How can I stop the drinking smiley appearing every time I type the word ""?

Day 5 – Saturday 29th of June – Budapest (0km)

Biker Camp is, as the name says, a campsite for bikers and cyclists in the center of Budapest.



It was founded by Zsolt Vertessy, a biker himself, who sadly died in an accident in 2004. The place has been run by his widow ever since, and offers a space to camp, toilets and showers, a washing machine, cooking facilities, wifi, tools, a self-service bar and the chance to meet fellow bikers. It is six underground stops from the city centre and is a great place to spend a few days.



I got here at about half past six in the evening and was shown into the camping space by the owner. There is room for about ten or twelve tents plus the bikes, but there was only another tent, which belonged to a Norwegian family who are on a cycling holiday.



I chatted with them over breakfast today and they told me they flew all their gear to Venice and are cycling back home from there, doing from 50 to 60 kilometers a day… with two kids! The youngest is only seven years old. When I think that most people back in Spain say that you can practically do nothing once you have had children…

After breakfast I took the underground, which is a couple of streets from the camp and went to explore Budapest.



The city is as beautiful as I expected from the tales of all the people I know who have been here before me, and today the weather was wonderful, which meant that I was a bit too hot at times!





I spent the whole morning walking around the city, exploring the most popular places and taking lots of pictures, and by lunchtime I went a bit off the tourist trail in search of a good place to eat. I found a small pub where I had a full traditional Hungarian meal for only 11€ - A very spicy paprika sauce to spread on bread, goulash soup, paprika chicken with cream, salad, coffee, traditional Hungarian bread, an enormous apple pie, and a pint of local . Delicous! The climb to the citadel was quite hard after that…





I was thinking that there were very few tourists in the city, until I reached the top of the hill and ran into an army of Japanese sun-allergic tourists hiding under their umbrellas and huddling together near their respective guides, seemingly afraid of getting very lost if they wandered too far on their own.



After spending some time there and taking some more pictures, I went back down into the center and decided to explore the non touristic neighbourhoods between the centre and the place where I was staying. Not far from where most tourists were, the streets changed quickly and I was in an area of run down buildings with a very high proportion of drunkards, homeless people and very dodgy looking characters.





I put the camera back into its bad, as it was the only thing giving me away as a tourist, as my clothes are quite simple (I can’t really carry much) and the cropped hair and growing beard seemed to blend in quite well. I stopped at a small fruit shop to get some oranges and apples and then got the underground for the last three stops, because my feet were killing me. I was glad to have spent the day walking for a change, but I would not know what is more tiring…



This has been a shorter post than the previous ones, I will let the pictures do the talking here. By the way, since I use a blog, and not a photo album, I will be posting extra pictures on the Facebook page, so if you are interested, you can see them there.

Day 6 – Sunday 30th of June – Budapest to Ighiu (536km)

I woke up earlier than I expected today, Hungary is the easternmost country I am travelling through that is still on the same time zone as Spain, and at ten past five in the morning the sun was already shinning. I managed to get some more sleep before getting up and putting everything back on the bike, as I expected today to be quite a hard day – I remembered Romanian roads from a trip there three years ago and they are hard.



I had a coffee while I wrote a quick entry into the camp’s guest book, and then spent some time flicking through its pages and reading a few of the stories there. After a few minutes I was surprised to feel a tear forming in my eyes. There are hundreds of people travelling around the world by all possible means and I had read about some of them on internet forums, but this was different – I was touching the very same pages those people had touched before moving on to their following destinations.



The previous night I had tried to put the coordinates for my next destination on the GPS, only to find that whatever settings, it refused to give me a route. I tried choosing a destination in Hungary, near the border, but the result was still the same. In the end, it only agreed to give me a route to a town near the border and on the motorway, so after leaving Budapest I stopped at the first petrol station I found to pay for a matrika, the vignette that allows you to travel on motorways. I had managed to get through Slovenia, Austria and part of Hungary without paying for one, so I was a bit bummed. It turned out to be quite cheap (I do not know exactly how cheap, I still have not had time to calculate today’s expenses) and in an hour and a half I was at the border, which meant that I had all the afternoon ahead of me to enjoy the Romanian roads.

On the trip to Romania three year ago, my friends and I stayed at a place called Terra Mythica, near Alba Iulia. We were not quite sure what kind of place it was, but it was the only thing we could find in the region, so we made a booking. We got there at about 1 am to find it was a sort of summer camp full of children. Against all odds, we had a wonderful time – Dalina, the owner, and some of the stuff joined us after dinner once all the kids were in bed and we had one of the hardest drinking sessions I remember. To cut a long story short, we became good friends and she visited in Barcelona a couple of times, so when I was planning the trip I decided to take a little detour and come back to Ighiu, and I was really looking forward to it.

At the Romanian border I was stopped by the police for the first time in my trip, but they only checked my passport and waved me on. I stopped just past the gate at a small shack that changed money and sold road tax, which is compulsory in Romania, whether you take the highway or not (in fact, there is only one highway, between the capital and the coast). I got some leu and discovered that it was not necessary to pay tax for the motorbike, so I rode on happily.



The roads were better than I remembered from the last time I was here, or maybe riding all the way from Spain meant that the transition had been more gradual than getting off a plane and into a van. In any case, I made quick progress and soon realized that it was already well past 2 pm and I still had not had lunch. I started looking for a nice place, but roadside picnic areas or public parks are notoriously difficult to find in rural Romania, and the kilometers went by without a proper place turning up. The clouds were turning a nasty shade of black, and this time there were no clear skies ahead, so it was becoming more and more pressing to stop not just for lunch, but to put the waterproof lining on the suit. Then, as the rain began, I spotted a petrol station. I had not seen one since the border, and even though I still had fuel left, I was starting to worry, so I was glad to find one. As I got closer, however, I saw that it was abandoned.



Well, at least it had a rood under which I could get changed and eat something. I performed a little strip-tease to the delight of the lorry drivers passing by and then sat down to eat a kind of Hungarian sausage I had bought earlier and some bread and fruit.



The first time we came to Romania, people warned us about stray dogs, apparently there are many of them and they can be dangerous. I was enjoying my sandwich when this fearsome beast appeared:



I swear if I had been doing this trip on a car instead of a motorbike, I would have taken her home. The poor thing was clearly afraid of people, God knows what bad experiences she might have had in the past. I threw her some meat and she ate it from a distance. She stayed there all the time I was at the petrol station, but did not allow me to get closer than a couple of meters, she kept her distance.

After saying goodbye, I got on the bike and set off again, happy to see that the rain had stopped. I was soon regretting having put the waterproof lining on, as it was getting hotter, and I was quite sweaty when I stopped for fuel at a petrol station that was quite far removed from the ones I had been using so far. I had to check twice to make sure this one was not abandoned.



By mid afternoon, the landscape changed from the flat corn fields I had been seeing from Hungary into hills and valleys covered with forest, and I was soon reunited with that old friend from three years ago – the Romanian pothole. The Romanian pothole is not the kind of broken asphalt or depression on the road we might be used to encountering in Western Europe. This indigenous beast that populates the country roads in large numbers is generally round or ovoid in shape, with sharp, cliff-like edges, and deep enough to swallow the front wheel of the bike. It normally dwells on mountain and forest roads, where the harsher weather has deteriorated the road more, and to make matters worse, they were filled with water, making them more difficult to spot. Needless to say, hitting one would mean, at the very least, a badly damaged front rim and suspension, not to mention risking a very nasty accident.

It was cold again, but the weather got better in the afternoon, and as I rode the country roads, avoiding the potholes, I remembered what a great country this was. I got to Ighiu at half past eight, and was delighted to see Dalina again. Things were hectic at the camp, with 70 children to be taken care of, and still fully dressed in riding gear and before I could unload anything from the bike I was sat down at a table for dinner with Dalina and the rest of the staff who, came from places as far apart as California and India. I had a great time, and after dinner, I had a shower, got changed and sat down to write and have a chat with Rushil, who also has a motorbike back in India, and showed me pictures of Khardung la pass, the highest one in the world. If I ever go to India, I will definitely hire a motorbike and ride it!

Day 7 – Monday 1st of July – Transfagarasan Road

There were two reasons I had taken a 1000km-detour on my route – to visit Dalina and to ride this road, one of the most famous in the world. Build by Chauchescu to be able to move troops quickly across the region, it is simply breathtaking.

Dalina did not wake me up this morning, but my body is still an hour behind, so at 8:30 I was already up and having breakfast, chatting to her father, who remembered how drunk we got last time and told me, half in English, half in Romanian “tonight, we drink!”

I am not going to try and describe the road here, as words would not even come close to what it is. Those of you who watch Top Gear will be familiar with it. I will just post some pictures and, for those petrolheads with enough patience, a video of the whole ride from north to south once I have a connection that is fast enough to upload it.

Day 8 – Tuesday 2nd of July – Ighiu to Lviv (607km)

Having been to Romania instead of heading for Ukraine straight from Hungary meant that I broke one of the rules I had set myself – to spend the night before a major border crossing near the border to get there relatively early in the morning in case there were problems with the paperwork and it took a bit longer than expected. Another consequence of that decision was that instead of going through an international crossing, I had to go through a small rural one, and some of those only allow locals to use it, not international traffic.

So, having also broken another rule – to keep journeys shorter the furthest east I went – I set off on a 10-hour ride through a border I was not sure would be open. I got there at about 2 pm, and lucky me, they let me into Ukraine! I was quite nervous about it, I was leaving the EU and I was afraid they would find some kind of problem with my documents or the bike’s, but there were none. The good thing about a small crossing is that there were no long queues, only four cars in front of me, but they still took their own sweet time and I baked under the sun for half an hour. Once into Ukraine, the bad thing about a small crossing became apparent quickly – the road.

Remember the Romanian pothole? Well, it is nothing more than a small bump on the road compared to this. Not only were they deep, there were thousands of them, all over the road, meaning that cars and trucks had to swerve around them, using the whole width of the road and often driving on the wrong lane. I had to stand on the footpegs and could only use first and second gear. It was hot, sweaty and dusty. This was the kind of thing that I was expecting in Kazakhstan, not on a road connecting two countries in Europe. It went on for about 50 km, after which the road turned into what I would have described as a bad road in Romania, which was a huge relief after that bit. I am ready to do this sort of stuff, but not as part of 600-kilometer days.



Once I joined the main road coming from Poland things changed, the road became much, much better and I started making progress. I did not ride too fast, as I had heard lots of horror stories about Ukrainian police and how strict they are with foreign drivers, but I still did what I had been doing for the last four or five days and what every other driver on the road was doing – overtake whenever you had space and was safe, regardless of road signs.

Well, it is common practice and there is nothing wrong with it, as long as you do not overtake the chief of police from the next village going back home in civilian clothes on his private car. Needless to say, he made sure that his colleagues were waiting for me at the next checkpoint, and as soon as I got there they flagged me down. The policeman spoke no English at all, but he made it clear that I had overtaken on a double line using gestures, and when the chief of police arrived he used the same gestures before driving away again and leaving me in the caring hands of his subordinate. The guy asked for the bike’s papers and then asked if I could speak Portuguese, because apparently he knew someone at the Portuguese consulate and was going to get them on the phone so that they could explain me what I had to do. He handed me his mobile phone and I spoke to a girl who spoke English, who told me that the fine was a hundred euros. Now, I had been given some advice on how to try to deal with police in these countries, but in this case it was obvious that I had broken the law, so there was nothing else to do but to pay. That would put a huge dent on my budget… However, the girl on the phone said that I had two choices – I could get an official written fine and then go all the way to Kiev to pay it before I could get the bike’s papers back, or I could pay there and then, it would be half price and I could go my way. I gave the phone back to the police officer and he gestured me to follow him into a smaller room. We walked in, he sat down and took some official forms, which were the fine, and his mobile phone, put them both on the table and pointed at them. I pointed at the phone, and then he handed me a piece of paper and a pen. I wrote ‘50€’, he nodded and then stood up, lifted the cushion on which he was sitting and pointed under it. I put the money there, he put the cushion back and then he was all smiles, asking about my trip while he walked me back to the bike, telling me to be careful where I parked it in Lviv because it was dangerous and even writing the speed limits on his palm to remind me not to break them.

Well, after the money I had saved over the last two days, I was only a few euros out of my daily budget, I had come off lightly and I had had a first hand experience in bribing the Ukrainian police. What a day!

After that I still had more than 200 km to get to Lviv, and once I got there, tired and smelly, it was hard work finding the place where I was staying. In the end, Igor, my host, walked out to the street and found me, trying to get directions from three guys who did not seem to understand what I was asking them.

He took his car and lead me to a car park a couple of blocks down the street where I could leave the bike for the night. He the took me to his flat, a small apartment in one of those big, gray, crumbling soviet blocks of flats, for the complete Ukrainian experience. He was the most wonderful host, prepared a very nice dinner for me and then we tried to overcome the language barrier and talked about the trip and motorbikes. He told me that he had had one in the past, and that was something we could chat about with very few words, watching the twilight sky from his balcony.

Day 9 – Wednesday 3rd of July – Lviv to Kiev (557km)

There is a tunnel at the top of the Transfagarasan pass that connects both sides of the mountain. It is not very long, maybe one and a half kilometers, but it is very narrow, with just enough space for two cars, the road surface is broken asphalt almost turned into gravel with the occasional big pothole and it is pitch black, there is not a single light in it. When I rode it two days ago, the fog that covered the top of the mountains had also got into it, so visibility was almost zero. With the screen covered in moist, I had to stand on the footpegs to see over it, and I could see no further than eight or ten meters, the headlights hopelessly trying to pierce the fog. Had you asked me this morning, I would have said that was the most frightening experience I had ever had on the bike, but what I did today was far, far worse.

In the morning, Igor took me to an ATM so I could get some local money and then to the bike. I loaded it and checked the oil, a bit worried about a developing leak that I had spotted in Romania. When I started the journey I noticed a bit of oil on the bash plate, but since I had had the valve clearance checked and it was a job that required opening the engine, I thought that it had got dirty then. Just to be sure, I checked again when I got to Budapest, and things seem to be the same. However, once in Romania I noticed that there was a bit more oil, and on closer inspection I discovered that there was oil in the V where the cylinders meet, and it seemed to be coming from somewhere in the back of the front cylinder.



I cleaned it to see how long it would take to get dirty again, and today, after two days and about 1,200 km, enough oil has accumulated in the V to leak down the side of the engine. In normal riding conditions, it would take weeks for that much oil to leak, since I barely do more than 20 km a day, but things happen faster on the trip. I cleaned it again near Kiev to check how long it takes this time. The oil level has been descending at a normal rate for the number of kilometers I have been doing, so I do not know how worried I should be. I will be in Volgograd in three days (1,200 more kilometers) and since I need to have the bike serviced there, I will have the leak checked. I hope it does not get any worse before getting there.

I said goodbye to Igor, who refused to let me pay for the car park, thanked him for his hospitality, and went across Lviv center to get the road to Kiev.



It is a shame I did not have more time to visit the city, as what little I saw from the bike was great. What was not so great was the time it took me to get out of there, through streets clogged with traffic, and cobblestones and tram rails to make things more challenging.



Once out of the city the road was good an clear all the way to Kiev. The landscape was beautiful, green fields stretching far, but it was one of the most boring rides so far. After my last experience with the police I was not going to give them a reason to stop me, so I stuck to the speed limit (90), and did not overtake unless it was legal. Since I was the only one following traffic regulations, that meant that I was the slowest thing on the road, and on roads that were mostly straight and smooth, I had to fight hard to stay alert. On the plus side, I managed to get the best fuel economy form the bike ever – 4,1L/100km for the whole journey.



As soon as I got to Kiev things changed quickly, little did I know that I was in for a hell of a ride. Luda, my host’s secretary, who speaks some English, had told me to meet her at an underground station on the main road on the city limits, because it would be easier if she showed me the way from there. I was glad she had taken the bother to do so, as navigating big city traffic is usually hard. She got on a cab and told me to follow it. I thought it would not be very far, since she had come to get me, but boy, was I wrong!

The cab driver sped off into the afternoon rush hour traffic in 8-lane avenues chocked full of cars, trucks and buses, and I was left to do my best not to lose him. I was determined not to, and that meant sticking to his tail, absolutely no safety distance to speak of, and even so, the moment I left a couple of meters between me and him, somebody would try to get in the gap. And all that at speed well above what you would expect in the city. I could not even check the mirrors, as taking the eyes off the car in front for even half a second might mean an accident. And on top of that, the roads were badly potholed, which meant that the ABS was constantly kicking in, providing some extra scariness tot the whole experience, and obviously, riding so close to the car in front I could not see the potholes in time, so I basically ate them all.

After the longest ride of my life, we got to the apartment, on the 14th floor of another soviet-style building, and I was shown into the shower and then sat down for another enormous dinner consisting of the finest traditional Ukranian dishes.

Luda made her best to translate for me, and I managed quite a conversation with Sofia, my host. After dinner, a friend of hers told me he would lead me to his car park, where I could securely leave the bike for a couple of days. I followed him, fearing another crazy ride, but by that time the streets had emptied, and it was a lot easier. We left the bike there and he drove me back to the apartment. Sitting on the back of his plush car, I almost dozed off after the adrenalin rush of the afternoon.

Day 10 – Thursday 4th of July – Visit to Chernobyl (0km)

It is difficult to describe today’s experience. I was looking forward to it, as it was one of the highlights of the trip, and it has been a very interesting visit, but at the same time it has been a most harrowing experience.

Luda took me to the city’s main square, where the tour bus was to pick me up, and once in front of the hotel that was supposed to be the meeting point, she told me she would be there again at 6 in the afternoon to show me the center a bit. I spotted a bus and a couple of people waiting and I asked the last person in the queue, who was the exact double of Hillary Swank. She was from Sweden, and since her boyfriend had decided not to take summer holidays, she was touring Ukraine on her own for a few weeks. We got on the bus and quickly started to talk about travelling, as we shared a taste for unusual destinations and Eastern Europe. The conversation was soon interrupted by the start of a documentary on the disaster, which turned out to be very interesting and much more complete than other things I had seen before. It finished shortly before we reached the first checkpoint. A big area around Chernobyl is still under military control and even though about 170 people, all of them over 70 and retired, have decided to move back to their land, nobody is allowed in or out without going through strict security checks. We got off the bus and after having our passports checked against a list, we walked past the checkpoint and waited for the bus to cross. It was then a short drive to the first and only inhabited town, which hosts about 5,000 people who work in jobs related to security and maintenance of the area. They live and work there for 15 days and then take 15 days off, and have to undergo frequent medical checkups.



On the way there, we passed several villages, but the only thing that remained were the road signs, as the military had bulldozed and buried the houses after the disaster and nature had quickly claimed the land back. We had a short stop in the town, where we saw a memorial, a fire station (whose members where the 3rd team to arrive on the site right after the explosion) and some of the vehicles that were used for the cleanup.





There used to be a bigger collection of vehicles at a place called vehicle cemetery, but they were deemed too radioactive to be safe and that part of the visit had been cancelled years ago and the vehicles buried.



Then we drove through another checkpoint to get into the exclusion zone itself, where no people live, even though lots of them work there. Before reaching the nuclear plant we stopped to see an abandoned kindergarden which, together with a post office that was barely standing among the trees, were the only two buildings remaining of the last village before the plant.





Then, as we were driving out of a corner, it came into view into the distance. The high chimney that stood between reactors three and four. We stopped one last time before reaching it, to see the construction site of a couple of cooling towers and reactors five and six, still surrendered by high construction cranes.



They were never finished. The bus stopped on the road and when we got off to take some pictures, the guide told us not to step off the road and onto the grass, as it was highly contaminated.

We got on the bus again for the final short drive that took us next to the sarcophagus that covers reactor number three. The structure looked quite old. It was the first and only of its kind, and its construction had taken several lives.



The people designing it and working to build it had never done anything like it, and nobody had ever worked or trained to work in such conditions. Thousands of people worked to build that sarcophagus, for no more than one minute at a time to avoid the deadly doses of radiation, and even that way, they all suffered horrific consequences. All of those who were there to contain the disaster gave their lives to prevent a much more dramatic outcome, one that might have rendered most of Europe inhabitable. Some of them knew what they were in for, other were sent by their superiors unaware of the great risk they were running, but without them, the tragedy would have been much bigger. From the first firefighters on the site, to the miners who dug a tunnel under the reactor to pour concrete and stop the melting uranium bars from reaching the water below and exploding, from the people who got on the roof of the number three reactor to clean the highly radioactive pieces of graphite with their own hands to the helicopter pilots who flew directly above the radioactive blaze to drop tons and tons of sand and then lead to try and stop the fire. From the people who walked as close as possible to the core of the reactor to get readings to the workers who built the sarcophagus, they are all unsung heroes who saved hundreds of millions of lives and have now been forgotten, left to suffer the terrible consequences their bodies bear for the rest of their lives alone.

Near the original sarcophagus that covered reactor number three, a French company were busy at work , building a colossal structure – a new sarcophagus that will cover the old one and ensure safety for a hundred years. Its dimensions are hard to appreciate on the pictures, but the red boxes near the top are shipping containers, which gives an idea of the size.



And it still has to grow to be twice as tall and twice as long. It should have been built about ten years ago, as the old one has long exceeded its useful life, but there were no funds for it. It will be finished in 2015. We were told there that we could only take pictures of the reactor and the new sarcophagus, as there were military buildings in the area and we were not allowed to photograph them.

In a way, I felt privileged to have had the opportunity to take this tour now, as these visits might have their days counted, at least as they are now. In three years the number three reactor would no longer be visible, buried under its new cover, and the city of Prypyat will have crumbled down and be claimed back by nature. The bus dropped us at what was the main entrance to the city where 50,000 people had lived here at its heyday, all of which were evacuated in two days without being able to take more than a couple of suitcases with them. They were never allowed back to their homes.



Today, it was hard to recognize it as an avenue. Trees and bushes had grown wild on both sides, reducing it to little more than a dirt road across a forest. The buildings have been abandoned ever since the disaster, so most of them have leaking roofs and are in danger of collapsing at any moment.



The bus dropped us off at the main square and we started walking into the city, careful not to touch the plants. We went around some of the main buildings at the square and found the amusement park, one of the most unsettling and infamous sights in the city, the ferris wheel still standing, frozen in time.



From there we went across what looked like a forest until the guide stopped in the middle of thick vegetation and announced that we were standing in the football field in the city’s stadium. Coming out of the trees we found the stands, and that was one of the two buildings we were allowed into.



The other one was the sports center, with its basketball court and empty swimming pool. It all made for a fascinating visit.





The bus met us again on another avenue almost turned to a trail and took us out of the exclusion zone and to the canteen in the town where present day workers live. We went through a comprehensive anti-radiation cleansing process consisting on washing our hand with an old chunk of soap and then sat down to enjoy a soviet-style meal.



After eating, we stopped at the main checkpoint and were made to walk through a radiation check machine that looked like the kind of thing you would expect to see in a cold war movie, Then we were let go, clean as a whistle.



On the way there in the morning, there had been an tense silence in the bus, with very little conversation, everybody full of expectation at what they were about to see. On the way back, tension broke, and there was light conversation and jokes. A Dutch teacher who was sitting behind me said that his wife was going to make him throw away all his clothes as soon as he got back to the hotel, and I met an American guy who worked for the CDC who had hundreds of anecdotes to tell about all the places he had been stationed at.

Back in Kiev, Luda was waiting for me to show me around the city a bit, as I still had a few hours left. She had brought along a friend who also spoke English, and we went for a bit of sightseeing before heading back home to pack my stuff for the next morning.



Kiev is an enormous city, an urban sprawl of over 3 million people, far bigger than I had imagined, and it was very obvious that I was missing so many things. I made up my mind to come back and visit it in the future.