In Poland tyre blow up you!

So I left you when we were in our “cool” hostel in Gdansk, called the Old Town Hostel, it was certainly not in old town, and not really all that hip and happening as it was mainly full of intense Russian men eating strange smelling vegetables in silence. We shared a dorm with a Polish builder and a Russian organist who were pleasant enough company and talked at us even if we understood little.

I met a sound a Canadian chap called Kasey, we ended up being room-mates and he accompanied us on our evening of fun going out on the town with Marta and Greg. They took us to a massive concert to begin the evening and from there took us on an all-night walking tour of Gdansk. This was conducted in true Polish style with lashings of vodka.

Gdansk at night was amazing, there was the old town with its ornate illuminated spires and Gothic grand Hanseatic courtyards matched in spookiness by the haunting spectres of the cranes of the now defunct shipyards. The city was brought alive by the stories of Marta and Grieg telling us the history and the folklore of the town, interspersed with personal anecdotes and cultural jokes. They took us into the famous dockyards, which were awesome and eerie and all the more spectacular viewed in the greenish hues of night.

Iain somehow managed to become spectacularly drunk. Drunk to the point of him losing his ability to properly walk, this combined with trousers repeatedly falling down (he had neglected to pack a belt, believing this to be unnecessary weight, created a rather comic effect. I basically carried him home.

The next day Iain, for some unfathomable reason reason was not feeling tip top, neither were me or Kasey but Iain seemed to take the proverbial biscuit. So I left him in bed with a big bag of crisps, bread and water to hand and me and Kasey set off to hang out more with Marta and Grieg as we were given a tour of Gydinia and Sopot.

After a struggle with Polish trains which proved confusing and unhelpful me and Kasey made it to Gdynia 3 hours late, feeling like idiots who can’t use public transport. We even struggled to find the Starbucks we were meant to be meeting Marta and Greg at as we had left without doing any research and wandered about Gdynia like lost children. We eventually found Marta and Greg and were given a good tour of the docks of Gdynia and the pleasure beaches of Sopot. Both cities were less touristy and more laid back than Gdansk. Though my abiding memory of Sopot will be Kasey playing the blues on his pocket trumpet in the ornate Victorian station of Sopot and the other passengers looking over and smiling.

We came back late to see if Iain was still alive, he was now on monosyllabic words rather than grunting, which we took be a good sign. The rest of our time in Gdansk was primarily spent sleeping and we stayed a day longer than we had intended, but this was necessary to recover from the fun we’d had.

As we left Gdansk we thought we would try and get the train out of the city so we didn’t have to reckon with tedious industrial suburbs and dangerous motorways. We thought wrong, the trains proved just as bewildering as they had before and we couldn’t for the life of us work out what time our train would leave and all the staff proved unhelpful and the other train passengers looked at us like we were insane if we asked them for directions.

So we abandoned that plan and headed for the road out of town. En route I wanted to investigate why my mud guard was rubbing, transpired that a bolt had sheared that held the rack on, leaving half the metal in the bike, the only option we had was to have it drilled out. So at last I was the one holding us up, Iain enjoyed this, I had not enjoyed him holding us up, so this seemed unjustified. Bike shop fixed this in a somewhat cowboy manner, none-the-less it works (thus far).

So we rode out of town 2 hours later than planned and rode uphill into the wind in heavy traffic out of Gdansk in what was some of the most unpleasant cycling I have had to do. When we finally escaped the tri-cities’ encircling motorways we were into pleasant sandy woodland and looking for a spot to wild-camp.

We settled for a recently cleared section of forest, which must have been cleared but the day before as it was eerily devoid of life and there were none of the flies and insects which we had become so accustomed to bothering us as we camped. It was quite pleasant though, despite being eery, we have decided that if we ever get cancer later in life it was caused by whatever toxic chemicals must have been present here.

Iain started a campfire as I read Lord of the Rings aloud which has been our way of avoiding actually talking to one another in the evenings. The campfire soon proved to be ill advised and we had to promptly extinguish it. Not wanting to waste drinking water we pissed it out. Bodily expulsions being Iain’s forte, he pissed like a horse, unfortunately he didn’t  manage to finish the job and I had to struggle to muster the urine and stop spreading a forest fire.

The next day was a reward for our suffering and we had a perfect days cycling winding through the sandy hills of northern Poland and hitting speeds of 50kph downhill. However punishment was coming our way.

Michelin are lazy bastard mapmakers. They said there was a road along a coastal spit, it looked fairly stunning, so we took that road. The road ended abruptly at a gate and as Iain was hopping it to a reckie a man appeared and sent us onto the beach. We should have taken the hint, but we had already done 6km and thought we’d press on.  And thus began a 4 hour struggle pushing our bikes through soft sand under a hot sun. The whole endeavour felt somewhat like a scene out of Lawrence of Arabia (and I had the theme knocking about my head as I struggled on) as the sun beat down on us the sweat poured and everywhere the sand was relentless. This was exhausting and stressful as we worried about what the sand would do to our poor bikes.

At last at about 9pm we escaped the beach when we saw people ahead; ‘Look Iain, there are people ahead and people are fucking lazy, this means there’ll be a car park, and a road’ Iain nodded in solemn agreement but did not speak (he clearly had gone into the ‘zone’, if you don’t know what the zone is, then you’ve never been in it, I gathered he was in the zone earlier when I turned and saw him lagging behind, which is unusual, so I asked if he was OK and he just looked at me like I was the village idiot). Surely enough there was a road leading us away from the accursed beach (it was actually one of the most beautiful beaches/sunsets I have ever witnessed but due to the circumstances I was filled with a deep loathing of the whole scene).

We reached the holiday village of Lazy (the name is a cruel irony considering our exertions to get there), where we went to the first campsite we could find to beg for a hut or a pitch for a night. We were rather coldly rebuffed and even denied a drink of water, maybe because we did look a bit like tramps. We pressed on, the town looked like a ghost town and all but one campsite was shut and this campsite was fully booked. We were in my mind now royally fucked. I began to feel my heart sink as the sky darkened and mosquitos swarmed, we limped on hope rapidly leaving us, but we joked and laughed none-the-less, however we thinking our luck had run out. Then a man outside a shop approached us asking us in broken German if we would like a room for the night. It transpired he was the shop owner and ran a small hotel above his shop which only opened in the high season. He only charged us ten pounds each but did make me wash my hands and face before doing business with me.

We showered and slept solidly feeling at last like lucky bastards, despite all that had happened that day. The next day, though, we had to see to our bikes, as they looked like we had done something akin to dragging them over 10km of sand, for some reason… The hotel owner appeared shirtless and said something in polish, pointing at the bikes and promptly disappeared and reappeared holding a soft brush he offered to us to use. Between using this and my toothbrush we managed to clean off the worst of the sand and everything seemed to be ok and we hit the road.

Temperatures soared to a roasting 40˚C and we were blasting it along a busy road when disaster struck. Again it was my bike that was causing us troubles, not Iain’s, I can tell he still feels smug about this. I felt a sudden deflation of my tire and put up my hand to signal a break to Iain, however this became an immediate break when my tire exploded with the sound of a shotgun and Iain slightly crashed into me. We managed to roll to a shady spot and switch over the inner tubes; we decided it must have been the sweltering heat raising the PSI on tires that were already at their very limits (80 PSI) to a dangerous pressure (over 85 PSI).  

However, this was to be the first of not one, not two, not three but four blowouts over the course of the next two days. Almost immediately after switching to a new tube the tire blew again and so collapsing in the shade of a bus shelter eating icecreams from the adjacent shop I set to work changing the tube again. I inflated it to a much lower 60 PSI and set off hoping for the best. We limped into the resort town of Kolobrzeg where I found us a campsite and we had to wait until the morning when the bikeshop would open. Kolobrzeg is a strange town, seemingly populated entirely by elderly German tourists, gigantic mosquitos that must feed on their ancient blood and Polish townsfolk who must make a good living in a manner not entirely dissimilar to the mosquitos (though in a more honest manner, I assume).

In the morning we headed to the shop. Iain was nagging me to purchase a trailer, because he theorised that it must have been my gigantic frame plus the weight of the touring gear that had blown it, I remained sceptical, believing it to be the heat, seeing as how the bike had managed 1000 miles with all the weight on it already and I think he just wanted me to get a trailer because he thinks it would be cool. We had however both agreed that putting on a wider rear tire which could spread the weight and run on a lower PSI was a good idea (we discovered later that this was in-fact about the worst idea possible for solving blowouts, but how were we to know, devoid of internet access in a foreign country). So we changed the tire and tube, I managed about 30 yards and the thing exploded again. This caused a minor mental breakdown on a bridge (where I had to fight a strong urge to scream and dropkick my helmet into the river) and several local people ran over and told us not to worry the repair shop was just 30 yards away, but as nice as they were we couldn’t explain to them how fucked we thought we were (it transpires the problem could have easily been solved there and then, but it was exceptionally hot, we were stressed and not thinking terribly straight, more on this later). The shop kindly exchanged the tire and tube and we tried again, this time I inflated the tube again to almost dangerously low PSI (about 55) and off we set. This seemed to solve the problem…

We found ourselves on a cyclepath that stretched all the way to the German border. It was smooth, well-kept and shady. It seemed to be too good to be true; especially so considering that we’d been informed of its existence by a very drunk Polish man we met on the street, who whilst friendly, didn’t seem like the most reliable source of geographical information. However, it ran on and on hugging the coast and racing through forests, it was at times even smoother than the actual road it ran beside. It finished abruptly with a gate, a hotel complex had appeared in the way and seemed to bar further travel west. Now from our tortuous experience of the beach, which was brought about ignoring gates, we were a bit wary of pressing on.

It was at this moment that a strangely dressed man appeared out of the woods, clad in crocs, pinstripe trousers, a tatty red vest, a baseball cap and a small drawstring bag. He was a large man (not as big as me or Iain, but still tall and broad) with a big shaggy beard and deep voice. As we didn’t know what to do we naturally asked him if he knew where the road went. He didn’t speak a word of English and I hadn’t really picked up more than my Ps and Qs in Polish, but we both spoke a small amount of German and so we roughly managed to communicate. He said he’d show us the way to the path to Germany and started leading us down a small winding path into the woods. Iain and I began to become a little bit sceptical and we both thought that he was taking us somewhere dubious, but as Iain and I are hulking cycling giants I decided we could probably take care of ourselves if anything started “going down”. In the event it transpired that he was just a very helpful friendly man who had gone somewhat out of his way to show two idiot Englishmen the way back to the cyclepath which we had missed the turning for. We were very grateful and thanked him in a mixture of Polsih/German (well I did, Iain stuck to safer ground with English).

Our time riding back on the path was not to last long, as the sky seemed to take an ominous turn and go very dark indeed. I decided we’d be best to put all the ran covers on our gear and pop up the outer skin of the tent and hunker under there until the downpour had passed. We put the tent up and sat it over a bench so we could at least be comfortable as we waited, we waited for some time before the rain began and we almost about to give up and declare ourselves meteorological fools when the downpour at last happened. As it began to throw down rain by the bucket load we did the very English thing and had what essentially amounted to a picnic, squatting inside a tent in the pouring rain. With the rain storm showing no sign of clearing off we decided to hunker down for the night. In a brief reprieve from the rain we rushed outside and cooked up our dinner (which consisted, as ever,  of fried smoked sausage, soup and bread) and noticed there was a big sign prohibiting camping, we decided to risk it as finding another spot to camp in the rain would be a palava. Though at this moment a park ranger appeared, Iain said ‘Just ignore him, don’t look at him and he’ll fuck off’, however as he walked towards us my heart sank as I realised he was probably going to move us on. ‘Dzien dobry [good day]’ he said, I responded and pointed at the tent saying ‘sorry, the rain, shelter’, to my great surprise he just cheerfully said ‘OK’ got back in his 4x4 and drove off. The rain soon started again and we had to hurriedly pack away the food and stove and sleep a damp and hot uncomfortable sleep. This was also the night of Eurovision and I can’t help but feel we rather missed a chance for an interesting cultural experience, but needs must, and as I say to Iain whenever he complains about conditions; this isn’t a holiday, it’s an adventure.

The next day we raced to the German border and decided we probably deserved (and indeed for hygiene purposes needed) a bed indoors and a shower, after finding the youth hostel and the campsite fully booked/closed we were left with the option of the town’s hotel. En route from the campsite to the hotel several of Iain’s decrepit spokes snapped and left his bike not only unrideable but also unrollable. So it was left to me to go and find us a hotel, I deposited Iain in a park and set off. The only hotel in town looked a little too nice for my liking but at what amounted to £55 for the two of us to have a comfortable bed, a decent shower and a hearty breakfast I decided I’d rather pay it than spend another night camping in the woods. Alas, just outside the hotel as I leant my bike up I had my fourth (and I hope final) tyre blowout. Bafflingly I was not even on the bike this time so now even weight was out of the equation and it was a cool evening, so why it had blown was a mystery, but I’d  decided to worry about that later, I had to walk half a kilometre to rescue Iain.

Using the hotel’s wifi I read up at length about bike tyre blowouts and discovered that they’re not altogether uncommon, the most common cause being a tyre that is too wide for the rim. So our crackpot scheme of putting a wider tire on had actually been precisely the opposite of what we should have done and probably in-fact caused the blowout and even explains why the low PSI tyre exploded on a cool evening without me on top of it.

When we awoke we ruined the breakfast buffet and promptly set off on a quest to every bike shop in town to try and find someone that would respoke Iain’s wheel and see if someone could find any defects in my wheel. My wheel was apparently fine, a mechanic put more rim tape on it which he thought might help. Worryingly none of the bike shops would/could respoke Iain’s wheel, that was until we reached the last shop where they inexplicably had a 27inch wheel (for those not versed in bike lore, continental Europe never used imperial measurements on a bike so finding an imperial part is in common parlance ‘fucking lucky’).

So with everything more or less in working order we left Poland behind and headed into Germany, where things became what can only really be described as nicer. Whilst I don’t want to cast aspersions on Poland and the Baltic Countries, or indeed dear old Blighty, nowhere I have cycled has been anywhere near as nice as Germany. It is the like we entered the land of bike with well ordered cyclepaths running in all directions. It is in a word lovely. Though we can’t help but feel we’ve left the adventure behind us now and we’re on the home straight. Which is at once a relief and also a little bit sad. After discussing my blowout problems with my dad I decided I should just try and outfit myself with a new back wheel and tyre. So in the town of Wolgast I got a second [German]opinion on my wheel. He gave the wheel a vorpsrung durch teknik seal of approval and suggested I just get a new tyre. Which I did and it’s been a good 500km since and so far there have been no explosions.

After all the drama of Poland, nothing particularly interesting happened as we wound our way along the north east coast of Germany. Enjoying the cycle paths and quickly finding out that if strayed onto the road even for a moment the motorists would politely but firmly inform us that we should be the ‘RADWEG’. We have become scoundrels and petty criminals by avoiding paying to stay at campsites by arriving late and leaving early (we don’t really feel like we’ve committed any heinous crime as we only stay for the hours of darkness, we leave no mess behind other than a pressed square of grass and take nothing but some tap water), we did this first because we couldn’t find anyone of any authority around the reception and continued (we’ve in truth only done this twice so we’re hardly hardened criminals) when we began to resent paying 12 euros to essentially have access to tap water.

The landscape of Germany was that of prosperous small towns and villages amid endless seas of crops, mainly yellow oceans of rapeseed and everywhere the twirling white monoliths of wind turbines. We ambled around this following a cycle-route as dictated by a small and very handy book I had purchased which was actually at a workable scale for easy navigation on the backstreets. Everything seems to be getting too easy.

Then came the last day on the road to Lubeck, we awoke in the tent to the comforting yet awful sound of rain battering our tent and we new it was not going to wear off. We packed up as best as we could without getting soaked through. We had wrapped our feet in bin bags and were wearing our full waterproofs in a feeble attempt to ward off the rain…our minds harked back to that awful day in Estonia. We battled into the wind for the last 50km and naturally we became soaked and chilled to the bone in the unseasonably cold (almost British) weather as we pushed onto Lubeck. We arrived at the outskirts of the town after a ferry trip and winding through the suburbs, we had hopped into a Lidl’s to outfit ourselves with snacks and lunch. Thank god we did. Iain met an exceptionally helpful man in the queue who was at pains to stress that we had to find a tunnel entrance to get into Lubeck altstadt. We listened to his advice but still took the wrong turnings, we then cycled past him on the road going the wrong way, he flagged us down and told us to follow him in his car. Round circuitous motorway roundabouts and backstreets he took us to an obscure bus stop where we had to wait for the a shuttle bus that would take us through the tunnel under a river to Lubeck.

We at last arrived at Lubeck at last at 4pm and passed through a grand brick built north gate in the proud former capital of the Hansa. This was a proud city and its buildings reeked of civic pride, as did the election posters and grinning politicians’ faces festooning every other bus stop. We reached our hostel and though the reception was closed some guests let us in to sit in the lounge where we changed into dry clothes and waited until the owner, a wonderful slightly dotty hippy therapist, who loved to talk to all the guests and find out our stories and tell us her own. It was a friendly welcoming little hostel with a very well equipped kitchen and colourful rooms and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone staying Lubeck (it’s also the cheapest digs in town).

Here we befriended Saskia, a recently qualified doctor who is hoping to become a plastic surgeon, she was in Lubeck for a job interview and happily chatted away to me and Iain all day. We wandered about the town with her and plagued her with questions about the ins and outs of surgery which she was only to happy to answer.

Right now Iain is cleaning the bikes, we have packed our bags and are about to head for Hamburg and enjoy the sights and sounds of a big city and maybe, just maybe, we [Iain] might be ready to party again.