Car fumes up my nose,
I feel sweat run down my spine -
summer cycling fun.
500km in six days, battling hills, strong headwinds, bad roads and intense heat ! We seem to have gained a new level of fitness lately - it certainly beats the pants off the 5 weeks we took to cycle the 1040km from Dublin to Noisy-sur-École back in March and April.
Today we are relaxing in Beska, Serbia (about 70km northwest of Belgrade), our first day off since leaving Budapest last Thursday. It has been a week of cloudless though hazy skies, temperatures closer to 40 degrees Celcius than 30 and it looks set to continue well into next week.
Croatia was full of interesting contrasts. Elegantly decorated old buildings next to very incomplete newer ones; wineries and green rows of vines interspersed with dry fields of ripe corn and drooping sunflowers; the sickly sweet odour of decomposing bags of rubbish, dumped overlooking sublime national park forests; cheap food and expensive accommodation.
As we came through Vukovar, a port town on the bank of the Danube, on Monday, we could see the holed and blackened ruins of a not so old water tower, left to commemorate the savage fighting around Vukovar in the early 1990's. The seige of Vukovar, also known as the Vukovar massacre, was the most damaging seige since that of Stalingrad in WWII. Many thousands of people were killed or otherwise 'unnaccounted for'. There is a large memorial outside the town.
Past Vukovar we were surprised, unpleasantly in the hot afternoon, by a number of steep hills that were not marked on our maps. We are using the Huber Verlag official Euro Velo route maps and generally they are pretty good but we find that the quality of mapping varies from country to country.
The French ones were very good. The Hungarian maps had no distance markings at all. And yesterday afternoon, several kilometres after Novi Sad (in Serbia), we followed a road that was marked on the map as unpaved but should have been marked as extremely rough - on some of the hills the dirt and stones were so loose the bike tyres could get no purchase and we had to push.
Although re-entering Serbia yesterday brought a few pleasant surprises too. Nowhere since France have so many people waved, yelled 'hello', beeped their horns (in a friendly manner, not a 'get off the road' sort of honking) and smiled at us. Another pleasant surprise was the cost of an hotel. We are currently staying in the largest building in this town - a huge old plaster wedding cake affair from some bygone prosperous era - and paying €23 per night for the two of us, with cooked breakfast thrown in as well.
And hearing a Midnight Oil song blasting from an outdoor café in Novi Sad was a bit bizarre but certainly brought a smile to our faces.
And the road signs - every junction of the cycle route brings more amusing quotes...
*
words by Gabby, most photos by Neil
I feel sweat run down my spine -
summer cycling fun.
500km in six days, battling hills, strong headwinds, bad roads and intense heat ! We seem to have gained a new level of fitness lately - it certainly beats the pants off the 5 weeks we took to cycle the 1040km from Dublin to Noisy-sur-École back in March and April.
Today we are relaxing in Beska, Serbia (about 70km northwest of Belgrade), our first day off since leaving Budapest last Thursday. It has been a week of cloudless though hazy skies, temperatures closer to 40 degrees Celcius than 30 and it looks set to continue well into next week.
Croatia was full of interesting contrasts. Elegantly decorated old buildings next to very incomplete newer ones; wineries and green rows of vines interspersed with dry fields of ripe corn and drooping sunflowers; the sickly sweet odour of decomposing bags of rubbish, dumped overlooking sublime national park forests; cheap food and expensive accommodation.
As we came through Vukovar, a port town on the bank of the Danube, on Monday, we could see the holed and blackened ruins of a not so old water tower, left to commemorate the savage fighting around Vukovar in the early 1990's. The seige of Vukovar, also known as the Vukovar massacre, was the most damaging seige since that of Stalingrad in WWII. Many thousands of people were killed or otherwise 'unnaccounted for'. There is a large memorial outside the town.
 |
| Vukovar tower hanging over new buildings. |
 |
| Ilok, old fortifications overlooking the Danube. |
 |
| Hotel Dunav, Ilok - right on the bank of the Danube (Dunav in Croatian). |
Past Vukovar we were surprised, unpleasantly in the hot afternoon, by a number of steep hills that were not marked on our maps. We are using the Huber Verlag official Euro Velo route maps and generally they are pretty good but we find that the quality of mapping varies from country to country.
The French ones were very good. The Hungarian maps had no distance markings at all. And yesterday afternoon, several kilometres after Novi Sad (in Serbia), we followed a road that was marked on the map as unpaved but should have been marked as extremely rough - on some of the hills the dirt and stones were so loose the bike tyres could get no purchase and we had to push.
Although re-entering Serbia yesterday brought a few pleasant surprises too. Nowhere since France have so many people waved, yelled 'hello', beeped their horns (in a friendly manner, not a 'get off the road' sort of honking) and smiled at us. Another pleasant surprise was the cost of an hotel. We are currently staying in the largest building in this town - a huge old plaster wedding cake affair from some bygone prosperous era - and paying €23 per night for the two of us, with cooked breakfast thrown in as well.
 |
| My turn to cook - making a tuna and kidney bean salad in the hotel room. |
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| Sun sets behind the last hill of the day. |
 |
| Hot hazy sky over Beska. |
And hearing a Midnight Oil song blasting from an outdoor café in Novi Sad was a bit bizarre but certainly brought a smile to our faces.
And the road signs - every junction of the cycle route brings more amusing quotes...
*
words by Gabby, most photos by Neil
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