Danube Ride: The wrap up

I started writing this on a beautiful morning sitting on my lovely balcony at the Olympic Boutique in Constanța. As I drank my coffee a flight of fast jets (F16s I think) came roaring over the town heading out over the warships outside the harbour to patrol the Black Sea. I'd forgotten that I'm 100km from an active war zone…

Overall Thoughts on Cycling Down The Danube

Now that I've had a chance to decompress a bit from the cycling, it's time for some final impressions on this solo self-supported bike trip.

The first thing to get out of the way is that this sort of travelling is a unique and very special way of seeing other countries, other places and other peoples. It is one of my favourite ways to travel.

On a bike trip — particularly a solo bike trip — there is no insulation between you and your surroundings. Some of this comes from just being on a bike rather than a car but a lot comes from needing to be totally self-reliant. If something goes wrong there's very little stopping a small problem spiralling out of control into a crisis which can be quite daunting.

In the middle of miles and miles of bugger all, one can get daunted.

The constraints of cycling as a mode of transport weigh heavily on any planning you might do. If you're driving and you have to go an extra 100 km to get to a nicer town with a better hotel then it's not a big deal. Drive for another hour. On a bike, that extra 100 km is completely unachievable. You're constrained to stay more than 100 km from your previous stop — because riding fewer kilometres than that would brand you a terrible wimp and the trip would take forever — and less than 200 km from your previous stop — because riding more kilometres than that day-after-day is frankly insane.

As a result you are forced to stay in odd places, you meet odd people and you eat strange penis shaped food. The Kod Dzimija in Vinci is a good example of this — as a penniless student, I would have raised a sceptical eyebrow at the Kod Dzimija but, in the context of this trip, there was no alternative.

You also spend a lot of time interacting with a country in ways which you normally wouldn't on a romantic city break or a business trip. Very quickly you have to work out the human and economic geography of a place: What do supermarkets look like? Who takes debit cards? Do petrol stations have water and sweets? What's the exchange rate? Can cars turn right on a red traffic light? How likely am I to be ripped off in cafes? What are the written and unwritten rules of the road? Are crazy people going to eat me?

One thing which varies a great deal across countries is the “clumpiness” of habitation. In Romania, I could rely on there being a small village every 20k with at best a ProfiLoco with AC and takes cards or a crappy village shop with no AC and cash only. In Bulgaria or Croatia? Nothing for 100km and then a big town. This is critical to planning and your wellbeing.

This trip was the third bike trip of this type that I have done and Cambridge Warsaw and Cambridge Stockholm were both a lot easier than this one. Why? It's about dealing with the intrinsic challenges in a long distance self supported bike trip. There are four:

1. Physical. Be it the distance, the hills or the gravel, you just have to keep turning your legs for two weeks all day, every day. Your legs lose power, your hands go numb, scary twinges appear in your knees and — it has to be addressed — your…soft tissues need constant care with SudoCrem™.
2. Weather. Last year in Sweden and Germany I experienced occasional torrential rain. On this trip it was a brutal heatwave topping out at 44 degrees and regularly 40 plus for most of the day. Wind is an unknown but can transform a pleasant day into 8 hours of purgatory if it's blowing into your face.
3. Roads. In Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Holland, the cycling infrastructure is good where it exists and drivers are respectful of cyclists where it doesn't. In Poland, I'd spent a little bit of time on busy roads but mostly I was on the quiet roads which wend their way across the farmland. On this trip there were long sections where I was grovelling along the side of a 100km/h single or dual carriageway with lorries and cars skimming my left elbow, navigating what were effectively motorway junctions and scary unlit tunnels with the roaring sound of thrashed cars and amphetamine-fuelled truckers bearing down on you from behind.
4. People. Poland was interesting and the Poles were lovely, friendly and engaging people. It was new to me but not difficult. Denmark is a caricature of a stable western social democracy and it feels safe and familiar. The Balkans are not like this. At all. Whether it's the constant undercurrent of personal threat in Serbia, the mental dislocation of transliterating cyrillic, or the desolation and deprivation of Roma villages in Romania, it all adds up to a degree of mental pressure.

By definition, you're going to be coping the first challenge. That's a given since you're on a long distance bike trip. Just invoke Rule #5 and get on with it. However, on top of that, I seems clear to me that one (sorry…I) can deal with one other challenge. No problem dealing with the “otherness” of places if the weather is ok and the roads are good. No problem dealing with bad weather if the roads are good and the environment is within the Western European window. When this bike trip was firing on all four of its “cylinders of challenge” it pushed me right to my limit of resilience. A limit which I didn't know existed until I hit it.

There's something to take away from this: I'm not infinitely resilient after all. Who knew? Not me.

Along the way I jotted down some random thoughts. I was trying to use Siri and AI for this but it was useless so I just stopped and typed the notes into…the Apple Notes app. If you're not going to attempt a trip like this, you can probably skip this. There's more interesting stuff after the bullet points.

In no particular order…

• Read the history first. Finding out about the places you're going to and riding through is important. I read a lot about Balkan history and especially Romanian history before starting. I got a lot more out of the trip because I had.
• It would be hard to do this in a group. Solo riding requires a certain hardness of mental attitude but it gives you the freedom to do what you want when you want. At times I would stop three times in a couple of kilometres to take a picture. At other times I would ride for 60km without a stop. Doing this with other people would be insanely irritating for them but you need that flexibility to get the most out of a trip.
• Don't take an expensive rain jacket when it's going to be warm. I'd brought my outstandingly wonderful and eye wateringly expensive Specialized rain jacket that I'd bought in Hamburg on the previous trip. Didn't take it out once on the entire trip. I seriously considered binning it to save weight and volume but…I own bikes that were cheaper than this jacket.
• A gravel bike is the best bike. Even if your trip is going to be on roads the whole way, a road bike is not the right thing to have. By the time you've added your bean of death to the back and a handlebar bag, the bike is heavy. Roads are potholed or you're bumping your bike up and down kerbs in cities. Your hyper bike is going to be destroyed in a day.
• AirTags are your friends. I used two. One in my bike bag which enabled me to track its location as the DHL omnishambles unfolded. The second AirTag was hidden in my bike frame in case somebody stole the bike. Not sure if it would have helped but it's reassuring. It was also reassuring to my family who could track my position throughout the day.
• Take a lock but not a heavy one. Weight is absolutely everything when riding a bike. There's no point taking one of those heavy duty locks that you'd use in London or Cambridge to deter thieves. You'll just end up throwing it away on the first hill. I took a plasticised cable and a small combination lock. It wouldn't stop a Cambridge bike thief for a second but it's enough to deter some Bulgarian bike thief from jumping on my bike and riding off into the Bulgarian countryside while I am in a shop buying water.
• Take a good back light. I took lights with me but they weren't really good enough. It was only when I got to the tunnels in the Iron Gates that I realised that my back light was completely obscured by the bean saddlebag. Even outside the tunnels, modern flashing bike lights are very visible on the road from a long distance behind. On the way into Constanța, I wished I had something warning the drivers of my presence. Something to think about more carefully for next time.
• Marginal weight losses matter. When you're packing it is easy to say “oh I'll just throw in another pair of socks”. Do this sort of thing too often and you've added a couple of kilos. I thought long and hard about whether or not I would take one or two CO2 canisters in case of punctures. How many USB cables did I actually need? Do I really need to shave? What's the smallest tube of toothpaste I can take? One advantage of using the bean rather than panniers is that it enforces a certain parsimony when it comes to what you take. It's just to small to fit anything else in.
• If you're in a foreign country, spell their words correctly. If you're going to talk about things like the Ðorðe Martinović Incident get the accents right. It shows respect and it's super easy on iOS devices.
• Tyres and tools. As mentioned previously, tubeless tyres are what you need. Take a lightweight mini pump because you might have add a bit of air to the tyres occasionally. Take one inner tube just in case of catastrophic failure. Two tyre levers and a good multi tool. The one I have has a chain breaker in it and I took a couple of spare chain links. If your chain dies, you're toast.
• Duct tape. In Romania, the temperature was so high that the tape securing the bar tape to the handlebars melted and everything unravelled. Annoying but fixable because I had wrapped about 20cm of duct tape round my seat post “just in case”. Like throwing a couple of cable ties into your bag, this is an almost zero weight addition and might solve some otherwise terminal bike problem.
• SPD Pedals and Shoes. You might not be walking the walk-of-shame up a steep hill but you will be walking in towns so use the mountain-bike-style clipless pedals. Do not use race style Look cleats. They make you walk like a duck and they'll get ground down to uselessness the first time you walk the walk-of-shame up a hill. If you're thinking of trying to do a long distance trip on flat pedals, just stop thinking that now. Get clipped in. It takes about 5 minutes to get used to it and the gains in efficiency are massive. Most importantly, using flat pedals and trainers makes you look like an amateur dork.
• 4G and WiFi is now ubiquitous. Even the crappiest hotels have WiFi and even the most god-forsaken tracts of bleak farmland have 4G coverage. My phone worked perfectly. I'd bought an eSIM on line from some provider and added it to my iPad. It was completely bloody useless despite advertising that it was 20Gb of data everywhere in Europe. Just use your wifi hotspot on the phone.
• You can do everything on Apple Pay...almost. I didn't take my cards out of my wallet once. I paid for everything with Apple Pay even down to a Twix and a Coke in a ProfiLoco. However, there are always places that won't take cards and you need a little bit of cash just in case.
• Take care of your undercarriage.Without going into the gory and unpleasant details, every day one has to make sure that nothing is going to go wrong "down there". Getting a saddle sore would be the end of the trip.I used SudoCrem™. However unpleasant it is smearing it all over "down there" every morning one just has to do it. The alternative is worse.

There was something really satisfying about having the route defined by geography. “Cycling down the Danube” is so clearly constrained. It's a double edged sword though. You get taken to places you wouldn't normally go because…that's the way that Big D is going. That's often unexpected, exciting and interesting. However, you have to go on roads or to places you would normally avoid like the plague because…that's the way that Big D is going. Your choices of ways to go both for interest and for safety are very constrained. The EuroVelo folks have done the best they can — and I understand in the German and Austrian bits they have done exceptionally well — but the Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian sections of the EV6 are really sketchy. Terrifyingly so in a number of places.

Finally — in a strangely self-referential conclusion — what about writing these posts? Like last time, I took an iPad with a keyboard to write them. It's awkward to pack and it is the single heaviest thing I took not counting the bike itself but, in my view, it is worth it.

Every day when I was on the bike I would look forward to writing the posts in the evening. I would fix a “flash bulb memory” in my head of some incident, sweeping view or impressive building and then spend some time on the bike thinking about how I would write it up that evening. Writing a post every evening enabled me to feel more connected to family and friends. There was a catharsis in writing something snarky or amusing about what, at the time, had been a scary or disturbing experience. Of course, it also allowed others to vicariously, and hopefully enjoyably, participate in an extraordinary experience — but you, the reader, are the best judge of that.

Will I do this again? Yeah, probably. As is the way of things for an inexplicably self-confident middle-aged bloke who considers himself immortal, I will have forgotten the miserable bits and brushes with death in a couple of weeks. However, next time it's going to be something a bit less on-the-edge-of-death. I understand that the other leg of the EuroVelo 6 route goes from Germany through Switzerland and down the valley of the Loire to the Atlantic. That sounds nice.

Until next time…

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