The Danube Ride

I did a daily post for the bike trip that I did down the Danube following for the most part EuroVelo 6. I have collected them all together into one page if anybody wants to read the whole trip linearly. I've done some light editing of the original posts for spelling mistakes and sorted some of the poor structuring of sentences.

Day 1: Cambridge to Cambridge

So it begins again...or, as we shall see, it really didn't begin

After the 2022 trip from Cambridge to Warsaw and the 2023 trip from Cambridge to Stockholm, it's time to do yet another pointless long distance self-supported solo bike ride. Feel free to click on the links above to get the full omnibus edition of all the blog posts for each ride. One of the favourite posts is the one where I ate a Swedish family's breakfast and got into a bit of trouble.

After discarding a lot of alternatives which in retrospect probably would have been better choices, I decided to cycle down the Danube from Vienna to the Black Sea. This was going to be somewhat more challenging than the previous two rides. Countries like Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria are not maybe quite as cycle friendly (or indeed friendly) as Denmark, Holland and Germany. Logistics planning was tough, the places with accommodation were few and far between, and the temperatures were going to be brutally high.

The first logistical challenge was working out how to get a bike to the start line since I'm obviously not cycling to Vienna before starting and then how to get my bike back from the finish point. Endless variations of flights, shipping methods, hotels were minutely analysed but eventually I settled on shipping my bike bag to a hotel in Bucharest and taking my bike to Vienna in a disposable bike box.

I managed to source a cardboard bike box from the incomparable Primo Cycles in Cambridge. Thanks Stephen! If you ever need to buy a bike in Cambridge go and talk to Stephen. He's got an amazing stock of outstanding bikes and is exceptionally knowledgable.

The only downside of travelling like this was that I had to go to the airport in my appalling non-cycling clothes. Admittedly, I was flying from Stansted and flying RyanAir is already pretty appalling and therefore appalling clothing would fit right in.

I was at Stansted (which is truly the worst of the London airports) bright and early at 7am ready to do battle with the Ryanair check-in folks.

Trying to hide my appalling trousers and shoes made of chemicals

Much to my surprise, there were no queues, the bike box was accepted without a murmur and I sent it off down the "outsized baggage" belt with a cheery wave. "Next time I see you bike box we will be in Vienna airport together" I optimistically thought. Security was quiet, I found a quiet seat in a coffee bar and generally chilled. What could possibly go wrong?

It turns out quite a lot could go wrong. The flight was delayed from 09:10 to 09:40. Ho hum, these things happen. Then it was delayed from 09:40 to 13:45. I was looking at spending 6.5 hours in Stansted which is not something I would wish on an enemy but I could cope. I had films on my iPad, I had emails to do and I could tough it out. Stansted had gradually got very busy indeed but as long as I didn't need to go for a wee in the next 6 hours, I had a seat. Predictably, I needed a wee pretty soon (see the previous mention of coffee) and as I stood up, my comfy seat was pounced upon by two disputatious families who were still squaring up to each other as I left.

I sought out the Ryanair customer service desk which was cunningly hidden behind signs which said things like "if you pass this sign you will be eaten by a tiger" and "Ebola risk ahead". The two people behind the desk set new Olympic records for dismissiveness and indolence but I did manage to prise two bits of information from them.

• The flight was definitely going at 13:45
• There was a website address which I could use to ask for compensation.

The lady lugubriously informed me "almost nobody gets compensation because we make it pretty difficult". Although Ryanair's booking website is pig ugly, it is very slick. However, their complaints and compensation website was written by a summer intern sometime in 1996 and doesn't work. At all. I said quite a lot of rude works about Michael O'Leary for a while.

After exhausting my rich vocabulary of insulting epithets, the flight board flickered and my 13:45 flight was now leaving at 18:30. I was now looking at spending 12 hours in Stansted. This is also doable but at the cost of some significant damage to my airy and phlegmatic mein. Another problem was that I had packed my phone charger and iPad charger in my bike bag so I needed to go and spend £30 to get a charger because they wouldn't last 12 hours.

I walked out of the overpriced travel accessories store clutching my charger and glanced over at the departures board. Now my flight was leaving at 23:30.

Yes, that is a 14 hour delay...

I'm afraid that was that. Arriving in Vienna at 02:40 in the morning, trying to build my bike, get to the hotel and then get up at 6am for one of the longest days on the trip was going to be impossible. I needed to get out of the airport get my bike box back from baggage handling somehow.

It turns out that this happens quite a lot. Here's what you do: you go to some secret door near the toilets, you explain your predicament to a bored security guard who lets you back into the arrivals hall where you ask yet another disinterested and dismissive Ryanair operative to find your bike box somewhere in the bowels of Stansted and send it back up the big luggage belt.

Much to my surprise the bag appeared at the top of the belt in about 20 minutes.

Me looking pretty grumpy

Why am I looking so grumpy? Because my bag remained inaccessible for another 30 minutes. Security guards shouted at me when I tried to climb on the belt. I bet they weren't looking at a 14 hour delayed flight.

So so near yet so far...for 30 bloody minutes

Just to bring the whole thing to an appropriate close, the Stansted taxi company could definitely take me back to Cambridge but only if I waited for two hours (or maybe more: they weren't very clear on this). The red mist of bloody-mindedness descended at this point so I ran to the railway station wrestling my 17kg bike box all the way, bought a ticket and then found out that the Cambridge train was....cancelled.

Eventually, a combination of a couple of trains, a few changes which were made especially irritating and awkward with the aforementioned giant bike box, I made it back to Cambridge.

Nine hours after I left home...I was home again

It's hard to overestimate how much of a giant pain in the bum this ws. Hotels had been booked along the way. Changing them was going to be both difficult and expensive. I needed to find another flight to...somewhere...do some rerouting on the Garmin...rebook hotels...but...now I was home at least I had working internet which not something that Stansted managed. I headed out to do some travelling on the information superhighway.

[Some time passed...]

It was sorted. I got a flight to Budapest tomorrow with BA. Business class and the last available ticket. I could have bought five of my very first car for the same money — my first car did only cost £150. I was about to start rebooking and rerouting when daughter #2 made a great suggestion. Why not get a taxi to the place I had planned to stay tomorrow night (Komárom)? In the end, much cheaper than rebooking new hotels.

In summary, today was the worst start to any trip I have ever done in my entire life. It's just fortunate that I'm such a relaxed and phlegmatic kinda guy.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. It couldn't be worse.

Day 2: Cambridge to Budapest

Remember how I said that today couldn't be worse than yesterday? I spoke too soon. This is a long story very short due to an extreme level of grumpiness.

I got to Heathrow Terminal 5 without problems but unfortunately my flight was leaving from Terminal 3. There was a massive rush getting to T3 which looked like a war zone. I got my bike checked, got to lounge for a quick coffee before rushing to the gate and getting on the plane. I'm done. Hurrah. What could possibly go wrong?

Flight delayed 2 hours. Annoying but not terminal to my plans for tomorrow. Landed in Budapest and when I switched on my phone, I received this:

This is terminal for my plans tomorrow.

My bag was still in London. In fact it was here and, according to BA, would arrive in Budapest at 1:40am tomorrow.

Thanks a lot British Airways

I've found a hotel in Budapest. I had no phone/iPad charger, no toothpaste and toothbrush, no clothes except the ones I was standing up in. Note to self: plan for this stuff and don't pack everything in your bike box.

Tomorrow was supposed to be my first cycling day but tomorrow was now about going back out to the airport, picking up the bike at some point and maybe riding to…Budapest where I was going to spend the day hanging out and cursing British Airways and RyanAir. In effect the first two days of my meticulously planned trip were hosed. Second note to self: don't meticulously plan trips.

Sometimes when bad things are happening on these bike trips like this the thing that makes them bearable is that you know that readers of the blog are going to find the trials and tribulations both entertaining and amusing. I'm afraid that doesn't apply today. I had a major sense-of-humour failure today.

Day 3: Budapest to Budapest

Yesterday was a bad day and I ended up being a bit dispirited and grumpy and even a couple of glasses of mediocre wine in the Alice Hotel's bar didn't really revive my spirits. Two long days of stress and worry don't make for a very good night's sleep and at 4:55am I woke up and checked the Apple AirTag which is in my bike box. The bike was in Budapest Airport! Things were looking up although, from where I was yesterday, there was nowhere for things to look down to.

A restrained breakfast — by long distance cyclist standards — fortified me for the day ahead. I took an Uber back out to the airport and, to be clear, IAG will be seeing the receipt for this trip in due course along with the taxi into Budapest last night, the cancelled hotel in Komárom, the hotel last night and probably the receipt for the couple of glasses of mediocre wine. I arrived at…Arrivals and set about the convoluted process of getting back into the baggage hall to get my bike box.

There was a slightly tense stand off between me and some armed guards when I attempted to get back into the baggage reclaim hall by walking through the doors but eventually they gestured with their sub-machine guns and I slunk past their stony and well-armed gaze.

Oh, there you are!

I think I may have blubbed a tiny bit when I saw that the bike really had arrived.

Now was not the time for inappropriate displays of emotion. I'd decided that I was bored of lugging around a big box on public transport and therefore I was going to make up the bike in the arrivals hall and cycle back into Budapest just to convince myself (and others) that this really was a cycling holiday.

This is about 30 minutes in real time.

Then it was time to change into my cycle gear in the fetid surroundings of a cubicle in the airport toilets and I was ready to actually 🎵get on my bike and ride🎵 — thanks Freddy Mercury.

First smile for a while

I pushed my bike out of the airport, through the throngs of happy travellers, and attempted to find a way out of the airport which wasn't a 6 lane motorway. Next time you're in an airport try to work out how you might get out of the airport without a car. It's not very easy to be honest.

A few forays down pedestrian walkways ended badly “ooops, sorry madam, I seem to have ridden over your child on her Trunkie” However, eventually, as if by magic, there was a cycle path.

It's like bloody Holland mate

I cycled past the saddest aviation museum in the world. A bunch of rusty old Magyar Airways Tupolevs and a tumbled down radar antenna which appears, if you zoom in, to be made by Tesla. Given the poor construction quality of the antenna, it really probably was made by Tesla.

We're not in Duxford now Toto

The nice Dutch-level cycling infrastructure lasted 2 km before I was unceremoniously dumped onto a busy and creatively-potholed side road.

Yes, we're back to normality for bike trips

I know that the outskirts of any city are a bit run down, especially so near an airport, but this was a very run down area. Strange shops appeared in the middle of desolate fields. I saw a lightbulb shop next to an ancient tailor with no other buildings within a kilometer. Who are their customers? Is it people who say “Oh Gabor, since we're on our way back from the airport, why don't we pick up a 100W lightbulb for the kitchen and while we're at it you can get that polyester suit with the wide lapels that you've been wanting since 1972”. It was all very odd.

My belief is that the strange mixture of businesses comes about because of the sudden flowering of capitalism after the communism ended. People thought “right, capitalism is here, I'm going to open a light bulb shop right here and make my fortune”. The retail sorting that, over time, aggregates similar types of businesses who have similar types of customers just didn't happen and so one gets startlingly heterogeneous retail areas. “Wow, if we need some power tools, a pram and a spray tan, this is the place!”

The journey was worryingly dangerous. Normally when I'm doing this sort of thing, I've got time to get my eye in when it comes to junctions, cars, road furniture before braving the rigours of a major city. Today I was thrown straight in at the deep end. Cars, lorries, buses, trams, scooters: every one of them in a big hurry to get somewhere and not terribly concerned about the wobbly cyclist avoiding the potholes and the tram tracks which greedily suck the unwary front tyre into their destructive jaws.

In the centre, Budapest is pleasant and up and coming city but, as I rode into it through the doughnut of decay that rings all ex-communist cities, the scars of the old architecture are still there. Occasionally I saw a new glass and steel building squatting amidst the Stalinesque apartment blocks like an abandoned sci-fi spaceship after an unsuccessful search for intelligent life but mostly it's old apartment blocks painted in primary colours sometime in the 1990s.

\

Calling a building Block 163 has a strong Airstrip One vibe.

The cycling infrastructure started to return and the buildings got grander and then there was the Danube. I'll be seeing a lot of this river over the next 10 or 15 days and so it was quite emotional to finally get to the river after the last two days of travel omnishambles.

Given that this is still over 1000 miles from the Black Sea this is a big river

I rode across the famous Széchenyi Chain Bridge built originally in 1849 which is a copy of the bridge in Marlow over the Thames. It was blown up in 1945 and endless cycles of destruction and reconstruction are a recurring theme in this part of the world. Rebuilt in 1949 by heroic workers of the socialist revolution, it is very impressive.

On the way through the fancier streets of Pest I saw a caricature of a Hungarian cafe and stopped for early lunch. Since it was a caricature of a Hungarian cafe, it was only appropriate that I had a caricature of a Hungarian lunch. Gulaschsuppe and a beer.

Do you have Gulyásleves? Of course you do.

Fully lunched up in a culturally appropriate way, I returned to the Alice Hotel and had a stand-off with the strange manageress regarding whether or not I could take my bike to my room. Eventually I had to deploy my Angry Eyes™ when she suggested that I could leave the bike outside the hotel chained to a hedge. My bike ended up in my room. Angry Eyes™…1, weirdo manageress…0.

It was really nice to actually do some cycling. The bike seemed in good shape and no parts of my body fell off during the ride so I was feeling confident in starting the big rides tomorrow.

After a couple of hours of fruitless discussions with DHL Express — who frustratingly are not the same as DHL e-commerce or DHL Romania — about why my the bike bag which is going to Bucharest is still stuck in East Midlands airport I could feel my bonhomie evaporating. I decided to deal with this drama later. Or rather, I decided to phone the wildly expensive ending hotel I had booked in Bucharest and get them to sort it out. It was time to go and explore Budapest.

I had only been in Budapest twice: once in 1990 just after communism imploded and a couple of times in the mid-nineties when I was attempting to sell financial toxic waste prudent risk management energy hedges to the Hungarian National Oil Company. I was excited to find out how things have changed in 30 years and, spoiler alert, the answer is “a lot” and “not so much” depending on where you look.

It's traditional on these trips that I find some weird and wonderful museums to go to. Those of you who liked that sort of stuff on previous trips are going to be thrilled.

First up was the Terror Háza. This is a multimedia exploration of Hungary in the 1930s, the German Occupation and then the communist period. It's a bit of a random mess but not in a charming way and the narrative flow is not helped by being effectively monolingual in Hungarian. Also…and I have to be careful here…there are certain aspects of Hungary's conduct between 1933 and 1945 over which a veil of silence is drawn.

Endless photographs of victims brings it all vividly into focus.

This museum is probably worth going to see. The dungeons in the basement are a sobering reminder of just how many people were killed by two brutally repressive regimes. I have read ahead on the history of the cities and towns along the Danube. Budapest is just one of many towns and cities which suffered.

But it was time for some light relief and something I'd been looking forward to for months. The Elektrotechnikai Múzeum.

This museum is a mess but in an exceptionally charming way. I bought a ludicrously cheap ticket from a giant woman in a tiny wooden booth and she directed me to her colleague who was a submicroscopic bird-thin nonogenarian with arthritis in her hips. It turned out that she would be my guide round the insanely wonderful random displays of crazy electrical shit.

I was warned not to go anywhere without my guide and, given that the museum is on three well-spaced floors, progress was very slow. We would wheeze up stairs stopping every couple of steps and, having reached a display, Skeletor's Grandmother would collapse into a chair while I wandered around making appreciative noises about rare 1906 vacuum tubes. I honestly wondered what I would do if she popped her clogs while I was investigating an early innovative electrostatic generator…

A sequence of photographs is all I can do to try and capture the strange madness of the Electrotechnikai Múzeum.

Look, lots of ancient radios

A big copper switch

Dunno what this is but boy is it electrical!

Early washing machines. Don't knock them, they're a significant contributor to women's emancipation.

What? Switches through the ages? I thought I was geeky…

Unsurprisingly maybe, I was the only visitor but if you're in Budapest, just go. It's brilliant.

It was a short walk from the museum to the For Sale Pub. It's well worth a visit and it has good beer and a quite unique atmosphere. They allow patrons to post any for sale notices (or indeed any paper) anywhere in the bar. There's straw on the floor and you throw the shells from the free peanuts anywhere you like. It is a screaming fire-hazard in almost every way but it was rammed and fun.

Fire!

There was one more place to go but it was a long walk away in Buda. As I'm sure everybody knows, Budapest was formed from two cities. Pest which is on the left bank of the Danube, is flat with a broadly grid layout and Buda which is on the right bank of the Danube and is hilly and feels a bit like Prague or something. Buda feels Waitrose. Pest is Sainsbury's…or maybe Aldi in the worse sections.

Unfortunately the bit of Buda I wanted to get to was 4 km away from the For Sale Pub and up a big hill.

It's over the river and a long way past this hill.

I gamely trudged along the river and up the endless steps to the cathedral on the top of the hill.

This is an impressive building.

This wasn't my final destination. There's a whole series of labyrinths underneath the hill which have been used for thousands of years and which once held the original Dracula — of whom we will hear more of later in this trip.

I got to the labyrinths hot ‘n' sweaty ‘n' tired only to find out that they only took cash. Who running a tourist attraction in 2024 only takes cash? Tax evaders, that's who.

I'd done enough so headed back to the hotel for a snooze and then decided that, after my run in with the crazy manageress, it would be best to avoid the Hotel Alice food.

This was a much much better day than the previous two. I got my bike, did some cycling, did some sightseeing and lanced the boil of frustration and anger which had been building.

Tomorrow is the first proper day. More than 150 km down the Danube to a small town called Kalosca. I'm staying at the "Club Haus 502" which is likely to be as bad as its name suggests. The choices for hotels on this trip are limited.

Day 4: Budapest to Kalocsa

The first proper day of the trip turned out to be fairly challenging but I will save the most challenging bits for later.

I'd eaten at a quirky and tiny Hungarian/Jewish restaurant called the M Restaurant in the run-down side of Pest. It could be unfairly characterised as paprika flavoured kosher, but it was delicious and I would definitely recommend it.

Up bright and early for the first day, I bounced down to breakfast only to have yet another run in with the scary manageress. She really objected to me filling my water bottles from the…water machine which produces infinite amounts of chilled filtered water for…nothing.

Four star hotels really are the “uncanny valley” of hospitality. In some cases like, say, the Kitzhof in Kitsbühel, they are stylish and luxurious but with a little iconoclastic twist. In cases like the Alice Hotel in Budapest, they're weird and clearly only holding on to their four star rating by their fingertips. Similar price to the luxurious ones obviously. Tonight's hotel, the Club Haus 502 in Kalocsa, is a three star hotel and, as I write this, I can say that they're holding on to that third star very tenuously. But more of that later.

Anyway, after reloading my Angry Eyes™ and filling my bottles I had my breakfast of two bread rolls, cheese, ham and three cups of Americano with an added double espresso in each. I waved a cheery goodbye to surly manageress and took the, now traditional, photo of the bike.

Nice bike you've got there. Check out the tan sidewalls!

Budapest was quiet and beautifully sunny as I cruised down to the Danube on a beautiful Sunday morning. People were out walking their dogs and sitting on the pavements sipping coffee or maybe having gulaschsuppe…who knows?.

The first part of the route through Budapest followed the banks of the Danube which looked particularly fine in the cool early morning,

If tan sidewalls are good enough for Tadej Pogačar, they're good enough for me.

Just before I crossed back over the Danube, I saw my first Eurovelo 6 sign! It was like seeing an old friend after a long time. Those of you who have read this blog on previous trips will know that I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Eurocrats at Eurovelo but what they have done is an amazing achievement. 14 trans-European routes mapped out and, in most places, signed. Like Sustrans in the UK but…bigger.

Not quite sure what's going on in the background…

The Eurovelo maestros had done their best to get a scenic route out of Budapest but it's not easy to find quiet roads in the suburbs of major European cities. There were some unpleasant cobbled bits and strange sections of rutted paths.

Eastern European cobbled streets. My “soft tissues” remember you from 2022.

The route wound its way through the Budapest suburbs taking some extremely strange turns up through some single track paths, what appeared to be somebody's back garden and fly tipping dump.

This is the cycle superhighway to the Black Sea

It was complex, tough, commando-style cycling. One has to be perpetually “on it” to avoid hitting the sand ruts and falling off. As I had discovered with Eurovelo 2, the route designers really really hate going on roads and will do almost anything to avoid them.

WTAF? These holes are a foot deep. Christ knows what it's like when it rains.

Progress was slow and the temperature started rising. What had been a cool and clear morning turned into a thermonuclear day. Eventually the Eurovelo 2 planners ran out of joke paths to send me down and I got on some vaguely proper roads — modulo the Eastern European potholes — and I started to make some decent time.

Along the river, there were boat clubs and those strange sports clubs from the communist era which I associate with people injecting drugs into unwilling teenage athletes. Although the roads were better than the rutted tracks, there were endless speed bumps (which are signed) and endless root bumps (which sadly are not).

The town of Ráckeve was the first place that I could stop and despite the three triple strength Americanos in the morning, I really felt the need for some caffeine. It was about then that I realised that it was a Sunday and not many places would be open. Luckily Ráckeve is a bit of a tourist hotspot (well…relatively anyway) and there was a little coffee shop that sold espressos and radioactive slush puppies. I had one of each.

My tongue turned this colour too.

Ráceve isn't actually on the Danube, it's on an offshoot called the Ráckevie (Soroksári) and the giant river which I'd been tracking on my left was just a little minor river in Danube terms. It was bloody enormous.

As I crossed the offshoot, I was back on the mainland and spent an hour cycling along gravel paths which were access roads to holiday homes. Each home had its own fishing jetty on the Ráckevie and I must have passed about 250 of them. Most were protected with scary signs in Hungarian but I did trespass on one of them to take this picture.

Ok, enough with the jokes about tan walled tyres

When the Ráckevie rejoined the Danube, I lost sight of the river because, of course, the real estate along the river is pretty valuable and therefore people build a lot of holiday houses and don't want sweaty cyclists cycling in front of their expensive view.

As the road swung away from the Danube, I was going through a tiny no-name village when a giant 200kg guy swung out in front of me on a tiny scooter. Some quick emergency braking avoided a collision but as his 50cc engine strained to accelerate to 25km/h, I realised that I was going to be stuck behind this guy in a miasma of badly combusted 2 stroke fuel and body odour. I stuck it out for 10 minutes and then just stopped in a bus shelter to give my olfactory organs a bit of a rest.

The Danube has flood dykes on either side. They're between 5m and 10m high, set quite a long way back from the river, and I had read that much of this route would be on top of these dykes. Soon after the smelly guy incident, I was directed up onto the dyke and things really started looking good. Of course, this wouldn't last.

Things are looking good!

The tarmac road lasted for 500m and then this appeared.

Ah, a this is a lot more challenging.

Yes, most of the flood dykes have farm tracks on top of them and this was the Eurovelo 6 route. Why was I not surprised?

It's hard to convey how difficult it is riding on this stuff so I stupidly tried to take a video. It's hard enough riding on this stuff with two hands and concentrating 100% on the two metres in front of your wheel. Taking a video is…foolish.

It was like this. For a very very long time.

I started being reasonably careful and keeping my speed down but after a while, I threw caution to the wind. Me and Tom Pidcock, living on the bleeding edge of off-road performance. To be perfectly honest, I bounced around a bit more but I can't honestly say I went faster. If the rest of this route to the Black Sea has a lot of this stuff in it, I was going to have to seriously rethink how far I can go in a day.

40 kilometres of this later (which to put it in context is about 2.5 hours of riding at the speed you can go on rutted gravel and grass) I was pretty done.

I pulled off the EV2 and went into Dunavesce for something to drink and maybe something to eat.

I looked like this dog. But less hairy.

There was only one restaurant open and so that was the choice. No menu in any language other than Hungarian but Google Translate came to my rescue. It turns out that “Kérhetnék egy nagy kólát, egy üveg vizet és egy csirkesalátát” means “can I have a large coke, a bottle of water and a chicken salad”.

Now is the time to mention how absolutely bonkers Hungarian is. It's one of those languages like Basque and Finnish which appears to have no relationship to any of the major language groups in Europe. Even if you don't speak French or German or Spanish, there's always a few things that you can work out but even loan words don't make any sense. It seems that it's vaguely related to the language which became Persian at some point in the 1st millennium BC but it is very very strange.

Whilst I wasn't in any particular rush today, I really didn't expect to wait 55 minutes for a chicken salad. One of the problems with not speaking the language is that it's very very hard to be mildly annoyed. You don't want to sit there like a dork but also you don't want to get super angry because god knows what the chef will do to your salad. So I sat there like a dork.

It took 55 minutes to make this. I can make this salad in 10.

I had prepaid the bill. It took me 5 minutes to eat my rather poor and small salad and then I jumped on the bike and headed off for the afternoon feeling like a dork for wasting an hour. If I could be arsed, I would give them a one star review on Trip Advisor but life is too short.

The gravelly, grassy track section seemed to be over for today and on my way out of Dunavesce I saw my first Eurovelo 6 compañeros. A family of four laden down with way too much luggage. I'd like to say that I slowed down and engaged them in cheery and supportive conversation about where they came from, their EV6 experiences so far, where they were going etc., but, that would have required an complete personality transplant. I powered past them and failed to avoid sneering at their huge amount of luggage and dilatory pace.

I might not be able to overtake a fat boy on a scooter but these guys I can take.

I could see ahead that the road climbed up on top of the dyke again but, praise be, they had tarmaced the top of the dyke. This was going to be better cycling. Well it would have been had the temperature not topped out at 36 degrees and I was starting to seriously regret not putting on sun screen in the morning.

This would have been glorious cycling if I hadn't been quite so hot and desiccated.

About 30 km of baking hot tarmac and relentless sun was…wearing. Even when the route slipped back down onto the road, I didn't really feel like I was powering along. I had water in my water bottles but it was now about the temperature you would use to wash dishes.

The kilometres ticked down very slowly on the way into Kalocsa. Even the appearance of one of those slightly disturbing sculptures made out of a hay bale didn't cheer me up.

This is creepy.

And then it was done. As I circled round Kalocsa, the podcast series I had been listening to finished. Perfect timing.

I've been listening to the 11th Series of Revisionist History. In this series Gladwell is doing the Berlin Olympics. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I was surprised that the story I thought I knew about the Berlin Olympics wasn't really true and weaving the story around this Olympics and the previous LA Olympics is the theme of how does Olympic sport deal with systematic prejudice in member states. Just listen to it.

I found the Club 502. It was shut, locked up and I was hot, dusty, tired and dehydrated. I had been dreaming of a cold beer in the bar for about three hours.

I banged on the door, I cursed the sky and generally behaved a little badly. However, hiding in the corner of the window was a small card which said “nyisd ki” and a telephone number. Thanks again to Google Translate, I worked out that this was “open” and I phoned the number and a woman answered. I was polite and restrained. Between her non-existent English and my non-existent Hungarian, she worked out that I was outside and came to get me.

The Club 502 is just in the three star zone. The proprietoress is slightly scatty, the rooms are…basic, there is no heated towel rail and only one towel. But…they have beer.

Two big bottles of beer sorted out a lot of my dehydration problems

A bunch of cycle kit to wash, one towel and no towel rail suggests that tomorrow will be a moist affair for the first hour or so.

There's almost nothing open in Kalocsa so I chose the only open place which is this pizza joint.

Not very promising

I sat there for an hour. Maybe today was Serve The Foreigners Incredibly Slowly Day. How does it take 60 minutes to make a Pizza Diavola? It was nice to have time to write the blog but…Christ. When one is suffering from a 3,500 calorie deficit, one's temper gets a little frayed.

Anyway, the pizza finally arrived. It was food and I needed food but the pizza was oily in the way that The Isles of Scilly were oily after the Torrey Canyon. I ate my oil-slick pizza. Such is the life of a long-distance cyclist. If I could be arsed, I would have given it a one star review on TripAdvisor.

I was getting a bit worried about tomorrow. It was going to be the longest day on the trip (203km), it was going to be hot and I wasn't that confident that the Club 502 is going to produce breakfast at 7am. Could I have done another 50k today? Maybe. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Stats:

• Distance 😊145km
• Average Speed 😕 21.2km/h — A game of two halves. Much of it at 15km/h, some of it at 25km/h due to the nice tail wind.
• Bike 😊 Worked really well. On tarmac, perfect and handled the off-road stuff with aplomb.
• “Contact points” 😣. Hands, feet, err…soft tissues…all taken a bit of a beating today unfortunately. Tomorrow is going to be…painful.

Day 5: Kalocsa to Vukovar

This was a brutally hard day for a variety of reasons. By the end I was sore, scared, dehydrated and tired. If I could have teleported myself to Bucharest I would have.

However, the day started well. My cycling gear had dried enough that they didn't actually drip when I put them on which is a strong result in my book. The breakfast at the Club 502 was slightly funky but the waiter mainlined endless strong black coffee into me which made the food taste better and also made my eyeballs vibrate.

The route would take me back to the Danube and along it on the left bank for a while before crossing the Danube at Mohacs and working cross country to Osijek and Vukovar. On the way to the Danube from Kalocsa, it was cool (7am helps) and the tree lined road was beautiful in the early morning sun. Sadly, all the black coffee meant that I had to stop pretty quickly and nip behind one of the trees.

One of these lovely trees was defiled.

As soon as I reached the Danube I was directed by the shadowy EuroVelo 6 designers back up onto the flood dyke and it was yet another gravel path.

Oh pants

Today was going to be a long long day and I really didn't need more of this gravelly crap. That being said, complaining about it wasn't going to get me to Vukovar so I fired up my indomitable will and just got on with it. 30 km on gravel gives you ample opportunity to become acquainted with the subtle differences between different types of surface on a gravel ride. There's the “nice gravel” which is mainly small 1cm stones embedded in sand and on this surface you can whizz along at a reasonable speed. There's “sand” which, when you hit it at speed, grabs your front wheel and you wobble about like a Weeble. And then there's the type of gravel which I like to call “death nuggets”. Big massive stones the size of cricket balls carelessly tossed into emerging pot holes. There were some scary encounters with death nuggets.

The kilometres slowly ticked down. On my left were the endless fields of maize and sunflowers stretching to the rapidly heating up horizon. On my right was the riparian forest which sits between the dykes and the river presumably to stabilise the ground in the event of a flood. I saw a couple of deer and a red kite dive-bombing a rabbit. It was like the Serengeti.

After what seemed like a very long time the EV6 folks (or maybe the Hungarian Government) decided to stick some asphalt on top of the gravel and my speed practically doubled. The scenery didn't change. Riparian forest on the right, fields on the left.

It was like this for a long long time. Geodesic straight.

I'd planned a quick stop in Baja to pick up some liquids and it turned out to be a lovely little place with cafes along shore the little arm of the Danube that comes through here. Sailing boats, people on their holidays and a really lovely vibe.

Unless I tell you otherwise, this is what I have at every stop.

Like everywhere in Hungary, it took way too long to serve me one coffee, two cokes, a bottle of water and some ice. I wasn't in a rush (yet) so my blood pressure didn't rise too much.

The geography is pretty confusing around here with all the various arms and tributaries of the Danube but after some aimless wandering I found the bit of the route I wanted and crossed this very cool bike bridge.

Nice cycling infrastructure Hungary

There was a combination of asphalt on the dykes and some roads so I arrived in Mohacs precisely on time to get the Ferry. The ferry is about 700 years old and moves at a glacial pace.

Ferry Across the Danube (sing that one Gerry and the Pacemakers!)

There was an ice cream shop at the top of the disembarkation ramp in Mohacs and I got my fix of Nestea and lemon sorbet. Top tip: pour the Nestea into the lemon sorbet for a lemony treat. Ok, ok...I suspect my critical faculties when it comes to food aren't fully functional but I loved it.

About to create some Heston Blumental level magic…

Very soon after this, I ended up cycling on top of a dyke but with the riparian trees on the left and the fields on the right. A shocking innovation but here I was…on the right bank of the Danube. It was an asphalted path which makes everything ok.

This part of the route is also part of Eurovelo 13 which follows the Iron Curtain from Finland to Bulgaria. Tim Moore's book The Cyclist Who Went Out In The Cold” is his story of cycling the full 9000 km on 1970s East German shopper bike. I blame Mr Moore for turning me on to these stupid cycling trips but I thoroughly recommend the book. It is very funny.

Two EV routes in one!

My podcast app had stopped working so it was time to break out music. It is well known that music adds 5km/h to your speed and 50W to your power. I started tearing along the dyke singing at the top of my voice without fear of anybody hearing me because this is a very very lightly peopled place.

For the full experience, watch the video. This is what it was like pretty much all the way from Mohacs.

Turn your sound up!!

It wasn't all Dad Rock. I listened to guitar boy bands (I guess Busted are probably Dad Rock too by now), a complete mix of 1970s funk disco and two albums of Ashley McBride.

Right at the end of the video you will see me cycling past some important looking signs. Yes, they were important, EV6 left the dyke at this point and headed away from the Danube for some cross country fun on real roads.

Like this one.

Bowel loosening fun.

I was heading towards the border between Hungary and Croatia -- or Hrvatska as it is correctly known.

It was a little bit of a bittersweet moment as I came closer to the border. This was supposed to be my third border of the trip. Austria to Slovakia then Slovakia to Hungary but thanks to Michael O'Leary, that didn't happen.

Ugly remnants of a different time.

Of course, Hungary and Croatia are both in the Schengen zone so I pootled through the border without any hassle at all. Schengen is great. We should be part of it…oh wait.

A happy man at a border

Just after the border, the odometer clicked over to 100km done and just over 100km to go. It was already 1pm and it was getting hot. I know that it looks cloudy but even with the cloud it was pushing 34C for most of the day.

The rest of the day was going to be on roads — although at this point I didn't know just how terrifying the roads were going to be.

Let's hope it's not a Klein Bottle village! Obligatory maths joke.

Very soon after this, it wasn't the topology I was worrying about, it was the topography. After a very long period of flatness as far as the eye could see, a line of hills appeared on the horizon. After the pan flat Great Hungarian Plain, this looked like the Col de Tourmalet to me.

What are these strange lumpy things in the distance?

As the hill started, I passed another Eurovelo 6 compañero. The fool was carrying about 25kg of gear on his bike and at least 20kg round his waist. I put the hammer down and smoothly swept by him. I would soon regret burning a few of my limited supply of energy doing this.

This is not classy long distance cycling.

The road almost immediately branched off onto a tiny but well tarmaced mountain road. The previous two days have been so flat that I have not bothered the four easiest gears on the bike. There was dust on the cogs. Those cogs were in for a shock.

The gradient got steeper, I started struggling and I slammed the bike into the “granny gear. It got steeper again. I would struggle on 14% with no luggage and fresh legs. With the bean of doom on the back and 120 km already in my legs today I was finished. I walked the walk-of-shame.

Nice surface, shame about the gradient.

At least the bloke I had powered past at the bottom didn't catch me up. That would have been humiliating. As I struggled up the hill, I looked forward to the downhill, foolishly as it would turn out. At the summit, the EV6 sign pointed down here.

You are joking!

This was marked as an unpaved path but it was just the margin of a field. It was hard enough on the flat bit at the top but once it tipped downwards at a white knuckle enducing 15%, I was holding on for dear life as the bike slithered around under me. It would have been difficult on a full mountain bike. It was right at the limit of what a gravel bike can do. Everything hurt. Hands, feet…and my "other bits".

When I finally got onto some tarmac I was shaking. I still had 70 km to go, 30 km to Osijek and I was running on fumes.

As I followed the route, the next turning was down another farm track. I said a lot of exceptionally rude words. Checking the map it turned out that if I followed the busy main road straight to Osijek it would cut 10 km off the route. Suddenly 203 km had become 193 km.

These were not pleasant kilometres. The roads were undulating, the traffic was busy. I finally made it into Osijek but my routing was messed up and I ended up manhandling the bike up three flights of stairs to get onto the bridge across yet another tributary of the Danube.

Osijek looked nice but I was running out of time. I had 40 km to go and that seemed inconceivable to me in my current state. Sadly the route I was going to take was…unavailable.

Fuck

On my way out of Osijek attempting to reconnect with the EV6 route, I saw a sign saying “Vukovar 30km”. I could save another 10 km by taking the route on the D2.

I was committed to this route before the penny dropped. A road with a small number is going to be an important big road and so it turned out to be. Whilst the D2 is not a motorway, it's a very fast and very straight main arterial road between Croatia and Serbia. I had a choice, backtrack to Osijek and try to find the longer but safer route or just screw my courage (or foolishness) to the sticking place and do the fast, scary and dangerous route. It's a sign of how completely empty I was that I chose the stupid option.

I had 30 km on this terrifying road. Obviously no music since big articulated lorries were coming past at 100 km per hour. There were cars coming even faster and ff there was traffic coming in the other direction both the lorries and the cars used this as an opportunity to get as close as possible to the cyclist hugging the white line on the right.

In retrospect I'm surprised I survived.

I stopped occasionally to get my heart rate back under control. All that off-road stuff has made my lovely bike very dirty. As I would find out when I washed my kit and my body this evening, both were also this dirty.

Sad

With only 10 km to go I found a garage and reloaded on liquids and sugar. Normally when it's 10 km to go I get a little spurt of energy and joy. This was joyless ground-state-energy cycling.

An innovative hydration and nutrition strategy

This gave me enough to get into Vukovar.

Vukovar was ground zero when the old Yugoslavia fractured and blew up. Unlike Czechoslovakia, which seemed to amicably split into Czechia and Slovakia and everybody seemed to get what they wanted (although obviously the “O”s got a pretty rough deal), Yugoslavia endured what would be called the most vicious land fighting in Europe since 1945. Ukraine has now taken that crown but we should not forget how brutal this conflict was.

A reminder

This is a lighthearted cycling blog but the history goes a bit like this.

Vukovar like almost every other town on the Danube has a standard history. Romans come, occasionally cross Danube to beat up tribes on the other side, tribes on the other side eventually force back the Romans and kill a lot of people. States form and they all fight each other and kill a lot of people. Then the Ottomans arrive, kill a lot of people and hold on for a while. Then the Habsburgs come and, after killing a lot of people, force the Ottomans back. WW1 is confusing. Some states form. People die or get displaced. Then the Nazis come and roll over everywhere killing a lot of people and a few years later the Russians come and fight the Nazis and kill a lot of people too.

The Yugoslav civil wars add another chapter to this horror. After trying to peacefully leave after a referendum, the Croatians were attacked by the Serbs and this started at Vukovar. There was an 87 day siege where 12,000 artillery shells were fired every single dayby the Serbs (who numbered about 35,000) on about 3,000 defenders. The town was levelled. After the siege it is estimated that 1,800 soldiers and civilians were killed and 800 were missing. If that wasn't bad enough the Serbian militias were then the instigators of the Vukovar Massacre.

Soon after this the Serbian army gave up. They were out of energy and since then they've really been the Bad Boys Of Central Europe.

This highly summarised version of the history is considered contentious by some people. Although how contentious you think it is is almost certainly directly proportional to how Serbian you are.

By complete chance, this was Victory Day in Croatia. Everybody was out on the streets celebrating them winning their independence from the former Yugoslavia. There were pictures of Croatian fast jets in the news and embarrassed looking generals in their best uniforms being interviewed on the TV.

The Hotel Lav was much nicer than its reviews suggest and my room had a bath but No heated towel rail though.

I was bored with Pizza so I went to the “best restaurant in Vukovar”. Given it was Victory Day, it was absolutely jumping. There was a confusing menu and so random poking at the menu resulted in the waitress bringing me this.

Meat in a pitta with chips and mystery red sauce.

After 60 minutes trying to eat it that's what's left.

That was one of the hardest days on the bike I have ever had. Tomorrow is a bit shorter at 150k and then I'll be in Belgrade (the capital of Bad Boy Serbia). I've decided I'm going to have rest day in Belgrade and explore a bit. It will be good to rest for a day.

The Stats:

• Distance 187km — too far
• Average Speed 22.2km/h — surprisingly high given the off-road component today.
• Average HR 129 — This is way way too high for long distance cycling. Got to keep this under control.
• Body parts. Everything hurts. Hope they fix themselves tomorrow.

Day 6: Vukovar to Belgrade

Another long day. Not as hard as yesterday but challenging in quite a number of places.

Despite its subterranean reputation on Trip Advisor, the Hotel Lav turned out to be fine. I slept like a log until 2am when I woke up with cramp in my feet. I managed to doze off until 4am when I woke up with cramp in my bum. How does that happen? I've never had cramp in my bum before. I took the opportunity to check the route for today and realised I had miscalculated. I had thought it was going to be a 150 km day but…it was going to be a 190 km day. Two of these back to back was going to be…very difficult. Worrying about this kept me awake even more than the cramp.

Eventually I just gave up, packed and repacked everything a couple of times, climbed into my somewhat moist shorts and went down to breakfast. The food was ok but there was a pot of coffee with the tell-tale signs of dusty instant coffee round the rim. It was empty but the waitress brought back a new pot suspiciously quickly. About the time it would take to ladle a couple of spoons of instant coffee in a coffee pot and fill it with boiling water. It was brown, caffeine-free, coffee flavoured liquid. Bah.

There's a path along the Danube which runs straight past the Hotel Lav and past the famous Vukovar water tower. This was shelled repeatedly during the siege and the Croatians have kept it as a memorial. It's now the symbol of the town around the world.

Lest we forget.

The nice path soon ran out and I was back on the D2 which I knew and loved from yesterday. It runs above the Danube on a plain so there isn't much to see except for the endless fields of maize and sunflowers. To a first approximation, every bit of cultivation I've seen since Budapest has been either maize or sunflowers. Surely the world doesn't need this much sunflower oil

Welcome back to the D2 sucker.

Although the D2 yesterday was as straight as a die and flat, the D2 beyond Vukovar had a little surprise. Well…four surprises. Every 5 km or so there was what I am reliably informed is called a coombe. The road would sweep down off the plain to the level of the Danube at dizzying gradients. Wheeeee.

Wheeeeeeeee….

The downside is that, naturally, the road had to fight its way back up to the plain and hence so did I. A couple of kilometres at 8% soon made it clear how much I had “left on the road” yesterday. It was miserable. The D2 was busy, the lorries and cars were very keen to get to the top of the coombe and not as keen to avoid the struggling cyclist hugging the verge. I had an onset of Cyclists Tourettes™.

Horse sphincters

Finally the coombes were done and I descended into the town of Ilok which looked rather sweet in the sun with the Danube behind. According to my Garmin, I was done with climbing for 60km. Hurrah.

Coombes are nice when you know you're not going to climb out of them

As I cycled out of Ilok, I saw a bloke in a turban working on a building site and I realised that this was the first non-white person I had seen since Heathrow Airport. I wouldn't see another non-white person until I was cycling through Belgrade. This part of the world is exceptionally homogeneous. It's disturbing.

Serbia — being a bad boy and also not part of the EU — is not in Schengen so there was all the faff with passports at the border and then it was onto yet another bridge over the Danube.

The front wheel is in Serbia, the back wheel in Croatia.

I took the traditional photograph at the border although in retrospect I look a lot happier than I felt. Cyrillic made its first appearance and, in tomorrow's blog I'll talk a bit about the Serbs relationship with the cyrillic script. That's for tomorrow.

Hot ‘n' happy.

The border town is called Bačka Palanca (Бачка Паланка) It was time for some liquids, some proper caffeine and a little sit down. I stopped at the first place I saw which turned out to be a smoke-wreathed drinking den. I cycled on and realised that this was the only place open. I returned and fought my way through the early morning smokers and drinkers to order a couple of cokes and a coffee. It was only once I'd drunk them that it was made clear to me that they couldn't or wouldn't accept credit cards. I worked out that the cost in Serbian Dinar was equivalent to about 5 EUR. I had a 20 EUR note and just gave them that. There was much grumbling but these people live 3km away from a Eurozone country. They can go and change it there FFS.

Four times as expensive as it should have been.

The way out of Novi Sad was the greatest hits of the D2 from yesterday. Straight and super busy.

Look at the distance between the lorry on the right and the edge of the road. That's how much space these people gave me.

Not being quite as tired as last night I didn't end up a quivering cowering mess in the gutter but it was a close run thing. Serbian National Route #12 was a piece of work. At least it was flat I guess.

Out of nowhere, my route turned right and without warning I was on a lovely cycle path on top of the Danube dyke. My critical faculties are shot right now but I absolutely loved it. The wind was behind me, it was flat and no murderous 18 wheel lorries grazing my elbow. What's not to like?

This was a huge relief.

As I closed in on Novi Sad, the path took me past a helicopter crashed into a building. Or something. The language of advertising is strange in other countries.

There's a lot of “the guy on the right” in Serbian advertising. Six packs appear to sell stuff.

The cycle path was joined by a promenade along the top of the dyke. There were families, cyclists, little cafes and fit women in bikinis roller blading.

Two cokes, one double espresso, ice cream. Better than semi-naked rollerbladers.

Suitably rehydrated I continued along the beautiful Danube path sweeping past the rollerbladers without even a glance — maybe I should be worrying about the numbness in my "soft-tissues" a bit more...

There's a number of Danube crossings in Novi Sad but for some reason the bike route took me past almost all of them to the furthest away one which you can see in the distance in this picture. You can also see the Serbian Navy which, to be honest, is going to have the shit kicked out of it if it ever comes up against a Type 26 destroyer.

Serbia will never rule the waves with these. Maybe it will rule the ripples?

After crossing the river, I trundled through Petrovaradin on the other side of the Danube and back onto the traditional busy road. I could see on my Garmin that I had a climb ahead and, sure enough, 10k after the river crossing the climb hit. And it hit hard.

An average of 8% for 4.5 km on a busy road. I had already cycled 90k today in the heat and this was excruciating. The temperature was 41 degrees and the gradient was relentless. I had to stop every 500m to cool down. I stood at the side of the road and took off almost all my clothes and poured water over my head. All the while busses, lorries and insane Serbian drivers were whizzing past at speed.

The bus passengers were about to enjoy the sight of a hot semi-naked man.
But not hot in a good way…

The hill went on and on. The temperature stayed in the 40 plus zone and I seriously wilted. After what seemed to be a not very enjoyable lifetime, the climb ended and here at the top of the hill was one of the most ornate and beautiful churches I have ever seen. The photograph doesn't really capture how bright the golden cupolas were or the deep green of the roof. For some unknown reason this was plonked at a random crossroads. Maybe it's dedicated to the patron saint of hot — but not in a good way— cyclists.

Extraordinary

I was more than half way there now and it was mostly flat all the way to Belgrade (Београда) so all I had to do was grind it out in the heat. The roads weren't too busy relatively speaking and after the hill I was glad of some flat wind-assisted kilometres. Since I wasn't in imminent danger of being squished like a bug I fired up some podcasts and turned my legs.

In a massive departure from the previous few days, it turns out that they don't just grow maize and sunflowers in this part of Serbia. They obviously do grow an enormous amount of maize and sunflowers but they also grow apples. I was so excited I stopped and stole an apple to eat but it was a cooking apple. Thanks for that God.

A stolen apple. I hope the police don't catch me.

There was another climb in the list of climbs in my Garmin which looked horrible (12% and up) but to my enormous relief it turned out that I had randomly routed myself down to the banks of the Danube and back again. No idea what I was thinking but I suspect the world looks a lot easier when you're sitting in your office planning a route than it does when its 40 degrees and you've got 150 km in your legs already. Whatever was down in Stari Sankamen is lost to me and lost to the historiography of this blog.

The heat was quite extraordinary. I had to stop in this bus shelter for some shade and a rest. Unfortunately, the quality of bus shelters in Serbia is not up to the Danish and Swedish bus shelters and it's also pretty clear that the bus shelters in Serbia provide extra services such as an ashtray and a urinal.

I was so hot I just sat amid the cigarette butts contemplating the piss-stained walls.

As I have said in previous posts, you can always rely on a garage. They're standardised, they take credit cards and they're almost always air conditioned. With 25 km to go I found a garage that had air conditioning which is a massive win, iced tea — my worrying addition to this excellent beverage is returning — and ice creams which are high sugar content in a frozen form. I sat on the one chair in the garage and contemplated the selection of motor oils I could buy if I were to be here with a car.

You can't see the air conditioning but trust me, it's there.

Eventually the dormitory towns and suburbs of Belgrade appeared and it all got very serious. Very busy with lots of parked cars each one waiting to “door” you as you cycled past. I can say without fear of contradiction that the Serbians are the worst drivers in Europe. Drivers would pull out of side junctions without looking, they would speed past me grazing my left shoulder and then immediately turn right in front of me. They would come up behind me on a narrow two way road and rev their engines. I lost count of the number of times somebody overtook me with inches to spare both for me and the people coming in the other direction only to stop at the next red light 50m up the road.

For 20 km it was not just hot and difficult but it also required total concentration. Imagine cycling into London but a version of London where there's no speed limit, everybody on the road has just passed their driving test and has had their empathy surgically removed. Now was the time that I really needed a lovely cycle path. I would have given up on the semi-naked rollerbladers to just have a cycle path.

For no apparent reason, the route cut down to the left on some cobbled streets (a joy for the hands and the undercarriage) and, there was the Danube riverside path.

Unexpectedly nice. A lovely park.

People were out buying ice creams — there are about a million ice cream stalls — and chatting as they wandered along beside the river.

A big relief after the roads.

As the path swept round the bend in the river there was Belgrade but sadly Belgrade was up on a hill. Oh no.

Pretty but…annoyingly elevated.

If I'd thought the traffic on the way into Belgrade was bad, crossing the river and going through the centre of the city was insane. Taxi drivers are definitely the worst. I'm sure one of them clipped my back wheel as he attempted to save 5 seconds before stopping at a red light.

I agonisingly slowly ground my way up the hill and finally, there at the top, was the Hotel Opera Garni. It was another uncanny valley four star hotel but it had a bed and, wonders of wonders, a heated towel rail. It didn't have a bar or a restaurant and therefore after washing my kit I headed out for some food.

The manager had directed me to the “Bohemian Street”. It was a hilly street leading down to the river and it was lined with restaurants.

I chose one at random and pointed wildly at the menu and ended up with fried cheese (!) and some sort of lamb dish.

This wasn't nice but it is calories. The rosé was good though.

Tomorrow is a rest day. I had done the best part of 550km in the last three days and it had been hot and difficult. I decided to take the day off and explore Belgrade. More impressions of Serbia tomorrow.

Stats:

• Distance 177km — More than 150 but less than 190 due to judicious shortcutting.
• Climbing 960m — This is a lot for a day like today. I need to avoid that sort of thing.
• Average HR 115bpm — This is much more in the long distance cycling zone.
• Body — Hands completely numb, feet super sore and the less said about the undercarriage the better.

Day 7: Exploring Belgrade

Today was my rest day and, much to my surprise, I did in fact manage to sleep through to 8am. Maybe three brutal days on a bike is good for one's sleep rhythms.

After a lot of coffee and not a lot else from the rather disappointing Hotel Opera Garni breakfast buffet, I was off out to do some Jack Reacher style shopping for some new pants and socks. Then it was exploring for me!

Although Belgrade has some impressive architecture, a lot of it is these apartment blocks which were loved by communist town planners.

Here you go comrade. Enjoy.

All the busy road junctions have those underpass shopping “malls” which are so redolent of the USSR and its satellite states. Budapest has them, Moscow has them. The only businesses which remain in them now are those marginal businesses that couldn't survive anywhere else. This place selling dress material, sheepskins and an array of cheap plastic plant pots was very typical of the retail genre.

Sad dying stores

Most of the underground units were closed and covered in nationalist graffiti which I would be seeing quite a lot more of during the day. It goes without saying that this sort of place isn't going to have cheap pants and socks. Or if they do, they're going to be made out of some horrendous chemicals therefore it was off to the nearest modern shopping mall for me.

Note the cyrillic transliteration of Starbucks. We'll come back to that.

After a satisfyingly western capitalist coffee, I trailed round the huge and ugly shopping mall looking for cheap pants and socks. I was ultimately successful but in the Jack Reacher books, he never has to buy a 2 pack of pants and a 3 pack of socks because nobody sells underpants and socks in singles any more.

Since I had more pants and socks that I needed, I changed my pants in the toilet, binned my current pants and socks and wore a new pair of pants and new socks just for my Belgrade exploring. Luxury beyond the dreams of man and, to heap on even more sybaritic joy, I will have a brand new pair of both for tomorrow. You might be asking “why doesn't the idiot just take two pairs of pants and socks in his bike bag?”. That's because it's all about marginal weight losses. As soon as you start adding extra clothing, before you know where you are, you're lugging around 5kg extra of “stuff” and you need those dorky panniers. Every day my load gets a little lighter as I use some toothpaste, take a statin, and use some SudoCrem but let's not go into the whole SudoCrem thing right now.

First on my list of strange things to do was the Museum of Illusion which I thought would be fabulous. From a very young age, I have loved optical illusions and I did enjoy quite a lot of the museum but a surprisingly large number of the illusions required you to have a friend to take a photograph of you in a strangely shaped room or reflected upside down or something. Being a nobby-no-mates solo cyclist, I don't have any friends.

This took me a while to work out.

There were lots of displays of those optical illusions that you've seen so many times. Yes, I know the lines are the same length. Quite surprisingly, the museum is impeccably signed with long descriptions of how the illusion works complete with academic references. The illusion below is seemingly quite famous in academic circles.

The top surfaces of both boxes are the same size. The little magnetic piece fits perfectly on both.

After a while, your visual cortex shuts down and it gets a bit overwhelming. There were the obligatory holograms which every museum of this type has to have and I muttered “this is not an ‘illusion' it's just physics guys” but nobody heard me because the Museum of Illusion didn't seem to be doing great business. I was the only visitor.

Creepy kids in a hologram. What's with that?

Enough of the frivolity, it was time to see some real history.

Almost straight out of the museum I saw this on the side of Republic Square (the Trafalgar Square of Belgrade).

No, that isn't true. It really isn't.

I had been reading a lot about the conflicts in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It kicked off with the Bosnian conflict, taking in the conflict with Croatia around Vukovar and ending in Kosovo in 1999. It's incredibly difficult to work out what happened as the former Yugoslavia imploded. Tito had ruthlessly tied together this country and had somehow managed to hold the ethnic tensions in check. Without wishing to summarise an exceptionally complicated and difficult period, it seems pretty clear that the Serbs were mostly the bad guys. It's true that almost nobody was charged with genocide but literally millions of people were displaced as refugees as the Serbs set about cleansing ethnic Bosnians, Croats, Albanians from the land that they believed to be theirs.

As I was reading the history of this region, I realised that I didn't really understand what “ethnicity” means. It's clearly not any kind of physical characteristics. Everybody in Serbia looks exactly the same as people in Croatia and Hungary and also very white naturally. I suppose I must be “ethnically Scottish” but I don't feel that I should shell Berwick upon Tweed for months as a result.

It is hard to comprehend that only 25 years ago troops were fighting and killing people in the name of some sort of “ethnic purity” in the middle of Europe.

There's a considerable amount of old history in Belgrade. It was one of the cities alternately overrun by the Ottomans and then by the Hapsburgs. Again and again. I thought I would take in some historical carnage first.

The beautiful Kalemegdan park surrounds the hill on which the ancient Belgrade fortress overlooks the Danube. I saw that staple of parks the world over. Old blokes playing chess in the sun.

Knight to rook four.

The fortress itself is free to enter and I wandered around happily looking at the various fortifications and a very strange display of photographs of swimming in the Danube through the ages. Not really sure what this was about but the photos were interesting. Seemingly swimming in the Danube has been a thing for a long time.

Thank god for the strategically positioned leaves.

To be fair to the Belgrade Fortress, the views from the balustrades are stunning. Here's a panoramic view from the modern suburb of Zemin all the way to the Danube flowing south where I will be heading tomorrow.

I'm in two minds about the value of panoramic shots.

Right outside the main walls is the Serbian military museum. This is a crazy random collection of ancient old cannons, and tanks jammed right up next to modern hardware. This is a battery of SAM missile launchers which saw service defending Belgrade when NATO bombed it in reprisals for the Kosovo atrocities.

These are supposed to have brought down a F117 stealth fighter.

On a marginally lighter note, I saw the smallest tank in the world. It is hard to convey just how tiny it is. It is definitely somewhat smaller than my Volkswagen eUp. Probably less environmentally friendly and a bit of a pain to use to go to Waitrose for the shopping. Given that the Serbians are all pretty tall — see the Lego™ haired vaccine-sceptic Novak Djokovic as exhibit one — the chance that any solder could fit in this was small. Maybe it's a kiddie tank? Maybe it's pedal powered? Who knows?

A teeny tiny tank.

It was time to grasp the nettle of the NATO bombing of Serbia and the bombing of Belgrade in particular. Even now, 25 years later, opinion is very divided about whether NATO should have done this, whether it was “legal” or a commensurate use of force. My own view isn't really very important here but what was happening in Kosovo was a humanitarian crisis and there was some debate as to whether or not it should be considered genocide. The military campaign brought the fighting to a close pretty quickly and that is a good thing.

One of the very contentious issues was the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three people died. There are a lot of conspiracy theories flying around. This was the first use of a B2 Spirit stealth bomber — the coolest looking plane ever — which flew all the way from the US to carry out the mission. It had the latest GPS guided weapons systems so why did it hit the Chinese embassy? One theory is that the Chinese had negotiated to buy the wreckage of the F117 which had been shot down to gain access to its stealth technology and the Americans bombed the embassy as a punishment but the most likely reason is a cock up. The cock up theory of history is always pretty persuasive.

The underlying causes of the Kosovo, Bosnian and Croatian conflicts are many and varied. I remember Serbian friends of ours in the early 1990s telling us about a terrible atrocity that the Bosnians had committed during which they had filled an Orthodox Church with children and then set fire to it. According to them, that justified strong action against the Bosnians — or maybe the Croatians or maybe the Albanians. It was only after some time that I managed to work out that this had happened sometime in the 16th century.

That being said, probably the strangest cause de la guerre in the whole history of human conflict is the Ðorðe Martinović Incident. At one point the world teetered on the brink of a global conflict due to somebody making up a lie about what happened when he was doing unspeakable things with a milk bottle.

NATO bombed the Yugoslav Army Headquarters and the Serbians have left the ruined building as a monument to their lost war.

Modern munitions do damage.

The side of the building was completely covered by an absolutely gigantic poster. The cyrillic said “We love Serbia”. Which is all very well but I'm not really sure that your army marching about with their faces covered is a good look. The snood really says “paramilitary nutters”

Let's look like the baddies.

It's time to do the cyrillic thing now. As soon as you cross the border into Serbia, you see cyrillic in lots of places. Almost exclusively on road signs, bus timetables, notices of opening times etc. Things which are government controlled. The Serbian government is promoting the cyrillic script for Serbian because it's “our national script”. “We want our cyrillic back” or something.

Now here's the interesting thing. Serbian is just Croatian or Bosnian. It's all the same language — Serbia-Croat. But almost uniquely amongst languages it can be written either in a latin script or a cyrillic script. There's a perfect correspondence between the two — it's a digraphic language.

So, for example, the “D” in latin is the “Д” in cyrillic. The “Ш” in cyrillic is “Š” (the “sha”). The spelling of the words is exactly the same, it's just a transliteration. The “Д in the “incident” above is the “Ђ” which is the “dje” sound. So the language is the same. It's as if we in English replaced letters with different shaped symbols.

If this all sounds pretty pointless, you would be right. Despite all official communication to and from the government having to be in cyrillic, unsurprisingly, the invisible hand of capitalism works its magic. If you're making drinks or clothes or adverts why do a cyrillic version for 6m people when you can do a latin version and reach a market of nearly 30 million Serbo-Croat speakers. It's exactly the reason why we have bottle caps attached to our bottles in the UK. Governments find it hard to force regulatory alignment, but Adam Smith finds it easy.

Also, in Serbia, cyrillic is seen as…”rural”, “traditional”, “old”. Latin is seen as “modern”, “young”. Guess which is going to win in the end?

Anyway, enough linguistics and orthography. As you might tell, I'm fascinated by all this stuff and it was a real joy to be in a country which is the only country in the world which is fully “digraphic”. There you go, come for the bike stories, stay for the linguistics.

Next on the list was the Nikolai Tesla museum. Apart from the Lego™ Haired Vaccine Skeptic, Tesla is probably the most famous Serbian. They've got his ashes in some sort of golden sphere and so that sounded like a great visit.

Would you like to wait 45 minutes in 35C sun to see some ashes. Nope.

There are lots of other sights in Belgrade but I was starting to flag a bit.

The parliament building. I think.

After my experiments with fried cheese which would be more accurately described as battered polystyrene and the greasy lamb in a pot last night I really didn't fancy another experimental outing for lunch. So I stopped at McDonalds and wolfed down some of that lovely standardised food that the West is so good at producing.

Don't judge me. You hadn't had fried cheese last night.

I went back to the hotel, did some admin, had a much needed snooze. When I woke I discovered that my bike bag is now in Romania. This is one less thing to worry about. I had asked the Hotel Marmorosch in Bucharest to try to sort out something with DHL in Romania and they had definitely worked some magic. Kudos to them.

Another little insert here. Anybody who says that Generative AI is going to revolutionise anything is talking out of their arse. In particular, they have probably never used an AI in anger. They've probably got “people” do do that for them. I tried for about 2 hours in Budapest to navigate the “highly advanced DHL AI powered help system”. It was absolutely useless as all Chatbot systems are and just redirected me to web pages which…surprise!…redirected me back to the chat box. This is a bubble and it's going to pop. Badly.

The main thing to worry about was now not whether or not I would be able to get my bike back from Bucharest on a plane. It will be getting to bloody Romania on a bike.

AirTags are a "sufficiently advanced technology to be indistinguishable from magic" © Arthur C Clarke.

Post snooze I went to the Serbian National Museum which was pretty mixed. The ethnographic and archeology stuff on the ground floor is very impressive and well done. It does put Serbia and Serbians at the very heart of pretty much ever advance in history from fire, through metalurgy to the wheel which gets a little tiring at times but the exhibits are good.

Beauty in the past was a very different thing.

The art on the upper floors is very “meh”. The same can be said of the Zepler Museum which is sort of a Tate Modern to the National Museum's National Gallery. That analogy would be better if both of the Belgrade galleries had anything that you might think of as…not shit.

This guy looks exactly like Nandor the Relentless in What We Do In The Shadows.

Here's a triptych which for some reason was done in 2009 about Margaret Thatcher.

Searing social commentary about the UK from some Serbian bloke.

The next week is going to be challenging especially on the nutrition front. After my fried battered polystyrene experience I thought it best to load up on some normal food. I found a rather nice place called the Saša Bar which, surprisingly, wasn't a bar but was an upscale joint which had proper cutlery, table cloths, napkins and waiters that didn't spit in your food — I assume.

Minestrone soup? Not minestrone as we know it Jim!

Main course had to be steak and chips and here's what I got.

The phrase “low residue nutrition” is not applicable here. Honest.

That was it. Done with Belgrade. Did I enjoy it? I enjoyed not cycling a bike and, in many places, Belgrade feels like a normal European city in the summer. Ice creams, street vendors selling tat, women shopping in lovely summery dresses, kids running around having fun. However, there's an edge to it. Most people in Serbia who are now over the age of 40 were cheering on Milošević in the 1990s as he ordered some of the most vicious campaigns since the Second World War. There's still a current of this that runs through Serbian society. Unlike, say, the Germans who have stood up and said “We were the bad guys and now we're going to be the good guys. Sorry.”, it doesn't feel like Serbia has come to terms with its past. There's also a lesson for poisonous grifters like Farage. When you whip up this ethnic and racial stuff it can end very badly indeed. Before you think that that couldn't happen in the UK, remember the Nazi party got 2.8% of the vote in 1928. By 1933 they were in power.

Enough of the politics. It's time to get back to detailed descriptions of scary bike riding and my undercarriage. I warn my dear readers that I have been reading a lot about the history of Romania and in future blogs there's going to be quite a lot of that sad and sorry story.

The next seven days are going to be on a bike every day until I dip my front wheel in the Black Sea. I've done some rerouting to keep myself off the busier roads — I've had a few emails and texts suggesting it would be better not to die. To be honest, I've had enough of whimpering in the gutter. Most of the days will be less than 150km which makes it easier but the infrastructure along the way is going to be much more basic.

Kind of looking forward to it.

Day 8: Belgrade to Vinci

All in all this was a pretty fun day mainly because it was quite a bit shorter than the previous ones. The route said 150 km which is definitely doable but some cunning shortcut work reduced it to just under 130. Despite being a good day, it had its moments — as they all do — as the day unfolded.

The Hotel Opera Garni supplied the same underwhelming breakfast buffet that I had suffered yesterday. Top marks for the endless coffee machine but when you're reduced to having a couple of iced doughnuts and some jam sandwiches you know you're missing out on that luxury four star experience somewhere. At least I got away early. I was hoping to beat some of the heat and some of the Belgrade traffic. In both cases I failed miserably. It was already warm and the Serbian commuters were out early doing their crazy driving stuff.

The first order of business was to try and work out how to get out of Belgrade. Rather stupidly I'd started my Garmin route 4km away from the hotel and I was reduced to navigating by the sun. Then one of the Eurovelo signs appeared and I thought that my problems were over.

The EV6 joins the EV11 for a bit.

I knew I would be going to Pančevo on the Pančevo bridge so this seemed to be the sign to follow. Very annoyingly the signs disappear just when you need them and you're back to vainly hoping that you're going in the right direction while dodging insane young men in shitty 20 year old Renaults talking on their phones. There was a nice path through a park which seemed to be signed correctly but I was so busy trying to work out on my Garmin when I'd be turning next that I cycled down a set of stairs. I realise that this is in some deep way my own fault but who puts a set of bloody stairs on a cycle path? Superhuman reactions and near pro-level bike handling skills saved me from a humiliating fall and injury. Or maybe it was luck. Who can say eh?

I'm actually quite cool if there's no cycling infrastructure. If you're on the D2 being buffeted by 18 wheeler lorries you know where you stand. It's the inconsistent infrastructure that annoys me. “Here's a nice cycle path but every 100m it crosses a road and you're going to have to bump down a 15cm kerb on one side and back up a 15cm kerb on the other side. You're welcome”.

Additionally all that nice cycle path tarmac is an open invitation to people to park on it further impeding progress.

Oí mate, you're parked on my EV6!

I averaged just under 8 kmh trying to get out of Belgrade. Finally I found the EV6 sign pointing over the Pančevo bridge but there was a strange…”motorway” feel to the road. Which is because it actually was a bloody motorway. Really, is this the best way out of Belgrade Eurovelo folks? At least three dual carriageways filtered onto the main motorway road before the bridge started. At each I was reduced to standing at the junction and waving at bus drivers hoping they would stop, block the road and I could push the bike across. There was absolutely no way I was going to cycle in this traffic.

Thoughtfully the bridge designers had put a bike path at the side of the bridge. They hadn't put any way of getting to the bike path in the plans though. They hadn't allocated any money to the cycle path's construction or maintenance either.

Is this really the best you can do Belgrade? Well, at least it can't get worse.

Oh but it did get worse. The “bike path” stopped and this was what confronted me.

The choice is death…or the shittest bike path in Europe.

I chose the shittest bike path in Europe. I had promised family and friends I would be careful.

Boy the shittest bike path in Europe was shit. I have noticed both in Hungary and Serbia, there seems to be no social pressure to avoid throwing crap out of your car. The verges of the roads are a veritable archeological dig of cans, bottles, condoms, fag packets, mystery bloody bundles and, bafflingly, single shoes. This path was no different although a number of people seemed to have had fun throwing glass beer bottles at the worryingly damaged crash barriers. There were also a huge number of bottles of…”trucker tizer”. Lorry drivers who need a wee and don't want to stop will pee in plastic bottles and then chuck them by the side of the road. Not all of them make it to the verge undamaged…

I stopped and took a quick photograph of the Danube in the middle of the bridge.

Nice picture but the smell was atrocious thanks to Trucker Tizer.

The bridge ended eventually and I slithered down a sandy embankment to find, in a sudden and jarring dislocation, that I was back in the countryside and I was back riding on gravelly dykes. I know I've been dissing this sort of cycling but after getting out of Belgrade alive, I was so pleased to see it.

Two shaven-headed thugs straight out of far-right-English-racist central casting ignored their dogs as they snarled and snapped around me for about 500m. I have a dog and I know what “Hey, new friend, want to play” barks sound like and “I want to rip your calf muscles right off your leg” barks sound like. These dogs were doing the second bark and their owners didn't give a toss. I red-lined it away from the dogs and felt it was a fitting sendoff from Belgrade.

Like welcoming an old friend.

As I have explained in posts passim you get very attuned to the state of the gravel and sand that you're riding on. This was not good gravel. It was sandy and loose but I was happy to not be squished or covered in lorry driver's piss or mauled by a dog so I didn't really mind.

Soon every thing became surprisingly rural. There were goats grazing on the dyke.

Unexpected. The goats were aggressive but not compared to the dogs.

The goatherd was sitting on a seat fannying around on his phone while the bull goat sat next to him like a dog. It was sweet.

Just like a dog. How cute.

I made it to Pančevo which, unlike its bridge namesake, was lovely and had some great cycling infrastructure which turned into some reasonable roads that wound their way through the countryside. I'd decided I'd gauge the road and traffic conditions and make a decision Omoljica about whether or not I'd take the now traditional 30 km dyke top path or take the 20k road. The roads were pretty quiet and the advantage of being able to average 25 kmh rather than 15 kmh swung it. Oh…the fact that my “undercarriage” wouldn't be getting another couple of hours of pounding by gravelly potholes was a bit of a factor too.

Given that I'd knocked 5 km off the route in the morning and another ~10 km by taking the road, the distance today was down to 133 km. A piece of cake. It would have been were it not for the temperature. From the moment I had left the “Bridge of Death” it was in the high 30s and topped out at 42 at one point.

Those of you who have cycled with me know that I'm a bit of an idiot when it comes to hydrating when cycling. I did the whole London 100 on one bottle of water for example. In these temperatures there's no room for that sort of rank foolishness. I'm drinking more than a litre an hour and not a lot of it is coming out the traditional way.

Drinking this much requires you to stop frequently to replenish your water bottles. The golden rule is “as soon as your first water bottle is empty start looking for somewhere to stop”. I'd made mistakes before with this so as soon as a little shop appeared in Kovin I bought another litre of water and some bilious yellow juice stuff. The lady running the shop was very friendly until she noticed that I had parked my bike on top of her rose bushes. She was not happy.

A litre of water, a litre of fizzy yellow and a pissed off shop keeper.

I knew that my next checkpoint was at 1pm because I needed to get a 🎵ferry across the Danube🎵 and it only runs three times a day. 40 km, 2.5 hours to do it. What could possibly go wrong?

This could go wrong

40km in 2.5 hours on roads is fine. On gravel, it's really pushing it. Especially this sort of gravel. There was nothing for it though. I could hang out in the one-horse-town Stara Palanka for four hours waiting for the next ferry or I could put the hammer down.

It was time to time-trial it on sand through the Serbian hinterland.

I thought I'd add a little insert here on the “Serbian” Vinča culture. There's a fantastic Rest is History podcast on this which I thoroughly recommend for a bit more detail than I can stick in a cycling blog. It's only 30 minutes and you will be surprised. I was.

In summary, about 7,000 years ago an “old European” culture appeared centred on this area of Serbia. It was very sophisticated for the time and produced some amazing pottery and votive statuary some of which I had seen in the Belgrade National Museum. They also appear to be the first people to smelt metal and there's a copper battle axe which I also saw in the museum dated to 5,000 BC. That's a long time before metal smelting was used anywhere else.

What makes it especially interesting is that some of the pottery has symbols suggestive of writing maybe 3,000 years before the appearance of writing in Sumeria. So, is it writing? Well…once again, there's a strong correlation between one's view of the symbols — and the impact that the Vinča had on the future course of civilisation — and how Serbian you are. The academic consensus is “no, it's not writing”…but not in Serbia.

The Vinča lasted nearly 2,000 years which is a lot longer than, say, the Roman or Chinese civilisations. Then pretty quickly — for an archeological definition of “quickly” — they were gone. There is a school of thought that they were a peaceful, agrarian and matriarchal society which was then overrun by the bad, aggressive, warlike and patriarchal tribes from the north. This school of thought was in vogue in the 1970s — when things like that were cool — but recent archeology seems to suggest that the Vinča were just as brutally vicious as pretty much everybody else in history and they declined due to soil impoverishment and climate change — which is in vogue right now. Anyway, listen to the RIH podcast. It's really fascinating. I was hoping to go to one of the dig sites but…gotta keep cycling.

i>I should also thank my friend Andy Sobek for putting me on to The Rest Is History while I was cycling to Sweden. I am totally addicted now and have listened to almost the entire back catalogue over the winter.

Back to the cycling. We left our hero putting the hammer down on a 40 km section of grass and gravel attempting to keep his average speed above 20 kmh. I had full water bottles — well, when I started I had full water bottles — and I was starting to get my eye in when it came to this shitty gravel. What could possibly go wrong?

This could go wrong

This road looks lovely but in fact it is horrific. Smooth on the top but underneath full of potholes. My hands, feet and…”undercarriage” took a terrible beating on this 10km section. Any deviation from going straight ahead was punished with a front wheel skid that threatened to throw me in the sand.

It was now getting incredibly tight for time. As soon as the amazingly horrible sand ended, I calculated I had time for a quick splash and dash — drinking 6 litres of water eventually causes some of it to come out the traditional way. It was my bad luck and the bad luck of a huge bunch of German walkers that they appeared on the dyke at the same time as I was answering the call of nature. I have no idea what these people are doing? Who goes walking along a boring dyke for 40km in the baking sun? It's boring enough when you're covering ground at cycling pace. At walking pace? Kill me now.

“Look Greta, a sweaty man with his tackle out”

The final km to Stara Palanka were desperate. I thought I was having “bean problems” as the bean dropped down and started rubbing on the back wheel.

Those of you who haven't read the Cambridge Warsaw trip will be a bit mystified at this point. The black bean shaped thing sticking out behind my saddle is the thing I carry all my stuff in. On the Cambridge Warsaw trip, I had poorly constructed Topeak bean and much of the trip was about how crap no that bean was. I now have a new one which performed perfectly on the way to Sweden.

I stopped and wasted precious minutes trying to adjust the bean. Nothing worked: it still rubbed the back wheel. There was nothing to it. I took out my trouser belt and tied it round me and tied one of the bean straps to the belt. It worked. More crazy fast cycling.

The actual scenery was beautiful and there was a huge international fishing competition going on along the canal — like the Olympics but for tubby boring men — but I didn't have time to stop to take a photograph. I was literally down to minutes.

I barrelled into the car park of the only building in Stara Palanka while doing a stylish rear wheel skid with a bare 2 minutes to spare. It might have been a bit more stylish if I had remembered about tying the bean strap to me. As I tried to get off the bike my style points evaporated in a hot sticky mess of stumbling and bike dragging.

There in front of me was the sign with the departure times for the ferry. I know you're all thinking that it was 12:30 not 13:00 but…the ferry was delayed until 13:30. I'd made it.

Two cokes, one water and one little tiny beer. I deserve it.

There were maybe 5 or 6 cars waiting, a handful of motorbikes and three cycling groups. I got into conversation with a delightful French family. Yes yes yes, I know that I make a thing about never speaking to other cyclists but they were lovely. Husband, wife, girl ~14, boy ~12 and girl ~8. They were cycling the entire Eurovelo 6 in 500k sections every summer. They had started at the Atlantic years ago when the kids were tiny and took them in a trailer. Now their kids are grown up and they all cycle together. Eventually they'll have done the whole of the EV6. It was really lovely to see. The mum explained where I could get a ticket on the ferry. The dad and I discussed bikes. Maybe I should rethink this not speaking to other people?

As my niece Teky said “it's like something out of Top Gear”

The Stara Palanka to Ram ferry didn't feel awfully safe. It's just a barge with a tiny tug boat attached to it. No dock to speak of, just the river bank.

Compared to endless sandy paths on dykes, it was a bit of a visual feast. I took approximately a million photographs but I've culled them down to a few. You can thank me later.

I'm a little concerned about the captain not being in the wheelhouse.

Lots of cyclists.

Note the spade which is used when this bit (the “stern”) hits the bank and the cars need to get off

The fortress at Ram. It's Ottoman. Or maybe Hapsburg. Who knows? Not me.

Having crossed the Danube again I now only had 30 km to go to tonight's finish in Vinci and so I could afford to stop for yet another couple of cokes in the cafe on the other side. The lovely French family were there too and we chatted some more. I wish I still spoke French.

On the boat I had worked out what the problem with the bean was. Three days of off road riding, especially the last three hours, had battered my seat post down into the frame. It's important to remember that the thing doing the battering here is my…”undercarriage”. I performed some quick repairs which I'll have to check tomorrow but, modulo having bruises from my waist to my knees, it's good to know that the bean isn't buggered.

There's a very steep hill out of Ram and, given that the lovely French family were at the bottom getting ready, I felt I should set off and make it look easy. I had a lot less luggage, a much lighter bike and it would be humiliating if an eight year old passed me on the way up. I rather misjudged how steep and how long the hill was. I was in the 160bpm heart rate red zone after about 30 seconds. It was a brutal and humiliating climb but middle-aged man stubbornness got me to the top without having a heart attack. Just.

However, when I got to the top, everything looked so so much better. Beautiful roads, little cute churchettes lining the road, downhill gradients. If it hadn't been 40 degrees it would have been perfect.

This is more like it

I swooped down the hills on the perfect tarmac to the banks of the Danube

This is what I expected from this trip. Lovely road, views of the Danube.

I felt great and almost too soon Vinci appeared.

I'm staying at the Kod Dzimija which is by far the best hotel in Vinci. It's also 32 EUR a night but before enumerating what 32 EUR a night gets you, I should point out that one of the best things it gets you is a giant beer on a terrace overlooking the Danube where the other guests are frolicking around in the water playing water volleyball with their friends and their dogs.

The Kod is owned and operated by a chain smoking family who seem super friendly despite the constant aroma of cigs and sense of chaos. It's very strange. On one side of the main road is what looks like a bog standard family house where the rooms are, on the other is a terraced restaurant and beneath the terraced restaurant is the Danube which has some rusty old goal posts and volleyball nets in it.

The room is…basic. Once the proprietoress had rectified the lack of soap in the room it seemed good enough. Unsurprisingly 32 EUR doesn't get you a heated towel rail. Once again it'll be a damp morning but in these temperatures my kit will be dry before I get to the Vinci town limits.

No, the radiator doesn't work either.

I thought it would be rude to go to the other restaurant in town so I went with the Kod.

I fought my way through the fog of the other diner's smoking and found a a table overlooking the river. I've learned now that extensive and detailed menus in restaurants are a kind of performance-art thing. There's no point asking for things because most of them aren't availble. “What's the speciality of the house” I asked. What I got was this.

Oh Christ, what's this?

Some Google Translate work indicates that this was called “Maidens Delight”. It's a very thin chicken escalope rolled up and stuffed with cheese. It spurts melted cheese suggestively out of one end when you cut into it. I was told by one member of the chain-smoking family that it's a Serbian favourite. Quite.

Anyway, it was food and I needed food. Breakfast not served until 9 tomorrow at the Kod (!!) so I'll get something down the road. Not sure if I'll survive without coffee though.

Tonight is my last night in Serbia. I'm crossing the border (woo hoo) into Romania tomorrow and before I get there I'm cycling through the Iron Gates. More about them in tomorrow's blog but suffice to say that the section tomorrow is supposed to be the most scenic section of the entire EuroVelo 6 route. It includes 22 tunnels. Glad I brought my lights.

Reading back the last couple of posts, I thought I would make two things clear.

• Concentrating on the things that have a sense of tension and jeopardy is natural in this sort of travel writing. People don't want to read about somebody having a nice time. They want to read about horrible roads, insane heat and getting your tackle out at unfortunate moments. To be clear, I am loving this trip. So much fun.
• Although I found Belgrade oppressive and dour, I should point out that every single Serbian I have spoken to in the last three days has been unfailingly cheery, helpful and pleasant. This is a country with a lot of very difficult collective history but individually I have to say that I liked everybody. Except the guys with the dogs. I really hated them.

The Stats:

• Distance: 129km. This is doable
• Avg Speed 20.1km. I feel pretty good about that given the amount of off-road stuff.
• Climbing 384m. Nothing.
• Hands: Almost totally numb now. Not easy to type
• Feet: Unusually very very sore. Wearing the wrong shoes I think.
• Undercarriage: The constant impact of off-road cycling is not working out well.
• Legs: Feeling strong still. This won't last.

Day 9: Vinci to Drobeta-Turnu Severin

What a day! Probably one of the most beautiful and scenic rides that I have ever done. As such, this post is going to have an awful lot of photographs in it. Apologies for the travelogue style today. However, as always, it wasn't without its interesting moments of pain and suffering.

It wasn't a terribly restful night. The Kod Dzimija didn't supply sheets and, although there was air conditioning, it was of the “amazingly loud for 2 minutes every 5 minutes” variety. The other guests were having a party downstairs with the chain-smoking family until about 12. I woke up at 2 thinking about digraphic languages and couldn't get back to sleep for ages.

Ok, I realise this is very geeky but I really have been thinking about Serbian as a dígraphic language and was thinking about what a giant pain in the arse that must be for Serbians. The same language but with a one to one correspondence between different symbols that sound the same and spell the same words. I was wrong. Think about the word “nag”, “NAG” and “NAG”. In the first two, I've used the upper and lower cases and in the last a handwriting font. In none of them are the letter shapes the same but from an early age we learn that there's many “shapes” that make the “g” sound of the voiced velar plosiv.

Eventually I got struggled out of my sheetless bed at 6:30. I showered in a minuscule dribble of variable temperature water and headed down to the deserted but still extraordinarily smoky lounge. Breakfast was nowhere to be seen and neither was anybody else. So I fixed my seat post in the porch in the quiet morning.

This was where my bike lived overnight. Nobody stole it because they were too busy smoking.

There was a really beautiful bike path which ran the 8 km from Vinci to the main town of the region, Golubac. There I negotiated a chicken sandwich and two coffees from a couple of fat guys running a cafe. They were, like everybody else I met in this part of Serbia, smoking “like lums” as my grandmother used to say. When the coffee and sandwich arrived, the coffee was so weak it was transparent and the sandwich had a slightly suspicious “ashey” taste. Oh well, it was energy I guess.

After Golubac I was going into the Iron Gates.

Like this. But a lot less throney.

We've done linguistics, we've done archeology, now it's time for some geology.

The Iron Gates are a sequence of four gorges running through the Carpathian Mountains. Reputed to be the longest and deepest gorges in Europe, they're a geological marvel.

“How does a river cut a gorge through a mountain chain?” I hear you ask. Very good question and prior to the discovery of plate tectonics, it was a bit of a mystery. The Danube has been around for a long time flowing (very roughly) in the direction it currently flows. Some time around 30m years ago, the African continental plate smashed into the bottom of Europe and created the Alps and the Pyrenees. It also caused the land around what is currently Albania, Serbia, Romania to buckle and created the Carpathian Mountains. This happened over millions of years and as the land rose up, the Danube just eroded it away and kept flowing in the same direction. Hence the gorges.

The Iron Gates were one of the “proof points” for plate tectonics. Now you know.

There's one road on the Serbian side and one road on the Romanian side. These roads are relatively new since, when the gorge was flooded, the level rose by 30m, submerged the old roads and new roads had to be created. The whole thing was done to tame the very difficult navigation conditions through the gorges — and also to create electrical power as we shall see later.

The road and the road surface are modern and perfect

Because everything was flooded when the dam was built, the Yugoslavians and the Romanians built new roads just above the new level of the river. They're new, well surfaced and beautiful. There is some controversy about the people who were displaced by the flooding. Unsurprisingly given the history of this region, they tended to be Turks, Jews and Albanians. They tended to be told to piss off home since they didn't have houses any more.

This sort of topography means you need tunnels and bridges occasionally. Bridges are cool, tunnels are not.

The Golubac fortress and tunnel 22. An easy one.

There's 22 tunnels between Golubac and the dam. Some are easy like the one above. 50 metres long and you can see the end from beginning and so you're silhouetted against the light for the cars coming behind you.

Others — in particular tunnel 14, 6 and 4 — are more than 250 metres long and have bends in them. They're unlit and they're terrifying. I had bike lights but, given the quality of Serbian driving, lights didn't fill me with confidence. At each tunnel, I would wait at the entrance looking back down the road until I could be sure(ish) that there weren't any cars or lorries coming and then I would sprint like a mad sweaty version of Chris Hoy for 300 metres to get to the other end. I put out some pretty impressive power numbers on those sprints.

How fast can I sprint 256 metres? Pretty fast it turns out.

In general, the traffic on the road was light. I've certainly had worse on the MA10 in Mallorca which is another contender for the “most beautiful cycling road in Europe”. There's a 50 kph speed limit on the road which is routinely ignored, in some cases by a long way.

As people sped past me I shouted “fifty kilometres per hour?? MY ARSE that's fifty”

Amongst the broadly respectful van drivers and holiday makers there was the usual sprinkling of young men thrashing crappy 20 year old Renault Scenics like they were in a rally.

Driving shit cars at speed has the all too predictable and depressing outcome that results in a sad procession of poignant memorials alongside the road. Each one a granite plaque with a name, a picture of a bloke in his twenties, a mouldering teddy bear, dying flowers, some car keys and other mementoes as a tribute to the indirect lethality of testosterone.

A typical example out of hundreds on a 70km section.

It's hard to imagine but I was once 20 and did stupidly dangerous things because of…testosterone and girls. I survived but could easily come unstuck in a car or on a rock face. I felt for these guys.

The road continued and the views were spectacular.

This was what I thought the entire trip would be like. It was glorious.

I did nearly 50 km before I stopped. As you can see from the photographs, it was actually cloudy this morning and the temperature was in the mid 20s. I hadn't realised just how debilitating the heat had been in the past few days so I really flew along the road.

I'd planned to stop and load up with water and something to eat in Donji Milanovac which looked like a reasonable place. Unfortunately all the bars and cafes in town didn't take cards and there was no way I was changing more money into dinars given I was 40 km from Romania. Therefore it was back to my default haunt. The garage. They always take cards and, as long as you don't mind eating and drinking surrounded by the smells of exhaust fumes and gasoline, they're ok.

2 litres of water, iced tea, two ice creams and a lot of exhaust gasses.

It appears that my addiction to peach iced tea has returned with a vengeance and a new one is building for ice cream. I had consumed liquids and carbohydrates and it was time to continue riding up the road. “Up” is the operative word here. Some places are just too difficult to get tunnels through and so you have to ride over the spurs. The gorge narrows here to its narrowest (120m) and its deepest (90m — the deepest river in the world!).

Spectacular. Worth the “tunnels of death” experience.

The road climbed higher and the thermometer joined it in sympathy. I was trying to have a “restrained” day without any stupid efforts — except the tunnels of course — so on the hills I just slammed it into the granny gear and trundled up at some embarrassingly slow speed. Old ladies out walking with their shopping trollies passed me sneering “Is that all you've got?” in Serbian. When you're in the middle of this sort of trip, there's no point in stupid heroics on the hills. You'll just pay for them later.

Well that's a bit pants despite how lovely the view is.

As I neared the summit, I could look over and see the famous rock carving of Decebalus.

Showing a sequence of photographs is there to highlight how insignificant this sort of thing is when it's set against the natural grandeur of nature. It's the same thing with Mount Rushmore. When you get there you say to yourself, “they're awfully small”. Anyway, Decebalus is a folk hero to Romanians because he fought off Trajan when he was crossing the Danube. Or something: the history here is mind-bendingly complex. He was and still is a really important figure for Romanian nationalists. Even during the communist era, Ceauşescu listed him as one of the 10 greatest leaders of Romania — guess who was number one eh?

The Rock Sculpture was paid for in 1994 by a Romanian nationalist businessman called Drǎgan. He seems to have been a pretty nasty piece of work of which the best example is that he inscribed his name next to Decebelus's in the sculpture. Like Serbia, nationalism is still very strong in Romania. However, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. There will be a lot more chances to talk about the history of Romania in future blogs.

What goes up, must come down and, given how good the road conditions were, the descent was an utter joy. I'm sorry to say that I broke the speed limit of 50kph by quite some margin as I freewheeled down.

There were lots of signs to look at and I stopped at a few that interested me.

Trajan was a dude. Looks like he's taking a selfie.

The Danube was considered the frontier of the Roman Empire and Trajan built a road along the southern bank which is sadly now flooded due to the dam. There's a tablet with his words inscribed on it which was saved from the flooding and moved up the valley to avoid the water. Impossible to see from the road so you're just going to have to look at the sign about it like I did.

Sometimes these trips have some strange surrealists moments. You shake your head and think “am I really seeing this or is it some early symptom of fatal heat exhaustion?” Round one corner I saw a strange bouncing black ball. I had to stop and take a picture of it. Why? Well this won't mean much to many people but if you've ever played Half Life 2, this reminded me of the bouncing mines that blow you up on the “Coast Road”. God I loved that game.

Niche. Sorry.

Before I had really registered it, the Most Scenic Road In Europe ended and I was crossing the Danube (yet again) on the top of the Ðerdap power station, dam and lock complex. Built during the communist period during a love-in between the two regimes which didn't quite fit into the Soviet sphere. Yugoslavia because Tito was experimenting with market reforms and Romania because Ceauşescu was a mad monster who was intent on creating his own Stalinist cult of personality. It still produces about 2GW of power which is shared equally between the two countries.

Its other main function was to make the Danube a lot more navigable. Which it did but, if you're going to dam a river to make it navigable, the ships have got to be able to get through the dam.

There's another one this size on the other side to get to a 30 metres lift.

Riding on top of a power station is not terribly picturesque but since I've take photographs on every Danube crossing so far, it only seems right to do the same here.

Like cycling through Mordor.

The Serbian border post was pretty perfunctory but on the Romanian side I got told off by a guy who gestured with a gun that taking a photograph was forbidden. He then smoked aggressively at me while he was checking my passport and pointedly stopped half way through to text somebody and watch some porn on his phone. It took two cigarettes and what sounded like three orgasms before I got my passport back. You're not in Kansas now Toto.

I'd been looking across the Danube to the parallel road on the Romanian side thinking “jeez, that looks pretty busy. Lots of lorries, glad I'm not on that side of the river”. Yes, you're right. The road I was joining was the DN6 — a suspiciously low number — and also the E70 route. The “E” routes are the main lorry routes across Europe and this one was exceptionally busy.

It was only 10km to Drobeta-Turnu Severin (DTS) so I would just have to grind it out — there literally was no alternative. There was a hard shoulder on the edge which was about 75cm wide and if I stuck in that, the lorries definitely missed me by…oh…25cm. Strangely it didn't feel as dangerous as the tunnels. The lorry drivers are professionals and generally do a good job.

After 5km the lorries were directed off onto a proper motorway and I had the, now much quieter, DN6 to myself. The road into DTS passed by decaying communist-era ship yards and smelting works. It was pretty grim. Although a nice bike path appeared I trundled through town thinking “this is pretty run down”.

My hotel is the Hotel Clipa. It's an oasis of desperate hipster desire in the middle of houses made of communist concrete and corner shops that look like they've been transplanted from Malawi.

Be glad this isn't a video. The music would make your brain melt.

The room is really much better than I had hoped. Comfortable bed, bed linen, towels and air con and a shower that both work. There's a non-functional heated towel rail but you can't have everything.

Who needs a heated towel rail when you've got this?

Call the Midwife was playing on the TV when I arrived.

This was really awfully nice given it cost 40 EUR. The Kod Dzimija needs to up its game.

It was the traditional end to the day: an hour of fighting with DHL about my bike bag which is now in Bucharest but needs to have some duty paid on it. Thank you Brexit. Oh thank you so much. Everything washed, everything charged up for tomorrow and time for some food.

No Maiden's Delight for me tonight.

That was a fantastic day. Something that I wouldn't ever have had the chance to see without going through all the pain and suffering of the last few days to get to this point. I know that nobody reading this blog is thinking “oh wow, let's go and do that trip next year” but…maybe you should. This was quite an experience.

I have a strong feeling that Romania is going to be very challenging in many ways. Despite being in the EU, it's still got a long way to catch up given what its starting point was in 1989. Then again, here I am in the land of Vlad the Impaler and Dracula! Spoiler alert, they're the same person!

Tomorrow I'm following the Danube as it snakes south and east. In a change from my original plan I'm going to cross the huge new bridge over the Danube (again) and spend the night in Bulgaria!

Stats:

• Distance: 131km. Not a long day by any standards and felt quite relaxed.
• Climbing: 837m. Less than the Garmin said when I left (1183m) but I think the Garmin got confused with the tunnels.
• Average HR: 113bpm. This is much more what I should be aiming for on these days
• Body: an opportunity for my “soft tissues” to have a day where they're not taking a beating but my hands have gone completely numb. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Day 10: Drobeta-Turnu Severin to Vidin

This was a bit of a transition day to be honest. Lots of grinding out kilometres in the baking hot heat but I was happy to get it done.

The day ended here:

Country number five.

There was a lot of riding to do before I got there though.

Since we've done archeology and geology, it's time for a little bit of literature.

I like to read up about the history of the places I'm riding through before I set off. It gives you context I guess. The history of the Balkans is…outstandingly complex. From the pre-Roman times to the recent past, it's a story of hordes of people with incomprehensible names and unclear motives rampaging up and down the Danube killing lots of people on the way. I'd read three or four books and really was none the wiser. However, my friend JJ suggested Misha Glenny's book The Balkans 1804-2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers. It is very much better than anything else I've read and it's my bedtime reading on this trip. Get it if you'd like to understand this strange and messed up part of Europe.

The other book that I highly recommend is Paul Kenyon's book Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania. Romania's story is pretty much a non-stop tragedy from the times of Vlad the Impaler to the current day and is filled with characters of quite unparalleled badness. This is an astonishing book which I will be using as the source material for a lot of comments about Romania as I cycle through it. Buy this book. You won't regret it even if you're not planning to cycle through Romania — and, let's face it, if you're following this blog and have all this pre-warning of difficulties, you'd be absolutely bonkers to attempt to cycle through Romania.

I slept like a log in the Hotel Clipa. The room was quiet, the air conditioning was superb and, for the first time on this trip, my alarm woke me up. Even my kit had dried despite the lack of a heated towel rail.

The breakfast was three double espressos and a couple of cheese rolls. I knew I had a lot to get done today so I really wanted to get on my way.

Rolling back down to the river in the cool early morning was lovely.

Cloudy and cool. This would not last.

Unfortunately, the first part of the route was on the RN56/E70. Yes, this is the main route along the Danube on the Romanian side. Single lane on either side and a lot of lorries.

Not ideal.

The first 5 km were pretty terrifying but soon the RN56 split into the RN56 and the RN56A. Weird. But it turned out that the RN65A was little bit quieter although it didn't have as wide a “bike path” next to the road.

You start to learn the aerodynamics of big lorries. As they start to pass you there's a region of low pressure which sucks you towards them — eek!! — then a region of high pressure which blows you towards the crash barrier and finally a region of low pressure behind the lorry which gives you a little boost of speed. However, if the lorry is carrying sand, that final low pressure region is like being in a sand blaster. A thorough exfoliation for free!

Although the sun was getting up, I was in good spirits and the occasional huge lorry thundering past didn't intrude too much. The villages got sparser and sparser and one of them was called Simian and I have tried for 7 hours on the bike to come up with a good blog joke about that and failed. I'm sure there's something involving Hartlepool but I just can't get it to work.

After about 20 km, there was another junction. The RN56A split into the RN56A and the RN56B. My route followed the RN65B and, extrapolating from two data points, I guessed that the RN56B would be quieter still.

Difficult choices…

A sign just beyond this one said that it was 85k to Calafat on the RN56A — effectively my end point — but according to my Garmin, my “quieter” route still had 120k to go. Hmmm. I could shave nearly 35k off the route by staying on the busy and more dangerous road. The heartfelt pleas of family and friends (“Can I have your jeep if you die?”, “Is the life insurance policy up to date?”) convinced me that I should do the sensible thing.

The RN56B was indeed very quiet. It wound its way up some bluffs onto the plains above the Danube — or “Big D” as I've taken to calling it. Most of the corners on the road had a sad little shrine to the people who hadn't taken the corner correctly. For some not very difficult to understand reason, these really affect me.

If you zoom in, you'll see that it's not just testosterone that kills teenagers.

Once up on the plain, it was like this. For a really long time. I've spared you the endless photographs that I took which look…exactly like this.

Straight hot roads with “Big D” down there on the right.

I dropped down to the river to cross at the Gogoşu power plant which is located on a branch of the Danube. By this point I'd ended up on the RN56C! The extrapolation model worked well, this was a really quiet road.

It was like being back in the Elektrotechnikai Múzeum in Budapest.

Very soon after I crossed over the hydroelectric station, I discovered the downside of quiet country roads. Dogs which aren't scared of traffic. Three vicious junk-yard dogs came haring out of a mouldering scrapyard and chased me. The dogs and I were both doing 35kph for a long period of time as they snarled and snapped around my wheels and calves.

Spot the dog moment in my power and heart rate.

Finally the dogs gave up the chase. My heart was 150bpm, I was hot, sweaty, I was down to my last water bottle and the air temperature was 38 and it wouldn't drop below this until I got into the air conditioned room in the hotel in the evening.

I went off-route into a small village called Balta Verde which seemed to be the only place in 20 miles which might have somewhere to buy liquids. Very quickly when you get off the main roads in Romania it becomes very rural.

A flock of geese on the road.

There were geese, there were horse drawn carts. It was rural and ,if you secretly think that “rural” means “smells of dung”, in this case you are absolutely spot on.

The topless tubby bloke look is very big in rural Romania.

Just when the village was about to run out, I saw a supermarket! Hurrah. I dashed in and bought two bottles of peach iced tea — I told you the addiction is getting strong — a bottle of water and an ice cream. The queue in the supermarket was huge. I stood there for 25 minutes as the person on the till laboriously scanned every item and then checked that the scanned number was the same as the barcode number…on every single effing item. Given that almost everybody in the queue was buying 3 litre bottles of unbranded beer and a packet of cigarettes, you'd think that they would have learned the numbers by now.

25 minutes wait for this. A poor haul.

I chugged the iced tea, poured my melted ice cream down my throat and filled my water bottles with the water. Ready to go once I had negotiated the horse obstacle.

Who leaves their horse in the middle of the road?

I was back on the plain pounding out some hot kilometres when I took the first drag from my full water bottles. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that the big bottle of water I had bought was cherry flavoured. I couldn't afford to not drink and therefore I spent the next hour squirting minging lukewarm cherry stuff into my face hole and grimacing every time.

The farms and fields here were absolutely enormous. I live in East Anglia and so large fields are sort of the thing that is done there but here the fields stretch to the horizon. Maize and sunflowers exclusively in fields that are easily 4 km by 4 km. That's 1,600 hectares for a single field.

I know that efficient agriculture feeds the world but the traces of the smaller farms that didn't make it to be the “Mr Big of Corn” are all over the landscape shown in the tumbled down and abandoned buildings that line the road.

There's a lot of this.

And a huge number of these.

Just after I took this photograph something happened that really drove home how far I am away from the UK both in distance and culturally.

As I pounded along in the 40 degree heat in the middle of nowhere, a VW Sharan stopped at the side of the road about 200 metres in front of me. I'd noticed it going past me unusually slowly. A middle aged couple, man talking on his phone, woman smoking. I was a bit worried that I'd done something wrong and there was going to be a confrontation. However, this was not going to be an argument. The woman jumped out, opened the boot, took out a burlap sack and shook out a puppy onto the side of the road. She jumped back in the car and they sped off.

I stopped and took a picture of the puppy which was cute in the way that 6 month old puppies are…but deleted it because…it wasn't going to end well for that dog. Abandoned amid endless monoculture maize fields without food or water at least 10km from human habitation. I know I'm a “dog guy” and therefore hard wired to say this but who the fuck does that sort of thing? Hard not to imagine your own dog in that situation…and impossible to know what to do. I got back on my bike and rode very angrily for a long time.

I found another supermarket after some angry kilometres which was a much happier retail experience and in which I managed to buy real water. I poured the disgusting cherry stuff away down a drain

Profiloco are my go to chain now.

The RN56C turned into the RN56B and still the traffic wasn't too bad — excepting the BMW drivers who lived up to their caricature by careering along the straight roads at near-light speeds. Bastards.

Then the RN56B turned into the RN56A and things got serious. Time to turn off podcasts and music and concentrate. On the A roads, there is a small strip which is designated, presumably, for cyclists.

Everything on the right hand side of the line are our lands Simba.

Once you get your eye in, this isn't too bad. You just stick to your side of the line and ride. The lorry drivers pull way out when they pass you as do the car and van drivers. The BMW drivers don't. Bastards.

Then the RN56A turned back into the RN56. The rule appears to be that the busier the road, the wider the bike lane. By now I was supremely relaxed about this type of riding but not relaxed enough to wear headphones because it requires a lot of concentration and I'm not suicidal.

This is a piece of cake now.

The temperature was still 40+, the road was hot but the gradients were easy. The reason they're easy is — oh the irony — it's easier for the lorries.

I was heading to The New Europe Bridge where I could cross into Bulgaria and, obviously, a very large number of lorries from places as far afield as Sweden, Poland and Turkey were also heading to the bridge. About 5k from the bridge start there was queue of lorries. So the single lane each way road was effectively blocked in one direction.

5 km of this.

Cars and vans (and hot sweaty blokes on bikes) had to try and avoid the oncoming cars, vans and lorries in the small bit of road you can see on the left here. It wasn't too bad on a bike although the heat coming off the air conditioning units on the cabs vents out to the left side and therefore the temperature was even higher. It was like a sauna.

All the customs, passport stuff is on the Romanian side of the bridge and, being a bike, I had the advantage of slaloming through the huge queue of cars and vans right to the front of the queue. Had I cared, I almost certainly could have learned some rude words in Romanian and Bulgarian as the frustrated and annoyed drivers shouted loud imprecations about my queue jumping but I think I was justified in doing this. I'd put in the effort personally to get here. They had just pressed on their accelerators in air conditioned comfort.

I approached the border post with a bit of trepidation but everything was sweetness and light. I gave my passport to the Romanian border guard with whom I had a nice chat and then he passed my passport to the guy next to him who was the Bulgarian border guard. We exchanged views on the madness of trying to cycle from Budapest to Constanțan and he made a big play for me to go through Bulgaria rather than Romania. It was friendly and both smoke and porn free. At the third booth, a blousy woman laughed at me when I asked if I needed to pay and then I was on the bridge.

This is not the Pančevo bridge. The Pančevo bridge has a lot to learn.

The bridge was constructed between 2007 and 2013 — I really recommend clicking on the link to find out more: it's an interesting story. The most important thing for me was that it was constructed during a more enlightened period where architects thought “hey, maybe bikes would like to go across in relative safety”. The bike path was beautiful and the views of “Big D” were stunning.

This is a big big river. Maybe I should call it “Big Big D”.

As I descended off the bridge, I had 10 km to go. I'd added the diversion to Vidin in Bulgaria as a little fun diversion from four continuous days in Romania. It added 15 km to both this day and the next but, in the comfort of my office at home clicking on the Garmin Connect app, it didn't seem like much. I rather cursed my decision as I ground out the last 10 km on the quiet roads along the Danube towards Vidin.

I saw my first EuroVelo 6 sign since Serbia. There's literally no signage in Romania although, to be fair, what are they going to do? As a result of the interplay between geography and economics, the hard facts of riparian agriculture means there's…one big road.

Like seeing an old friend.

Vidin itself is surrounded by lorry parks — presumably for the bridge crossing — and as you get closer to the centre, there's the usual serried ranks of communist era apartment blocks. I wound my way through neighbourhoods which even Cumbernauld residents might turn their noses up at. I wasn't feeling terribly confident about my hotel choice but then I burst out of the crumbling-concrete zone and out onto the boardwalk along the banks of Big D and there was my hotel.

I'd spent the extra energy to do 15 km extra to Vidin mainly because there was nothing available in Calafat on the Romanian side of the border. There were a few properties on booking.com which said “managed by a private host” but I've tended to avoid them. Somehow I think I would turn up at some random dude's house and the whole family would be round the dining room table dressed up for their Saturday night satanic ritual and I would never see Sunday. This is probably deeply unfair to “private hosts” on booking.com but…better safe than sorry. I'll have to do that extra 15k back tomorrow as I cross the bridge back into Romania.

A very Austrian feel.

The Family Hotel “Anna Christina” Vidin or СЕМЕЕН ХОТЕЛ АННА КРИСТИНА as it is known here — we are back in cyrillic land — is very funky. A combination of old world charm with a crazy swimming pool out back where scores of enormously fat families are sitting around getting shitfaced and smoking.

I should point out that I'm really deep in smoke land. I haven't seen a single person not smoking in any situation indoors or out where they could be smoking. Throughout Romania and this bit of Bulgaria, smoking is just a thing that everybody does. Just assume that everybody I interact with is smoking unless I tell you otherwise. It's like being trapped in 1970s Glasgow.

However funky the Anna Christina was it has turned out to be great. Maybe that's because I paid 60€ for the VIP room? On the plus side the room was absolutely enormous, had a huge bed, serious air con, 6 giant towels and the plug sockets didn't turn off when you leave the room. On the downside, no towel rail, taps with a confusing API, and no plug in the washbasin. What is it with hotels in this price bracket and not providing plugs for the hand basin? I didn't have a washbasin with a plug any time during the previous 8 days. Every time I had to fashion a plug out of wadded up toilet paper or an upturned cup just so I could wash my cycling kit. Grrr.

Searching along the Danube walkway for some food, I found a huge Bulgarian restaurant. There was no menu in English and nobody spoke any English except for a Moldovan waiter who translated Bulgarian into English via Russian. I managed to score a Wiener Schnitzl and some beer which was a win for me. As I looked around there were probably 200 people here and every single one of them over the age of 14 was smoking furiously as they eat. It's a different world.

Apart from the puppy dumping incident today was a good day. I was now acclimated to the heat a bit more and I was now relatively relaxed about cycling on the busy roads — not complacent…definitely not complacent. I was really loving this trip despite it being great deal harder than the Warsaw trip. Poland is Denmark compared to Romania.

Tomorrow I go back across the bridge and join the RN56A/B/C and continue along the northern banks of the Danube. I realised as I crossed the bridge today that I only have four more days of cycling left. I felt sad about that.

Stats:

• Distance: 151km. This is as long as I want to do. The next four days should all be shorter.
• Climbing: negligible although didn't feel like that on the short steep hills.
• Average HR: 115bpm. Max 158 (dogs)
• Average Power: 110W. That's about right. Max power 740W (dog sprint)
• Body: Most things holding up although my hands are really screwed. Not easy to type since they're tingling all the time…

Day 11: Vidin to Corabia

I won't suger-coat this. Today was 7 hours doing a spin class in a sauna while miserably listening to The Rest Is History podcast. If that's your kind of thing then let's get started.

I have a little guide book which I used to help to plan this route. I've brought it with me and I'm ripping out the pages I no longer need as I go — weight is everything remember. On this stage, the author says “There is nothing of interest for the tourist or cyclist for 96 kilometres”. He is right.

The Anna Christina was quiet and I slept well apart from waking up at 4am stressing about whether or not my bike bag will actually make it to Bucharest.

This is not the time or the place to go into the woeful tale of DHL's customer service. Suffice to say that I have spent at least an hour every night trying to get this bike bag delivered and failing. Hopeless call centres, laughable “AI powered” chatbots, telephone numbers that don't work if you dial them from outside the UK. As you might imagine, this is not what you want when you are trying to recover from a hard day cycling. My lovely family stepped in to take the mantle and fight DHL from UK soil. I felt bad about this because part of the point of these trips is to be self-sufficient. But I was at the end of my tether.

Breakfast at the Anna Christina was the standard three star fare but amusingly served in a dungeon under the hotel. Apart from the excellent coffee machine, there wasn't much that was appetising except a couple of jam doughnuts. Big shock of the morning was that almost all the overweight families that I'd seen round the pool down at breakfast were British! To me it seems like a "long run for a short slide" to get all the way to Bulgaria and sit around a crappy pool getting shitfaced and smoking but…YMMV.

We stuffed bad breakfast into our face holes together and watched Bulgarian TV which appeared to consist of a German Police Show dubbed into Bulgarian incredibly badly — indeed so badly that a German cop would say a single syllable word and a stream of Bulgarian would come out of the TV. The dubbed TV Cop excitement was punctuated every 5 minutes with adverts where meaty and moustachioed Bulgarian men would sell…meat. Surreal.

It was still cool as I rolled down the boardwalk along the bank of the Danube. I passed the Baba Vida Fortress which is the big thing in Vidin. It has the usual story about Bulgars, Ottomans and Hapsburgs kicking the crap out of each other over hundreds of years for the ownership of it.

To be honest, it isn't much

I retraced my steps (pedal revolutions?) back to the New Europe Bridge. Due to the proximity of the bridge, Vidin is ringed with lorry parks and, with the heavy density of truckers comes the inevitable heavy density of sex workers. Young and not-so-young women sat topless on discarded sofas by the side of the road selling themselves at 8am in the morning. It was a sad sight.

I rejoined the same bike path onto the bridge and crossed back into Romania. This was the last time I would see the Danube all day. My route took me inland.

The customs post was as crazy as yesterday. There were huge queues of impatient drivers — who got more impatient when I weaved my way through to the front of the queue.

The folks sleeping on the ground on the left must have had a hard night.

There was some reasonable cycling infrastructure to get me into Calafat and then my route took me onto the RN55A. I was dreading this since the previous A road had been a roller-ball-derby of huge lorries and narrow bike lanes. However, as I probably could have worked out, the density of heavy goods vehicles on the RN56A yesterdat was due it being the main road to the bridge.

The RN55A was incredibly quiet. No lorries and very few cars. In fact, a very large proportion of the traffic was consisted of horse drawn carts.

Maybe a quarter of all vehicles were these.

The RN55A links together the poor and predominately Roma villages which dot the road every five or ten kilometres. Between the villages the road is long, straight, hot and flat.

This picture taken at 9am. I would be seeing a lot of this.

Occasionally I would see a little old man on a bike ahead and I would up my pace so I could sweep past him with a cheery wave.

Cheerily waving cyclist approaching on your left…

I had thought that the low temperatures would continue and I could make some serious distance without dehydrating but by 10am the temperature was over 35 and by lunchtime it was 40+. It's hard to describe how debilitating it is to realise you've got 100 km to go and it isn't going to get cooler until 7pm.

I'll spare you the photographs of the road which I took over the subsequent 6 hours. They all look identical. A long, hot and straight road disappearing off into the heat-hazed distance.

One has to be extremely careful doing exercise in this sort of heat. Without enough liquid, one is in danger of terminal heat stroke and therefore I was very diligent about seeking out refreshments. I had worked out that each village had two betting shops, two cafes with beer-bellied blokes hanging outside drinking beer and…a ProfiLoco! Profilocos are probably the equivalent of the Nisa Locals that you get everywhere in the UK. Big advantage is that they're air conditioned and they take Apple Pay.

A typical ProfiLoco stop.

Even if I had enough water in my water bottles, I would stop at each ProfiLoco and get some fresh cool water and chuck out the disgusting 40 degree liquid that remained in my water bottles.

Some observational work in the ProfiLocos suggested that every man over the age of 20 has a beer belly and every woman between the ages of 15 (!) and 25 is pregnant. The beer bellied guys have the disturbing habit of rolling their T-shirts up over their bellies when they get hot. This is really not a good look. I checked my Rapha kit for sartorial elegance before venturing into a shop. I don't want to let the cycling side down.

This is a very poor part of Romania — I would discover one of the reasons for the poverty at the end of the ride — and that makes everything more challenging. For the first time I locked my bike before going into a supermarket for food and drink and took my passport with me. It doesn't feel…safe…which is sort of fair enough. I know that my bike only cost me £1,000 to buy the bits to make it but it still looks like an intergalactic space cruiser next to the tumbled down knock-off Chinese mountain bikes that most people ride here.

In between the long dispiriting kilometres of hell there were some interesting sights. Amidst the tumbled down but occupied cottages which looked like this…

Lots and lots of these

…there would be a very thin smattering of houses that looked like this.

Bling palace

I mused on the provenance of the money which allowed people to build these houses amid the squalor. The words “organised” and “crime” floated through my head.

The weirdest thing about these houses is that they had golden plaques on the gates which were Armani or Louis Vuitton branded. Some examples below:

Ignoring the blatant trademark violations, it's hard to understand why people would do this. I realise that people wear Ferrari baseball caps or Burberry scarves to signify a tenuous association with a luxury brand but what does this say? “Hey! I've got a big house and I also get my underpants from Armani!”.

However, it was mostly just non-stop grinding rural poverty with the occasional ProfiLoco.

There were lots of horse drawn carts carrying everything from a Roma family of 9 to a consignment of scrap washing machines. They travel a little bit slower than a hot sweaty tired cyclist and so I would pass them with a wave which became increasingly perfunctory as the long hot day continued.

Grumpy hot cyclist passing on your left.

The prevalence of horse drawn transport adds another cycling hazard to negotiate.

At least it's concentrated in the middle of the lane

In every story ever told, the hero has “the long dark night of the soul”. In cycling stories the long dark night of the soul generally happens with about 2 hours to go to the end. You've had the fun of the cooler morning. You've had the excitement of getting to 🎵half way there, livin' on a prayer🎵 but then the motivation and will-power drains out of you. Even a ProfiLoco stop for food doesn't help much.

This was surprisingly good. Hurrah for ProfiLoco.

The digital thermometer on my Garmin hit 42 and I was reduced to cycling for a couple of kilometres and then sheltering in the shade of a tree next to the road.

I did this every couple of k. It was grim stuff.

As I got closer to Corabia my speed seemed to drop proportionally. At 25 km to go I was going at 25 kph, at 20 km to go I was going at 20 kph. Maybe I would go slower and slower as I got closer and closer. I spent some time trying to work out this slightly more sophisticated version of Xeno's Paradox but, to be honest, my brain was buggered and there's no way I could to do an infinite summation in my current state.

This photo was taken 6 hours after the previous near-identical photograph.

I did manage to keep my speed up above 20 kmh and so I finally reached the outskirts of Corabia and here were some of the reasons that this region was so poor. For a good two or three kilometres, there were abandoned industrial plants and buildings

Lots of these hidden behind trees

Huge numbers of these

During the 70s and 80s, the mad bad bastard Ceauçescu decided that Romania needed to be an industrial powerhouse. Why? His Stalin complex probably. Or as an illiterate failed shoe maker's apprentice he probably didn't know any better. We will be seeing more of his (and his insane wife's) work as we progress through Romania.

He bought outdated — and in many cases non-functional — industrial machinery from other communist states and paid for them with grain and food. The machinery was installed in badly built factories in stupid places. all the agricultural production had to be sold abroad to pay for this and he thus managed to engineer a famine in a country which is one of the most fertile farming locations in Europe. As a result of this, in the black market, the unit of exchange was the chicken thigh. You'd give the party functionary a bag of chicken thighs to get your kid into a school or get your driving licence. Why thighs? Because the rest of the chicken was exported…

The truly crazy thing was that Ceauçescu then decided that the reason why the Romanian economy was tanking was that there weren't enough people. He instigated a huge state programme to encourage women to have as many children as possible. Contraception was not just discouraged, it was illegal and punishable by hard labour prison terms. At the height of the AIDS crisis, condoms were unobtainable. This natalist policy resulted in the Romanian Orphan Crisis which we all found out about in the West when he finally was deposed and executed in 1989. A truly tragic sequence of events. It is deeply surprising that Romania is managing to slowly drag itse lf back from these historical catastophes.

When the cold winds of western capitalism swept through Romania in the early nineties it was painfully obvious that Ceauçescu's industrial vanity projects were wildly inefficient and they all closed. EU structural funds have softened some of the impact in the rural areas but the farms are now so huge and mechanised that there's not much work. It's hard to see how this will change until the generational migration from the land to the city is completed.

It was a sobering last few kilometres through Corabia as I contemplated these catastrophes.

I'm staying at the Sinner's Hotel in Corabia. Before anybody gets too excited about what's to come, it appears that the owner's name is Sinner. It is a very strange hotel and has the vibe of a badly built modern tourist hotel in Africa. It is located miles away from the centre of Corabia but I didn't care by this point.

There was nobody on the desk when I arrived but there's an attached pizza joint next door so I explained in sign language that I wanted to get into the hotel and the woman running the pizza joint phoned a bloke who turned up and proudly talked me through an unnecessarily sophisticated code based key system.

No plug in the basin and no heated towel rail but it'll do.

I know it doesn't look promising but after today, anything will do.

According to Google Maps the nearest restaurant which isn't the pizza joint next door was a 20 minute walk away. After the exertions in the heat, I could barely walk to the room and so it was an easy choice to have pizza. It would have been nice if the restaurant wasn't playing atrocious euro pop at deafening volume but I can put up with a lot for food and beer after a long day in the saddle.

Beer, pizza, blog authorship. A classic combo.

Today was really difficult in places. Possibly cycling across southern Central Europe in August was a mistake. Possibly taking up riding a bike was a mistake. Possibly the mistake is being so bloody minded about this that I'm not going to stop now.

Tomorrow is sadly a virtual carbon copy of today. 158 km without much climbing in the same easterly direction towards Giurgui where I cross the Danube for the final time and end in the Bulgarian town of Ruse where I'm sleeping tomorrow night.

I think I can do it — I know that there's going to be a ProfiLoco every 20 km and therefore I'm unlikely to die. However, these sorts of days are just about getting from A to B. If I can get tomorrow done then I've got one shorter cycling day in Bulgaria (woo hoo!) and then a final day cutting east to the coast on the Black Sea. Can't stop now.

Stats:

• Distance: 157km. I can't really do any more than this in the next few days. This is the limit.
• Climbing: 526m. Absolutely nothing compared to the distance but the little rolling hills are a trial in the heat.
• Bike: Still working well. A few worrying creaks from various places but still getting the job done.
• Body: I'm keeping hydrated so I am in no mortal danger. My feet are blistered, my hands are totally numb and the less said about my soft tissues the better. Finally there's a strange “twang” going on in my Achilles tendon which doesn't bode well for the next three days.

Day 12: Corabia to Ruse

Today was, as predicted yesterday, a virtual carbon copy of the previous ride. Baking heat, frequent stops at ProfiLoco stores for liquids, pain and deep suffering…but it would end crossing the Danube for the final time and staying in Bulgaria once again.

Bloody hell, I need a shave

I left the Sinner's Shelby hotel at 6:30 foregoing what was likely to be a disappointing breakfast. I was sure that I could pick something up at a ProfiLoco along the way and this proved to be the case — although the 40 km until I found the first open ProfiLoco were hungry kilometres.

As the sun rose over yet another long straight rural Romanian road, I settled into what was likely to be a long day.

I know you're as bored as me of these pictures

Ok, I'm not going to do this one more time. If you're bored of photographs of maize fields, wrinkly old men on horse drawn carts and run down villages baking in the unrelenting heat, imagine how bored I am after three days of this. All you need to do is to read the post from yesterday again but imagine it being hotter and me being a bit more buggered and lacking in energy. You will have completely nailed today.

While you're imagining all that, let's do something a little different. While I'm suffering on the road, why don't we dive into a little bit of the history of Romania and its two most famous sons. Vlad the Impaler and Dracula.

In the 15th century, the region of Wallachia — much of which is current day Romania — was ruled by Prince Vlad II. It wasn't an independent kingdom but was a vassal of the mighty Ottoman Empire. Vlad II was summoned to pay homage to the Sultan Murad and he travelled to Gallipoli with his two younger sons Vlad and Radu. His elder son and heir Mircea remained in Wallachia.

It turned out it was a trap. The Sultan had heard that Vlad II had been fighting on the Christian side against the Ottomans and wanted to punish him. He took away the two younger boys and interned them in a castle as hostages and sent Vlad II back to Wallachia to put him on the naughty step and to “think carefully about what he'd done”.

Years previously, in Nuremberg, Vlad had been inducted into a secret society known as the Order of the Dragon in which each member vowed to fight on the Christian side if any of the others were attacked. Hence Vlad II doing the anti-Ottoman stuff. The word in old Romanian for Dragon is “Dracul” and he passed the title on to his second son Vlad III but with the Romanian dimunutive added and Vlad III became Vlad Dracula.

Vlad Dracula and his younger brother Radu remained in the Ottoman Empire and by all accounts were very well treated. They were well educated alongside the Sultan's son Mehmed and, by some accounts Radu became Mehmed's lover.

The story of the Balkans can be summed up as “eventually it didn't end well for ⟨insert name here⟩” and eventually things didn't end well for Vlad II. He and Mircea were deposed in a palace coup by the boyars (nobles), their bodies were mutilated and buried alive. Vlad Dracula came steaming back from Gallipoli to avenged them, but only managed to retain the throne for 30 days before he had to escape to the wild lands in Transylvania. There he remained for 13 years, hanging around in bars and looking — and acting — a bit like Viggo Mortenson in the Lord of the Rings. Like Aragon, all he had to do was hang around looking sexy and cool and his chance would come. The Prince of Wallachia got tied up fighting yet another Ottoman imperial overreach near Belgrade. While he was otherwise engaged, Vlad Dracula swept down from Transylvanian mountains and fought a brilliant guerrilla campaign which brought the Prince back to defend the throne. Vlad Dracula ambushed him and his party in a forest and fought him single handedly and killed him. There was definitely a lot of swash being buckled. Immediately all the boyars saw which way the wind was blowing, hailed Vlad Dracula as the rightful king and he was installed on the throne.

Vlad knew that the boyars were the ones that had killed his father and brother but he bided his time. 9 months later at a feast celebrating Easter he rounded up all the nobles. Those who had directly participated in his father and brother's deaths he impaled on long birch poles. The ones who weren't directly involved were sent to rebuild a church for a couple of years and then impaled anyway. In Romanian he became known as Vlad Țepeş. Or Vlad the Impaler. Big reveal, Dracula and Vlad the Impaler refer to the same guy.

Some light relief

He was a pretty fierce guy — and is still much admired in Romania to this day.

There are hundreds of Vlad Țepeş streets in Romania.

He was once so annoyed at two ambassadors from the Ottoman Empire who didn't take off their turbans in his presence that he got his guards to nail the turbans to the ambassadors heads. Needless to say, that didn't end well for the ambassadors.

He once invited all the beggars in the capital city to a big feast. They all arrived, started munching on the lovely food only to smell burning. Vlad's soldiers had barred the doors and were burning down the building. Hundreds died but from Vlad's perspective, he had made his views on begging (“as bad a stealing”) very clear.

He is most famous for the retreat he made when Mehmed — the boy who had been his brother's lover succeeded his father and was now the Sultan — decided to invade across the Danube and teach Vlad Dracula a lesson. The Ottomans got across the Danube near to where I am now in Ruse. They had a huge army which outnumbered Vlad's four or five to one but Vlad's retreat was masterful. He would draw his troops back slowly, poisoning all the water, torching crops and every now and then flooding fields so the Ottomans couldn't bring up their cannons due to the mud. He also dragooned the peasants whose crops he had burned and cattle he had slaughtered into digging pits, filling them with spikes and camouflaging them. All the time he was undertaking guerrilla raids to capture Ottoman soldiers or killing them and taking their bodies with him.

Finally, Mehmed's exhausted, hungry and terrorised army approached Vlad's stronghold. They saw what they thought was a forest in the distance but was, in fact, 20,000 of their ex-comrades impaled on giant posts. Mehmed took one look at that and thought “fuck that for a game of soldiers, these guys are mental”. He installed Vlad Dracula's brother Radu on the throne and he went home never to return. This is effectively the foundational story of Romania.

A number of sources suggest that the Romanian predilection for rulers who have strong authoritarian policies is an echo of these times.

Finally, so what's the gig with the blood sucking vampire Dracula? Although Vlad Tepeş was a pretty bad bloke, he was never accused of sucking the blood of attractive young women in diaphanous night dresses. Well…Bram Stoker was an impoverished Irish writer and sometime theatre impresario in the 1890s. He'd noticed that gothic horror stories were doing well in the shops (The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde etc) so he thought he'd try his hand at one. He was idly flicking through some books in the London Library and came across one about Transylvania which mentioned Dracula. He underlined the name twice in the book — which is a very poor form when it comes to library books — and set about writing his book using Dracula's name for the main character. And so there you have it.

I really recommend Paul Kenyon's book The Children of the Night — from which these stories are taken and poorly summarised — for more of this stuff and a whole lot more about the tragic history of Romania.

That history lesson might have been boring but I have spared you detailed descriptions of 7 hours of real suffering. Just like yesterday it was hot — the temperature in Zimnicea at lunchtime was 44 degrees, the roads were long, hot and straight and I was flagging badly. The villages were, if possible, even more run down than the ones I went through yesterday although I did see a bling house who had forgone the traditional Louis Vuitton or Armani and wished to shout to the world that they liked the fashion of Coco Channel.

Apart from that, there was trash absolutely everywhere and a veritable menagerie of road kills ranging from squished birds and snakes, through cats and dogs to — in one never-to-be-erased-from-my-nightmares instance — a fully grown goat which had effectively exploded on the front of a car.

Let's just draw a veil over this entire day until got to the end.

I was going to be crossing into Bulgaria to stay in Ruse (or Pyce as it is in cyrillic). Ruse is across the Danube from the Romanian town of Giurgiu. I had to work my way through Giurgiu and up onto the Friendship Bridge to do what would be my final crossing of the Danube for the trip. I was 140 km into one of the hardest days on a bike…ever…when I started passing the, now familiar, decaying remnants of communist industry. If anybody ever wants to shoot a post-apocalyptic movie, Giurgiu has a lot of great locations.

Once through the “industrial rust and graffiti” doughnut which seems to ring every town, I was then into the “residential wasteland” zone. Most places I have been in the former Warsaw Pact countries, the past 30 years has enabled the government to pull down or renovate the old Soviet era housing. Not in Romania. It's all still inhabited in all its alienating architectural horror.

Giurgiu had thoughtfully installed some cycleways and infrastructure although they had forgotten to tell the populace what the point of cycleways were. Drivers parked on them and cut across them without bothering to look because…lets face it…there was only one mad cyclist in the whole town actually using the cycleways so what was the point?

I stopped in a small bit of shade on the cycleways to check my map. It is yet another golden rule of cycling in temperature conditions like this that if you ever stop the bike, you do it in some shade otherwise you will die. While I was checking my map in the cycleways a young lady in an ancient VW Golf tried to reverse over me as she attempted to park in the cycleway I was on.

After that I just stuck to the roads. At least on the roads you can own your own bit of road and try to dominate the traffic by being as big and loud as possible.

Some pretty hairy and fucked up roads led up onto the bridge approach. Lots of lorries, lots of potholes but the lorries had to go through customs and so it was relatively quiet on the final approaches.

Looks ok right? No, it isn't.

The Friendship Bridge was built in the 1950's when, it appears, nobody ever wanted to ride a bike or walk across a bridge. It is two lanes of semi-destroyed tarmac and a distinct lack of bike lanes or even pedestrian paths. Although the lorries were delayed by going through customs, every 30 seconds one of them was released and they roared up the road behind me with absolutely no space between them, the oncoming traffic and me. This made the Pančevo bridge look like Holland.

It was to get worse though. Half way across the bridge, I hit a traffic jam.

Really very unpleasant indeed

While being buffetted by the oncoming traffic and being shouted at by the cars on my side as I weaved in and out of the traffic, I did manage to snatch a quick shot of the final crossing of the Big D.

Bye bye Big D.

The reason for the traffic jam was that workmen were repairing one of the carriageways. The whole bridge surface and supports were removed on one side and the workers were wandering around on planks 50m above the water with no safety gear at all. You thought cycling was dangerous? I rolled down the hill into the Bulgarian border post and then waited for 30 minutes in the heat. Just before I arrived a bus-load of approximately 40 Turks had arrived and the border guards wanted to check every single one of their passports with a magnifying glass. The message being sent here was very clear to all concerned.

The outskirts of Ruse make the outskirts of Giurgiu look like Bruges. Dying heavy industry, stinking trash dumps, dusty lorry parks and serried ranks of sex workers. Those last 5 km felt very long indeed but almost without warning, my route directed me down some stairs and there was a beautiful riverside (I've been told I'm using “riparian” too much) park.

This is a lot better and a lot less stressful.

I had booked into the Hotel Grand Riga which was the best hotel in Ruse — indeed the best hotel within 100 km. The photos on the website had the vibe of a four star business-oriented hotel in Oslo: clean, efficient and with all character surgically removed. After doing quite a few days of pushing the envelope of “funkiness” I was really looking forward to it.

As I finally pulled into the car park I knew what the Hotel Grand Riga actually was. It was the Communist Central Committee hotel.

This isn't what I expected.

The central lobby screamed “12th Annual Bulgarian Tractor Collective Congress”. There were four restaurants although only one of them actually serves food and there were two bars but neither of them serves drinks.

The rooms have been refurbished in a “generic modern” style but the tiny windows give away that the design is very firmly in the 1960s communist style.

Pretty good but note tiny windows.

The view from the 9th floor is spectacular.

Party functionaries made sure they had the best views in town

This was definitely a step up from the places I've stayed in over the past few days. The shower is functional, the AC works, the sink in the bathroom has a plug and there's a towel rail which sadly doesn't work. They had supplied a lot of towels so the “wash 'n' twist in towel” technique is going to work well tonight. I have to thank my friend Gareth for this tip. I think of him every night when I'm rolling my rapidly decaying cycle kit in a towel and twisting it with my weak palsied hands.

I hobbled down to the only functioning restaurant and was surrounded by Bulgarian families eating huge amounts of food and smoking furiously. The restaurant was on a terrace above the Danube and, once I filtered out the Bulgarian big-hair rock music, it turned out to be really nice. The food was substantial and wasn't Pizza Diavola which was very good news all round.

I was down to two days to go. Tomorrow was a day in Bulgaria on the right bank of the Danube which was going to be a bit shorter than today but, as I looked at the route, I realised that it had 1,000m of climbing in it. I probably should have thought a bit more carefully about this months ago when “planning” the route but there aren't many alternatives by this point. It would be my first proper day cycling in Bulgaria and I fervently hoped they had a ProfiLoco equivalent.

Without wishing to catastrophise too much, there were definitely moments today where I was right on the limit of what I am capable of doing both physically and mentally. That is, I guess, the point of these trips in some way…or maybe that's testosterone singing its siren song just like it sings to the teenage boys in souped up cars before they miss the corner and end up as a sad little shrine.

Stats:

• Distance: 158km. Too long too far not enough interest to get through it.
• Climbing: 547m. Not much but not looking forward to twice this tomorrow.
• Body: Less said about absolutely everything the better. The “stupid middle-aged man” solution to the Achilles tendon problem (“Just ride it out, it'll be fine, grow a pair”) hasn't actually made it worse. The cyclist's palsy in my hands is progressively getting worse. At some stage I won't be able to type these posts.

Day 13: Ruse to Silistra

I finally had to bow to the inevitable. The temperature was going to be 2 or 3 degrees hotter than yesterday and I had felt in considerable mortal jeopardy out on the road between towns yesterday. I took a taxi between Ruse and Silistra instead of risking my life. Who says that it's too late to grow up?

I'd had a difficult night punctuated by my fingers and arms cramping up and nightmares of riding a bike off a cliff. By the time the sun rose in all its merciless glory, I was resigned to needing an easier day. While I was eating the miserable breakfast in the Hotel Grand Riga, the very lovely receptionist arranged for a local taxi company to take me to Silistra for about €80. The best €80 I've ever spent.

Stefan the life saver

As a result, this post is going to be cycling free but I did get to spend some time exploring Ruse and then later Silistra nut I have to say that neither place should be on your must-see-before-I-die-bucket-list.

Despite applying to be candidate for the 2019 European Cultural Capital, Ruse has only one interesting attraction: a communist-era monstrosity called the Pantheon of National Revival Heroes.

Bloody hell, this is ugly.

On the morning of October 26th 1975, the residents of Ruse were woken by the sound of bulldozers destroying the main church in the city centre. The church was razed to the ground in short order and three years later on the 100th anniversary of the Liberation of Bulgaria (from whom? Who cares?) this monument was unveiled. The bones of some historical Bulgarian nationalists were re-interred in the monument. I quote a website about the opening ceremony

Todor Zhivkov, First Secretary of the [Bulgarian] Communist Party and Head of State, personally attended the opening of the Pantheon, but because of his disappointment with its appearance, he did not deliver his intended speech or present the designers with the expected state awards. Instead, he asked whether something should be changed in the appearance of the building to make it harmonize with Ruse's older architecture. “What is that Turkish bath?!” Zhivkov is said to have exclaimed. To this day, the people of Ruse have mixed feelings about the huge building, with its golden dome and strange appearance.

The town planners added the cross at a later stage but, to be honest, I suspect that the people of Ruse don't actually have “mixed feelings” at all. I tried to get in but a bloke who looked a lot like Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films wouldn't let me in. The cost was 1 LEV and despite offering him a €10 note he wasn't swayed. Good to see that bribery has no place in modern Bulgaria.

The rest of Ruse was tired and dusty and very Slavic. Everybody in Bulgaria looks very Bulgarian, although none as much as this bloke. Moustaches are big in Bulgaria in both senses of the word.

Now that is moustache! This is a SpongeBob SquarePants reference.

I trudged around Ruse looking at the remnants of neo-classical architecture and the brutalist communist concrete surrounding them. It was 10:30 and already 40 degrees. I had made a good decision to take the taxi.

How good a decision it was only became clear as Stefan whizzed out onto Route 21. A single lane highway with a 120 kph speed limit with no bike lane or hard shoulder. This was the route I would have taken — indeed the only route that I could have taken — and even in the taxi it was utterly terrifying, The road wound its way up and down rolling hills and on every uphill section, I imagined myself grinding up the hill at 10 kph in the 42 degree heat as lorries, vans, cars and taxis sped past me with millimetres to spare.

The other thing that quickly became apparent was that there were no Bulgarian equivalents of small run-down villages with ProfiLocos every 10 km. I would have had to cycle 138 km in 40+ temperatures on this road without any opportunity to buy liquids. I almost kissed Stefan when I realised this…but I didn't. I just gave him a huge tip with a little manly tear of gratitude in my eye.

We arrived at the Hotel Drustar in Silistra about 1pm. On paper, this is the best hotel I'm staying in until I get to the Marmorosch in Bucharest. It's a five star hotel, listed as one of Bulgaria's 100 best hotels and I have a suite. This should be the Cheval Blanc Maldives but on the Danube. Sadly, in reality, it's a faded rundown family-run place built in the 1960s and lightly renovated to bring it up to a 1970s standard. However, I should point out that it's about one fortieth the price of the Cheval Blanc Maldives per night so maybe I shouldn't complain too much.

Fancy a dip in our pool sir?

There was nothing to do in the hotel. No sir, we don't have a restaurant or bar until 5pm in the evening. I was forced out on the streets of Silistra.

Silistra is a little microcosm of the entire history of the Balkans. In AD 12, the Romans founded a fort on the foundations of an earlier Thracian settlement and kept its name Durostorum. Over the next few centuries it got larger and then, like everywhere else in the Balkans, the usual mayhem ensued. The Christians took over and killed everybody, the Bulgars took over and killed everybody, the Christians took it back, the Bulgars took it over again and named it Drastar (which is presumably where the name of the Hotel Drustar comes from). By this point we've only got to about 1,000 AD so I'll spare you the rest of the history up until modern times but trust me, a lot of people died. By the 20th century there was a barney going on between Romania and Bulgaria about Silistra. At some convention in 1913, the Great Powers awarded Silistra to Romania. With the “storm clouds of war gathering”, this wasn't to last — what a surprise — and Bulgaria took advantage of the rest of the world being distracted by The Great War to take it back in 1916. The Treaty of Neuilly returned it to Romania in 1919 until the Axis-power-sponsored Treaty of Craiova in 1940 returned it to Bulgaria which was confirmed in the post-war Paris Treaties.

I realise that the previous paragraph was pretty dense and confusing. I present it as just one example of the complex history of literally everywhere in this region. You try reading and understanding the history of the region when you're completely buggered after riding 150km in an oven. It's not easy.

When the glorious Bulgarian Communist Party took over in 1944, Silistra was an area ripe for that sweet, sweet central planning so beloved of communists. There was a significant population increase over the coming decades and at its peak in the 1980s Silistra had a population of over 70,000 all of them working in the docks, agriculture and heavy industry while living in endless crumbling communist apartment blocks. The population is now less than 30,000 as the industries succumbed to the chill winds of capitalism and inhabitants migrated to Sofia or abroad.

I had a whole afternoon to explore Silistra. What delights awaited me?

It's a brutalist communist monument…with a tank!!

I wandered through the baking streets — giving thanks to the gods of cycling that I had made the right decision — searching out the three Silistra museums. The first, the “local history museum” was locked up derelict and had a very strong “meth factory” vibe to it and so it was on to the Archeology Museum.

A lot less “crack house”.

As I wandered into the reception, a couple of blokes who were playing football on the other side of the street came running over shouting at me which is always a slightly sphincter-clenching moment in places like this. However, it turned out they were the curators of the museum and, for the equivalent of 40p, they turned on the lighting and let me in.

I know that everybody is waiting for the snarky asides about crap displays and underwhelming artifacts but…surprise...this museum was utterly transfixing. Probably the best display of artifacts ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Romans I have ever seen. Here is a very small selection of the photographs I took.

Just stuck in some house

Massive display of Palaeolithic axe heads

Everything documented and there to touch if you want

These Roman bronze figurines from 300AD were exquisite.

From the bits of brass they have found in a tomb they have recreated a Roman chariot

As I went in, I was silently rehearsing my snarky lines for the blog post but I was blown away. The curator showed me round and explained some of the artifacts to me in amusingly incomprehensible English — there were a lot of English signs on the exhibits so I got the gist. Because I was such an appreciative visitor or maybe because I was the only visitor, he took me round the back to the locked area which contained the silver and golden artifacts. It was forbidden to take photographs but they had gold coins from the time of Alexander the Great through the the early Christian period and some utterly exquisite Roman gold rings and earrings. I am honestly not going over the top when I say it was the most detailed and complete display of pre-Roman, Roman and post-Roman finds I have ever seen. The British Museum pales by comparison.

This, I guess, should not be surprising. In the UK we get excited because somebody discovers a broken Roman pot somewhere near Chelmsford. This area around Silistra was heavily occupied by the Romans for centuries and the incredible fertility of the land means that people have lived here for 50,000 years. Wherever you dig, there are archeological treasures.

Next stop was the Ethnographic museum which I eventually found at the end of a dog-shit strewn side alley.

Not promising

A bit more promising

Little asid here:

Being in Bulgaria is being back in cyrillic land. It's very very hard not to think of yourself as some sort of Jim Prideaux on a mission for “C” in the old Soviet Union. You start to get your eye in for cyrillic and once you've worked out that Г is“g” (like gamma) and П is “p” (like “pi”) and И is “e” (like a backwards N which is mad) and Ф is “f” (like “phi”) you can start to work out the signs. Also, you feel a bit like a cool British spy. Sad I know.

Like the Archeological museum, it was manned (sorry “personned”) by an enthusiast. A twinkly old lady and I communicated via Google Translate which resulted in a special discount on the entry due to me being over 55 and, for approximately 40p again, I was in. She explained — thank you Google Translate — that the displays were on two floors and if I wished “to rub myself on the displays” this was permitted.

The exhibits weren't quite as special as the archeological museum but what they lacked in wow-factor value, they gained because they were all there to rub myself on.

Bagpipes, bread and cloth. Just pick them up. I didn't rub myself on them.

On so many levels this was a bonkers place. Real artifacts from the 13th century behind a little bit of rope with little or no organisation and amusing mis-translations into English. But I loved it.

A sewing machine, a lathe and some sort of metal thing that makes buttons.

Once again, I wouldn't cancel your holiday to Washington DC to see the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum — the best museum in the world ever — in order to go to Silistra but visiting this sort of museum one of the reasons for doing these sorts of bike trips. You get stuck in somewhere that you'll never ever visit without cycling through it and discover little gems like this and the previous museum.

Apart from this, the rest of Silistra has a very strong East Kilbride town centre vibe.

Just missing a Greggs.

My “five star” hotel opened the restaurant and bar at 5pm and I ate very mediocre food in a surreal atmosphere. The main course had a suspicious “Maiden's Delight” feel to it and I'm sure that there's a great Ph.D thesis to be written entitled “Phallic Symbols in Balkan Cuisine”.

I was the only person eating here

The food was mediocre although thank god, it wasn't another Pizza Diavola but the view from the terrace is out of this world. The wine was acceptable and astonishingly cheap which was probably more important than the food to be honest.

Definitely a “wow” moment.

For those of you following these posts to read tales of cycling derring do and buckling swash on a bike, I apologise for wimping out today and having to fill the post with pictures of Roman coins and Cumbernauld level architecture. However, quoting Julius Caesar.

No one is so brave that he his not disturbed by something unexpected.

I didn't expect four days in a row in 40 degrees plus temperature.

Tomorrow is the last day. From here to the Black Sea is 133 km. I cross back into Romania soon after starting and I've checked the route and there are ProfiLocos every 20km. The weather is forecast to be a couple of degrees cooler than it's been over the past few days. However, rather foolishly, it appears that I have constructed the whole Vienna to the Black Sea route so that the last day is the “Queen Stage” — the stage with the most climbing in it. There are eight quite hard climbs tomorrow but it's short. I can do this. Next post from the shores of the Black Sea and this time it'll have some cycling in it.

Day 14: Silistra to the Black Sea

The last day ended as it was intended to with a stunning view over the Black Sea. However, today also had a variety of hurtful stings remaining in the tail end of the journey.

That's the Black Sea that is.

To get to the Black Sea I had 136 km to ride and, more worryingly 1,369m of climbing to do. Given that every stage so far had been pretty flat I wasn't really prepared for the climbing. 1,369m of climbing isn't a Mallorca 312 but it's not nothing and, despite today being cooler than the previous few days, it was still going to be 36 degrees for most of the day. Eeek.

Here's the first “interesting fact” of the day. Last night I had done some calculations on the flow rate of the Danube (“Big D”), found some stats on the width and depth of the Danube and made some heroic assumptions about the shape of the river bed. An isosceles triangle with a base of the width of the river and a height of the average depth of the river seemed to be the best model. It turns out that the flow rate through the Danube is well documented at various points. More heroic — but broadly justifiable — modelling assumptions led me to discover that if I had dropped a stick (pooh-sticks!) in the Danube from the Chain Bridge in Budapest as I had crossed it on Day 4, the pooh-stick would — very roughly — be floating past Silistra as I left this morning. Cool eh?

The Hotel Drustar lived down to its undeserved five star rating by not serving breakfast at 7am when I was ready to leave — despite reassuring me twice yesterday that breakfast started then. I had to put on my Not Angry But Very Disappointed Eyes™ and eventually a waiter rustled up some weird fried croissanty sort of things filled with melted cheese. What is it with the Slavs and their penis shaped food filled with spurty melted cheese? In a strong field, this was the worst breakfast of the trip.

I rolled past the sad and despoiled pool “complex” mentally rehearsing my booking.com review for the Drustar and burping horrible cheesy burps.

The border between Bulgaria and Romania crosses the Danube here — no doubt as the result of some blokes with fabulous moustaches and top hats drawing a line on a map in 1918 or 1945 or something. There was a sad and quiet border crossing personned by a very happy and loquacious young Romanian chap who looked a lot like a famous pop star of the 1980s. We chatted about liquid intake and cycling for a bit and then he waved me off. He must have knocked off his shift about 15 minutes later because he sped past in his car on the road and gave me a toot and a cheery wave.

Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling cheery at that point. As soon as I got into Romania, I was on the DN3. The low number had filled me with some trepidation but it turned out that for at least 100 km, this road was relatively quiet and safe. What made me less cheery was this monstrosity rearing up out of the vineyards that dominate this part of Romania.

Moscow suburb in the middle of endless vinyards.

I would have taken more photographs but decaying apartment blocks on quiet roads are a home to packs of scary dogs who fancy a nice bite of juicy cyclist leg. There were a number of dog-defying sprints during my first hour

My friend Saeed suggested I read The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinnes. It's a very personal and harrowing novel set in the last days of the Ceauşescu regieme. Here is an extended quote where he's talking about the results of the forced relocation of peasants off the land into tower blocks like these.

To balance out the dream of the old city, Leo made me visit the new Bucharest, where whole peasant communities had been forcibly relocated to the cement outskirts. Families were broken up and moved into tiny flats, often without water or electricity or even windows. Many took their animals with them: goats and pigs rummaged around the rusty metal and broken concrete, shat in the corners, rutted in the courtyards. Cockerels, disorientated, crowed beneath builders' floodlights in the dead of night and hens yaffled in the scaffolding. Old men with narrow eyes and calloused hands peeled potatoes and old women sat on deckchairs in peasant dress, watching the cranes stalk the strange horizon, listening to the mixers and diggers, new beasts lowing in the asphalt fields. It was a tragic transplantation. Many wandered off, back to the land, or to where the land had been. They were found, half-mad, walking the motorway hard shoulders; or, if they ever made it out of the city limits, weeping over their flattened shacks, their lost livestock. The few who stayed on the industrialised farms took jobs as machine hands or in abattoirs, or staffing the vast hangars where dioxin-filled pigs were shackled to the ground and fattened on darkness and fear.

Come for the cycling, stay for the searing commentary on one of the darkest periods in recent history.

The cycling was going pretty well despite the occasional high speed sprints past the roaming packs of feral dogs. I felt quite strong and, unlike previous days, my heart rate was high. There was a downside of it being cooler in the morning. All the exercise made me sweat as usual but on previous days the temperature had been high enough to evaporate the sweat quickly. Today it was a little cooler and so sweat was running into my eyes and making it impossible to see. I had to break out my casquette which I had carried for just this eventuality. I certainly hadn't carried it for its sartorial panache.

Last view of Big D.

On the way out of every village and town in Romania there's a post like the one on the right. It says “Drum bun” which means…”good way” or “good road”. I fervently hoped that the next 120km were going to be a drum bun.

My first stop was planned for the first village on the route which was called Băneasa. I had thought that the villages I rode through a few days ago were run down, I was wrong, they were Hampstead compared to Băneasa and the rest of the villages on this route. Băneasa was dominated by Roma who, like the Jews, have suffered appallingly in just about every conflict for the last 1,000 years. It doesn't look like it's getting much better for the Roma. There were a lot of physical deformities and many people were not just short but stunted.

This ProfiLoco had a very strong bunker vibe to it.

I locked my bike, took everything valuable with me into the shop and waited for 30 minutes in a queue while every transaction was minutely examined by tiny shreweish Roma women in traditional dress in case the bar code reader had screwed up.

I scored three bottles of water and a couple of cans of coke. The guys you can see next to the door in the pictures obviously make money by recycling plastic and cans. They were very aggressive and surrounded me wanting my used bottles and cans. So much so that one guy snatched my coke can out of my hand as I drank the last dregs. I might have been 30cm taller than everybody else in the village but there was a lot more of them. I don't often feel threatened in my life but there was a strong "fuck off" vibe and so I fucked off out of Băneasa pretty quickly.

The hills kept coming. None of them “a real leg breaker” as our favourite Eurosport commentator Sean Kelly would say but they were relentless.

I realise with a little bit of sadness that the ghostly and lugubrious voice of Irish cycling legend Sean Kelly hasn't made an appearance in this blog since last year in Sweden. There were opportunities today for him to witter on “Kirk's givin' it won hundert percent on this climb. Oi tink it's going to be a difficult one to keep this up when he's sufferin' majorly in the heat”. That's enough from Sean for this year.

Up hill and down dale I went. My average speed was a pathetic 18 kmh — you just don't make enough back on the downhills to make up for the miserable progress up the hill.

The land heated up and, as is the way with metrology, air flowed from the cool Black Sea where I wasn't towards the hot interior where I was. By 11am, there was a 25 kmh boiling-hot headwind which would be my constant tormentor until I eventually arrived in Constanța. During the Falklands Crisis, Denis Thatcher once said that the Falklands were “miles and miles of bugger all”. I rode for hours through miles and miles of bugger all but in temperatures never experienced in the Falklands.

It was like riding across the high plains of Spain.

The elevation profile was unforgiving.

None of these are individually big but all the little ups and downs kill you

I stopped at crappy general stores to pick up water or something to eat because the spurty cheese filled croissants were a long long time ago. These stops were also an opportunity to have a much needed rest. In a town called Viişoara — yes, two “i”s in row and I will definitely have to do something on the Romanian language in a future post — I ate the best Twix of my life. It was the sort of day where eating a Twix can be the best part of the day.

On the positive side, the DN3 was pretty quiet. A few lorries, vans or cars every couple of minutes. However, when a Romanian driver sees a nice straight and empty road, he's hardwired to put his foot down to find out how much speed he really can get out of a 15 year old Škoda. The answer is something around 130 kmh which isn't really much to write home about compared to proper cars but it is a terrifying experience when it comes up behind you when you're battling a 25 kmh headwind up a 4% slope.

“Let's open the throttle on this puppy and see what she can do”

I encountered some road repairs which consisted of painting some liquid tar on the road, throwing down some gravelly stones and expecting the traffic to bed it all in. If you're in your BMW X5 travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, this isn't much of a problem but if you are the aforementioned hot and sweaty bloke fighting the headwind up hill it has two side effects. The first is that you get hit by little bits of gravel travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light — and those little buggers really hurt. The second effect is that the gravel is new, sharp and almost perfectly designed to give you a puncture and, predictably, I got a puncture. However, Tyre Jizz™ worked its magic. A couple of revolutions of the wheel — which, to be completely transparent, did spray sealant all over my legs — and the puncture was repaired.

I know there are some readers of this blog who are very sceptical about the value of the new tubeless technology for bike tyres but they are very wrong. I have cycled more than 7,000km on tubeless tyres now and have only had one major failure which was my own fault. You run your tyres at lower pressure and therefore everything is a bit more comfortable, you can bump up and down kerbs because pinch flats don't happen and punctures repair themselves. They are magic.

After what seemed like multiple windy, hot, sweaty and painful lifetimes I finally got to a more downhill section on the descent down to the town of Murfatlar. On the way down in a white BMW 3 Series skidded to a halt in a lay-by in front of me. I was expecting yet another confrontation but it turned out he just wanted to get out and inspect the sad, overheated, topless sex-workers plying their trade along the DN3. Whatever it was he wanted, it wasn't there and soon afterwards he was spraying me with high velocity gravel as he headed off to the next lay-by. I said a lot of rude words about this man and not because of the gravel.

I was travelling downhill because I was coming to this.

It's just a canal right?

No, it's not just any canal. It's the Danube Black Sea Canal.

Starting in the early 1950s, the communist leadership in Romania came up with a plan to dig a canal direct from the Black Sea to the Danube cutting a couple of days off transiting through the Danube delta. It is said that Stalin suggested to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej — the communist thug that preceded Ceauşeceu — that this would be a good plan. They gave some picks and shovels to political prisoners — no surprise that a large number were Jewish I guess — and told them to get on with it. This is a canal that required more earth to be moved than either the Panama or Suez canals. Estimates vary but it's certainly true tens of thousands of people died in horrific conditions during the first attempt to build it. In some accounts, more than a 100,000 Romanians were killed in this first attempt to build the canal.

The project was discretely shelved reputedly at the behest of Stalin in 1953 — maybe Stalin didn't think enough people were dying. As was the way for Stalinists, somebody had to take the blame for not building a giant canal with wooden shovels and a show trial executed a few hapless functionaries. When Ceauşescu got his venal hands on the Great Helmsman leadership prize, this sort of thing really appealed to his crazy megalomaniac side and he borrowed some money from the IMF, bought some proper equipment and started building it in 1973. It was completed in 1987 at a cost of over 2 billion dollars but the canal brings in about 3 million euros of revenue a year. A waste of money and a waste of lives.

Imagine digging this by hand with shovels.

Time to get back to the cycling. It was about 30 km from here to Constanța. How hard could this be? I'd be sitting next to the Black Sea with a beer in my hand in no time.

This was not going to be the case. The nice DN3 joined the main road from Bucharest to Constanța and everything got serious and scary. This road was a dual carriageway with no hard shoulder and little or no cycling infrastructure anywhere else.

An example of shit cycle paths. Bumping up and down junctions every 50m is a pain.

Eventually I had no choice but to brave it on the dual carriageway. To be fair to them, the lorry drivers were pretty good and generally pulled out into the outside lane when they went past. The car drivers, not so much.

There was a hard shoulder for about 2 km. It was full of death nuggets and therefore unusable.

The DN3 intersected with the Bucharest-Constanța motorway in an unbelievably dangerous and scary junction. Imagine trying to cycle through the M11, M25 junction. It was like that.

Easily the worst bit of the entire trip.

Even when I got into Constanța, it didn't get much easier. People were parking along the inside lane of the dual carriageway and so I had a choice: hug close to the cars and risk getting “doored” by somebody opening their car door in my face or move out into the outside lane where I was risking getting “squished” by somebody watching porn on their phone as they zoomed through the 50 kmh zone at 100. This was not an easy choice. You become very aware that everybody else on the road is travelling very fast with a solid metal exoskeleton protecting them and you're not travelling very fast sitting on top of a few wisps of carbon fibre held together with resin…

Constanța has the familiar “doughnut of shit” around the outside. Decaying apartment blocks, cheap supermarkets, tyre stores and car washes. I wearily wound my way through traffic just wishing for it to end and finally the core of the city appeared and it all got a little easier. There were quieter tree-lined avenues with only a few potholes to keep me on my toes.

And then…there was the Black Sea.

Beautiful enough to make me forget about 2 hours of hell.

I had a beer to celebrate.

I've drunk more beer in the last 12 days than I've drunk in the last five years. I love it.

Rather annoyingly, this turned out to be a premature celebration. My route had taken me to my original hotel called the Hotel Cherica. I'd cancelled the stay here when they started sending my crypto scams and phishing emails from their official booking.com account. Mad. My new hotel was only 10 minutes away but I had to cycle carefully due to the beer.

My new hotel was the Olympic Boutique which is everything that you would expect a “boutique” hotel to be in a middle income country. Self check-in and poorly executed funky decoration but it had a balcony overlooking the cool hipster street in Constanța so all's well that ends well.

Pretty nice to be honest

As I sat down to write this post, I was sad that it's all over. Despite this trip being considerably more challenging that my previous trips, I enjoyed doing it most of the time. These trips are a way of seeing places that you just can't do on weekend city breaks or on a traditional holiday.

Tomorrow I have to get to Bucharest somehow. My bag has made it to the Marmorosch hotel and I have a flight booked to get back to the UK on Saturday.

There will be no more cycling oriented posts on this trip but there will be two more general ones. I'm looking forward to my day in Bucharest and my obsessive searching for weird and off-the-beaten-track museums and sights will no doubt make for a fun read.

There will also be a wrap up post about the whole trip. It's too soon to do it now.

Stats:

• Distance: 136km. Not massive but into a headwind, that's a lot.
• Climbing: 1369m. This is a lot.
• Average speed: 17.2km/h. Pathetic on the flat but with the wind and the hills, all I could manage
• Bike: The bike has made it. A thing I made out of bits I bought from china has taken me this entire way. One problem with a slipping seat post but apart from that, faultless. I am so pleased.
• Body: Not much power left in my legs. The SudoCrem strategy avoided any undercarriage problems but my hands are properly buggered up. Hopefully the nerve damage will repair itself.

Day 15: Constanța to Bucharest

The Olympic Boutique was a lovely place to stay. Quiet, cool and it had an outstanding breakfast. The coffee shop downstairs did double duty as the breakfast location for the hotel and hence the coffee was superb.

I packed my bean and saddled up for nearly the last time and rode from the old town up to Constanța railway station. I had been worried about getting to Bucharest by train for the last few days. This train trip with the bike was second only to the DHL Bike Bag Omnishambles on my list of “things to worry about that I can't control”. In reality, the single most important “thing to worry about that I couldn't control” should have been not joining the sombre ranks of Romanian Road Kill but eventually you get numb to that risk.

The lovely lady in the ugly train station building hummed and hawed about the possibility of taking a bike on the train but she eventually found me a ticket on a slow train leaving in a couple of hours which, she assured me, would allow my bike to travel. I would have to pay some unspecified amount of money — in cash — to the train guard but what's a little bit of low grade grift between friends?

I had two hours to wait so I explored the train station

The trains here have low continental platforms which are indelibly linked in my brain to Gordon Jackson saying “thanks” to the Nazi solder in The Great Escape.

Having explored the station and taken a picture of a train I now had one hour and 55 minutes to wait. Even the stunning Zürich Hauptbahnhoft is a bit of an awful place to hang out hence you can imagine that a Romanian railway station was a very bad place to hang out. The toilets were a horror show. I walked about the environs of the railway station, sat in a park for 5 minutes until it became clear it was infested with biting flies, read some signs in Romanian and tried to work them out. Time dribbled by dispiritingly slowly.

Like the park, the station was infested with biting flies.

With 30 minutes to go my train clanked and shuddered into the station. The slick express service didn't take bikes and thus it was going to be a second class seat on the stopping service for me. I got on with my bike, found my seat and looked around me. This was a train designed and constructed by a worker's committee in 1952. Uncomfortable seats too close together, unfinished bolts and screws, a wheezing air conditioning system that blew hot air…

It was absolutely rammed to the ceiling, all the passengers were watching TV or TikTok on their phones without headphones, everybody had giant suitcases and I was convinced that at some point somebody would bring on goat.

We set off and the train guard arrived. It turned out that the unspecified amount of money was 15 LEU. The notes — roughly equivalent of £2.50 — disappeared into a back pocket and the deed was done. I could have asked for a receipt but I didn't think that a receipt was part of the transaction.

All of life in its rich tapestry was there. A tiny but hugely fat couple argued vehemently for three hours in hissed undertones that spoke of deep seated hatred and betrayal. A giant suitcase fell on a dwarf's head. A tiny dog tried to pee in my bike helmet which I had inadvisedly put on the floor. Flatulence and body odour fought it out for supremacy. Walnutty grandmothers stuffed sweet fatty treats into the gobs of their spherical grandchildren — no doubt whispering in their ears about the privations of rationing as my grandmother had done to me when I was a young child. In my grandmother's case she was talking about 1943, in their case they were talking about 1989. A disabled man showed delighted children that his right leg appeared to have developed so that the knee went the wrong way. He whizzed up and down the aisle of the carriage on a stolen scooter in a most disturbing way. I've said this before but “we're not in Kansas now Toto”.

In the “miles and miles and miles of bugger all” between Constanțan and Bucharest the only notable thing was the Cernavodă Nuclear Power Plant. It produces 20% of all the electricity in Romania and the surprising thing about it as you rattle by on the local train is how small it is. I remember the Chernobyl complex of multiple reactors being much larger. The other surprising thing is that both the Americans and Canadians were cool with giving reactor technology to a murderous Stalinist dictator. I mused a bit on this and also what the optimal density of large scale reactors are on a site but I didn't get very far because the bloody dog tried to pee in my hat again.

After multiple subjective lifetimes, the journey was over and we arrived at Bucharest Nord.

Glad that's over

Getting the bike down the “Gordon Jackson stairs” was a bit trying. The bike is absolutely filthy and the chain looks like a stretch of Prince William Sound in 1989. This is not a problem when you're riding but when you're manhandling the bike past suitcases, people's legs and your own legs, you leave a lot of traces of your passing. I had “chain tattoos” as did a lot of random people's suitcases and socks.

In a surprising departure from my standard operating procedure, I had actually thought ahead and had set up a route in my Garmin from the railway station to the hotel — no buggering around with Google Maps at difficult junctions for me. As I found out later, this day was a big national holiday — Assumption Day I think — hence the roads were actually pretty quiet despite being big and broad.

The buildings in this photo give a nice feel for the vibe here.

Very soon some rather nice cycleways appeared. Each with their own little bike traffic lights and priority on some junctions. It was lovely as the derelict buildings slowly morphed into derelict buildings hidden behind trees on tree-lined avenues. I was 200m from the hotel and surely nothing could go wrong now?

This could go wrong

Inconsistent cycling infrastructure is worse than none at all. If there's no cycleways you get your game head on and fight it out with the scooters and busses. No you bastard, I'm turning right here and I'm locking eyes with you until you give way. You tend to relax on a nice cycleway.

I was taking in the emergence of the gigantic Soviet style government buildings when my front wheel went into the 20cm deep pothole shown in the photograph above. The handlebar bolts gave way, the handlebars rotated by 90 degrees and my right brake lever/shifter clamp sheered off. I didn't actually fall off and…big surprise…no puncture or wheel rim damage. Thanks Tubeless Tyres. I love you.

I could have walked to the hotel but that felt like some sort of failure in my stupid middle-aged man brain. I jury-rigged the handlebars back into approximately the right position and used a cable tie to get the shifter attached to the handlebars. I was going to ride up to the final hotel.

Then I was there and it was perfect.

This is not Club 502 Kalocsa.

They had my bike bag and now is the time for the tragic and frustrating DHL story.

Last year I had sent my bike bag to Stockholm with DHL. Pretty much hassle free. This year's bike bag delivery would be very different indeed. I'd put an AirTag in the bag so I could track what was happening.

A bloke turned up in a DHL van 2 hours earlier than the advertised “one hour pick up slot” and bundled the folded up bike bag into his van and it was off. From Cambridge to Wellingborough, short stop in Eastleigh in Hampshire, back up to Birmingham and then to the East Midlands airport. Where it stayed for a couple of days before flying to Budapest and an overnight lorry trip to Bucharest. I was feeling good about this.

Just as I actually started my cycle from Budapest I started getting emails from DHL saying they couldn't deliver the package. There was a link to click but it led to some branch of DHL which wasn't the right branch. There was a telephone number but it was only able to be dialled from numbers within the UK. Every night for a week I spent 45 minutes to an hour trying to sort this out. I tried their laughably bad AI ChatBot service — although to be fair to DHL, all AI Chatbots are laughably bad — which would ask me to rephrase my question three times before suggesting that I go to the web page which…contained the link to the AI ChatBot. I phoned DHL Romania who didn't pick up for three days. When they did they told me there was duty to pay. Sure, I'll pay it I said. Ah but you can only pay it with a Romanian Bank Account…

A week passed, I got stressed about this. My family offered to help and didn't have much luck either. Finally I phoned the Hotel Marmorosch and threw my bag problems into their lap. They were superb. They put a rocket up the arse of DHL Romania, paid the duty themselves charging it to my room and the bag arrived two days ago 14 days after it was sent. DHL were terrible and without the support of a luxury hotel and their great staff I would now be out on the streets of Bucharest working out where I could buy a bag.

Right, got that off my chest. I had booked my flight back to the UK on Saturday and therefore everything was drawing to a close. Tomorrow would be explore Bucharest day. There's a lot of interesting stuff to see and fans of my crazy museum visits are in for a treat.

Day 16: Exploring Bucharest

This is very much a “travelogue style” post. If you're more interested in reading about cycling stuff then you can skip this and head on to the Danube Cycle Wrap Up post.

After sleeping the sleep of the dead — I really am a 400 threads per inch sheets kind of guy — I enjoyed a proper “hotel breakfast” complete with…an egg station! Despite being a 400 tpi sheets guy, I still consider an egg station the height of sophistication and class.

However, there was no time to angourously savour a freshly cooked omelette and high quality sourdough bread. I had a major European city to “do” and I had about 8 hours to do it.

First stop was the National Museum Of The History Of Romania because it was practically next door to the hotel. I had some great hopes for this museum and the façade certainly promised treasures within.

A promisingly classical look to this one.

I was to be sorely disappointed by this museum. I was first in the door and was directed to a confusing array of desks where a sour-faced attendant grudgingly relieved me of some money and I could explore the exhibits.

The entire museum was a giant shambolic mess of absolute rubbish. Here are some examples

Let's put a TV and a set of scales here. Why? Why not?

Cases and cases of creepy dolls.

What's a thing that's going to go well next to some stamps which were originally Hungarian but were over stamped by the Romanian government in 1921? I know, a Soviet high altitude jet helmet.

It was absolute madness. No rhyme or reason to any of the displays. Random photographs displayed on the wall next to a dog collar or a sword. However, there was one little exhibit which hinted at an interesting back story.

Some moon rock and a Romanian flag that's been to the moon. Thanks Tricky Dicky!

It is hard to read on the photograph but this incredibly small and light Romanian flag went to the moon and back on Apollo 11. Richard Nixon presented this plaque — with some tiny fragments of moon rock embedded in lucite — to the Romanian people. What's going on here? Why was an autocratic genocidal Stalinist dictator best chums with American presidents and British Governments in the 1970s and 1980s?

The answer lies in a canny geopolitical decision that Ceauçescu made in 1968. Always terrified of Soviet power and control, he decided to not support the Warsaw Pact when the tanks rolled into Prague. On the basis of “my enemy's enemy is my friend” the West fell over itself to make life easy for the Romanian Communist party. Romania joined the IMF, they got to borrow money and access to technology — including nuclear power — because…well…anybody who was hated by the Soviets surely was a good chap. It was convenient to ignore his eugenics policies in the name of realpolitik

The most bathetic example of this was when Nicolae and Elena Ceauçescu visited the UK in 1978. The story is well told in this Spectator article. But, for those of you who can't be bothered, the summary is that the Labour government was struggling with a tanking economy and was desperate to get trade moving. Ceauçescu was one of the “acceptable communists” and was also desperate to get trade with the West in order to keep blowing the money on gargantuan ego-driven projects. A state visit was arranged during which Callaghan would attempt to wheedle some timber or coal out of Romania in return for the plans for the Austin Montego or something. Elena insisted on staying at Buckingham Palace and also insisted on an academic honourary doctorate — she had form on this — which she actually received despite being illiterate. The Ceauçescus stole ashtrays and light fittings from Buckingham Palace and the Queen is said to have jumped into a hedge to hide from them when they were out walking in the palace gardens.

The museum's hot mess of badly signed and confusing exhibits led through the building towards the main event: The Column of Trajan. It's mentioned a lot. "Not long until Trajan's column!! Just round the corner is Trajan's column!!“ Wow, that's impressive” you might think until you realise that it's just plaster casts of the real one in Rome. I mean, I know Trajan is a bit of a founding father when it comes to Romania but…really? It is certainly not mentioned in any of the signs in English that this is a copy.

Like going to Madrid to see a poster of the Mona Lisa.

There was a strong room with more undifferentiated crap in it — ranging from Roman bracelets made out of copper to the famous Iron Crown that crowned all the kings of Romania.

Made from a melted down cannon of some enemy. Or maybe a fake? Dunno.

The story of the Romanian Royal Family is a particularly sad and tragic tale especially in the 20th century. The shy king Fernando, his beautiful British princess consort — who called him Nando (hehehe) — and, in a strong field, the biggest wastrel prince in Europe. No time or space to go into this now but, once again, I recommend Paul Kenyon's book.

Walking is the best way to see a city and I had a lot of walking to do through the streets of Bucharest. Every now and then, you get a glimpse of the faded Parisian elegance of the old town streets seen like something at the bottom of a swimming pool: shimmering and not quite tangible. Tree-lined and cobbled streets with an elegant townhouse amid the centrally planned monstrosities and ever present smell of bad drains.

Mostly everything outside the old town is adverts for betting shops, the betting shops themselves and fast food joints selling penis shaped food.

No comment

Walking in cities in the heat is about making sure you're always in the shade while keeping your eyes firmly on the pavement to avoid the ever present dog crap. This was possible in Bucharest until you came across “triumphal boulevards” like this one

Consciously modelled on Pyongyang after Ceauçescu's visit there. He bloody loved North Korea.

I was making my way across town towards a museum which I was very excited to see but on the way I had to stop in at this tiny little church.

Tucked away behind some ugly apartments and offices

This is one of the famous “moving churches” of Bucharest. During the demolition of the old town as part of the “systematisation” program resulting in the building of the Palace of the Parliament — which we shall be seeing later in this post — the communists demolished about 7 square kilometres of the centre of Bucharest, displacing 40,000 people into brutalist apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city. To save the churches in the area, an engineer called Eugeniu Iordăchescu designed a way to get the churches off their foundations and roll them away to safety on rail tracks. It is well worth reading this lovely story coming out of a terrible time.

I was heading to the Dimitri Leónida Technical Museum and, when you look at these photographs, I think you can imagine why. This description just heightened my already overwhelming desire to go and see it.

“The museum covers a wide range of topics related to engineering and the physical sciences, including 1960s nuclear power plant technology, gamma spectrometers, horse-powered oil extraction techniques, magnetic and electrical fields, chemistry, mining, telecommunications, and hydraulics. Reflecting some of the main engineering efforts of the 20th century, the museum features lots of different motorized carriages, motorbikes, and all kinds of crazy cars, from beefy antique German race cars to wacky Eastern Bloc vehicles to fabulous concept cars that never saw mass production.”

Anybody with even a fleeting understanding of me and the sorts of places I like to visit is going to realise that this is the crack-cocaine of museum visits and can understand why I was practically vibrating with excitement when I walked up to the door but…it was closed for the day. I can't be certain but I think I may have had to stifle a tiny but manly sob when I found out.

There was nothing to it. It was time to get to the main event. The Palace Of the Parliament — or House of the Republic or People's House depending on what era you're talking about. This is the truly enormous building that was the centrepiece of Ceauçescu's attempt to remodel Bucharest along the lines of Pyongyang.

Photographs to not do justice to the sheer immensity of this building

I really recommend clicking on the Wikipedia link above to dive into some of the details of this building but for those of you who can't be bothered, here's the summary.

As part of the systematisation programme of the Romanian Communist Party, Ceauçescu initiated “Project Budapest” to rebuild Budapest based on the “socialist realism” style (c.f. Pyongyang). There was a competition to design the main building and, unexpectedly, it was won by a 28 year old architect called Anca Petrescu. Building commenced in 1984 and the whole programme went as well as might be expected with a junior architect being directed by a megalomaniac control freak dictator. Scheduled to be completed in 2 years, despite using 5,000 soldiers and 40,000 slave labourers, it was still being constructed when Ceauçescu fell in December 1989.

Old Nicolae definitely wasn't the sharpest spoon in the drawer and he had difficulty understanding scale models and, as a result, it just got bigger and bigger.

Nicolae's venal and dangerous wife Elena — who was desperate to have her own cult of personality — also got involved. She wanted it to be in the “eclectic style" which, as so often, is a synonym for a flaming dumpster fire of architectural and design gaffs. For example, there are examples of Doric, Corinthian, Ionic and Tuscan columns on the outside.

The building is the heaviest in the world due to its construction out of over engineered steel/concrete/marble because Bucharest is in an earthquake zone — thanks for that African continental plate! It's the largest administrative building in Europe and not much smaller than the Pentagon.

It turns out that you have to book a tour 24 hours in advance but there was a spare place on an organised group tour leaving in an hour which I could have. The desire to see the inside of the building fought with my deep seated misanthropic aversion to doing things in organised groups. I wasn't going to come back to Bucharest any time soon so I swallowed my misanthropy and joined the group.

A minor corridor

It is impossible to convey the gargantuan scale of this building in photographs. Some of you may have been to the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. That's a big building on the outside and has enormous interior spaces. It is absolutely dwarfed by this.

Those curtains are 40m long and weigh a quarter of a tonne each

The ballrooms and state rooms are also on some inhuman scale.

The main ball room is half the size of a football pitch

The insanity that led the leader of Romania to spend approximately $10bn in 2024 dollars on this while the country was literally starving is an unforgivable crime.

Everything had to be made from Romanian materials to satisfy Ceauçescu's infantile grasp of economics. Entire farms were converted to silk production in order to make the silk curtains which Elena insisted on. All in order that foreign leaders could be welcomed into rooms like this.

The classical style? The carpet weighs three tonnes.

Each of the main rooms has a different style as specified by Elena. French, classical, oriental and more. They're all there and, like the outside, the net result is a mess. I am in no way blaming the slave labourers but, as you might imagine, when you look at the details, everything is done very sloppily and, like old churches in the UK, the building struggles to cope with the demands of a modern building like lighting, air conditioning and data/telephone access. Duct-taped ethernet cables snake across floors and small data racks lurk with incongrous modernity in the corners of baroque marbled ballrooms.

The building has 1,100 rooms and six levels of basements with nuclear bunkers and a little James-Bond-villain-style train to get around. It's currently used for both houses of the Romanian Parliament and various other administrative functions. During my visit, we saw approximately 6% of the floor area and there's still 70% of it which is completely unused.

There's a certain squeamishness in Romania about talking about the fascist period in the 1930s until 1944 and the communist period until 1989. There was a holocaust inflicted on the Jewish, Roma and intellectual population in the first period and unthinkable human misery and avoidable deaths in the second period — unsurprisingly also disproportionally inflicted on the same groups. Given that a fair number of people alive today were complicit in the outrages of the Ceauçescu era, maybe that squeamishness is understandable. No country's history is a clean history but I felt I needed an antidote to the People's Palace.

On my way back to the hotel I stopped in at the Museum of Communism in the old-town restaurant quarter. A tiny red door sandwiched between a sex club and a bar offering “all night parties, €1 shots, tits!” was the entrance to this exquisite little museum.

It's two floors in a tiny town house and it probably has less than one hundredth of the area of The National Museum but it packs a much much stronger punch. Extensive information in Romanian, English and Spanish details both the horrors and the everyday humiliations that Romanians suffered.

The Securitatea were the feared secret police.

Displays of a typical kitchen or living room in one of the socialist era apartments are poignant and sad.

Beautifully done. And you can sit down and play with the exhibits.

Little vignettes about sport, transport, electricity, the electronics industry — yes, they had one before Ceauçescu crashed the economy — are powerfully done in a detailed and informative way. Little throw-away sentences have a strange visceral impact. For example, the Dacia 1100 (a knock off Renaut 8) cost 30 times the annual salary in 1980 and had a 5 year waiting list. Who presides of a system that produces, frankly really shitty, cars with a 5 year waiting list that cost many multiples of the annual salary and thinks…”yeah, this is the best system”. Or indeed a country which exports all its food while the population is literally starving in the streets.

Due to “external debt” pressures — basically the communists borrowing way too much money and blowing it on stupid projects like the Transfăgărășan highway— meant that there was rationing in Romania for 20 years. Or, in a classic piece of communist double speak…”The Scientific Food Programme”.

My horror and fascination at all this is because it was all happening when I was at school and university and flirting with left wing ideas. What could possibly go wrong if clever people plan an economy and give services and products to the population according to their need? It turns out starvation is one thing and forced labour camps are another.

This display was very poignant.

Nadia Comāneci was a hero until she defected. Then she was airbrushed from history.

I loved this museum although it didn't make up for the Dimitri Leónida Technical Museum being closed, nothing could do that. If you're ever in Bucharest, please go and see this museum. I tried to buy a t-shirt to support them but they only had them in XS and, although I've “left some weight on the road” on this trip, I didn't think it would really look good. I just gave them the money anyway.

After eight hours walking and being a tourist, I headed in the hyper-touristy section of the Old Town to eat Turkish food and drink surprisingly good rosado. It was a good day. I had the joy of seeing this weather forecast on the TV in the restaurant — yes, it's that type of place — and I was so glad I was not cycling any more.

That band of “Disconfort Termic” are the bits I cycled through.

No more Disconfort Termic for me!

With that, I'd “done” Bucharest or, at least, a good amount of things in a day. Did I like the city? Yes, in a way. It's got some deep character even after being comprehensively destroyed in the 1970s and 1980s but maybe the scars of that destruction are too salient. It would have been nice to see it in its heyday in the 1920s when it was known as “Little Paris”.

The city today feels oddly underpopulated. Maybe it's the scale of the Ceauçescu era buildings and roads but even in what is left of the old town there don't seem to be enough cars and people for the size of the city. The population has fallen from its peak of 2.2 million in 1992 and it's still a city of 1.7m people but it has a strange emptiness.

Would I come back? Probably, if only for the Dimitri Leonida Technical Museum and there's an old derelict chemical plant 6km out of the city which is supposed to be a wild experience.

There's a “wrap up” blog post about the whole ride which you can read if you're more interested in the cycling stuff than the tourism and searing social commentary.

We're done here.