the end of amazing Austria... and past Passau

Phew! Now that messy story is out of the way, we can get on to the more pleasant parts of our journey, more Austria!

August 8th we rode into a small community (called Au) outside of Mauthausen, Austria; a beautiful, bustling community with tons of things to do and a lively atmosphere. This community had also been the location of a level three (referring to rate of death) concentration camp during WW2. We decided to pay our respects to the lives lost during this dark period of history, and I suppose, if given the opportunity, one should visit a concentration camp. We should learn from our history and be aware of the evil that we are capable of.

The Mauthausen concentration camp expansion was only two camps in Europe to be labelled as level three camp, the highest ranking death-toll classification. The camp was reserved for the "intelligentsia" population, or those ememies of the Reich who were educated and of high social standing. The camp is infamous for the horrible practice of literally working the inmates to death... upwards of 300,000 people died as a result. The Mauthausen camp liberated in May 1945 by 65th infantry division the US army (Go Yankees). I don’t feel I could explain such a place, but the experience was sobering and contrasted sharply with the peaceful and fertile county that Austria now is.

We rode on to Linz, the capitol of the county, and then into the country side where we camped, once again, next to the river. Linz was a sweet little artsy-fartsy community and was full of beautiful buildings. And I don’t think we will ever tire of sleeping in little “Kempingplatz” next to the sound of trickling water, breathing fresh mountain air.



We ended our tour of Austria August 10, as we crossed into Germany and the city of three rivers, Passau Germany. Here we found a set of maps for the next portion of the journey (unfortunately the guidebooks are only sold in German) and we actually found camping fuel that works correctly for our MSR camp stove. Up into this point we had been using some crappy stuff that we found out was actually lamp fuel, and every time we went into a store looking for the right stuff, the store owner wouldn’t sell it to us, saying we would “blow up!” and shake their heads. The stuff we got doesn’t “blow up”, in fact it works like a charm and we made a lovely meal to celebrate. Garlic seasoned fresh veggies on top of quinoa and two bottles of cheep local wine.

The route in Germany doesn’t come close to the ease by which we passed through Austria, and the trail markings are in fact more confusing and sparse. Todd has a theory that some well-meaning townspersons goes around and rotates the sign posts so that you end up going through their small towns and spending your money. Whatever the case, between the maps being only in German, the backwards signage and detours due to copious amounts of flooding along the route, it’s been slow going.



August 11, after hours of biking through farm fields and occasional villages it was only fitting that we stayed our second night in Germany in a middle-of-nowhere farm community of Waltendorf. Some smart farmer had set aside a small portion of his farmland as a little campsite, he sold beer out of a converted barn and added an extra bathroom with a scrub sink to the side of his farm house. I’m telling ya, this is the life man. The Germans, they got it goin’ on.

The other funny thing about Germany is their strange fixation with lederhosen and obsession with all painting their houses the same shade of white. Everywhere you look its red roofs, whitish-cream houses with some sort of wood siding. You are also likely to find lacy white drapes in the windows and windowsills overflowing with vines and flowers. It must be some sort of unwritten German housing code. Whatever the case, they made great schnitzel and their camping is cheap as dirt (if the campsite owner even bothers to make you pay).

The other difference we come across is the hills. There a bit more than “rolling” in fact, there more or less vertical… and never ending. Still, it’s always nice to climb for an hour in the corn fields, to look down over the… cornfields, and then coast for a few minutes into more cornfields. It’s like a lumpy Wisconsin.


We stayed in Regensburg the night of the 12 and scarfed down some German/Turkish Kabobs (man, those things almost kick the pants off of schnitzel) and rode on past Kelheim the next day. Our riding has been getting a bit sloppy and I’ve been keen on taking more breaks than usual and complaining more about the hills and we decided to take it easy for a few days, until we found a hostel where we could finally do some laundry and find internet (there is NO WiFi here… I’m serious. When we ask about it, people just scrunch their eyebrows as if we asked where the payphone is… it just doesn't exist!)

So here we are, August 16, in a fancy hostel in a little town of Danuworth. You could blink and miss this old-world town, so it’s suites us just fine for a day of rest and relaxation. (We don’t have any guilt from not doing the sight-seeing thing, the only museum is a German puppet and porcelain doll exhibit which I’m convinced would only give us nightmares). We should be nearing the source of the Donau river soon and from there we’ll just figure it out.
Auf Weisterstain for now!

Passau to Vienna, Europes most popular bike route, backwards.

By now we’ve realized we are officially doing this route backwards. Our first hint should have been that all the guidebooks we could find discussed the route from west to east... but we thought this was simply a peculiarity and didn’t mean that you couldn’t ride the opposite way. In Serbia and Croatia, there were so few riders that it didn’t faze us that it’s easier to ride downstream… and after a few weeks of a constant head wind we began to realize why everyone passed us the opposite direction—it is much easier to ride DOWN stream rather than UP stream. In fact, we have been steadily climbing since Belgrade, and have been chasing into a prevailing west to east head wind.

This slightly funny observation only became more obvious when we came to the Vienna to Passau route. This trip through Austria is considered the most loved and most traveled bike route in all of Europe, and for good reason; it is downright gorgeous, in every sense of the word. For those taking the route in the “correct” direction (from Passau to Vienna, downstream, west to east) you will find the route blessed with an almost guaranteed gentle tailwind, slight downhill gradient, well marked signage and loads of places to rest, eat, sleep or otherwise preoccupy yourself with quaint riverside towns and vineyards. Although most of this is also true for Todd and my adventure through the route, we also found, more often than not, the trails we better marked going the opposite direction. Nevertheless, this 300 km? route was truly magnificent.


We left the great city of Vienna August 5th, still full from a night of beer and hearty Austrian cuisine, and wound our way along well paved bike paths through beautiful countryside. Along the route we kept finding these cute little snails and slugs crossing the road and we even stopped to take a photo of a couple— they were so unusual! That is, until we found out they run rampant through the Austrian countryside, and have a strange affinity for all things camping related (shoes, tents, bags, food… you name it). Waking up in our first campsite we found all our things to be just swarming the slimy, wet, gooey creatures… they left a thick film wherever the roamed and simply covered our things. Quite disgusting.




Besides the slugs, we somehow managed to find ourselves in a never-ending rain. Packing up a wet tent is always a lovely experience. Although the ride made up for it… orchards of apricots and apples, intertwined with the famous Wachau wine region alongside the meandering Danube river.

We decided to take a 2 km side trip to see a famous old castle the Runie Aggstein. We were feeling fit and didn’t think much of the fact that the old 11th century castle was on top of a mountain. About 1 km into the 20% grade climb, we decided to lock our bikes up and walk the rest of the way (okay, we’re still champs, walking up 20% grade is still wicked hard).




The sun was setting and we found a lovely little campsite outside of the town of Melk. We had just set up tent when it started to pour. The kinda rain that doesn’t stop for two straight days. We woke up the next morning and decided to hibernate in the tent all day instead of fighting through a bitter cold and wet headwind. The campsite was truly lovely, right on the river with a great four-star restaurant (which smelled great, but one meal was about the cost of living in Hungary for a month). The owner of the site had given us a campsite on high ground so we didn’t get flooded out (a real worry; a lot of the bike paths and towns were seeping with water from the rising river after several days of straight rain).

The rain finally stopped sometime through our second night there, and we fell into a deep undisturbed sleep, ready to tackle the next several days of riding.

Things never go as planned.

That night, we were robbed.

Side note: This isn’t a particularly lovely part of our trip, and I considered not including it our blog (mostly because I didn’t want to worry my Mom) but I believe it is necessary to be aware of these sort of dangers, that way you can be more prepared in case you too find yourself in a similar situation.

Around five in the morning I woke up, for no apparent reason, rolled over, and fell back asleep. The next thing to wake me up was rays of sunshine and the sound of birds, a chilly breeze was drifting through the tent, but we were warm and cozy in our sleeping bags. My watch read 7:30. I sat up, and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. Why was the tent rainfly unzipped? Had I forgot to close it up last night? Wait a moment, why was the screen open? Oh my God! Where was the backpack? Where was our front pack?

My panicking woke Todd up and it didn’t take us long to realize that we had been robbed in the night. Both rainflys were open and the screen next to me had been unzipped. We scrambled out of the tent to see our things littered across the wet ground. Next to me we had kept the backpack (which contained mostly our food) and between our feet we kept the front pack, which contained all our most important documents— passports, wallets, maps and such. Both bags were thrown across the ground and stuff was everywhere (and covered in slugs).
My mom told me once that she wonders sometimes if I have a lucky horseshoe shoved up my butt…and I must say, I think she’s right.

Always prepared, we also kept a fake wallet in the front pack, which contained a number of outdated credit cards and such (an idea we were given by Todds cousin Joanne… thanks Joanne!). I had also used the wallet to store foreign currency until we found an exchange bank. The robber had found this, taken out the money and left the wallet. He/she/they also found a small change purse that I had jammed packed with euro coins, and Todd’s fancy Cateye bike light. Luckily I had our wallet with credit cards and cash in the breast pocket of my rain jacket, which was untouched, and the robber apparently had no interest in our passports, which were delicately thrown on the ground.

Overall, the robbery costs us about $100USD and some shaky nerves. We were just happy that we were safe, and our most important items were as well. Funny thing is, the paper currency that was stolen was mainly extremely devalued Hungarian Forints and Serbian Diners, which came in notes of $5,000 $10,000, or $20,000 and looked similar in size and color to Euro paper currency. The bastard had probably though they had just made out with a jackpot of money… until they realized it was devalued, basically worthless, foreign currency.

We picked up as best we could and went to the campsite reception. I pulled out my pocket German/English translation book and pointed to the word “burglary”. The desk worker flew into action and before we knew it, the Austrian police were there in a matter of moments. With sign gestures and broken English, we managed to explain what happened and they took a few photos and ushered us into the cruiser (which was some fancy Volkswagen) and tore off towards the station. Going 180kmph through windy wet roads into the hills, (especially after biking at 18kmph for days on end) was a surreal experience and although slightly unnecessary, due to the fact that we were not in any sort of emergency event, we didn’t mind. In fact, I may venture to call it a highlight of the day.

The police were very thorough and sympathetic to our situation, and assured us that although it isn’t all that common, it does happen from time to time and the best thing to do is keep the most important items next to your head, simply because a burglar is less likely to attempt to reach over your head to steal your valuables.

Truly, we had thought we were quite smart about our camping situation. We always keep important things in the tent, and everything else in sealed bags under the rainfly. Honestly, we had been more concerned with our bikes being stolen and took extreme care to make sure they were securely locked up and covered in a non-discrete tarp. Never had we considered a robber actually entering the tent while we were asleep and locating the bag with the valuable items.

The lesson of this story is to never assume you are safe. When telling our experience to fellow bikers, they were shocked to hear we were robbed in Austria, after having traveled through poverty-stricken Eastern Europe without a hitch. I suppose it doesn’t matter where in the world you are, there are people who will take advantage of you.

We also are now more careful about where we place our tent. We had previously avoided being next to other tents because we liked our privacy and didn’t want to be kept up by noise, but as a robber, you are more of a target if you are off on your own. Our tent was also wedged into a corner of shrubbery, with a roadway on the one side… creating an easy get-away. No other tents were robbed that night, that we know of, clearly indicating that location is extremely important. We also now lock the inside screen zippers and keep all valuables in a separate bag by our heads. Although this may seem ridiculous, simply the idea of fumbling through a lock or extra deterrence really makes a difference. The side of the tent that Todd was sleeping on had also had the rainfly opened, but all of our bike panniers were stacked up precariously and folded and snapped down. The robber clearly was deterred from looking through, or trying to enter from that side and instead choose the easier route which only had a small backpack in the way.

A Days Diet

'Cuz I know you're wondering...

Breakfast:
1 loaf of bread
2 banana’s
2 glasses of yogurt
1 box of cereal
3.5% milkfat milk
Instant coffee


Snacks
bag of pretzels
7 small apricots
Bag of carrot chips or various crackers
Salted peanuts with trail mix
Acceleraide sports drink
Chocolate protein drink

Lunch:
Two cheese and tomato sandwiches
Two ice cream cones
1 bag of pepperoni or summer sausage

Pre Dinner appetizer
1 pizza


Dinner
Instant pasta dinner with fresh veggies
2 bread rolls
Local wine or beer (usually both)
Candy bar

Caio Eastern Europe and Hello Austria

The morning of the August 30th, we left Budapest for our last few days in Hungary

The ride outside of the city was lovely, with small communities and lovely river views traveling along windy bike paths and alongside small country roads. We made our way to a city called Estergrom, a VERY cool city. Seeped in old-world appeal with a towering basilica.
We took a stroll though the cobblestone streets and found the city was having a jazz and wine night, with a fairly awful Hungarian band and lovely local flavors around. We left when the band kicked it up a notch and made your ears really bleed (it took us about three songs to realize the singer was actually singing in English) and climbed up to the basilica where we found a lovely path through the wildflowers and caught the end of a magnificent sunset that set the sky above the river on fire.

The next two days took us into Kardomon and Lipot where we took the bike path across the river and rode in Slovakias’ country side. Nothing too worthy of mention, the ride was truly quite boring and the towns not too noteworthy. We did however discover that the water bottle holders on my bike can also fit a bottle of wine (strapped with a bungee cord for safely, of course). We finally made it to Bratislava, the sleepy capitol of Slovakia, where we devoured some fast food and took a nap in a park to avoid the midday heat. We rode out that evening and crossed into Austria.

Immediately, the entire trip changed. Rolling hills and mountains surfaced out of nowhere, and beautiful towns surrounded by small farm fields and vineyards. A beautiful paved bike route formed, and we started to ride with gaping mouths in awe of the splendor. After the arduous riding in Hungary, following highways and through poor rural communities, the rich atmosphere and cool mountain air was refreshing and absolutely delightful. We made our way to a little camping site. The next day we continued down the bike path, dotted with little hotdog stands and beer tents and fields of wildflowers and occasional glimpses of the Danube. If you think I’m making this sound too much like we entered the pearly gates of heaven… I’ve done a good job of describing this country.

Vienna. The city of Mozart, Freud, old Kaisers, chilled white wine, hot dogs and castles. The city, almost entirely destroyed during WW2 has been rebuilt to its former splendor with nothing held back. Huge buildings with ornate sculptures, fountains everywhere you look, modern bike lanes alongside high speed rails and horse drawn carriages. The city is teeming of old world splendor and modern high-class radiance. We both loved it.
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Leaving Eastern Europe was shocking and fascinating. A stark difference can be felt somewhere along the invisible border between the east and the west…. And damn, get out your pocketbook. Prices here soar several times higher than Eastern Europe, and I suppose, you get what you pay for.

Of all the lovely things about Vienna, perhaps the most celebrated moment of all was when we found the dude who fixed our computer.

This guy was a real story in himself:

We found the hole-in-the-wall computer repair shop next to the busy downtown. You were greeted at the door by a thick wave of cheap cigarette smoke and piles and piles of computer parts. There was a crude path visible through the junk that led to a strange chain-smoking, almost toothless, computer nerd. He spoke English with a thick-as-tar accent that bordered on pure vulgarity— the words he didn’t know in English he made up for with the vast amount of American cuss words he was fluent in. He continually referred to our computer as “he” and cursed all computer companies for their quality gouging (among the things he hated, you can include Norton anti-virus, IBM, cheap hard drives, super stores and apparently showering). Yet, he managed to work some computer magic and teased the programs and files off of the old corrupt hard drive and onto a new one. He tossed in an anti-virus protection and taught us how to make a backup start-up disk. The computer case still reeks of ciggy smoke, but hey, we have a laptop again!

The Adventures of Hungary

We crossed into Hungary mid morning, and already temperatures had reached over 100. We headed for the small town of Mohacs. Tonight was to be our first night of camping, and we were a bit unprepared. Not having found camping fuel in any of the communities thus far, we had no way of cooking food. Also on our to-do list was finding a bungee cord and bug spray. We soon found out however, that they spoke even less English here than in Serbia or Croatia (mostly German or the local dialect), and these items were extremely difficult to find. We resigned to eating cereal for dinner and breakfast and free-camped on a small sandy public beach.
The next morning we woke up early and rode on to Baja where we hoped to find what we needed. After wandering around for awhile and playing charades with the locals (go ahead, try acting out “I need a bungee cord” to someone who doesn’t speak English… it’s super hard!) we found one item on our to-do list in a car repair store next to the nude magazines…. Go figure.


Eventually we found our way to a heating-and-cooling store owned by a large German man. We did our little skit, trying to describe camping fuel with hand motions. He was fairly determined to figure out what we were asking for, even though he knew no English, and we knew even less German. In fact, he even called his son (who spoke some broken English) to translate on three separate occasions. We showed him the stove and the fuel bottle (which he opened and smelled intensely much like a wine connoisseur does to determine the flavor) and finally held his hands in the air in a display of defeat. He did not have the kind of gas we needed to use our stove. What he did have however, was that outstanding German stubbornness. He looked at us, standing there with our bike helmets in hand and pouring sweat, and waddled to the door of his shop, impatiently waving his hand for us to follow. He led us to an impossibly tiny smart-car-for-fat-Germans and motioned for us to get it.

So there we were, in this tiny car, with this funny German man, cruising through a small Hungarian town, listening to Black Eyed Peas “Imma be” play on the CD player. Our guide just pointed to the small car seat and said something I’m assuming meant “Granddaughter” and pumped his fat arms in the air to imitate a small child dancing. It was pretty priceless. He stopped the car at a small store and took us inside, where he spoke gruffly to the store owner, and produced two liter bottles of kocherbenzine… just what we were looking for.


The people of Hungary are nowhere near as friendly as Serbia or Croatia, but they are truly kind.

We found a lovely little “Kemping” ground on a small touristy island outside of the city, with a lovely view and a beautiful beach and set up our tent. I had been noticing some strange bruising on my arm from a fall I had taken a few days prior, and Todd was worried I had broken my arm. The accident is not that thrilling of a story, a simple equation of small sidewalk, two bikes going opposite directions and a curb. Nonetheless, I had fallen pretty hard right onto my forearm— and we were both a bit concerned about the bone being broken. The receptionist at the campground told us that the emergency room is always free and they could x-ray my arm there… so off we went.

My wish for you, dear reader, is that you never have to spend time in an ER in Hungary.

Good news: no broken arm! Thank the biking gods! We left the hospital dancin’ in the streets and went to find a pub to celebrate. Bad news: accidently prone that I am, I didn’t quite make it to a pub before I hurt myself again. This time, I fell into a pothole and sprained my ankle. Unlike my arm, I actually did some serious damage. Before long my ankle resembled the Kool-Aid man and a huge, angry red welt had tripled the size of my ankle in a few minutes time. It looked like we were going to spend a few extra days in Baja. I had resigned myself to relaxing and hanging out at the internet café across the river, but our bad luck wasn’t quite over. After uploading the blog about Croatia, the computer completely crashed.

Determined to make up for lost time and to we set ourselves a lofty goal of making it to Budapest in two days time. Had this section of the route been more developed, it wouldn’t have been so difficult, but we generally found ourselves having to choose between unpaved dike roads or riding next to high traffic on busy highways. In the end, it took us about 210 kilometers to reach our destination (including several unplanned detours and wrong turns).

The first night we found a small camp ground outside of the city of Solt just as it began to pour rain (which had been following us for awhile, and hasn’t really stopped since then). We found a hole-in-the-wall pub that specialized in that Hungarian specialty… big ‘ol crusty meaty pizzas, and dug in.

After two sticky rainy days of riding, we made it into Budapest around 9:30 at night. Exhausted, hungry and sick of pedaling, we found ourselves in a huge pickle: we have no place to stay the night.

Just as I was about to have one of my infamous temper tantrums, we asked a girl selling gyros in a small street side shop if there were any hostels near by. She came out to the street with us and walked right up to a doorway and buzzed a room several stories up. She spoke no English, and we were a bit concerned about who she was calling. Fortunately, a cute young guy opened the door and asked “are you looking for a place to stay?” We hesitated, but said yes. “We are hostel!” he replied. I could have kissed him (I resorted to just kissing Todd instead) and he led us up four flights of stairs to the nicest hostel either of us have ever stayed in (Bebop Hostel, for those traveling to Budapest any time soon, totally rocks. Go there.You won’t regret it!).

We stayed three nights in Budapest…. There’s just so much to do! Both days we rode our bikes (without gear) around the ancient ruins, old castles, beautiful buildings and tourist sites, and ate authentic dinners with good local beer and wine at beautiful patio restaurants. We splurged a bit in the cities cheap yummy tourist restaurants— one big appetizer, two drinks each, soup, entrée and dessert weighed in at about twenty US bucks… pretty hard to beat. Bottom line: Budapest freakin’ rocks.