Time and Distance – Day 2, 11am – Day 3, 11am, 440 – 690km; Town and Country – Dad in Hungary to the Slovene border; Kilos (with apologies to Bridget Jones): 84 – that’s one less, the slide is just beginning; Coffee stops – 2; Ice creams and cakes – 5; Close Shaves on the Steed – none. Injuries – plenty, see below. Animal life – deer.
It is clear that I faced 45 South-West with a certain trepidation… in fact with many trepidations if that’s a linguistic possibility. Principal among them was which body part would give up first and bring the whole thing to an end. Most worrying were my back and my ankle, but there were other possibilities. What of my neck? Having ridden in Britain for years looking over my right shoulder, in 45 Southwest I would be riding 4400 kilometres on the other side of the road. Would the other side of my neck suddenly cramp itself into rictus?
Of course there are the unavoidable issues, unavoidable at least for me - my hands and backside always end up as brutalized, insensate lumps of flesh and gristle - my index and middle fingers were tingling and losing feeling within 24 hours (and to a lesser extent my feet; they lose feeling too, but in this case only on Day 4). And then there’s my backside, which despite my visit to Strip - for a back, sack and crack… sorry… ‘intimate bum’ - had already bubbled up a dozen proto-pustules.
These are mere trifles, however - the backside a simple pain to be borne - compared to the potential debilitation of a back or ankle… and so I was surprised and very pleased that unlike other body parts they didn’t develop into a problem. Some unexpected, protective defence seemed to swell around them, and amazingly, neither is gave me grief. Evidently I had worn in my back sufficiently. But my arthritic ankle? Well, even as it clocked up something like its 200,000th turn after the 48 hours, it wasn’t complaining…
From a town called Dad to a village called Papa... through the hottest part of the day. And, see previous journal entry I was getting dozy again. I arrived at a Co-op (purchases - one savoury roll, a huge bottle of Fanta, another of water, and an ice cream) just as it closed for a siesta, which I decided was a good plan for me too. So I sat in the shade for a doze. I was just nodding off when my sister appeared. She lives in Slovakia and we hadn’t seen one another since before covid. Evidently she had been so taken by the dot-watching thing over the previous 48 hours that she hopped in her car and drove 50 miles south to find me as I passed through. I was easy enough to find, via the 45-SouthWest tracker page – they just joined the route, somewhere near Dad, and drove along it until they caught up with my marker. And there I was, dozing in a Co-op forecourt.
By 3.30pm it was cool enough to ride and I was waking up; the route took me through rolling Hungarian countryside, fields, some full, others harvested, and copses and strips of forest. At 7pm I sat for 15 minutes in the garden of a village bar, stocking up with water for the night. At another table a young couple seemed to be buying a mortgage or a pension. How nice it felt to be so far from life’s responsibilities.
I rode on into a golden dusk, spooking two deer as the road emerged from a wood. They took off at speed but then trotted daintily through the fallow field. Finally, at 10 it got dark and so my thoughts turned to somewhere to sleep. As mentioned before, many riders prefer visible infrastructure: so I tried settling in a covered bus shelter, but the local dogs had other ideas, keeping up a relay of barking. When eventually they went quiet, I realised I wasn’t comfortable on the bench, so I headed out into the countryside, on a gravel road, looking for a spot to hide myself away.
I turned off into a track leading through a field of crops, assuming I was deep into untouched countryside. But I wasn’t far enough off the gravel road as it turned out, which despite looking like a road to nowhere weirdly turned into a sort of after hours motorway. I was woken repeatedly by vans and cars on the gravel road. And then, spookily, I was woken from behind me, in the field, a creeping noise… I assume it was an animal creeping within a few yards out of curiosity, perhaps another deer, or a boar, but at the time I dreamed that I was being stalked by the village dogs, which had somehow followed me out here. Dehydration brings on delirium.
If central Hungary had been hilly, at dawn I descended into a river basin, riding flat for a while. I left it via an equally flat side-valley heading south-west, arriving at 7am at a village whose general shop was open already. I loaded up with yoghurt, a chocolate milk, a couple of rolls and some bananas and sat eating happily on the forecourt. A steady stream of villagers came to collect their newspapers and bread. I speak not a single word of Hungarian, but nobody wanted to engage me in conversation anyway. Perhaps I smelled already.
The payback for following a meandering stream along the flat is the steep climb at the head of the valley. But I knew also that this climb would take me to the next border crossing, into Slovenia. And apparently we would be cutting through a tiny corner of Austria. I didn’t see any markings (from the map, later, it looks as though Austria was just across the river). On the climb we entered cool forest with mature trees. There is national park on both sides of the border here, so it has the feel of a place uncomplicated by humans. But just imagine how heavily guarded it was 50 years ago, in the Cold War, when this was the interface between a fractious West and East.
If our arrival into Hungary had been so undemanding (on a bridge across the Danube - it turned out as the only one of the six border crossings in 45 Southwest which didn’t appear at the top of some sort of climb), leaving Hungary was more typical. After a short, steepish ascent (just 200 metres of climbing), the road meandered a little along a ridgeline, and then began another glorious descent. At around 10.30 am, I freewheeled into the Lukaj Valley of Slovenia. And what a surprise it was…