September 12th
Stage 41 Rackeve to Kolacso 98 kms
After a good night’s sleep, yesterday doesn’t seem so bad
but by 6 o’clock last night I was feeling very tired indeed. Katherine and I had decided we would keep
close together, the better to appreciate the countryside which was indeed very
lovely, and we thought our luck was in
when almost by chance we negotiated the village of Makad. The signposting here
is as erratic as it was in Ireland. The road, however, grew more and more
narrow, the tarmac dreadfully potholed until at the end of a seven kilometre
dyke on which it had been impossible to turn round, the inevitable happened:
the bridge which on the map was marked as a minor road, was only a footbridge.
Perfectly good for the bike, of course, but no good for the car. Katherine would have to turn back. Not
surprisingly she was unhappy about driving alone along the embankment –
reversing would have been a nightmare – and so there was nothing for it but for
me to put the bike in the car and drive all the way back to Rackeve, some 20 or
more kilometres , cross the river there, and drive down the other side and look
for the footbridge – which eventually, although with difficulty, we found. We
had lost nearly two hours.
Then things got worse. Somehow I missed the new bicycle
track that had recently been completed alongside the main road 51 which runs
from Budapest to the Serbian border. I rode for some 15 kilometres, much of it in a straight line
where you can imagine the heavy traffic was moving very quickly, It was far
from pleasant, especially as the road
surface was very poor, and particularly so at the edge, necessitating some
delicate manoeuvres. It was only by chance, having stopped for a rest, that I
discovered the bike piste some twenty metres away and the next few kilometres
To Apostag were a great relief.
The Danube valley now was very wide, and there was a very
strong headwind from the south but , as usual, I seemed to get second wind and,
after a welcome break in the lively small town of Solt, where I was overtaken
by a young woman riding a very spirited
horse at a gallop and bareback down the main street (only to be brought up
short at the traffic lights!) I was ready for the next 43 kms to the paprika
capital of the world, Kalocsa.
My route still followed the main road 51 but on the old road
which, whilst very exposed to the wind on the top of an embankment, was
completely deserted and I moved along at a cracking pace. A slight detour into
the village of Harta, followed by a brand new cycle path which, winding its way
through pleasant woodland, also provided some shelter from the wind, and I was
racing through the villages of Ordas,
Gederlak, Dunaszentbenedek and Uszod, held
up only briefly just before Ordas in order to offer some assistance to a local
cyclist who seemed to have fallen into the ditch by the side of the road with
his bicycle on top of him. (He refused my offer, politely) to arrive in Kalocsa
in the early evening where, fearing the storms that had been forecast,
Katherine had booked us into a simple hotel.
I immediately liked Kalocsa with its look of faded
gentility. Its main boulevard of stately five storey buildings is tree-lined
and its twin-towered cathedral magnificent. By the time we were ready to find
somewhere to eat, it was dark and the lights gave the town an even more
romantic appearance. I asked the waiter why there weren’t more visitors to this
lovely town and he shrugged, just like
the lady in Lesneven in Brittany all
those kilometres away, and said “Well, this is Kalocsa” or words to that
effect.
A strange day which got better as it went along. One thing
is certain, though. We have lost all the
other bicycle tourists. Today, after Rob, a very pleasant young Dutch man whom
we met on the campsite last night and
who is riding from Ulm to Istanbul on a recumbent, moving rather more quickly
than I am, I met no other cyclists
except local people.
98 kms Total from Schaffhausen 1480 kms
Total from Galway 3390 kms
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