the loose in downtown Vilnius! That amusing parsnip shaped like a penis! OK, I made the last one up. So you'll just have to buy the book.

Amazing times though I've had, amazing people though I've met, amazing food though I've eaten in all these countries, I don't want to linger on the past. I want to talk about the future. My immediate future. And, if the advice I've received is correct, my immediate impending doom. Y'see, Monday brings me to the border of Russia, and apparently Russia is scarier than a naturist weekend on the surface of Venus.

This advice has come from Brits, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and, most worryingly, real life Russians living in Estonia. There was an all-night party a few days ago and about twenty of them impressed upon me just how likely I am to be robbed, skinned and eaten alive as soon as I take my first breath of Russian air. And some of them had even been there!

Last night I Skyped The Lovely Nina. I mentioned my concerns and the warnings about being robbed. Always positive, she said, "You'll be OK. No one'll rob you. You look like a tramp." Now, I'm not sure how much consolation that should be from your loved one, but I've gone and ruined it. Today, here in Tartu, only two days' ride from the Russian border, I foolishly went and got my hair cut. I've de-tramped myself. With my newly coiffured Estonian style and slightly greying stubble I could pass as super-tycoon Roman Abramovich. I'm a sitting duck. I may as well just fling my rouble-stuffed panniers from my bike as I pass the robbers in the streets.

A lot of Russia's problems seem to revolve around alcohol and I've seen a few warning signs myself. The closer I've got to the border, whether in Ukraine, Belarus or the Baltic states, the more people you see stripped to the waist, clutching bottles and staggering about the place. I saw one wobbly guy like that today, but he had the charming additional feature of very recent and extensive Dr Frankenstein-style facial stitches from which leaked fresh blood.

If people are *that* pissed I don't mind so much. There's only so much damage you can do when your central priority is balance. But here's the worry: Put them behind the wheel of a car and their balance isn't an issue. They can scream around, pinging cyclists from the road at will, just for a laugh. And, according to one person I spoke to, here in Estonia the police are incorruptible and so drink driving equals prison, whereas in Russia all you need to do to avoid arrest is to buy the copper a bottle or two of vodka and it's all sorted. And then I might be being pinged off the road by the fuzz!

Then there's the other problem: Moscow. Moscow is absolutely massive! If you've ever wondered how daunting it might be to cycle into London or Paris or Rome, all I can say is don't be a wuss. Moscow is sooooo big that the whole of London could comfortably fit inside the first 'o' of Moscow. More people live in Moscow than in the whole of Europe, including Russia. That's how big it is.

But I have a map of the city. And I think I have a small party of British cyclists meeting me about 100 km from Red Square to escort me in, although they've never attempted this route either.

Mmm, what could possibly go wrong?

Belarus Part 1: Dreading Belarus

It was with a mixture of excitement and dread that I was approaching Belarus. It is, after all, the last dictatorship in Europe. It's also the last country in Europe to hang on to communism. Communism suggests poverty, shifty secret police and endless queues for basics like bread. Is this what I would find? I had so many questions but the internet couldn't tell me. Really it was the unknown that I was fearing.

There's a web site called CrazyGuyOnABike.com. There you can find nearly ten thousand blogs of cyclists who have a story to tell. If you need to research your own trip, it's a great resource to learn all you can about the places you're interested in visiting. If you type in 'Belarus' and search through the results you realise that only two of those bloggers ever visited Belarus, and one of those was a quick two-night stay to the far north-west corner of the place. No one cycles here. There must be a reason for that.

Well, there are lots of reasons. First of all, the visa is expensive and tricky to obtain. Second, the politics of the place scare a lot of people away. There may also be fear of radiation, since Ukraine's Chernobyl selfishly dumped its worst on the south-east corner of Belarus. There's a chunk of the country that's still a restricted area.

But I came here, via the swampy south of the land. The border guards were friendly although the mosquitoes weren't. I came away with my visa stamped and my legs smeared in my own blood as I wiped off hundreds of the buggers. Three days later I was in the little town of Mar'ina Horka. I had a reservation at a hotel there. Such is bureaucracy here, and my rubbish Russian, it only took 25 minutes to check in.

The next day, the morning of my 43rd birthday, I had some very special cycling companions: Bruce, the UK ambassador to Belarus; Martin, a good friend of his and whose wife also works at the embassy; Chris, number two at the US embassy; and Denis and Pavel, two Belarussians, one of whom had done an MBA with the Open University. It was nice to hand over the route-finding decisions for one day only as Chris directed us for 80 kilometres on smaller roads to the riverside cycle path on the edge of Minsk. This path would take us all the way to the centre of my 39th capital and to the appropriately named Victory Square.

The team: Martin, Denis, me and Bruce (and Chris taking the photo)

Bruce, the UK ambassador, clearly loves a challenge. Of all the European ambassadorial roles this one has to be the trickiest. He has to make connections within Belarus but he can't get close to the regime. He has to be positive about the country but remain critical about it too. His mantra is: "It's clean, it's safe, everyone has a job". The way that he rattles off that statement makes you expect it to be followed with a big, fat 'but'. But there is no 'but'. It's a clever trick, positive and yet critical.

But these three things - cleanliness, safety, full employment - aren't to be taken lightly. There's no other country in Europe that can boast this trio. As soon as I hit Mozyr, the first town over the border, it was obvious that the place was a lot tidier than any of the countries I've visited so far except perhaps Austria and Switzerland. And full employment is a first. No one was homeless or looked like they were desperately short of a meal. The roads here are the best in non-EU, eastern Europe (so far), the exact opposite of Ukraine's, the worst in Europe, just over the border. And Belarus's apartment blocks, at least the ones I saw, are not crumbling like Romania's. Something is right here.

But then again something's wrong too. There's a darker side to Belarus but for the casual cycle tourist it's not something you would ever see. Bruce has been here nearly a year and he admitted that he hadn't seen it first hand either. I'm perhaps not seeing the table, just the varnish but it's a varnish that enables me to walk around feeling entirely safe.

I'm torn. Freedom is everything. The UK's politics is adversarial. Whenever one side proposes something, the other side takes the opposite view. It's about scoring points. It's about one side gaining or retaining power. We have some massive decisions to make soon, decisions about climate change, peak oil and sustainable pensions for a start. Their solutions will not come within a single term of office. They'll take decades. And it'll be painful. But it can't happen with our system of party politics because whichever side is causing the pain necessary to solve the problems will be kicked out next time around. There needs to be a stable government in power for decades to see the plan through to its conclusion. The system here in Belarus, with one man - one dictator - in control,  for all its serious human rights abuses, is more geared up to solve long term problems than the UK's. And yet freedom is everything. Freedom versus solutions. That's why I'm torn.

And so while I came here with a dread of the country, I leave with a grudging admiration for the place. Its past political violence and police heavyhandedness can't be forgiven but I will happily wear the bright red and green Belarus t-shirt given to me by Martin as a surprise birthday present (it was a surprise for him - he didn't know it was my birthday) and talk fondly of the country and remember these few days not as a nightmare I survived but as one of the highlights of my entire trip.

Sorry, that got a bit serious, didn't it? Part two will be back to the usual frivolity and tell of a great bunch of co-riders, jazz concerts, reindeer soup and elk for lunch, cheeky photographers, ambassadors and Ferrero Rocher and include no politics whatsoever.

да пабачэння!

Chisinau & Kiev

Sorry, it's been a couple of weeks, hasn't it? I've been busy with the cycling but also revision for my MT365 maths exam on the 11th June in Latvia. Since last time I've seen two more capitals, Moldova's Chisinau and Ukraine's Kiev.

What can I say about Chisinau? Well, I can't see many people adding it to their bucket lists. It's got no real sights to see and none of that magic that you sometimes find in smaller cities, like the joyous Sarajevo. Moldova itself was lovely, a giant allotment of a country with, it seemed, each household growing fruit or vegetables in its back garden, maybe out of necessity but it still looked pretty. Moldova does countryside very well. But its cities are not up to much. And the country as a whole is desperately short on road signs. Finding your way out of a strange, car-stuffed city with half a million inhabitants and without any help at junctions or roundabouts is a bit taxing. Perhaps it's the Moldovan government's way of keeping you trapped in town spending your money.

Luckily, using the power of my trusty compass, I escaped the city. The first road sign confirmation that I was on the right road out of town came about 20 kilometres from the centre. I was heading to Orhei or, rather, a small village, Trebujeni, nearby that has a little, pink house. And after the traffic, noise and dirt of Chisinau it was lovely to spend one evening sat in the garden of the little pink house, reading as the sun went down, being served up way too much Moldovan home cooking. Don't worry, it didn't go to waste; I took cakes and pancakes with me the following day to sustain me on the next leg. If you fancy a trip to Moldova, skip Chisinau and go to the pink house.

A week or so later I was hauling myself into Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. I'd been warned that hotel prices in Kiev were inflated. Although my first Ukrainian night cost me only €8, the cheapest bed of my entire tour, elsewhere in Ukraine I'd been paying around €25 for a room. Kiev would be double this, giving my budget a good kicking. Ten minutes after hitting the city proper, I found a hotel that €50. I was all ready to accept this when the glum receptionist added that she wanted another €4 per night to lock up my bike. Every other hotel on this trip has done this for free and so I walked away. If I'd found an offer so soon, how hard could it be to find a second?

It would be two hours before I found another room, cycling around a 2.5 million inhabitant city without a map. The first hotel I approached was full, the second was, ahem, a dog hotel (OK, I know the Ukrainian word for 'hotel', but not 'dog'). The next was full, the next's only remaining single room was 'premier', whatever that means, and was going to cost me €170. Er, no thanks. The next was full. I was beginning to think that I might end up sleeping in a park. But then I found a tiny place, with only seven rooms, and they wanted the same price as the very first hotel and were happy to include the price of the stored bike. Result! Much longer searching and I might have returned to the dog hotel and given them €20 for a cage.

So, having cycled around much of Kiev already, the next day I went out to explore. I wonder if all this city seeing is making me slightly jaded. Kiev has some lovely churches, the glittering, onion-domed towers of Orthodox architecture, but it also has a lot of the crap that comes with a successful tourist market, people dressed up in costume to winkle the cost of a photo out of a passing tourist. You could choose from a rabbit, a pharoah, Scrat from Ice Age and a manky-looking home-made Bart Simpson with a nose that would have been more more suited to Squidwood - all national icons of Ukraine, as you well know. And you also had plenty of those turnips who dress up as statues and then stand about. I think if you've looked at the balance of your talents and decided that your only chance of income comes from standing still for hours on end, it's probably time to get that CV moving with an OU course.

Chisinau and Kiev may not have been this year's Rome or Istanbul but I'm glad I've seen them, and even happier that I saw all the places in between. But now it's time to go as eastern European as it's possible to go. Next stop, Belarus!

When Old Ladies Attack

Never believe anything you read on the internet, especially if it warns you of the dangers of a place you want to visit. Fear is a good motivator to keep you ploughing through someone's blog but stuff can be made up or exaggerated to provide a good read. Don't worry - you'll never find me trying to provide you with a good read.

Here's a fine example - the Ukrainian border. I'd read on numerous occasions of time-wasting, total bag searches that keep you trapped for hours and then the compulsory bribe when the guards find a tube of Smarties that could - they say - be a party pack of something trippy. So, as I approached the Moldova-Ukraine border, I fretted a bit because my blood pressure medication consists of five tubs of self-labelled pills that could easily be mistaken for ecstasy (well, in my mind anyway, having never actually seen a real E). That's surely got to be a bribe in the thousands.

So I turned up at the border, the guards and I chatted nicely about my trip - even the burly bouncer type border guard in charge seemed impressed with the distance (I'm now past 25,000 km) - and they let me through within five minutes. The irony is that I don't have high blood pressure and I now have loads of high quality drugs with a street value of three million pounds to sell in Kiev. Except I can't speak the lingo. Looks like it'll be personal consumption then.

If the first 24 hours of life in Ukraine is a yardstick for what's to come then it might take me a few months to get through the entire country. Yesterday, shortly after arriving here, I quickly searched for a hotel and quickly found one. Sat in what you could call reception but wasn't really (think hallway) were two middle-aged women: a small, chubbly, smiley one and a small, chubbly, moustachioed one. The latter was Maria, also a guest, a Polish lass here for Orthodox Easter. Despite my insistence that I don't believe in God and stuff she invited me to the celebrations at the local church the next day.

So I went. Now, I could write about this for about five thousand words but I won't. I'll summarise. If you want more, please buy my book. When I eventually write it. Each book will come with a free E.

Anyway, the service itself, like all church services, was tedious in the extreme with lots of chanting by a football team of heavily garbed priests in big hats standing in distant parts of the church that the congregation could barely see. I think boredom at these things is to be expected but I was there for the new experience.

Church service - Yeahhh....awn!

There was also an outdoors part of the service where we were all splattered with a large brush soaked with holy water. Some poor, old sod on the front row got a right soaking. It nearly knocked off her head scarf. But it was a hot day and we were all happy for God's cooling effect.

After the service, which lasted two and a half feckin' hours, there was an outdoor buffet. Buffets in the UK are very British. We all form an orderly queue with our little floppy plates and then, after collecting our goodies, we stand around in the middle of the room with the plate in one hand and a drink in the other wondering how the hell we are going to eat that pasta salad. Not in Ukraine. Here you stand around the table with a spoon in your hand and you dig in. (Yes, Nina - double dipping!)

Dig in, ladies!

And then once you've realised that the tall bloke with the weird blond eyebrows near the end of the table is from England you stop digging in and you make it your life's mission to feed him and make sure that he takes as much as possible of the table's contents home with him.

Next to me was Julia, a soft spoken German-Russian lady in her 60s with a lovely, open face ('open' as in friendly, not an axe wound or anything). We spoke in German. She topped up my plate about ten times, made sure I had plenty of wine and water and slied chocolates into my little rucksack. And then, when it was time to leave, she sneaked a bottle of red wine in there too. Oh, and two carrier bags of snacks. Then another older lady asked me to wait for a minute and then delivered a third carrier bag. I haven't lost the whole of my winter weight yet - I can't look that hungry. But lots of the folk around the table were doing a sort of 'strong cycling' mime - y'know, scrunched up faces and twisty hands - and so I guess I might need the sustenance to get me through the little hills that lie ahead.

Me and (one third of the) swag.

Normally it would be time to return to the hotel but not today. Instead Maria and her new friend Acsenti, a wonderfully friendly but manically talkative bloke, had decided to take me to the monastery at Lyadova. Only a visit - they weren't planning to section me or anything. So we climbed on to the back seat of Sergei and missus's car (yes, I know these are new characters - keep up) and off we popped to this 11th century church on the deep green banks of the silver river Dniester. And we saw skulls in caves, and drank holy water, and Acsenti bought me a couple of Jesus Top Trump type thingies from the gift shop for luck and health - if only I played Dungeons and Dragons! - and that type of thing. Look at the website - it was an interesting trip.

Skullls. You'd probably guessed that.

Just as we were about to jump into the car to go back to town, a family of Moldovans invited us - just like that! - to join their picnic. We drank their wine and ate their jars of meatballs and I really can't imagine something like that happening in, say, Blackburn.

The family of friendly Moldovans.

When the dad of the Moldovan family learnt of the nature of my trip, he said to me, "Your ride is a mission of peace". And even though I'd never thought of it like that, and - who knows? - maybe the religiosity of the day had got to me or, in reality, the totally wonderful and yet entirely unnecessary friendship that had been shown to me by absolutely everyone I'd met today, he was right. It's about peace, and it's about new friends, but some of it's also about old ladies sneaking bottles of wine into your rucksack.

So, if there's somewhere you fear going, just go. It'll be fine. Scratch what I said earlier. You can believe some things on the internet.

A Little Place To Call My Own

On Bucharest's Bulevardui Libertăţii is Romania's National Institute of Statistics. That must have been the best place to work during Nicolae Ceaușescu's dictatorial reign. As you might know, I love maths but there isn't much room for creative thinking. But in a communist statistics department you could invent any old shite. Productivity is up by how much this month, you say? Oh, I dunno. How about a million percent? That'll do. Brilliant.

Right across the road from the National Institute of Statistics is a building that has provided a few amazing statistics of its own. Although in the late 80s Ceaușescu - the man who put the first syllable in 'dictator' - was failing to balance the books, he decided to build himself a little palace. This palace turned out to be, then as it is now, the largest civilian building in the world, as well as the heaviest and the most expensive. Well, we're all in it together. Even though Cameron trots out that line, equality was never supposed to be the backbone of capitalism, but it's the very heart of communism. Given the squalor of a lot of Bucharest's apartments even today - judging by their crumbling exteriors at least - it's hard to see how building such a monument to himself back in the 80s could have helped Ceaușescu's popularity. Luckily it didn't and he was shot before it was finished.

The palace. Though in real life it's bigger than that.

The building itself - now called The Palace of the Parliament - is fuppin' huge. It has 1,100 rooms on 20 stories (8 of which are underground). To do a lap of the building's exterior is a two mile walk. The total floorspace is 340,000 square metres. Can't visualise that? It's approximately 50 football pitches. And then there's the opulence of its building materials. They used a million cubic metres of marble and 3,500 tonnes of crystal. The building has nearly 500 chandeliers for gawd's sake.

And it wasn't a green field site, oh no! In his wisdom, Ceaușescu - remember, to build his one home - demolished a vast area of Bucharest's historic district and with it nineteen Orthodox Christian churches, six Jewish synagogues, three Protestant churches and another eight that were relocated. Oh yes, and 30,000 homes.

The palace cost Romania three billion euros. When you see it for yourself, this monstrous white elephant with its huge Corinthian columns, you can imagine the effort, the labour, the time, the resources that went into. It's slightly worrying that the UK's deficit (the amount the UK's debt increases each year, not the debt itself) is about 40 of these palaces. That's two thousand football pitches of palace with twenty thousand chandeliers, each year. Just think how that money could have been spent instead. They could almost have built two palaces for each of the ConDem cabinet. Oh, go on, they deserve it.

Bucharest's Museum of Contemporary Art - usually a good-for-a-laugh pit stop in any city - is in the corner of the palace. Unfortunately it's the far corner and so it's a bit of a walk. The car park near the museum is falling to pieces. Its surface is in bits. Perhaps the budget isn't there to maintain such a palace. But the museum is free, or at least it was today. It didn't contain the usual collection of bonkers things that you'd normally expect in such a gallery although it had its moments. There was a film of a wolf and a very nervous looking deer trapped in a room together. The wolf stalks around, the deer wobbles a bit, the wolf lies down, the film repeats. You never get the death scene you are obviously anticipating. Is that what it means? Is it saying how we crave that blood lust moment. How should I bloody know? I just thought the wolf looked nice and fluffy.

That's the problem, and perhaps the beauty, of contemporary art. You can interpret it any way you like. It means nothing and everything. There was another film of a circle of about thirty people, all different ages and ethnicities, laid face down with an outstretched, bandaged palm towards the centre of the ring. A woman - the artist I'm guessing - lays a fuse in a large circle over each hand and then, when she's finished, she sets fire to it. A closeup of each hand shows the person's reaction as the flame passes over their particular bandage and lightly frazzles their naked fingers. What does that mean? Maybe it means we're all in it together. Or maybe it means one single person can cause pain to a large group and there's bugger all you can do about it. Maybe it's a metaphor for the palace itself.

Or maybe it's just a load of cock. After all, most contemporary art is cock. And I've got the statistics to prove it. I know 'cos I just invented them.

Live From The Crossroads Motel

I was expecting snow and ice and polar bears, wasn't I? It didn't happen. I got lucky again. The evening before I set off, as I trudged to a grungy pub in Graz to say a final farewell to good mates Damian and Jo, it was sleeting a sort of miserable, icy chowder of depression. The next day, Pete and I began this gymungous journey and it managed to stay dry but a frozen wind blasted our stupid, little faces until the only option was to dive into another bar, but one that wasn't a dive this time. Then, the next day, Pete left to return to reality and the sun came out. That was over a week ago. And the sun's been out every day since. And it's forecast for the foreseeable future, as long as we only try to foresee for a few days. I'd say 'thank you, God' but He's probably busy infecting African babies with malaria or something.

But something bad has happened. As I sit here, in the most inappropriate motel in Romania (I'll come to that in a minute), glugging a glass of Transylvanian red, which appropriately looks like a cup of blood, I can't remember anything about Hungary. Well, that's not entirely true. I remember Budapest but, from what I saw, Budapest doesn't seem very representative of Hungary. I mean, it had buildings and stuff. Most of Hungary is this big, flat, featureless thing. You can't take a decent photo of a big, flat, featureless thing. It can't be done. Have you ever seen a decent photo of an absolutely massive pancake? Well, have you? No, you haven't.

So the long days of ticking off the kilometres as I passed through sparsely populated Hungarian villages, where the only human interaction was someone who looked like the big, lurchy fella from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gurning at me from every bus stop, has added up to an indistinct memorial blob of partially flooded, very, very flat farmland. Oh, and cheap beer. If you're Hungarian, don't get me wrong. I probably chose a really rubbish route. And I'm not knocking Hungarians. I had a great chat with Robert, one of your lot, who ran a hotel in Budapest. I think. Maybe I just dreamt that conversation to fill in the gaps.

Anyway, now I'm in Romania and I have to tell you that the roads are bleedin' mental. If you look at my Romanian road map, there are basically four choices of road. There are motorways, of which there are not many and it seems no one uses them anyway. How do I know this? Because all the traffic that should be on the motorway is on the A-roads. The colour of motorways on my map is irrelevant as I can't go on them. A-roads, which are red on my map, are usually in an OK condition, except the shoulder, i.e., the bit I have to cycle on. The shoulder is full of stones and broken glass and twisted metal, so I try to keep out of that. But then the juggernauts might get me. So I go back into the shoulder. And so on. It's not perfect.

There are two other types of road. One of these is yellow on my map and appears to be a sort of B-road. I haven't found one of these yet but I'm hoping for one the day after tomorrow. And then we come to the last type of road, the really thin, little, white one. On most European maps this indicates something like a peaceful, idyllic lane. And it can mean that here too. But if instead of the map showing a really thin, little, white road, it shows a really, really thin, little, white road - and you honestly do need a magnifying glass to tell the difference - then it means an unsurfaced road, the sort of track they used to have on the 80s motocross show Kickstart, and there are loads of these. Bloody millions.

Today my destination forced me on to a purely red, A-road route. It was trucks and coaches and cars going at light speed all the way for about six hours. I'd planned to go a bit farther but, with a strong headwind, I quit early when I found a roadside motel. I felt frazzled. I thought a beer or a glass of wine might calm me down and remove the heavy goods vehicles from my nightmares. But, silly me, this motel sits right by that busy A-road. Each time a juggernaut goes past - about ten per minute on average - my walls wobble like I'm on the set of Crossroads. So  I won't get much peace. And then I discovered that the train comes past my window too. When that happens the whole room turns inside out like in that film Inception. But apparently this too shall pass and so everything's just dandy.

If you're planning a cycling holiday in Romania, may I suggest France instead. Or not cycling at all.

No Cheese, Sherlock!

Some people have a difficult start in life. Take US goalkeeper Tim Howard for example. He was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome as a young boy. But I think, like Sherlock Holmes on a pushbike - Bicyclelock Holmes if you like - I've deduced that little Tim was the victim of a terrible misdiagnosis. Let me explain, by which I mean let me waffle nonsensically for a bit and then come back to it right at the end.

Country number one this year is Hungary. It's where I'm sat right now, in a forgettable little town, drinking beer at 1980s prices. Before leaving Austria yesterday with good mate Pete, I'd given him a little cribsheet of important Hungarian words, written phonetically for ease of pronunciation. My cribsheet is very useful for this bizarre language but having done my extensive research there are some words in Hungarian that I will remember until the day Alzheimer's sets in. It's hard to forget that the Hungarian word for 'cheese' sounds exactly like 'shite'. Or that one version of their word for 'no' is 'minge'. Oh, and 'trees' sounds like just like 'faaaak'. I could be wrong about all this. I got my information from Google Translate's virtual speaker. Maybe it had been hacked.

Anyway, we set off yesterday on what was possibly a stupidly long distance for a first day - 134 km (90 miles). I hadn't cycled so much this winter and it turned out that Pete had never cycled so far in his entire life. By the time we hit the Hungarian border, still with 60 km to go, we were tired and extremely Hungary. Luckily, just over the border was the sort of transit cafe/bar you see in lots of places over here. There appears to be a rule that they are only allowed one party of customers at a time. And - lucky us! - we were that party.

The staff, of which there were many, spoke a little German but we tried our Hungarian phonetic cribsheet. Something that sounds like 'kate scher' got us the two beers we desired. Yeah, Google Translate! Scanning the food menu, my eye was drawn to their burger options, particularly their 'shiteburger'. Fearing that they might know enough German to fulfil our order a little too accurately, we went for the 'extraburger' without really knowing what the extra was. It turns out to have been cabbage. Nice cabbage though.

We struggled on to Szombathely, our destination, with a fierce headwind and collapsed into the cheapest hotel we could find, which was also the only hotel we could find. This saving allowed us to eat in the only restaurant open on a Sunday evening (apart from McDonald's) and go a bit mental. The highlight was a bottle of wine that was made from a bizarre Hungarian grape that could only be enjoyed if it was blended with a more popular grape, a bit like the way that people can only stomach Piers Morgan if he's interviewing someone much less of a twat. The wine tasted alright though. And then there was the main course. I ordered a mountain of meat offering allsorts but also, and this was the reason I choose it, pigs' trotters. It was another first for me. Mmm, they're, er, gelatinous.

What the 'trees' has all this got to do with Tourette's Tim Howard and his effing and blindingly good goalkeeping. Well, Tim Howard was born in the USA - wait for it! - of Hungarian parents. Have you put the picture together yet? Tim wasn't swearing uncontrollably. He was just talking to his dad in his native tongue. Tim's doctor clearly didn't have my phonetic cribsheet. Or am I talking 'cheese'?

It's Snow Joke

(This was supposed to be on my other blog - the Open University one - but they don't seem to be replying to my emails...)

I'm excited. By the time you read this I will be either preparing to leave Austria or already on the road to Budapest on the final leg of the UniCycle50 tour. And unless something amazing has happened to the weather between writing this post and you reading it, it's all going to be a bit snowy. The whole point of splitting the ride into three stages, from April to September for three years, was to avoid the cold stuff. Oh well.

So far, over the 22,500 kilometres I've cycled, I've been spectacularly lucky with the weather. Over the twelve months of actually moving through Europe I have probably had less than three weeks of rain, and six days of that was trying to escape England right at the beginning. And if the rain wasn't as severe as expected, neither was the summer sun. August 2011 probably wasn't the most intelligent time to be cycling through Spain, but then again neither was it ideal to spend the whole of July 2012 in Turkey. Luckily for me, the temperature rarely exceeded 35C (95F) in either place and that's bearable on a bike as long as you keep moving. As this year is the Northern European stage I can't imagine it's the heat that's going to be the problem.

So it looks like, statistically, I'm due some rubbish weather. Fortunately, the countries that I'll be cycling  through during the coldest period of 2013 - Austria and Hungary - get a good dumping of snow every year. Surely they will be able to cope with it better than the UK does. I'm expecting clear roads, although the campsites might be more of an issue. That is, if they've even bothered to open at all by the time I pass by.
I'll be presented with a bigger challenge if this year's winter continues into the second half of April. The only hills of any decent size this year are the spooky Carpathian mountains that rise up shortly after I cross the border into Romania. Romania is known for its dodgy roads even at the best of times. If there's snow at the bottom of the hill, climbing up to a pass at 1200 metres will be interesting. Still, no one said it was going to be easy.

So, six months of cycle adventure and study is spread out before me like a slightly scary duvet, taking me through some of the most rarely visited places in Europe. And if you happen to live in or around Budapest, Bucharest, Chisinau, Kiev, Minsk, Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallin, Moscow, St Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Cardiff, Dublin, Belfast or Edinburgh, I'd love to meet up for a beer or, more likely, a giant mug of steaming coffee and a warm blanket. You can reach me at steven@UniCycle50.com once my computer has defrosted.

Scratching Out Sarajevo

It doesn't seem to matter where I go in former Yugoslavia. I turn up at a town, plug its name into Google and discover that it was the recent site of something horrific: a rape camp in Foča, a prison in which inmates were tortured to death in Sremska Mitrovica or the site of a massacre in Vukovar. I suppose that's what happens when you cycle around a former battlefield. Especially one that's been a battlefield on and off for over seven hundred years. Thank God next year I only have Hungary, Romania, the former USSR and Ireland. Ah shit.

Of all the places I've been in recent weeks the only one with some hope in its story is Sarajevo. In all the others, people were endlessly tortured and slaughtered or women were relentlessly raped but Sarajevo was a city that, despite suffering plenty of death of its own, braved it out and didn't give up. Pyrrhic victory though it may have been, it was at least a victory.

Last week I slipped into Sarajevo by the road that had been known as Sniper's Alley. It was the route from the airport to the centre of town, a nightmare of a ride that would have seen your vehicle peppered with bullets from gunmen hidden in the tall buildings on either side of the road. And me without a cycling helmet!

After fixing a cheap room in a crumbling banana yellow and lime green concrete precinct near the centre of the old town I went out to meet Julian, an OU student, and Fedya, his Bosnian colleague. Julian had been a UN peacekeeper here during the siege and is now back to help train army officers in peace management, using lessons learned from the Bosnian conflict when things didn't go as well as they might have done. He admitted that a lot of mistakes were made. Fedya is a local who now works with Julian and lived through the siege from age 12 to 15. I thought my early teens were traumatic.

Fedya and Julian

We met in town in Baščaršija Square, known by tourists as Pigeon Square because they can't pronounce Baščaršija, or the really not so difficult "bash-shar-she-er". I'd love the Bosnians to get their own back and pronounce it Piggy-On Square but, alas, they don't.

Together we walked to Sarajevo's brewery. The brewery had been an important lifeline during the siege. It has its own spring and so, as one of the few sources of unpoisonable water in town, the Sarajevans would queue to get their share in a city starved of all basic utilities. Julian told me that, as the thirsty hauled away their plastic tubs of water, cocky snipers on the surrounding hills would aim to pierce their containers.

Let's meet in Piggy On Square

On the way to the brewery Fedya pointed out local attractions. First we passed the corner where, in 1914, Gavrilo Princip blew away Archduke Franz Ferdinand thereby launching World War I and, ninety years later, a successful UK guitar band. Then we saw the Turbeh, the tomb of seven wrongly convicted and beheaded brothers. There's a belief that if you visit the site and talk to the lads in the right order, the question to which you desperately seek an answer will be relayed by the mutterings of the first person you hear upon leaving. I thought it might be fun to hang around outside and shout out useful answers: "A boy or a girl? Neither. It's a fish" or "Of course your arse looks fat in those jeans. Your arse is fat." But these people have already had enough trouble.

The Turbeh: "And tomorrow's winning horse will be...?"

Once inside the brewery's moodily lit bar Fedya gave me a month's course of Balkan history in about an hour. There was a lot to take in. I wish I'd recorded it. Even Julian who is knee deep in this topic said that he'd learned something new.

This session was also my 20,000 Kilometre Party. Although I couldn't be positive, not having a working mileometer, I calculated a few weeks ago that I would hit the 20K mark by Sarajevo. What better way to celebrate than with good company and a few pints of Sarajevska's dark, treacley beer?

Fedya had to leave and so Julian and I went for something to eat. "You fancy pie?" he asked. Blackburnians always fancy pie but I haven't had a real one in years. But he was talking about burek, a stuffed flaky pastry that I've had in various forms since Greece. The Greek spanakotiropita - spinach and cheese pie - is one version. It can occasionally be great but is frequently bland with watery spinach and tasteless cheese. Turkey's burek - aside from a lovely one I had in Jalova - usually had even less taste. More filling please! But as I'd headed farther north into the Balkans things had improved and, here in Sarajevo, they reached their zenith with the best meat burek I'd ever tasted, a circular dish filled with an ever decreasing radius of filo pastry, crunchy on the outside, soft and buttery further in, with a thick sausage of tasty meat throughout the centre. Perfect.

Late afternoon the next day, the second part of Julian's tour required his car. Up into the steep hills we went, where the Bosnian Serbs had been positioned, shelling and sniping at the poor sods in the town down below. It's also up on this hill that you can see the old 1984 Winter Olympics toboggan run, now derelict, graffitied and with the occasional hole blasted through to make it the ideal defensive cover.

"It's perfectly safe," Julian said, and so I walked down inside the remaining kilometre or so of track while he drove the car to the bottom. It was eery being inside the concrete tunnel amongst the darkening woods in the perfectly still evening, knowing that only a few years before these trees would have been crawling with hundreds of paramilitary launching mortars from all around. I reached the bottom of the track and had to jump from the top of a small wall. At its base was a patch of grass and a patch of concrete. "Err, aim for the concrete," Julian hinted. I looked at him uneasily. "You can't be too safe." Bosnia, especially in these hills, is littered with mines and many of the ruined buildings are booby trapped. Finishing the remaining 10,000 kilometres of UniCycle50 would be difficult with a leg missing.

Going for gold...er...mould

Sarajevo is a wonderfully atmospheric little city - one of this year's surprise highlights - but my time here was up. The next day I was off to Belgrade, capital of Serbia, with more to see than I had time to manage. I did get a few minutes inside Tito's mausoleum. As well as his tomb, his uniforms, the many gifts he'd received from foreign officials and the dozens of batons that were relayed across Jugoslavia each year to be handed to him on his birthday, there was a relief map of former Yugoslavia. A visitor had scratched out Sarajevo.

Scratched out Sarajevo (circled)

Tito, dictator though he was, is thought of as the most benign of the Eastern Bloc's Communist leaders. Using his mantra of Brotherhood and Unity he kept this fragile country at peace. It wasn't democracy but thousands weren't being butchered by their own former neighbours. Rousseau wrote: "Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men." Britain has a system that looks a bit like democracy but isn't really. Maybe other peoples need even less of it.

This evening I made it to my sixth of the seven countries to emerge from Yugoslavia, Croatia. I arrived at a town called Osijek. With the internet connected it was a relief to read that this place had got away with only light bombing and few casualties during the war. But then I scrolled further down the page. It seems that five Croatian officials from here had been condemned for war crimes commited against Serb civilians. It's Serbs killing Muslims killing Croats killing Serbs wherever you go.

Fedya has a Muslim father, a Serb mother and a Croat uncle. I'd asked him what he would do - would he take a side? - if another conflict broke out. I was hoping he'd tell me that such a thing could never happen again. But he didn't. "I'd have to leave," he said. Where's a Tito when you need him?

Albania, Land of Mountain, Fire and Serenading Tweens

So I cycled up the steep, steep hill from the lovely lake Ohrid near Struga in Macedonia, surrounded by clear, mountain air and dense, lush forest, and eventually, after a few swear words and a lot more sweat, I reached nearly a thousand metres above sea level, where lay the border with Albania. I got through the officialdom in minutes - there was hardly anyone else there - and I was in Albania. Finally, Albania! Of all the places on this trip, Albania was possibly the one I most wanted to see because you never hear anything about it. It never wins anything. I'm not even sure it ever enters anything. What was it going to be like?

Normally when you cross a border you don't really notice a change in your surroundings. OK, the houses might become a little shabbier or a little grander, the people a little better or worse dressed, the prostitutes fitter or fatter. But cross into Albania and suddenly the thick forest was replaced with yellowing fields with the odd shrub, as though I'd jumped a thousand metres higher and I was now above the tree line. And the air was bluer, and not in a good way. It couldn't be the heat haze; it was still only eight in the morning. Was it pollution? All the photos I took looked like a crisis-abandoned travel agent's window display. Everything had gone cyan.

Coming down the hill from the border I noticed a large dog in the road. That's fairly normal. You always see the odd dog. Then I turned to my right and saw what must be ten or fifteen of 'em in a pack. Luckily they were all looking in the opposite direction, maybe devouring the last cyclist who came this way. I pedalled on and whizzed past before they could notice me.

Down and down I went. Eventually I came to people. The first person I passed was a twelve year old boy. At the top of his voice he sang out to me in English: "I love you sooooooo much!" He even did X-Factor wannabe arm gestures. I laughed. He laughed. But I kept cycling. Freak.

And then there were the hoses. If you know an Albanian and you're wondering what to get him or her for Christmas then my advice would be to buy a hose. They bloody love them. I must have counted twenty or thirty in a minute or two, erected nozzle up, pointlessly spraying water. Never into a field, mind. No, just on to a bit of tarmac, making a big, unnecessary puddle. My mum loves a water feature. I think that's what it was. Oh, you could watch a hose for hours! Sometimes they even held the hoses and sprayed them randomly at things that never needed water - like a kerb - just for the hell of it. Crazy Albanians. Maybe there was nothing on telly today. Or maybe it was another soddin' Norman Wisdom film.

I'd heard the road surfaces here were awful but so far they've been at least as good as Greece's. A bigger problem is that the roads aren't wide enough for the amount of traffic. The road from Elbasan, a major town, to Tirana, the capital, is no wider than a British country lane. And after descending back to nearly sea level it rose up again to near one thousand metres. Driving in Albania is slow going. Or it should be. They just gun it, the mad fuckers.

Once I'd got to the top of the hill I noticed a burning smell, and then I noticed smoke and bits of ash in the air, and then I noticed forest fires just metres from the side of the road. In fact, I think the road was acting as a fire break in some places. There were tons of 'em. Only little ones as yet but still. If only there'd been loads of people with hoses.

And then I descended into Tirana. There's nothing much I can say about Tirana that might make you want to come. I mean, it's not awful. Not really. The river that's marked on the map is only three metres wide and is of a similar composition to the liquid that escaped from the burst drains in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar after a sudden downpour when I was there. But if you are going to blow your disposal income on a city break then my advice would probably be - oh, I don't know - Barcelona or Prague or, well, anywhere. I'm glad I came but I will be happier to leave. Not Albania - the countryside is lovely, if bluish - but Tirana is a traffic-filled hole with little to stare at and go 'Ahhhh!' You can always watch the cars dangerously overtaking each other and go 'Arggggh!" but that's not the same.

Did you know that beards were banned in Albania for a long time? Apparently, Enver Hoxha, the Communist dictator who ruled this place for about forty years, didn't like 'em. He could probably only grow a weird, patchy, diseased-inmate one like my brother. (Just to be clear, my brother can't grow a beard. He's not a diseased inmate. Or maybe he is. I mean, I haven't spoken to him for a month or two.) And I've now got a great, big, stupid beard again. Apart from the odd bit of stubble, no one else here has a beard. I feel like a rebel.

I'm not a rebel. I'm just a pink-headed, podgy, forty-two year old who Albanian boys like to serenade. Saddo.

Stop Or The Plastic Dinosaur Will 'Ave Yer!

Some countries have been predictable. That's not necessarily an insult. Italy gave me predictably tasty pizza eight times a day. Turkey gave me predictably amiable blokes offering me glasses of tea every fifteen seconds. On the other hand, British drivers predictably wanted to drive within millimetres of me and my panniers, the inconsiderate bell ends. Other countries though are not predictable at all. In fact the only predictable thing is that something weird is about to happen.

I'd like to do a little survey. Have you ever gone through the front doors of a single hotel to find yourself in the reception of three different hotels and then had the women in charge of their respective desks start a banshee-style slanging match with each other to win your custom? Have you ever met a boxer-sized bloke with the voice of a Monty Python woman and then, ten minutes later, an old woman with the voice of Frank Bruno, clearly the outcome of some voodooistic vocal swapover? Have you ever met a man who lives under a table by a lake for half of his life, has a penchant for plastic crowns, has an underground fridge and an electronic till - though no actual electricity - and a small, plastic dinosaur as household security? I bet you said no to each of those questions. I hope you did. Well, I experienced them all in one long weekend. Welcome to Bulgaria!

You know all you need to about the pugnacious receptionists and about Mr Helium/Mrs Barry White and so I won't bore you with the details. The real star of this story in Mario.

I stopped at a tiny café near a lake fifty kilometres from Sofia. Two blokes were sat outside together, one of whom, a bearded man of about sixty, was enjoying a beer in the sun. He turned to me and asked me if I spoke English. That was odd. That's usually my question, especially in Bulgaria for which I'm lacking an MP3 language course. When I told him that not only do I speak English but I *am* English it was as though I'd given him a sudden shot of amphetamine. He stood up and danced around. He loved England, he gushed. By this point, about twenty seconds into our conversation, I'd already worked out that this beer he was slurping probably wasn't his first of the day. It might not even have been his eighth.

He continued. "I love everything about England!" Really? The weather? Nick Clegg? TOWIE? I let it slide. Y'see, Mario is a private English teacher, among other things, and wanted to practise on me. So I sat down. He bought me a coffee. And later, after our chat, when I asked if I could take a photo of him and his mate, he told me that he had better things for me to snap. And he wasn't lying.

So we went for a walk, me with camera in hand and Mario with a hole in the back of his shorts so large that I could clearly see his royal blue, bikini-style underpants. During the warmer months, he told me, he lives in Sofia for three days and then cycles the fifty kilometres to this 'house' by the lake for the rest of the week. Later I hope it will become clear why I've crowned that word with scare quotes. But we haven't got to his 'house' yet.

First we went to the hotel and bar around the corner from the café. He showed me a painting of his that he'd presented as a gift to the owner of the hotel. It was a boat on a sea and the cunning part was that the sun was a mirror. He particularly liked that bit.  He danced around a bit more. He liked dancing around.

"Look, the sun is a mirror. Look!" Yes, I've seen it.

Then he showed me his collection of windsurfing boards stored nearby. Windsurfing is his thing, y'see, and the reason why he comes to the lake. But probably also for the beer in the café.

"That's the first letter of my name, that is."

At long last we set off to his 'house'. On the way, as we walked along a country road, he told me that he would like to sing and that he was quite a good singer. But he wasn't. He launched into Rod Stewart's "We Are Sailing". If I'm honest, it's unlikely that we are going to see him in the Over 25s category of X Factor. Unless 25 is the number of bum notes you must hit per verse.

We took a turn from the road into dense woods, then down a steep banking towards the lake. "All these houses are illegal," he pointed out. We walked along a narrow path. "And here it is!" Guarding the entrance was a miniature pirate flag and a small, plastic brontasaurus.

As good as a guard dog.

OK, I thought, that's completely normal. And then we entered what I guess might be called his living room. Except that we didn't really because his house had no doors or walls or a roof or any of the things that a house usually has. What it did have was a washing line pegged with various tattered garments, a collection of tables containing the stuff that charity shops would sift and discard from their donations and a big mat, all sitting on a bit of flattened earth about ten metres up from lake shore. The assorted junk included a plastic telephone, a pretend musket and, obviously, a full-size till. "There's no electricity or running water here," he said, as though this was some sort of explanation.

"Don't forget your receipt. Oh, I'll have to plug it in. Have you got an extension lead?"

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy because he questioned the limits of what we can know. How do I know that what is happening is really happening? I could be asleep, for example. It could all be a dream. This thought occurred to me too that afternoon. If this was a dream, it was definitely a cheese dream. This was utter stilton!

Mario ran through the highlights of his abode like an estate agent hoping for a sale. He ordered me to take a photo as each feature was unveiled. I obliged, only too happy to document these events, if only to prove to myself tomorrow that they really happened.

Next to the aforementioned mat on the floor was a table. "I sleep on the mat when the weather is nice. When it's bad I sleep here." He crawled under the table exposing even more of his arse and switched on a little radio to show the entertainment system contained within. "Lovely," I said. Music was clearly important to him. He tows a small inflatable containing his radio behind him while windsurfing so that his toons aren't submerged even if he is. That's quite a good idea for a madman. I can imagine him breezing along in the summer gusts engulfed by the mellifluous tones of Patsy Cline's "Crazy".

Mario gives a tour of the master bedroom. 

Then he showed me his fridge. Remember, there's no electricity. This was another mat, under which was a lid, under which was a polystyrene box containing bottles of water, bits of fruit and vodka. He threw me an apple. It was pretty cold. His fridge was an environmentalist's dream. Even if it was Aggie MacKenzie's nightmare.

"I also have a freezer but it's on the top of that mountain over there."

Next up was a small cupboard where he kept his valuables. It contained, he said, his ID. He opened it up. It also contained a soft porn calender. I'm assuming that the porn calendar wasn't his ID otherwise he looks pretty hot with his shirt off.

"What do you mean I look nothing like my passport photo?"

Finally, he reached into the pocket of a suit jacket - for, yes, one such jacket hung from the washing line, obviously for when he was entertaining - and removed two novelty hats, one a pirate's (he clearly liked the pirate thing) and the other a small plastic crown. He modelled them both for me. As I focussed my lens on an old man with a drunkenly crooked smile and a golden, plastic crown lopsided on his head, I wondered if I might have chosen a sachet of something other than honey for my toast from the hotel buffet that morning. A sachet of LSD perhaps.

King Lear or 'King Mental?

It was all over. The demonstration was complete. In truth, Mario came across as a complete nutjob. But I've got to admire a man of advancing years who cycles a hundred kilometres each week and spends his nights under the stars, or under a table - whether that's the table in his 'house' or the hotel bar - just so that he can pursue his passion for windsurfing. As with other people I've met recently, he's living a - erm, let's call it - different life but he's clearly enjoying himself. Mario is utterly, glue-sniffingly bonkers and yet, in reality, he isn't bonkers at all. The really bonkers person is the bloke sat in his office, staring out of the window, wishing he was somewhere on a lake rather than preparing this bloody spreadsheet.

I like it that the world has Marios and I like Bulgaria by extension. I'll be very sad to leave this country tomorrow. These six days have been a lot of fun. So, guard your house with freebies from Jurassic Park Happy Meals if you like, maintain a collection of novelty plastic headwear if you must, sleep under a table if you have to but please indulge your passion, whatever it is. Good luck to you, Mario, you utter fucking fruitcake!