Budapest - and Going Offline for a While

OK, so I cheated a bit today. Taking the train from Vienna to Budapest (see luggage taking a break too), where I'm going to lay up for a while, see old friends and make a serious attempt at learning Hungarian.

The Hungarians are so keen that foreigners should master their imposssible, upside-down but fascinating language, that they massively subsidise classes at the Debrecen/Budapest summer school - which has a three-week intensive course starting here in a week.

Perfect timing, picking up on lots of hard but ultimately incomplete learning during my time in Vienna in the ealy 80s. In which city, warm thanks to Brigitte and Andy for their fabulous four days of hospitality while I nursed a sore ankle.

Taking a break with my passion for Hungarian (was I a Magyar in an earlier life?) will also give time for the tendon to heal before cycling on into Transsylvania, most probably, to meet up with brother Hugh and check out on Dracula and the some of the world's most beautiful landscapes.

Today, meanwhile, IT WASN''T RAINING. Gloriously sunny, in fact, and Budapest and the Danube - Chain Bridge and Parliament above - positively sparkled.

Trees bursting into green, warm and everyone out by the river relaxing and cycling and reading and talking. Mainly Hungarian. Spring as she is meant to be. At last.

So, expect something of a break in blogging for now, and then a probably sporadic resumption, as the Blackberry coverage in rural Hungary and Romania when I get moving again won't be brililant.

Still, it'll be good to be pedalling again. In Hungarian.

BFN.
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The Ultimate Mobile Office

And while I have access to a decent, real computer here in Vienna, able to post serious photos taken with a serious camera, here's a shot from back in France, on the Loire at La Charite (once a major stop on the Camino to Santiago), of my mobile office.

O2 Stellar Blackberry-enabled mobile on the left (also more technically known as an HTC Kaiser), and folding Stowaway keyboard on the right. Apart from the last two, all the photos on this blog are taken by the mobile (hence my previous inability to post a picture of the actual device), and although a bit fiddly, the keyboard works very well with Bluetooth.

And the other bit of kit that is now working better is the old tendon. I'm told today by sensible medics (my GP phoned in Cirencester) that it's actually OK to keep cycling, gently, and fill up with Nurofen at the same time. So, the trip remains very much on - though several days, if not a week or two, of quiet in Hungary are about to ensue, perhaps with a focus on learning Hungarian properly at last.

So, will be much quieter on this blog for a while now. Don't expect, or dread, daily posts. I'll be back, though...

One I took earlier...

These three cheerful types were spied rather earlier on the trip, back in Paris almost a month ago, where I stopped to take some photos, in the rain of course, of self, Raven and the Arc de Triomphe.

The two on the left started eyeing the bike with clear expertise, and when I greeted them en mauvais francais, they explained they had returned, literally the previous week, from a year and a half cycling together around South America, and were now planning writing projects and lecture tours.

Did I, they asked when I explained that I was just setting out on a shorter European version, have a blog. Mais non, replied I truthfully at that point, whereupon we were joined by a determinedly cheerful young South Korean, see right in the picture, who had just bought a bike and panniers in Paris. And was setting out the following day on a three-month tour of Europe, through the Low Countries and Germany.

There are clearly more of us demented cyclists out there than you would expect.

Did I get their names? No. Bad journalist again.

And if you're wondering why this blog looks different, it's because it's from a Real Computer in Vienna, where I'm laying up for three days with Brigitte and Andy before continuing to Budapest by train at the weekend - just a short powered trip, honestly - to give my aching Achilles tendon a break. Unfortunate term. Shall we say, a rest.

Vienna. And Why Blog?

Beware, this is a long blog. Take a deep breath, jump in, but be prepared to navigate in manageable segments.

Yes, the tent last night stayed dry inside, as did the sleeping gear, and I even dreamed of warm and snuggly sleeping bags.

OK, I have had to wear my socks and expensive 100% waterproof (not) rain jacket this morning to dry them out. And sitting in a warm and dry café on the Vienna Ringstrasse, just round the corner from my old BBC office, my shoes are still sodden.

But hey, I survived. And even made the last 20 miles here this morning with reasonable comfort. Rest of the day is quiet to rest old Achilles. No wonder we use that metaphor for our weak spots.

I'm going to muse a bit on blogging today, having had some lovely supportive emails from friends and family after my early morning bleat.

But first (as Kate Adie, who doesn't believe journalists can possibly get traumatised, says introducing From Our Own Correspondent on Radio Four), an explanation of the pictures.

Sue in Cirencester and Clare in Berne especially will appreciate the photo of a power station on the NW approach to Vienna prettified by Austria's oddest but most brilliant post-war architect, Friedensreich Hundertwasser (what a fantastic name), a kind of Central European Gaudi.

See here http://www.outbackphoto.com/places/2000/20001022_Hundertwasser.html for some more images of his work.

I was reminded passing the power station with its disguised chimney (still belching noxious effluent of course) of a once boring old East German school block in Wittenberg which Sue and I saw last year, also given the Hundertwasser treatment, and of a totally outrageous but beautiful hotel and appartment complex in this style in the centre of nearby Magdeburg.

Flair, colour, inspiration and curves - all lost in so much of modern industrial architecture.

Curves and straight lines also in the quite arrestingly pink piece of modern art (yes, that's what it is) I cycled past just before Vienna this morning, outside a large (square) museum dedicated to the artist who created this interesting and in my view rather unnecessary piece.

I forget his (of course, his, not her) name - Essl, I think. But if you can enlarge the image (the squeamish may not wish to, this already being quite large enough) it's is on the plaque on the wall to the right. (Blast, on re-reading the blog, I realise I posted a different picture, one without the plaque. But I'll leave the thought about enlargement...)

I wonder what it's intended to represent. No answers please. They might be stopped by my spam filter.

Onwards.

The lady in the remaining picture with me and Raven outside the café where I'm now sitting is Susanna Hamad, a young Austrian broadcast journalist now embarking on a Masters research project into journalism and trauma in this country.

We had a good conversation about her research questions and people to talk to, useful timing in terms of where Vienna fitted into my travels and Susanna's research. Clive, that photo, although a bit distant, is in part for you...

So, why blog? Narcisisstic self-indulgence, as Sue would probably think? Or serious connection and communication?

I've actually been surprised what fun this is, having vowed not to. As long, of course, as one has something to say in which people might be interested. Alastair, my number two, is well up on matters internet, and warned me firmly of the dangers of vacuous blogging for its own sake.

But as one who has always found writing for work really hard, despite it being my core profession for so long, doing a blog is very different.

It's personal, direct communication, without having to sastisfy editors or programmne-makers or established, usually unexamined and unquestioned, agendas blocking authentic connection between the writer/reporter and the useful/consumer/reader.

One of the reasons, also, why From Our Own Correspondent, which has always been a bit bloggy, is so popular with both listeners and BBC reporters.

Awareness of the blog, I find also, gives structure to my thoughts as I pedal along during the day.

I'm chatting with you all all the time, whether you like it or not. Not sad and self-indulgent, but a real conversation. And if I forget to include an important thought one day (well, what strikes me as important anyway), I can put it in tomorrow. There's a continuity and a flow which is rather rewarding.

And given how many said how much they envied me doing a trip like this, I do feel emboldened and encouraged to share a little of what it's really like to do something as challenging, fun, different - and wet - as this.

For the therapeutically-minded, it's also about Attachment with a capital A, as in John Bowlby, and the need each of us has, from infancy on, to feel emotionally connected/bonded with people who care for us and vice versa.

It's also a form of diary writing, which I always encourage my therapy clients to do for the sake of their own emotional well-being.

It's good for the brain chemistry. Putting ideas down in writing connects our thinking and our feeling bits, and helps us act and feel in a more integrated way. Especially when it's shared.

Time to switch gear a little.

The industrial age has been - will have been - a catastrophe for the human species, and for many other species besides.

(My hobby horse, as you know, but on which see a serious, authoritative and alarming report today in the Daily Telegraph on the security implications of global warming. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/04/23/eaclimate123.xml&DCMP=EMC-new_23042008).

But again with James Lovelock, author of the Gaia thesis, I believe that amid all the bad things we have done, the internet and mobile technology are good, a quantum leap in evolution and consciousness.

And at a very small level, that's what serious blogging (this one included, I hope) is about.

E.M. Foster summed it up in A Passage to India well before the internet was even dreamed of, in the novel's core message about, in effect, the Meaning of Life, which has stayed powerfully with me from A-Level English.

Only Connect.


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The Danube cont. And rain. Lots of it.

The less said about today's ride the better.

Eighty-four hard, and for the second half spectacularly wet miles (see grey pic above), the last 30 slogging through a succession of thunderstorms in a vain search for a warm dry B&B.

I've ended up having to put up the tent anyway, in Tulln on the Danube about 30 miles short of Vienna.Thank Heaven for waterproof Ortlieb panniers, so at least my sleeping clobber is dry.

And, how come there are no free guest rooms in one of Austria's major tourist destinations in the middle of a rainy week in April and not even school holidays?

France, you are forgiven.

And - moan, moan - that Achilles tendon is playing up so badly after all that for the first time I'm beginning to wonder if I'll have to cut this trip short. The prescribed cure for an inflamed tendon is rest. Several weeks of it. Hmmm.

Before things turned seriously unpleasant today, though, the Danube turned for a while seriously picturesque and unboring.

Offering an unusual opportunity also for self-reflection, as you can also see. Always good in the therapeutic business - but I can't immediately see why the local folk at this point of the Austrian Danube put up a line of perfectly honed mirrors alongside the cycle path. Perhaps they make mirrors there?

Elsewhere in today's pictures, Duernstein (with Raven) where Richard the Lionheart once had one of his major Central European crusader castle bases (top left on the hilly horizon) as he and his medievally merry men were heading out to bash the Muslims and claim Jerusalem.

These days, I guess aircraft carriers do the same.

Vienna, slowly and carefully, tomorrow. Old BBC working base nearly 30 years ago when communism and the division of Europe seemed set in stone. And then, tendons permitting, it will be across the old iron curtain, where so much has changed.


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The Danube and Pilgrims

The banks of the Danube, which I reached today and along which I ploughed for a healthy total of 83 miles into a ferocious headwind, are indeed flat, as expected.

But they're also, to be honest, a bit boring, despite the last couple of days' fabulous explosion all around of tree blossoms in this very late spring.

And, this evening, it's also wet. The heavens opened just before I set up my tent, right by the river just west of Ybbs.

I have been intending to test my camping equipment for a rainy overnight stay. Tonight's clearly the night - I just hope the Danube doesn't rise during the night and sweep me away.

The river photo above from one of the many hydroelectric dams that interrupt the Danube's eastward progress here is boring apart from the promised view of the Brooks saddle.

Nearly 1500 miles now and I hope the sunless view is enough to show how exquistily supple and even comfortable the leather has now become.

Believe me, Brooks saddles are hard bum work to start with, but they're worth the investment of briefly, in the greater scheme of things, sore parts....

This will, I promise, be my last reference to the saddle, despite the rather intimate role it's currently playing in my life...

I mentioned food in yesterday's blog. Those not familiar with Austrian cooking may have wondered what on earth a Palatschinken is.

Confusingly, it has nothing to do with ham, which is what Schinken means in German (and Austrian). (Not sure what Palat means...)

What it does have to do with is pancakes - large ones, full of cream, ice cream, chocolate sauce and nuts. A day's calories in one go.

The enormous one above was pictured at about four o'clock this afternoon (with my little foldable keyboard to the right), and the timing of its consumption might help explain why I felt energised to keep cycling beyond the 80-mile boundary today, until stopped by the rain

The other two photos illustrate that this remains el Camino, der Weg, le chemin, the Way to Santiago de Compostela.

The lady with the rucksack, Cecilia from Linz, is a Genuine Pilgrim, heading to Spain in short stages, a few days at a time when she can.

She was heading west as I headed east this morning, away from Christa, my hostess last night (Danke auch fuer das schoene Fruehstueck!), pictured in front of the house in which her family have lived for nearly 200 years.

Vienna next, but probably not tomorrow. A bit of a stretch at 90 miles, especially if it continues to pour with rain.

And maybe then, the promised blog on why blog at all. A hint - it's to do with Attachment.


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Salzburg and The Sound of Music

Now into mjy fifth week on the road since leaving home on Easter Day, this was one amazing day's ride. 64 miles heading east from Salzburg through Austrian pre-Alpine landscape for which the word idyllic was invented.

Stayed last night with Dart Centre friend and colleague Susan Moeller at the Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, home since 1947 of the Salzburg Seminars, but better known to most as the setting for the final scenes of The Sound of Music.

Talk about beautiful. The two shots above give just a hint at how lovely it was this morning, with the sun out at last and the sky blue, and snow stilll lying on the Unterberg mountain across the lake.

Then, up a long winding former rail track (the nicest cycling there is) from Salzburg east to the Mondsee and Attersee lakes, where we once had a fabulously picturesque holiday with the boys in 1982 (I think) when Jutta and I were living in Vienna.

With the sun out, the cyclists have also emerged. For weeks, I've been almost the only serious rider on the road. Today, Sunday, the routes were full of them. As a German farmer comnmented as I spun past the other day - Ah, the cyclists are out. It really must be spring.

Today was a chance to muse on how efficient the human body can become at doing this kind of work as long as it's appropriately fed, watered and rested.

It hasn't taken long to begin to feel very fit indeed, and heading up hills is surprisingly little trouble, if more slowly and in a lower gear (with the Rohloff hub Raven can climb almost vertically) than would have the case 20 or 30 years ago.

The left knee tendon which was so sore before setting off has been no trouble at all, to my surprise, and the keyhole surgery at Cheltenham General last December to clean up a tear on the right knee meniscus has done what the surgeon said it would. Sorted. Amazing how well these interventions can now work.

Left Achilles tendon still a bit sore - but maybe that's also got to do with banging the damn thing again and and again, until I realised what was happenig, with the left pedal. One is not as robust as one was....

Food tastes unebelievable. Bread, tomatoes, cheese and cucumber for lunch - heavenly. And as for a Greek salad at supper or sickly sweet Palatschinken for afters ... Gorgeous.

And yes, there have been, briefly, bilsters in Interesting Places. All well cured by now, thanks especially to some slidey cream daughter Katharine gave me for Christmas. Too much detail, I think.

My saddle - I will take a picture tomorrow - is now exquisitly supple and smooth. Caressed and worn into shape over more than 1400 miles by determined bum bones.

The days settle into a kind of working routine. It's good to do 30 miles before lunch, and then to try not to even THINK about looking for a place to put the tent up until there are 65 or so miles on the daily clock.

Tonight, found a soft grassy spot in Schwanenstadt (av speed 10.2mph, 6:17 hours in the saddle) outside the house of a local woman who recognised the shell on my handlebar bag. and who turns out to have done the Camino de Santiago, twice.

Schwanenstadt is on the Austrian segment of the Camino, and her brother next door has just invited me in for a beer, so must rush...

Reach the Danube tomorrow. Flat. Lovely.


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Another reason why Bavaria is green

Of course another reason why Bavaria and the Northern Alps are so green, apart from the muckspreadng, is that it rains.

A lot.

Yesterday was glorious sunshine. But today, as I approach Salzburg, it's back to form. Hence shot above of another serious biker encountered today, togged like me to the gills for the rain and doing a seven-week solo tour clockwise right round Germany.

Forgot to ask his name (bad journalist), but let's say Hans and I, both 60-ish, agreed that 100km, about 65 miles, is the average daily run to aim for at this age over the long haul.

I used to do 100 miles a day, no sweat. But that was in my 20s.

For which one needs good sleep. How the brain does it is amazing, but tenting last night in the shadow of St James Unterbeuern, see other pic, bonging the quarter hours and pealing the hours right through the night, I scarcely heard a thing.

And a final midday musing as I stand at a forest edge in the wet near the Austrian border picking with plastic stylus at my Blackberry screen.

Of course we Braynes have a soul connection with Bavaria, Whence my first set of in-laws and also the place where I did my 1968 gap year, in Bamberg. As indeed we connect with the village in Norfolk where I grew up.

Brayne. Bayern. Barney. All anagrams. Now there's a thought.



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The rest of today's photos

The Alpine flowers are at last beginning to bloom. Very late, but delightful. Mum, this photo was for you!

And on the same theme, the green of the meadows here in the German south takes one's breath away. How do they do it?

Like the English lawn, it's easy. Just nurture/roll/manure for hundreds of years. And believe me, there's a LOT of manuring going on here in Bavaria at the moment. The picture shows the muckspreading at work. Imagine the whiff. Rich and fertile, very!

I was going to report in today's blog about how one keeps The Body, Adonis-like, at supreme performance fitness. When averaging 9.2 mph as I did today, or reaching top speeds of 39.2mph (I'll make 40 one day, but only when there isn't a whacking great hairpin bend looming) , in a total of 7.36 hours in the saddle, the longest actual cycling day yet in what after tomorrow and Salzburg will be four weeks since I left home.

Sadly, I'm finding that enjoying a couple of beers and a decent cooked meal in the evening is making sure that no podge is being lost at all in all this steady pedalling, though perhaps it is being redistributed.

Perhaps I'll come back in a later blog to the theme of how it feels physically to be doing this. Rather good, actually.

I must stop. Or I WILL be toast.


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Bearing One's Cross

After spending an hour this morning re-posting my Serious Wistful Thoughts from yesterday, which Blogger.Com had got all confused, I'm going to try one post today with three pix, and then a separate one just with pix, but text will refer to both.

Make sense? If yes, then read on.

After yesterday's thoughts about the suffering Christ at the Wieskirche, I suddenly clocked the symbolism today - cycling 70 miles east in a more or less straight line in and out of the Alpine foothills - of the cruxifixes one sees all over Bavaria by the road- or path-side.

I've been following, as a good law-abiding cyclo-Burgher, The Official Route, which has slowed me up enormously as it's taken me up hill, down dale and along miles of unmade-up forest track.

But the views of the Alps looming through the morning mist were breathtaking, and studded every few hundred yards with these peasant carvings of Christ on the cross, with always, almost, one tree either side.

I should have noted what the trees are, some old and some newly-planted as you'll see in the pix. But the symbolism has to be that of the two robbers at Christ's side at Calgary. Repent even at the last minute, and heaven is yours.

It's rather touching, to realise how seriously the local peasantry here in Bavaria, on what is now again the Jakobsweg/Camino de Santiago (see Further Official Signs in the second batch of pix) at least used to believe in the literal truth of the Bible.

Be a good Catholic, say your catechisms and nurture your churches and roadside crosses, and you're headed up to join the saints in those etheral scenes yesterday at the Wies. Sin, or spurn the church's teachings, and you're toast.

I wonder how seriously the Bavarians still believe. My verger at the Wies lamented how churches here too are now emptying as people turn away from their ancestors' traditions.

I'm not sure that humility from Pope Benedict, a German of course, on things like clergy abuse in the US is going to make much difference. But the crosses are very pretty in the landscape, and they're still being built and cared for.

Right, my waitress in the Gaststaette where I've been supping tonight wants me out. My tent and snug sleeping bag await outside in the pub's children's playground, in the shadow of the appropriately named St James (San Tiago) church here in Altenbeuern.

I'm the only guest and it's time to close up - with a thought of course that The Way, the Camino, the Dao/Tao are all the same idea in different religions. It's about the journey, not the destination. And that's what I also, in a modest way with Raven and my panniers, am on.

So, briefly to the rest, I'll attach the text after all to the second batch of photos.


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Musings on life, love and more...

Having trouble wth the blog today, so first text, then photos.

I promise I will write that blog on Why Blog At All, but it's been a thought-provoking kind of day - my 58th birthday, and thanks to many of you for the kindest of emailed wishes - and there are Other Things that are calling out to be shared.

Southern Germany, eastward today along the northern edge of the achingly beautiful Alps, is very familiar territory for me.

Following the route of the official Lake-Constance-Koenigsee bike track (teutonically efficient state-financed signs, pictured above, and none of the well-meaning, charity-supported but amateurish Sustrans stuff that we have in England) has taken me today (67 miles, seven hrs in the saddle) from my former sister-in-law's in Wertach, past where Jutta and I married in 1977, to where I'm now quartered for the night, in Ohlstadt, where her parents/my former in-laws once lived.

All rather unexpected.

We used to come by here, just a few hundred yards from where I'm writing in a lovely German pub that is of course open till late, in the late 80s and early 90s with the kids to collect the in-laws' caravan for mad, totally overloaded windsurfing holidays in former Yugoslavia, down on the Croatian coast.

Before Yugoslavia also became former.

As in the John Donne poem which we used to sing in the church choir in Barnet, the former things are passed away. Donne's religious vision assures us that God shall wipe away all tears, and whatever your understanding of divinity, time of course does heal.

Still, when marriages die, tears are shed and things are broken that can never be put back together again.

It was so lovely to see my ex-sis-in-law Carola, for the first time in a decade, in the picture above this morning with her absurdly beautiful living room view of the mountains.

We drank rather too much bubbly, Italian and Hungarian, and Reminisced with a Capital R. About skiing in the local mountains 20 years ago, about holidaying with our collected kids in Croatia, about families, about parents living and no longer living.

And then in the afternoon, the Official Bike Route took me (minus half a pannier's worth of unnecessary clobber now being posted, thanks to Carola, back to England) surprisingly past the equally ridiculously beautiful church in the Wies where Jutta and I married 31 years ago.

The 18th century Wies (simply "Meadow" in German) is set in the forested middle of nowhere in an unreal kind of Windows XP welcome screen landscape (sorry girls, blokes will understand) hard up against the Alps, and with grass so green and skies so blue they must have been painted.

Rococo within, and an organ so silver and so celestial (again, see pix) that it's as if the architects and the builders were able to capture Donne's vision of a world beyond this reality where there shall be but one equal music, one equal light.

But the Wies also has a statue of Christ above the altar, the Scourged Saviour as he's known, who, Mel Gibson-like, is being very seriously tortured. 3-D, chains, Crown Of Thorns, the works.

Exquisite beauty all around, but focusing on a portrayal of sadistic brutality. A reflection perhaps of the human condition. And of what it can feel like at first when a relationship breaks down?

People mean well when they get married. Of course, they intend it to last. But architecture, ritual and ethereal symbolic context can't substitute for the hard subsequent slog of making marriage work. And sometimes we can't.

It was strangely curious, but also good, to see, courtesy of the verger, the 1997 Wies Book of Marriages with its record of one local Bavarian girl marrying one Reuter corresondent with home address at the time in 1977 in East Berlin.

But - an absolutely critical question - how long does one carry the hurt of disappointed hopes and good intentions, and when do they truly and finally turn into just memories, no longer burning in the present?

Hard to say, and something always stays. But it's been an important, Gestalt-processing day.


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Wies, Carola, Signposting

Here the photos to go with the last blog.


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Neuschwanstein 2

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Fairytale castle

Two pictures from a glorious, snowy, sunny, Alpine day that don't need to wait...

Neuschwanstein Castle near Fuessen, 25 miles into today's ride, and the inspiration for all those Disneyland theme parks. Built by Bavariia's beloved but eccentric King Ludwig II 1869-86, before the government of the day had him declared mad and locked away.

But so full of tourists - I've heard Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, Vietnamese, Hungarian, American, Italian and even German - that there's no point in waiting the hours necessary to get in.

So, back onto Raven in what must count as some of the world's prettiest scenery - see also shot of hairpins and snow from yesterday afternoon.

More this evening over some Bavaria beer, possibly better than Czech. No, on second thoughts good, but not better.



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The Snow Must Go On

One thing I can't quite crack with this Blackberry blog is how to make sure the photos get posted in the right order. I think I'm going to give up expecting precision, and let you make your own connections.

Among which (connections) today is one of precipitation. I did enjoy a German road sign this afternoon, captured barrelling east down a very snowy mountain between Bregenz (Austria, right-hand end of Lake Constance) and the Allgaeu in Germany.

Bad Rain. How true - though they say the weather is about to improve and finally get springy. Apparently also, here in the Alps, they're about to launch their first flying pig...

Actually, though, the theme today was snow, over 34 largely vertical miles (so far, 10 still to go), keeping average speed down to 7.3mph (hills really do slow you up) though a healthy max downhill speed of very nearly 40mph. Would have been more if my nerve had held. It didn't and it wasn't.

So, it never rains but it snows. For which experience it was good to possess now post-Bern what are proving to be probably the best cycling gloves in the world. Sealskinz, they're called, and I needed a new mortgage to buy them. But they work, awesomely. Warm and waterproof, a serious boon on a day like this.

Which provided for the most sensational insider views of clouds. Like Joni Mitchell, I have looked at life and clouds (quote from one of her big late 60s hits) from both sides now, back west towards Austria/Switzerland, and north-east to Germany.

However, as Raven illustrates above, against the backdrop of what was visible of Lake Constance from the pass, the view mostly really was only of water vapour. Good for musing, as I pedalled along and up, head-down in first gear, about life and Why One Blogs. Thoughts for a later post, which might be hard to illustrate, as it's mind-and-emotions stuff.

Oh yes, I promised a picture of solar panels in Got-The-Plot-On-Alternative-Energy Bavaria. Sure enough, just this side of the border, a traditional Alpine farmhouse with not only the roof covered in photovoltaic panels, but also the entire end wall.

Bavaria pays people five times (I think) their standard rate as electricity consumers to feed power back into the grid. The technical term is feed-in tariffs, and doesn't it just illustrate how dramatically governments can change consumer behaviour with the right economic incentives.

Interestingly, Germany is way ahead in this even of Switzerland, where there was scarcely a solar panel anywhere, and not a single windmill. Not to speak of dear old France.

On which a final thought for today before I head for my ex's delightful sister-in-law in Wertach, not seen for nearly a decade.

I really wasn't making up the difference between France and Germany on the service front. Here, the shops and the cafes are open pretty much all day, and you can get an evening meal until well after nine o'clock. Germany rocks 2 - but Austria ain't bad either, and it's there next.


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Encounters

There are downsides to cycling a long distance on one's own like this (at least there must be, though I can't think of too many at this moment). But one of the absolute upsides is the people one meets.

The Moroccan immigrant in a small hotel in France (whither I'd fled from the rain) talking over blood sausage and wine (that was me; as a Muslim he was on fruit juice and fish) about how in all his travels over 35 years he'd never met an individual, individually one-on-one, who was unpleasant.

The others around our table - three labourers on a local drainage project, a toilet engineer down from Brittany and one wet English cyclist - all agreed. Taken singly, human beings are just great. It's in the group that we become a problem.

Or the café owner also in France who was desperate for custom, praising Sarkozy as new President but predicting literally another bloody French revolution as ordinary people like him take guns and storm the banks. In all seriousness. But he did me a lovely lunch.

Or the 60-year-old in my first Swiss restaurant who talked over lunch (escaping from the rain again) about the joy he gets, like my friend John back in St Etienne, from sending students on exchange programmes to England, and especially also a little late in the day from his only child, just 10 years old, but living separately it seemed in Geneva with his mother. Another complicated private life.

Or, today (71 miles after a warm dry night in my tent from one of the Steins on the Rhine to Bregenz, along the south shore of Lake Constance, very very wet and NOW OVER 1000 MILES in total since leaving home!!!), three sets of real cyclists going real distances.

Alex and Sandra, from Clermont Ferrand in France, were on two massively-laden bikes (see pic) towing their seven-month old on her first major cycle trip around the Lake as a tester for something bigger. They have, at home, three tandems and 30 other bikes! My kind of people.

And then there was Francesco from Italy at the other end of the scale, on a brisk four-day belt around the Lake with the minimum of luggage, all in a cape-covered backpack, no mudguards, and a relentless Italian enthusiasm. He too hates Berlusconi.

If Francesco was of a Certain Age (early 50s?), so is Hille, 54 and from Belgium, on a four-week slog down through Europe to Venice, using an umbrella to keep dry and an enthusiast, as I once was, for good value Lidl cycle gear.

I think I arrived at the Bregenz Youth Hostel today drier than he had, but sans umbrella a lot less elegant.

I may be thoroughly gloomy about the prospects for the human race as a result of what we 've done to this lovely planet of ours. (And theirs, as in other species, especially birds who travel at sort of cycling speed and are cheerfully and chattily everywhere I go).

But my goodness, people are nice.


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Germany rocks...

I'm risking posting five photos tonight as there's no dominant theme today - but rather, sitting in a Swiss (I think, see below) - Italian restaurant full of spaghetti and rejuvenating beer, and regular guests aruond me talking of Berlusconi's absurd victory in the Italian elections, a glow of accomplishment having at last cycled more than 80 miles in a day (81.27 to be precise), and gone over 1000 miles since leaving Cirencester (1020, to continue precise.).

That was a long lead para, which Bob at Reuters in Moscow anno 1974 would have had me rewrite. But full day = lots of words and images.

Such as, the Rhine in its upper reaches along the Swiss-German border along which I've been riding since leaving Rolf and Karen reasonably early, after a late evening helping Karen's brother Fred recast a letter of acceptance in English for a job as food and beverage manager at a new mega-hotel, five stars, on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast at Varna. Not everyone's cup of tea, but Fred is an old hand at this stuff.

Another long para. Sorry Bob.

Or, a delightful little newly-built roadside chapel I chanced upon along the bike path, in what I think was Germany as the road dips in and out of German and Swiss territory every couple of miles as it follows the Rhine eastward. Very confusing.

People everywhere hurt, and are moved to share their experience of meaning, and sometimes healing, with others. The metaphors of Christianity give very accessible expression to that, and it was a briefly moving place to rest for a moment, and light a candle.

Or, in the rain (yes, it poured today, but only for an hour or so, and with fabulous new waterproof gloves and top, I was dry by the time I put my tent up tonight alongside the river), a view of the splendid cycle paths the Germans routinely install alongside most of their larger roads.

The Germans have seriously Got The Plot when it comes to cycling. And with much else. I will post, in due course, pictures of German photovoltaic solar energy generators.Virtually every roof in Bavaria has one - putting Germany light years ahead of the rest of Europe.

After the charming but often annoying flakiness and self-centredness of France, it's VERY good to be in the very familiar territory of German-speaking Central Europe.

Or, back to the pictures, two views of one of the magnificent covered wooden bridges which punctuate the Rhine's still adolescent progress in these parts - in Stein am Rhein with the border, marked by an efficiently large German sign, half way along. Echoes of Merryl Streep and Clint Eastwood in the Bridges of Madison County.

Das waers fuer heute. Mit dem herzlichsten Dank an Rolf und Karen und Fred fuer gestern.
 

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The Siebenthal Bomb Shelter

Wonderful welcome at the von Siebenthals this (Sunday) evening in Oberdorf. 43 miles from Berne, glorious Swiss landscape and NO RAIN!!

And if you were wondering what their bomb shelter in the basement looks like, here it is with Rolf, Karin and daughter Lena in bright yellow helmets.

That door is nearly a foot thick, weighs in at least a ton, can withstand an earthquake or major explosion, and the bunker ceiling is also more than a foot of solid concrete.

The neighbours would join Rolf and Karen here if it came to the worst. There wouldn't much room! Karen is holding a football to shield the light from the camera. But think bicycles, skis, spare beds, school stuff and wine.....

 
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