Jurnal de călătorie

Day 23: Gyor — Esztergom

It was an 118 Km ride. Because of the hot weather I didn't feel like I could go the 70+ remaining to Budapest, so I remained here in Esztergom. I'm camping. There's a sea of mosquitoes around my tent so I'll need to be fast when I get back. Now I'm enjoying a beer in the town square, where there is an interesting festival happening Esztergom Kultura. So far I watched an opera duet which sounded quite good, even though the orchestra was formed mainly of 15-17 year old kids.

Day 22: Gyor

In Gyor I managed to take the picture of a very nice moment after the sunset. My camera keeps surprising me with these kind of interesting shots.

Yesterday I made it to Hungary. After something that should have been another easy day, but wasn't, I arrived in the spa city of Gyor, the intermediate stop before Budapest. The road was very flat which allowed me again to madly spin the pedals (I was riding around 30Km/h most of the way), but some headwind occasionally gave me problems and off-course I managed to get lost again for about 20Km. These extra Kilometres and the fast pace I forced myself to, made my arrival to Gyor to consist of finding accommodation and then falling asleep as soon as I got out of the shower (this was around 4 PM).

I managed to wake up, though and visit a bit the city, which fortunately is quite small, but my plan of having a nice relaxing time in the spa didn't pan out.

And speaking of plans, I must say that in Bratislava I actually managed to do all I had in mind. Swim in the lake at Zlate Pieksi (where they still don't have warm water in the showers, or maybe I'm just unlucky), visit the Devin Castle and meet a fellow redditor for a beer. All in all, in Bratislava I had a very nice rest day. The pictures from Devin start here.

Day 21: Bratislava

Initially this post was titled Day 23, but actually this should be day 21. I don't really know where I messed up the count and added three days, but I have started my journey on the 28^th of July, and that means that until today there are 21 days.

Yesterday was a great cycling day. Even if the route was very, very boring, I mean, almost 70Km of this, even though it's nice, gets a bit monotonous at one point. So, I upped the stakes a bit by riding hard. Most of the way I was doing around 30Km/h, which made me feel pretty good about myself, and not even the rain could bring me down. Like I said, it was a pretty good day for this banana fish.

What brought me down, however was the part where I couldn't find accommodation in the center, as always I didn't bother to make a reservation in a hostel and I opted for getting by on location. It didn't work so well this time, as everything was already full. In the end I had to ride the 10Km to Zlate Piesky, a campsite of which I had some fond memories from my previous visit to Bratislava. That meant that I didn't visit anything of the city yesterday – as riding 20 extra Kilometres seemed too much of an effort. Even more down I was brought by the people inhabiting the campsite, a bunch (and please forgive my judgemental state) of chavs and chav offspring, who managed to black-mail me out of some energy bars which weren't even appreciated by these future Essex girls, not even close to puberty, but mimicking oh so well the behaviour of tramps.

After I managed to be left alone by these unfortunate specimens, I had a pleasant quiet evening, just me, the soft hum of the rain on my tent, a book and falling asleep at 10 PM, occasionally jumping from my sleep by the noise some rowdy English gentlemen (undoubtedly the fathers of the little girls I mentioned before) were making by playing nearby with a punching machine.

For images on the trip please see my Picasa account, as it is a bit too time consuming to create the html for them to be posted here.

Day 20: Vienna (still)

17^th of August and still in Vienna. I'm not happy about it, but it happened since yesterday the local friendly bike shop, The Bicycle Company messed up the tune-up I requested them to perform on Mathilda. For the last week I had really bad breaks, especially in front and I wanted them to change the brake pads. Firstly they didn't have the required model on stock so I had to bring my own spare pair. Secondly they replaced the wrong ones, the back, which still held quite good.

Today I need to buy new pads – I have already scouted the shops where I can do it – and then go back to them to have them installed. Hopefully this will leave me time to leave for Bratislava too. In the end 70Km should not be that big of a deal, right ?

In retrospect Vienna wasn't my favourite place in the whole travel, I must say overall it was quite an unpleasant stay. But to this contributed a number of factors that have nothing to do with the actual sights of the city. A very big problem was the fact that my hostel was in the middle of nowhere, actually a pretty nice nowhere, but still very far from the centre. When I first arrived it took me almost two hours to get there and because of that I thought it's a better idea to go into the city by means of public transport. Well, big cities are a pain to visit on foot, I don't know how all these tourists can do it. :D

Geeky detour: About Google Command Line Tool

Thinking about Lucian's request to have my pictures uploaded to Picasa instead of my personal server, I was thinking about methods about how to do it with as little time needed as possible. When riding for tens of Kilometers a day, fortunately, you have plenty of time to think about things.

Since my current set-up, of resizing the images then uploading them on my server with scp, works pretty well and simple, but still needs about 30-40 minutes to complete, based on how bad the connection is, I didn't want anything that increased the complexity on my end, and, more importantly, not to require extra bandwidth. One such solution was the recently released suite: Google Command Line Tool, which should allow performing Picasa related tasks through a headless machine (hence Command Line).

Since, all this morning I am going to be stuck up in the hostel waiting for my laundry to finish, I decided to take a shot at making this work. In practise, it proved quite a bit more difficult, as the suite needs to be manually allowed to perform said tasks with the help of a browser. The problem is that, exactly as the vast majority of Google web-sites, the access panel requires a browser with JavaScript enabled. As we all know, cli browsers are somewhat lacking in this respect. Thankfully, I managed to find the Wiki page related to configuration options, which mentions how you can set up a browser, as the default one was initially links, which didn't even manage to log me in Google settings.

Another problem, which I haven't had time to solve yet, is that the tools treat extensions as case sensitive and don't take into account the mime-type of files. And since my camera (and I bet that 99.9% of all cameras) treat their SD card file system as case-insensitive, all my files are named *.JPG, which is not recognized.

So, Lucian, I am trying... I don't know when I'll be able to do it, but there will be pictures on Picasa soon.

Update

Yay... I managed to do it. All I needed was some good ol' bash scripting for copying/renaming all the relevant files and my Picasa profile has a new album called Bru-Buch, to which the pictures are being uploaded as I write this. I do hope, I didn't upload the NSFW ones. :D

Day 19: Vienna

I didn't even realize when this happened: I'm almost in my third week on the road.

Yesterday I arrived from the Czech Republic and the road was hard on me. It was pretty short ~60Km, but it seems that day 19, from Slavonice to Hevlin which consisted in quite a longish detour off the main road, really messed me up. The detour consisted of about 30Km (between Vranov and Satov) through the Tayatal National Park, and as you can imagine, asphalt is not welcome there. There I was, on a path more suitable for hikers than for cyclists carrying heavy panniers, descending some really off-road trails full of mud and tree roots, through mountain streams and over steep hills. It broke my legs to pieces and even though I managed to go another 30Km from Satov to Hevlin quite painless, the first hills on the next day made my muscles cramp really bad in my right leg. I suspect I have some pulled muscles in my tie and calf.

With all this in mind, Vienna was a welcome rest day, allowing me to do laundry and have Mathilda checked up for the breaks and tire pressure.

Day 17: Slavonice

I arrived here yesterday. It was quite a good ride, I would say it was the best ride I had so far in this trip: 105 Km of hills from Tabor to Slavonice, under a pretty scorching sun but through some really nice pine woods at the end. Everything went smooth and I enjoyed it a lot.

It wasn't exactly what I had planned for the day, as I wanted to go South, and then for day 17 I wanted to be on my way over the border in Austria. However the Prague-Vienna bike path wanted me to go towards the East, so here I am. There will be another day inside the Czech republic, going towards Znojmo and crossing the border ad Mevlin.

In the background there's the route 12 I was planning to take for the day. However I ended up on the 32.

Enjoying a cup of coffee, while I was deciding where to stop.

Lake side view.

Into the wild

This one will end up on my Facebook profile. =)

Everything was going well...

I was considering getting water from here as I ran out.

Ooops, front break cable broken again.

Amateurs

Training for the Vienner schnitzel...

... under 10 minutes.

I don't even look that tired.

Going up.

... and up

But finally I'm there.

Day 15: Tabor pictures

Young grasshoppa!

Main square in Tabor

Sometimes my legs feel like this.

Czech people preparing for an local colour version of "Corazon espinado"

Moravian houses have this type of murals

Sometimes my legs feel like this.

Another interesting mural.

The Jordan river.

Fisherman.

A nice lake

Day 15: Brejlov - Tabor

After a less than spectacular day fourteen, I decided to minimize the chances for frustration today and to ride it easy only to Tabor (118Km from Prague). So here I am.

The distance from Brejlov was around 80Km and I made it by 14:00 hours, my legs felt like they still had a couple more Kilometres in, but I preferred to play it safe and find a nice bed and breakfast to get a nice meal and a beer. So, here I am, enjoying a draft Pilsner Urquell - which yesterday was presented to me by Blanca as having 12° alcohol. I doubt it, but it feels good to drink a cold bittery beverage after an 80 Km ride in the baking sun. Yes, today was a very hot and added some more contrast to my cycling tan line. Tomorrow however, it seems that the weather will go back to being shitty and I will get wet again. I hope I won't be hit by any storms though.

Blanca, if you wonder, is the very nice, very blue-eyed, very young, very un-Czech named hostess that made my end of yesterday a bit more pleasant with her slightly ethereal smile and tasty food. But as road romances go in real life, my attempts of being charming have been ingenuously down-played by her, by either pretending to not understand my English come-ons, or by just adorably shrugging them away. Well, such is life and I'm only sad I didn't think of asking her to take a picture with me.

Back to the important matters, tomorrow I'll head towards the Austrian border, hopefully getting accommodation somewhere next to Ceske Budejovice or even further to Ceske Krumlov depending on the road profile. All in all, in three more days I hope to be in Vienna.

Before leaving Prague, a not so orderly mess.

Oh joy!
After about an hour of stumbling around, I finally found the bike path.

Look! I made a little friend.

After two more hours of wondering around in circles I found the path again.

But I was a bit unsettled about this path.

So, after about 5 hours of leaving the hostel I was leaving Prague.

This place will from here on be known as the Mud Hell.

Carrying 45Kg of bicycle over the Mud Hell did this to me.

A friendly face.

Some nice roads for a change.

Brejlov, a quiet corner of Paradise.

On the verge of a nervous break-down.

Quiet.

This was no milk and honey but, boy, was it sweet.

Tired old shoes.

A good place to go back to. A bit expensive though.

Enjoying the last minutes of civilization before leaving for day fifteen.

Towards the South... downhill.

A scare... fish ?

Preparing to enter hyperspace.

A very hilly day.

Enjoying some sights... probably I was getting closer.

Prague: the day before departure

Today was my last in Prague.

As such I had to shop for supplies instead of visit. I ran out of Sultana crackers and other tasty goodies for the road. I needed ankle medicine and batteries. And most definitely I needed a road map. I found them all without lots of problems, so now I'm ready to pack and ready to move on. The snacks I bought at DM and I think the girl at the counter must have thought me mad to leave with a bag full of candy and granola bars and a small shower gel.

I managed to take a couple of pictures running from place to place and I even climbed (on the bike) to the Metronome and again to Mala-Strana, where, this time, I actually took the hard way. Unfortunately the pictures don't do justice to the gradients I had to work my way up to.

The map, is actually a cycling guide and I hope it will help me find my way easier than I did in Germany. Still, looking at the maps it worries me about the routes between cities. They are quite sinuous and I'm afraid that they will force me to increase the number of days on the road.

I have started making my baggage lighter and I hope to bring it down a couple of kilograms just by throwing away (such a waste) the maps of the previous cities I visited.

Raining in the centre.

The sea of tourists on the Charles Bridge.

That's where I came from.

A nice little square.

A building with an interesting façade.

... and arch at the back.

More ivy.

Lots of students... must be the Prague University.

Nice view of Legii, Karluv, Manesuv bridges (not necessarily in that order)

The Metronome is a good spot to take pictures from (1).

(2)

A close up of the Metronome.