The Long Road Home

Today I rode through a small slice of Slovakia into the Czech Republic. Before that I spent a few days crossing Hungary.

Everything today was soft and green and yellow and brown. It was easy. The roads are SMOOTH. All the roads from china even through to Romania and Bulgaria had continual bumps and lumps and the tarmac would be squashed up in ridges from heat or broken off or rutted. And then heaps of gravel, or whole sections just earth and gravel etc. You get jolted and pitched and bumped all day long. Now on these European roads I can just ride smoothly along. It’s gorgeous. You can look around. Easy peasy.

You can refelct on things. I was riding between lines of towering yellow shivering poplars that looked just like the ones far away in the Uighur oases of north west china. I saw the Morava river a flash of blue water just like the river near Borjomi in southern Georgia. A train went by rusty red engine and line of container wagons slowly overtaking me, like the huge trains did sometimes on the steppes in Kazakhstan. When I think of it all, I can hardly even believe myslef how far I’ve come.

Hungary’s Great Plain east of Budapest was actually quite tough. The wind was against me so I battled for two days across the open land, betwwen huge expanses of wild yellow grasses tossing in the wind and marshy green tussocks. At the end my hands are cramping with squashd nerves and it’s monotonous and I just want to GET OFF THE BIKE. But I saw wild ducks splashing out of reeds, white egrets standing alone, lapwings crying and flapping up from still water. Occasionally there are old wayside inns, white with huge roofs and arcades of low arches, geraniums. The wind was just sweeping over the open land. Around Hortobagy, the few houses there cling together, the wind scouring over the village. There were ww2 tanks left in the villages as memorials of the huge battles fought across the Plain.

Hungarian towns seem terribly well behaved sober and clean. People walk little dogs on those long retractable leads. People have their toddlers in HAMAX CHILD SEATS on the backs of their bikes. So safe and proper. There are bicylce paths with people standing nicely at the kerb when the little red bicycle is showing. Children are being taken to violin lessons. Students are carrying badminton racquets. There are TOURIST INFORMATION CENTRES with people in green shirts to help you. There are CAMP SITES. The petrol stations have astonishingly clean toilets and shops with coffee machines and CDs. There was a quiet demonsration going on in the middle of Debrecen, people politely listening to speeches in front of the reform church.

In the villages there are spanking nice houses all well painted with sharp square corners and rows of flowers. Ladies are buying flowers and pedalling home on their bikes. There are shops with trays of pansies for sale. I haven’t seen any donkeys for ages. It’s all so affluent and comfortable compared to anywhere else I’ve seen. It’s dramatically different from Bulgaria and Romania.

The huge pale brown fields have huge tractors, you see lines of dust far away as the tractors turn. The earth is fine and dry. I sat in fields to brew tea and watched the tractors go to and fro.

I arrived in Budapest in glorious late afternoon sun. I thrashed through massive suburbs. Traffic was snarled up for miles. Finally in the middle, the Danube looked fantastic. The Parliament building also looked fantastic all spires and gothic pinnacles. In the old city, you heard pianos from open windows, and peple practising trills on trumpets. Lovely lovely Europe. Tourists were listening to guides and pushing prams on cobbles noisily, the wheels going all the wrong ways.

West of Budapest, I saw numerous pairs of well-turned-out mostly middle-aged german and swiss people on cycling tours with nice clean bikes. So many!! Up till now, if I’ve seen another foreigner on the road, it’s a BIG EVENT, as you only meet one about every two months or so, so you absolutely STOP and talk frantically for 20 minutes in sheer delight at the company. I was all readyto stop and chat, but there are so many of these Euro ones that of course people don’t stop to chat, they just bowl on by. Some did stop. Each pair had a little ring-bound guide with maps, and notes saying there’d be no shops of this section for 10km so remember to carry food etc. I just boggled at it all, to be honest. In my head were those Kazakh steppes over 40 degrees, Kyrgyz mountains with hail coming down and the ice-white Pamirs under black clouds that I was too scared to even look at, and China’s remote wildernesses where I made so many mistakes and floods in Azerbaijan and lonely hills of Turkey etc.

When you’re there, you just battle on with getting through each bit, and it seems normal, but this week amongst the green and in the soft kind sunshine of europe, I stood there by the road with my little bike, talking to people, and even I could hardly believe what I’ve managed to get through. I felt I wasn’t explaining anything properly at all. Riding alone thru those places suddenly all seemed so far and so different from riding these gentle lanes. I didn’t know how to explain what it was like.

I stopped for a day in Bratislava. Sweet squares, towers of the city walls, the little cathedral. Cafes. Well dressed people (not me). Most exciting was (a) seeing my parents for a day and (b) a WASHING MACHINE.

Today I crossed the border into the Czech Republic on a minor road south of Breclav. Ther were two chatty policemen, one czech, one slovak, standing in the road listening to a music radio station. No stamps, no fuss. No huge queue pressing on foot for hours to squeeze through a stupid narrow turnstile (kyrgyzstan-kazakhstan); no long series of barriers, and trucks piled with scrap metal (china kyrgyzstan). No soldiers and border police at questioning me at 2am (georgia-turkey). No men with mustaches singing oh susanna (georgia-azerbaijan). Quite tame really.

I’m aiming for Prague now.

Yesterday I rode into Budapest in Hungary. Today I’m really tired and havng a day off the bike. In the next couple of days, I’ll write about what’s now happening in CAMBODIA with the money you’ve given for that project, AND also announce the winner of the Virgin Atlantic competition… Meanwhile today here’s a short update about the project in Pakistan.

The media have been reporting quite a lot this week about the South Asian earthquake, because it’s now one year since it killed more than 73,000 people in north pakistan. During the past year, NGOs such as UNICEF, and the Red Cross Red Crescent have been helping people rebuild homes and schools etc.

But the NGOs also say there’s still lots of rebuilding to be done. And they say people’s mental state can be poor, with obvious signs amongst children especially of post-traumatic stress (eg nightmares, bed wetting, unexplained sudden crying, manic behaviour changes). Thousands of those who died were children, who were killed when their schools collapsed on top of them.

Parents and community members tell field workers that they would like to see activities in addition to education which could bring normality back to the surviving children’s lives.

In the affected areas, children play in the streets, mainly cricket, and girls and women do not normally participate. Sports and games are almost never implemented in schools, there are=A0no after-school sports or recreation programmes, and no sports/play facilities exist.

In this context, we are raising money to enable NGO Right to Play (RTP) to set up simple sports programmes to help the earthquake-affected children have some fun, stay safe and healthy, and regain confidence.

RTP has already run similar programmes in Pakistan, for children at Afghan refugee camps, with great success reducing problems such as truancy and drug abuse. The RTP field workers have left the Afghan camps now, as planned, but sports activities, including girls’ cricket and badminton teams, are now still running as a result of their work.

To run similar initiatives now with pakistan’s earthquake survivors, RTP needs just under 300,000 USD. We are trying to raise a chunk of this, and RTP has meanwhile been hunting other sources to raise the rest.

We’ve raised over 25,000 USD thanks to Deutsche Bank, Prudential, Crosby Capital and other corporate donors, and lots of individual contributors.

The very good news is that RTP has now received 280,000 USD from a group of Swiss donors for this Pakistan programme. This means that the RTP project, which aims to reach 5,000-10,000 children, can get started late Oct early November.

So we look forward to see how the implementation progresses… Thanks to the RTP staff, especially Julie, for updates, including photos, which I hope we can put up on this site (thanks Ben - again).

As I mentioned above, there’s also news from the Cambodia project working with street children. I’ll write up about that later (thanks a lot Lisa at ADM for your update from Sihanoukville. ) AND, with help from Angelina Wong at Virgin Atlantic Hong Kong, also let you know who won the free flights competition, which lots of people entered, especially from Deutsche Bank and Reuters.

Goodnight from Budapest! Now I’m going to plan my route up from Hungary into Slovakia, and then sleep.

I’m now in the town of Oradea, in western Romania, close to the Hungarian border. I’ve been riding through Transylvania for the last few days.

It’s quite easy - hills, but nothing like turkey, never mind NW china etc. These are wooded gentle hills, mild hairpins from time to time, nothing drastic. There are villages dotted everywhere with church spires and autumn sun and the shadows of trees and smell of woodsmoke. I’m doing long days, over 120km, just rolling and rolling from one valley to the next.

Now there are foggy mornings, chilly, then mostly blue sky and sun later. Loads of insects and bugs are out, sometimes I’m going through nasty clouds of flying ants getting in my ears and everywhere, grass full of furry caterpillars, and very thick spiders webs which stick across you when you go into the verge.

Places are hungarian, german, romanian. You see all different styles of houses including (a) small old pink and yellow cottages with arches into farmyards, (b) wooden cabins with wide eaves where people pile their stuff and sit out (c) squat square bungalows mostly dark green, with roller shutters. Etc.

There are farmyards with wells that have a huge tall post, and then the bucket on the end of a beam. Chickens running (surprisingly fast), dogs chasing pigs, barking, other pigs just flopped at the roadside.

People are ploughing fields with tractors, collecting sweetcorn by hand, grubbing for potatoes, cutting grass with scythes, loading hay or marrows onto horse-drawn wooden carts. There are loads of horses and carts clip clopping along, all registered with wood number boards on the back. Men in green hats with cord hatbands (look sort of Austrian to me) say bun giorno (or something). There are bent old women in black, standing alone, clutching a tree, or leaning on sticks.

The verges by village houses are covered wth roses, michaelmas daisies, yellow chrysanthemums, and there are rows of marigolds and mysembrianthemum (?not sure spelling) down by the wall, hanging baskets with petunias, pots of geraniums.

Along the fields there is purple clover, dandelions, pale blue cranesbill (a new plant), and a thing with spikes of yellow flowers like snapdrogons. Hillsides of thistles and teasel, rose hips and blue sloes, and grassy fields dotted with purple autumn crocus (very nice).

Sometimes I take the minor roads cross country, especially if it’s a more direct route. Mostly it’s been ok, but I got lost on the hills east of of Cluj-Napoca, where the road became one of those awful rubble tracks, uphill, confusing junctions etc. After ages scrabbling uphill, I stood at a sunny windy road junction, white tracks leading here and there across hillsides of green and yellow stripes, a wayside cross. No idea which way I should go. In a car you’d just think how annoying, and bash on till you got somewhere, but on a bike you really don’t want to go up extra hills etc. Very frustrating. I eventually got to a place on the map, and sorted it out from there.

I’d not thought about him for a while, but TIMURLANE even came here. How extraordinary is that. His Mongols raided in 1241, and apparently the German towns here started out because Germans were invited to fill up land timurlane laid waste. I went through Sigisoara, one of the Saxon German towns, which has huge clock tower, Lutheran churches with the hymn boards in old gothic writing, and a lovely graveyard all ivy and horsechestnuts and tombs of german people, identified by job - tradesman, railway official, mayor. Scruffy schoolboys were shouting to each other in german, organising football games.

There are also people in most surprising costumes - men in startlingly big black wide-brimmed hats like Zorro, and women and girls in enormous pleated long skirts. I think these are Hungarians, but not sure.

I am a bit scared of some of the people. Barefoot kids and wild looking people roaming about, especially at the edges of towns. I haven’t seen such poor wild children since I left the tibetan bits of china. And lots of dogs. After that knife-throwing incident, I stopped in another village and was buying some bread quite normally, but when I tried to get out of the shop, the door was blocked wth people. I heard shouting and barking and saw there was a horrendous dog fight going on outside, a black big muscly dog was biting the neck of a white fluffy one and lots of poeple gathered round. A man was ramming a wooden hand cart at the dogs, but bits broke off his cart and the big dog still was going at the little one. Finally poeple threw water and it got sorted out but then the men started fighting, and it was all awful. I got quite worried about stopping in little places.

BUT I have to stop, and of course most people are perfeclty normal and nice. In one Hungarian village I was chatting in a huge half-bare shop, and they forced me to take a whole bag of bananas, chocolate, salt crackers and drinks without paying. I’m still eating their stuff.

The towns are just full of very proper Culture. They were doing Aida at cluj napoca, Ploeisti has a huge list of art and dance classes you could enroll for, there were organ recitals at Sigisoara, chamber music by Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov in Targu Mures, and plays by Ibsen, Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams. That’s just in October.

Now I’ve pretty much finished Transylvania, and Romania. I’ve now reached flat flat land in its far east. You see the lorries driving towards Hungary’s Great Plain silhoutted against the evening sun, far ahead. That’s the way I’m going too, aiming to cross the Great Plain and get to Budapest.

Sometimes these days I feel suddenly really lonely. You look bakc at the road you’ve just ridden and it’s empty, and you sit sometimes for a moment finishing a cup of tea by a field and it’s lonely. Don’t know why I feel it more here than in places before. It’s ok, you just have to turn back round look forwards hum a tune think of people smile at someone - and it’s ok. In fact, I should be fine, I’ve had quite a lot of poeple to talk to, after I was on Romanian TV news. Fame! Actually I wasn’t sure if they’d broadcast any of the film which they did on a dull rainy day in Brasov when I was really cold and wet. But they did, and in the days after it was on, people even asked me for my autograph etc in the street. One big lady clapped her hands, knew my name, told me all about myself, and gave me kisses on both cheeks. Bit of a surprise. Nice of her really.