I could be a TV!
August 3, 2008 at 12:34 pm | Trip | 3 comments
“I could be a TV man, fuck that man I could be a TV, I could be a book, I could be a table, I could be a TV man, fuck that, I could be a TV!”
Richard’s funny when he’s drunk.
A week or two ago I spent the day in Den Haag with Richard (an English guy foolish enough to want to go into IT) and Catherine (an American doing a 2 year(?) RTW trip).
The day itself wasn’t very eventful apart from being lucky enough to try a beer called BarBar, which is a honey beer, which sounded disgusting if intriguing, but tasted absolutely delicious.
They also had a rather impressive sandcastle opposite, quite how it survived the torrential downpours I’ll never know.
After our 3rd bar-beer we were all feeling rather cheap and ended up drinking a six pack of Heineken in the park, rather surreptitiously as apparently such things are illegal round there, and headed back to the hostel.
Whereupon Catherine whipped out a pack of uno cards and taught me and Richard how to play.
We were shortly joined by a Turkish girl called Melahaat who spoke far better English than anyone would have expected and we whiled away the night playing “Drunk Rules” which got us through 2 x 24 packs.
One of the best rules was the first, that Catherine came up with, which was that whenever anyone said anything, they had to say the name of the person they were talking to, which is why I actually remembered peoples names for once!
You can find Catherine’s blog here, which mentions some of the same incidents, though is censored on behalf of her parents, so no naughty drinking!
Man, how wasted do I look in that photo, lol!
On the road again!
August 7, 2008 at 3:03 pm | Trip | 2 comments
#I’m on the road again, don’t where I’m going or when, my wings were clipped but now I fly, way up into the blue sky#
Inside my helmet is the only place I can adlib both lyrics and tune without getting eggs thrown at me, aah I missed it.
Having thrown off my crutches and caught a bus to Munich I picked up my bike with glee and looked the other way while I pressed “Ja” on the card machine for a transaction of €3,700.
I spent a couple of days in Munich just because it was cheap and I couldn’t be arsed to figure out what I was going to do next.
Since my camera was in Switzerland I figured it best to head down to Chur (where I lost it) and take it from there, while sending off an email to my friends from Hospital Thusis to see if they wanted a calpirin.. calpyrhin.. cocktail of some description while I was in the neighbourhood.
So there I was, merrily singing away to myself having set off only moments before from my hostel in Munich when I get pulled over by a policeman.
“Oh, a routine check I guess”
“You were doing 64kmh”
“Yes?” I said, thoughtfully looking at the dual carriageway I was on, trying to convert 64kmh to mph.. Not a lot I concluded.
“The limit is 50kmh”
“Oh shit… I didn’t realise!”
“€25 please”
Well, that’s not so bad, better than 60 quid and 3 points eh?
Still in high spirits I buggered off to Chur, not far from Munich, but still 3 countries to be traversed.
Beautiful weather followed me all the way and all was right with the world, soon the alps loomed in to view, looking like an oil painting with their precisely varied distances to produce long distance perspective!
I arrived in Chur, bent down to take off my motorcross boots as they’re as about as suitable for walking in as a chastity belt is for the reverse cowgirl.
And while I was bent down next to my bike, what did I see?
“Oh goody… an oil leak..”
The same oil leak no less that my bike had when I gave it to BMW Munich.
Apparently 3000 pounds isn’t enough to spend to get a BMW fixed…
Ah well, c’est la vie!
Stopthink, Startthink
August 9, 2008 at 2:06 pm | Philosophy | No comment
Very Orwellian in style these two words sum up something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Stopthink covers most things in life (slightly depressingly), TV, Movies, most Books, Drugs, even people!
Stopthink is anything that distracts you from thinking about what is pertinent to your current situation; may that be your next big decision in your career, your relationship, or simply aiding you in hiding from the realisation that you’ve made a mistake somewhere along the line that you need to face up to and correct.
Startthink is a rare and wonderful thing, it’s anything that brings you to inspiration, realisation or any epiphany or idea in general.
What acts as startthink varies from person to person and time to time, for me 3 books spring to mind, “1984″, “The Diceman” and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles”, three people spring to mind, my father, Chris and Hedi, a wide panoply of places and no movies that I can think of.
Stopthink can be useful, don’t get me wrong, it’s not an entirely evil thing by any stretch of the imagination.
Distracting yourself from certain aspects of life, memories, people or events can be entirely beneficial when they become overwhelming.
But it’s far too easy to use stopthink as a crutch, as a magic carpet upon which you seem to escape your problems; its usefulness is always fleeting.
Leaky Leaky Catchy BMW
August 12, 2008 at 4:33 pm | Trip | 1 comment
Well, I must say BMW Chur did an outstanding job of fixing the leak.
Not only did it start leaking again before I even got back to Munich, the sump plug is now leaking as well! Yay!
I’ve given the bike back to BMW Zentrum Munchen now so… Hopefully Fred will sort me out! Go Fred! He’s our man, if he can’t fix it… Well.. I’m kinda fucked really!
In the meantime I’m back at “The Tent” in Munich.
It’s a nice place, dead cheap (€7 a night!) and the beer is plentiful and pretty bloody cheap as well!
Though on that count I think I’m going to take some time out for a while, as I’ve been drinking every night since I broke my leg.
Perfectly normal behaviour for a holiday!
However with a “holiday” as long as mine it starts to tax ones liver, paunch ones belly and add up on the beancounters.
Must… Not… OOOH BEER!
I’ll be good!
Deadlines are like buses.
August 18, 2008 at 10:54 am | Trip | 2 comments
Except you don’t wait for them, they wait for you, or not as the case may be.
I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for weeks in Munich, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, etc waiting for something to do.
Finally I get my bike back (today, hopefully it will make it more than 2 miles without pissing oil all over the place!) and I’ve got four deadlines to meet and can only make 2 of them!
Tomorrow morning I’m meeting a chap from ADVrider.
Midweek I was supposed to be meeting a Canadian chap I met in Rotterdam in Prague to catch up.
Thursday I was supposed to be meeting the son of one of my aneasthetists (from when I broke my leg, I’m not addicted to Morphine, honest…) in Berlin.
Saturday I’ve got a tour of Chernobyl first thing in the morning.
Now, this should in theory all be possible, if I trade my BMW in for a MiG…
As it stands I’m going to have to drive from Prague straight to Kiev, do not pass Berlin, do not collect local beers or contacts.
Only appointments I’m gonna meet are seeing Martin tomorrow morning and the Chernobyl tour…
Sorry guys!
I hope the photos of Chernobyl make up for it!
The road to Praha
August 20, 2008 at 2:38 pm | Trip | No comment
“His name is Sam, hes 22, hes from Oxford and he needs a girlfriend!!
“Shut up” I snapped irritably.
Id had enough of this kid, he started following me out of nowhere and me not being very interested in kids but still good humoured, answered his questions with a subtext of “Leave me alone”.
Clearly this kid didnt get subtlety so I grabbed him by the arm and told him to shut up and go away.
He grinned stupidly and conceded to at least be quiet.
This made me realise that when you grow up, although it seems like you get better at dealing with people, its simply that adults are less fucking irritating than kids.
I remember why I was so bleeding antisocial as a child now…
Still, “The Tent” in Munich was a pretty cool place, quite literally it felt like a fridge, and exceptionally cheap.
Especially as when I went to check in for the second time, after driving my bike back from Switzerland, they said “Oh, our computers busy at the moment, go and have a beer and come back later”.
… I did the first part, but somehow ended up forgetting to check in and spent about a week there for free!
Yesterday morning as part of my “hectic” schedule I was due to meet Martin from ADVRider.com.
Me and Martin headed off to… A palace of King Ludwigs that I forget the name of, situated on an island in the middle of a lake.
As you can tell Im the one doing all the hard work!
Some of the statues in the fountains were rather odd.. As Martin rather poignantly commented “He was quite mad you know!”
Extravagant? Naaaaah!
Personally I think I look quite dashing with the rolled up bike trousers and the flip flops… Most people seem to disagree however, but will generally agree that I do, if nothing else look very English.
You can just about see Martins bike hiding behind my overloaded behemoth.
We headed back to Martins place afterwards where I traded him my UBER torque wrench, which was taking up half a bleeding pannier, for a slighter model.
Martins also took some photos of me stuffing my face with his food, but I look so much like a hamster Im going to neglect to post those, though if youre that interested theyre on my smugmug page anyway.
My brief soirre with Martin was a good laugh! Hes a great guy, especially as he paid for everything including breakfast lol!
Thanks for the day out mate, but I rather wish Id gone my original route to Prague.
I ended up getting to the hostel at 11PM last night! I set off at about 3:30.
Entirely my fault of course, I should have had a larger scale map, but hey, I found some nice roads near the border!
Prague, is, BEAUTIFUL.
I dont know why when queried all anyone ever says about the place is “Oh Prague, yeah its REALLY cheap”.
Sure, its cheap, but I wasnt expecting it to be the better of Paris for looks!
Not entirely convinced by the food however!
I think the waitress would rather I just buggered off in this photo.
And although Ive always seen posters on the street, Ive never actually seen the elusive beasts that put them there, so… I felt this was worthy of a shot!
Im going to get some photos of the centre this evening as they really know how to do uplighting round these parts.
The next two days are going to be fun fun fun as Ive got to cover 800 miles to get to Kiev before the 23rd for my tour of the irradiated land.
Still, the bikes holding up ok, touch wood, so in theory it shouldnt be an issue!
Oh and I apologise for the distinct lack of apostrophes in this post, seems they didnt think them worthwhile on Czech keyboards!
Update
August 20, 2008 at 4:54 pm | Trip | No comment
Well.. Shit…
Clamps, Clubs and Clocks
August 23, 2008 at 11:24 am | Trip | No comment
“No parking here”
“Yes, sorry, I realise that now”
But why? I’ve parked on the pavement everywhere in Europe, even in front of the Colosseum of Rome for God’s sake and nobody batted an eyelid!
Still, they did show up within 15 minutes of me calling them to unlock it and it was fairly reasonable at 40 quid or so…
However, when I came to unlock the bike and pack it up to move it…
*CRACK*
(I seem to be using that particular bit of onomatopaeia a lot in this blog)
And my bike falls flat…
“Shit… the side stand’s snapped”
Being six o’clock, everywhere that could conceivably repair it was shut, and as I was supposed to be driving to Kiev the next morning I was in something of a pickle.
I decided the best course of action was to put off my Chernobyl trip yet again and get the side stand fixed, as the idea of refuelling my overloaded monstrosity without a side stand didn’t bear thinking about.
The next morning I spoke to the guys behind the hostel bar, who busted their arses and found me a guy that would not only fix it, but would come to the hostel so that the bar guy could translate for me, but also escort me back to their garage and fix it then and there!
Damage? Twenty quid including tip!
Still, I had a while to kill as I’d put my tour off until next weekend, so I decided to stay in Kiev and got to keep my appointment to meet Ashley Chivers after all!
Me, him and a group of German lads went out to a club they knew of from their previous trip.
Waiting for the metro…
The club itself
Modern equivalent of a disco ball…
The DJ was very impressive, mixing three tracks at once of Reggae, Pop and Trance..
The German lads!
Prolst!
Leaving the club the gang was a little drunk…
According to Ash the chap sitting down is a little old lady… I can see the resemblance actually!
“We’re not lost, my friend has great intuition” “… Yeah.. And a map…”
We did get back in the end, and what wonders we saw on the way!
We even saw a man who lived in a cupboard with a coat hanger and lots of cigarette smoke.
He tried to get us to join him, but we decided to run away instead…
It was a good night!
As I had a few days to spare my dad’s coming over to visit! Woo!
He couldn’t get a flight to Prague though so I said…
“Hey, try Warsaw, it’s on the way to Kiev for me!”
So he booked a flight to Warsaw!
I had to drive straight to Warsaw the next day to get there on time, but when I looked at my map..
“Oh fuck, I meant Krakow, not Warsaw!”
Little difference of an extra 250 miles to do that day.
Ten hours on the bike was fun…
Still, I’m here now and my dad lands in about 3 hours and I still don’t know where his hotel is.
So… Goodbye in Polish!
And I would walk a thousand miles.
August 28, 2008 at 9:53 pm | Trip | No comment
Well, drive at any rate.
I’m so glad I didn’t drive from Prague to Kiev in two days, that would have been murder.
Warsaw was ok, didn’t really see very much of it, the old town seemed quite nice, as did the hotel bar (which we managed to wrack up a HEINOUS bill in).
But all too soon it was time to move on, To KIEV!
My first border crossing was smooth if lengthy, and soon enough I was driving down the ridiculously wide and well paved road from the border post.
Which… abruptly ended in road works and dumped me onto something a bit more traditional.
Mile after mile after mile of endless straight roads!
Kiev was signposted right from the off so I thought “ooh, this should be easy!”
Except that eventually even the undulating, patchworkof a road that I’d been converted to, also abruptly ended in roadworks.
No matter, I simply turned onto the nearest road, which was a washboarded unpaved road.
“This can’t be right” I thought to myself as my spine tried to escape throught the seat of my trousers.
Eventually the road went through a tiny little village, and upon noticing a group of teenagers huddled round a hay/fire I pulled over and pointed down the road.
“Kiev?”
Turns out Kiev is prounounced more like Kia than anything, so at first they didn’t understand what the hell I was on about.
Despite not sharing a language they invited me to warm myself by the fire, and as we got to talking they invited me to stay the night!
Being as Kiev was some 300 miles away and it was utterly dark I was more than glad to take them up on their offer.
One of the kids had his own motorbike, so he was very excited to give mine a try.
Thinking that he was just going to tootle round in a circle I let him jump on and start it off.
15 minutes later I was starting to wonder where the hell he’d got to.
Though seeing as he’d left me with what was presumably his girflfriend I felt there was a certain amount of mutual trust involved and stayed by the fire.
Eventually he came back and showed off a very impressive gash on his leg where he’d binned the bike -See! It’s not just me!-.
Him and his group of mates showed me back to a house, which seemed to belong to an extremely randy old man who was desperately insisting I have sex with one of the girls… Though as the teenage lad was saying the same I suppose I shouldn’t blame the old guy too much…
We spent the evening pantomiming questions to each other, they were very impressed by the cost of my shoes, which struck me as rather odd as they all had the latest mobile phones.
Admittedly the standard of living seemed to be pretty low, 4 beds to a room, and it looked like they ate what they grew for the most part.
I was somewhat non plussed when he asked for ten euros for the nights stay, but didn’t begrudge him his money, price of a hostel anyway!
Another five euros for breakfast next morning struck me as a little ridiculous however.
The breakfast was in itself a feast.
It consisted of an omelette that tasted NOTHING like any omelette I’ve had before (including the one I made with duck eggs!), which had the worlds saltiest bacon in it. Alongside this was a plate of fat strips, and for the main component we had a giant bowl of mashed potato each.
It was actually pretty nice, just… really not what I wanted first thing in the morning!
One of the kids was going to Kiev that morning, so I volunteered to give him a lift.
He didn’t have a helmet, despite owning a bike, so we scoured the village looking for (presumably) the one guy that had a helmet.
But.. Since he was, from what I gathered, unavailable, we made a trip to the nearest bus stop some six miles away.
The roads in between were pretty epic.
The earth road was fun, the gravel road was hair-raising but the weirdest of all was where they’d taken an old, undulating, potholed road and put COBBLES on it without flattening it.
At one point we were quite happily bombing along a delightfully flat unpaved section at some 40mph, when suddenly we came upon a 3 foot wide, 3 foot deep TRENCH spanning the entire road.
If I’d braked we’d have locked up the wheels and still hit it, so I just went for it.
Down went the front wheel, UP went the front wheel; me and my pillion hanging suspended at the peak of our parabola quite seperately from bike.
THUMP the bike landed straight and as we kept whizzing on, awestruck by our good fortune I turned and looked at my new friend and we both laughed the nervous laugh of two people who for a split second thought they were in deep deep shit.
Eventually we got to town and it was decided that since he couldn’t describe how to get to Kiev I would just follow the bus.
This was all well and good until about 5 miles down the road my fuel light flicked on.
“Oh well” I thought to myself, “I’ve got about another 70 miles before it actually conks out, I’m sure we’ll be on the main road by then”.
Little did I know that this bus took the worlds most winding route to service all the tiny little villages in the surround area.
Sixty miles on I found a petrol station.
“No cards” Shit, I had no local currency.
I soldiered on, even though by this point I’d lost the bus and consequently had no idea where I was going.
Praise the lord I found a town, even rarer a town with a CASH POINT! WOOHOO!
Fuelled up and feeling pleased I stopped in front of a sign to consult my map.
Head buried in my “Cart” I heard over the top of it “Do you need some help?”
“Holy crap! Somebody that speaks English!”
He grins at my amazement.
It turns out I ran across one of three guys who own a metal working company locally.
The odd thing? Just a couple of months ago they hosted a pair of Danish bikers doing a long haul bike tour!
He invited me back to the office to meet his friends, I went along delighted at my good fortune.
Over lunch we all got to know each other a little better and they agreed to have a look at improving my side stand.
Good god what a job them and their guys did.
My side stand is now about two yards long and has a foot on it the size of my hand!
It’s amazing how much difference such a seemingly small thing can make, but it’s improved my confidence in the bike astoundingly, and they didn’t even charge me!
This is the Ukrainian hospitality I’d been hoping for!
We also discovered on further inspection that in my friends late night escapade he’d managed to bend my pannier rack, moreover one pannier had popped half out of the rack and was held in only one place!
How it held on when we were flying through the air on those roads I have no idea, but I thoroughly reccomend Jesse panniers!
After straightening it out it was dinner time and my new best mates took me to a local restaurant.
I would love to regale you with the stories we shared and the exciting things I learned about Ukrainian culture.
However I don’t remember much after we polished off the first bottle of vodka.
Waking up in the morning it was reassuring to find a big bowl and a bottle of water lying next to me.
“Aah” I thought to myself “At least I’m not the first person to get really drunk round here”
That day was spent mostly recovering from the hangover to an extent where I was able to drive the rest of the way to Kiev.
But eventually I did recover and fare-thee-wells said I strode off, mounted my newly strengthened bike and headed for Kiev.
Where I eventually found a Hostel run by a loquacious Norweigan.
And tomorrow? Tomorrow I go to Chernobyl!
Chernobyl
August 30, 2008 at 12:37 pm | Trip | 4 comments
After a 2 hour bus ride from Kiev, we arrived at the 30km exclusion zone checkpoint.
“Please will everyone get out and bring your passports”
The guard has a clipboard with our names and passport numbers on, I hand mine over.
He runs his fingers down the list of names, looks puzzled, runs his finger down the list of numbers to check and is even more confused, he consults the driver in Russian.
“The numbers don’t match” translates a Belgian guy also on the tour.
Shit, I gave them the number of my other passport (I have two UK passports), visions of being left outside the checkpoint while the group saunters on cross my mind.
Eventually after much incomprehensible discussion the guard shrugs his shoulders and lets us through.
We stop in a nearby village and pick up our tour guide, who is also a leading government official concerned with public relations in regards to Chernobyl.
As you can see his approach is somewhat.. relaxed to the whole affair.
This monument was built and maintained by local firefighters with no outside assistance in order to commemorate their comrades who died.
Reactor number five was under construction at the time of the disaster; the cranes used for its construction remain a skeletal monument to the confidence and visions of expansion at the time.
As our tour guide explained, the party line on nuclear disaster before 1986 was “It can never happen” and afterwards the party line was “It can never happen even more“.
A quick demonstration of the geiger counter reveals that in the air the count is around 45 miliroentgen per hour.
On the ground it’s over 200!
The biggest surprise for me was seeing people walking around!
Apparently around 10,000 people work on a shift rota of something like 14 days on, 50 days off to minimise the build of up radiation in their bodies, and at any one time around 3,000 people are working in the exclusion zone.
The information centre had an amazingly detailed model of the current state of reactor #4.
Apparently the thing in the middle of the photo that looks like a scrubbing brush weighing 30 metric tonnes leapt 10 metres in the air at the time of the explosion and landed on its side… Gives you some idea of the scale…
We got very close to reactor #4 (by my standards anyway) and this was in fact the area in which we saw the most people.
They didn’t say what the radiation level was where we were standing and nobody asked.
Town sign for Pripyat.
The long road to Pripyat.
The infamous bridge from which the Pripyat villagers watched the technicolour fireworks display that was the burning reactor #4, fifteen minutes here at the time was a lethal dose.
Pripyat main street, you can’t even see all the buildings; it feels not so much like a city with trees in it as a forest with buildings in it.
Entrance to Pripyat hotel.
What remains of the lobby.
“In case of nuclear disaster, please do not use the elevator”
So we took the stairs!
I think I’ll stick with my Hostel…
The views however are quite spectacular.
This was my favourite place of the whole trip, I have absolutely no idea what this tree is growing in six storeys above ground level, but I’m very glad that it is.
Outside the hotel again there’s evidence still of the group of graffiti artists posing as photographers who paid Pripyat a visit some years ago. Though caught they were not prosecuted as the entire town is classified as nuclear waste, and there isn’t a law against graffitiing nuclear waste!
More graffiti, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, I think if anything it adds a chilling air to a place that, given the style of the locals, is more exciting than reverential.
The stairs leading up to the local gym.
The climbing rope hangs forlornly, the last remnant of what must have been a well furnished gym at the time (Pripyat was a model town for the communist ideal)
An amazingly photogenic place, you could spend weeks here with an army of creative photographers without realising anything like its full potential.
From the inside of the gym you can see our next stop, the amusement park that was due to be opened a few weeks after the disaster.
Bumper cars sit gently rusting, never having heard the playful whoops of children in their midst.
Somehow I don’t think this would pass Health and Safety…
The ferris wheel was one of the few rides that was used briefly even though the park was never officially opened, its belts long rotted the engine turns no more.
“Anyone want to take a dive?” jokes our guide.
Maybe not…
The olympic sized swimming pool was apparently quite a popular social ground at the time.
Entrance to the local school.
And entire room, filled 3 foot deep with strewn books, a pity you can’t take souvenirs…
Rusting cash machine.
This abacus looks rather folorn sitting forgotten in a corner, its wires bent, its beads spent.
The school was the end of the tour, we nearly ended up not visiting it until one of the tourists shouted out on the way back to Kiev “We must visit the school”
I’m glad we did.
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