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!

The Black Bag of Shame

I've mentioned in one of my recent blogs what a wizened old prune I've always been. Even as a seventeen year-old I could pass for fifty-five. Nearly. Well, I could easily buy bottles of Martini for my then-girlfriend and her mates, who were all fifteen at the time. It felt furtive but drinking the sickly sweet shite felt oh so good. Well, not drinking it, obviously, but its effect. I didn't know any better. It was the summer of 1987. My family had gone to Malta and left me alone for two weeks. What the hell else was I supposed to do with a houseful of fifteen year old girls?

Now that I'm 637 (and a half), I thought that this furtive feeling was just a distant memory. But in Turkey, "the system" reduced me to clandestine pickups of bags of booze just like the olden days. I took to downloading some vintage Terence Trent D'Arby tracks from YouTube just to make it all feel genuinely teenage again.

As far as I can see, Turkey has an odd relationship with alcohol. Although the country itself is officially secular, the vast majority of Turks are Muslims and, according to the Koran at least, Muslims don't drink. Now, Turkey is known in the west for offering a fairly relaxed sort of Islam, certainly not the kind of place that's going to stone the missus if she looks suggestively at a donkey, but does this relaxation extend to alcohol?

There are lots of establishments in Turkey that advertise the fact that they sell their expensive booze. Outside of Istanbul, restaurants rarely seem to sell it. Even those outdoor cafés that do sell it, like those in Bandirma, never had anyone visibly drinking it. Supermarkets almost never sell it either (I've seen only two that do in the whole of Turkey and one of those was in Istanbul) and neither do most corner shops. But if the bright blue logo of Turkish brand Efes or the easier-to-miss gold of Tuborg is shown around a corner shop's logo, then it's an off licence. And yet I seem to be the only person who goes into these places. Here's the procedure:

1. I walk in. The shopowner looks guilty. He never smiles (which is unusual for a Turk).

2. I walk to the beer fridge. The shopowner has already located and opened a black - always black - carrier bag.

3. If there does happen to be anyone else in the shop, especially someone under eighteen, he is now sniggering, as though I am buying a stack of Gusset Munchers porn mags or something worse, like Model Train Enthusiast.

4. The beer quickly goes into the black plastic bag and the financial transaction is carried out with the utmost haste. I leave feeling guilty for reasons I can't fathom.

The black bag

As a side note, during Ramadam (or Ramazan in Turkey) even this is not always possible because some of the off licences stop selling alcohol entirely, which sort of makes you wonder why they don't just take a month's holiday.

And so I'm puzzled. If I'm the only person buying from these shops, then how do these shops make any money? They can't just have set up with the knowledge that I'll be passing through town, lovely though that thought is. If they have, they've certainly overestimated how much I can drink, although if they reduced their price I'd be prepared to give it a go. Like I say, I'm puzzled.

UniCycle50's Facebook page now has at least five Turkish Likers. If any of you can give me more information on this topic (without incriminating yourselves if that's a possibility) then I'd love to know.

The black-bag-as-cloaking-device in itself is odd. While cycling I've popped into such an off licence and bought only a can of Coke and then you get an innocent white carrier bag (that is, if you don't tell them in time that you don't need a carrier bag for a single can of Coke), a white carrier bag that is probably hand-stitched from the hymens of a thousand virgins. So the black bag doesn't hide that you've bought some naughties; it merely highlights the fact. But maybe that's the idea. Maybe it's the black bag of shame, the mark of Cain, the Judas sack.

None of this affects me now. I've moved on to Bulgaria where the opposite is the case. This afternoon I was sat on a lovely, sunny terrace drinking a decent pint for 66p. Whereas Turkey usually sold a bottle of rubbish blended whisky for €50 (I kid you not), here a large bottle of schnapps is a tenth of the price. Alcohol here is so cheap and so plentiful that I might just end up dead in a gutter. If that happens, please would someone pop around and cover my face with the black bag of shame.