Categories
Bosnia & Herzegovina Croatia Hungary

What is on the other side?

How can I be better emerged into a mountainous landscape when I am dropped right next to it and I simply cycle back home. The best of both worlds, so off to pack these old panniers (post 1).

A huge cross marks the end of the climb, a lone shepherd waves me ‘dobar dan’. As always I am hugely curious what comes on the other side. And what comes takes me by surprise: a seemingly flat landscape that stretches far, edged with peaks and a single road in an almost straight line passing through. There’s hardly any traffic and the prospect of being on a plateau high up after climbing makes me jumpy and excited.

Categories
Hungary The Netherlands

Double Rooted

The blog is full and I need to divert you to my creative blog for the new write up. It is mainly because I keep photographing the beauty I am surrounded by that I want to give these images a place. Next post is about some good old-fashioned cycling (yes, on a bicycle) while this is about home. Skip it if you’re not into plants, green and beauty. So, here’s to read and see the new post

Categories
Bosnia & Herzegovina Hungary

The price to pay for comfort

Comfort’s Concession

The tapestry of being self sufficient becomes complex. There, lilac flowers hanging to dry turning deeper purple against the wooden structure that once held corn to dry, I notice a beauty I would have admired while travelling past: now it’s where I am.

Seeing, sitting from an old barn, birds accidentally flying in while buzzing overhead from insects nestling in the wooden ceiling, I know there’s no turning back into a style that I once, and still, longed for.

Read more

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Hungary Thoughts

It is SAD II

Every burst of sunlight is an immediate thrust of a lance, straight through my brain and heart and the only decision on such winter days are which way I go. Left or right? It isn’t that difficult, yet with the knowledge that neither left nor right is anything to see, I have to be positive and find something to go to. The cabinet of my brain is filled with connections to forgotten tombs and chapels. I can braid together the multiple forests paths to a maze of sense. Read more

Previous part of this post: It is SAD I

Categories
Hungary Thoughts

It is SAD

A few days sun means I could make a short kickbike tour to the hills. They will feed my needed portion of wonderment. Even though the nearby Hungarian hills are not that spectacular, it will give me more the view that bald trees provide me with. Read more

Part II

Categories
Hungary

The ascetic isolated summer retreat club

I don’t know where to begin. With what I learned perhaps? But is that interesting or even feasible in my attempt to inspire you? Or shall I simply write a bit about what life means in the countryside of Hungary? Read more…

Categories
Hungary Interview

Meet Szandra

Two reactions were of happily surprise: the first that I got to know a Hungarian footbiker, the second that we would meet with our footbikes. Szandra, you are a tourguide in Budapest and there are many ways to choose how to guide people through Budapest. The city is big and walking will take long. An open bus is another way. Or a boat. Maybe even these stand up electric mobility scooters. Fatbike electric rollers. You name it, it is all out there.

Categories
Hungary

Forest Clarification

Compelled to share my ideas of the forest as I have never been so much in them. Not my favorite kind of landscape, by far not as there is really not much to see when it comes to sweeping distances. Unending waves of land like a desert are none. Yet, there is this strong pull to be in the forest.

This post has moved

Categories
Hungary

“I can imagine that it’s lonesome at your home, I couldn’t stand it”

I felt the desire to write a little bit, but the tiredness from another sweaty shallow menopausal night kept me from finding a short, to the point topic. But luckily, not having a paid job, I decide to take it easy today and answer someone’s personal message which offered me an interesting topic. Read more

Categories
Hungary

Kicbike listens to calling hills… Prt. II

This post starts with part I

Like all seasoned cyclists, nervous about setting up my tent somewhere is not an issue anymore. We have done this so often that I look at every spot in nature as a potential place to camp, even when I do not need to camp.

Categories
Hungary

Kickbike listens to calling hills… Prt. I

Days roll into weeks and being absorbed into our own little bulb where silence, peace and no-nonsense makes for a supporting base to create, grow and admire, I find it difficult to leave. Yet I know that out in nature all that I don’t have in my own quiet green cocoon is present. I call it the magic of plant life; a strange realization for the traveler I was.

Categories
Hungary

Winter Reset

I know most people who read this are not interested in vegetables, and the thing is, I wasn’t so much either a couple of years ago. Same when I met a Dutch cyclist in Pakistan, I was not interested the slightest bit (a few years prior that I cycled 50.000 kilometres). May I try to inspire you once more, and promised, the next time with a touring story.

Categories
Argentina Bolivia Creativity Hungary

Llama

Before I can write a story about a kickbike travel, I first need to go on a tour (it’s in the planning). For now, let me allow you to share a very short story about Llama.

Categories
Croatia Hungary Slovenia

Beyond the Drava

The difference with a bicycle to a kickbike is that I can make more kilometers and can reach further out and therefor see ‘far-flung’ beauty in Croatia. That’s where I am heading.

Categories
Hungary Kickbike

A love story

Days of kicking: 9. Total distance: 275 kilometer. Average on a day: 30 kilometer while average speed is about 11 km/per hour. Nights of camping: 10. Average a day spend: € 5,60 (exclusive the new tick tweezer and the food I brought along ).

Clothes laundered in a creek, wet stinky shoes and a damp sleeping bag drying in a fishy corner surrounded by overflowing containers with unwanted-clothing, far removed from the main entrance of Tesco supermarket. I feel too old for it. Like I felt too old, or outgrown, for hostels and bunk beds. The last bunked I shared was in Malaysia; a room without a window, dark as a cell, except when the only female roommate stumbled in at night and left the light on. I must have been 35 years of age. Always been a loner, I disliked these dorms.

Categories
Hungary Kickbike

Kéktúra

Kéktúra: an almost 1200 kilometer long walking trail through the upper part of Hungary. I kick a tiny part. Days of kicking: 3/Days in camp: 2/Average speed: 9/Maximum kilometers in a day: 60

Categories
Hungary

Southwest Balaton Tour

Distance made: 65 kilometer. Average speed: 7.6. Number of nights: 5. Coldest temperature: minus 7.

Every time Geo and I drive in the car with lake Balaton quietly looming in the distance, the low series of mountains sharply contrasting, appearing to be a man-made painting, I feel a strong desire to be on those hills, looking out over the lake and absorbing the unrealistic looking shapes embracing the lake.

Categories
Hungary Kickbike

Comfort’s in sunshine, sweetness’ in the discomfort

What is the thing with winter camping? I was never into it but when I had to cross Patagonia I could not avoid cold temperatures, snow and frost. Heat reaching to a 50 degrees is not pleasant either but cold starts to sit in the bones and makes stiff. Cold has the easiness to disable pleasure and make the whole trip a grim nonsense ongoing rather than a pleasurable challenge.

Plan: 2 nights camping, 70 kilometer in 2.5 days. Done: 1 night camping, 60 kilometer in 2 days. Average speed: 9 (much pushing through mud). Level of happiness and satisfaction: high.

Categories
Hungary

Travel & food: a happy marriage.

Food. One can not do otherwise than loving Indian street food, in particular the dishes available at truck dhaba’s. The inventiveness of African mom’s is not to dismiss either. They cook up delicious meals with leavy vegetables and home-made palm oil. A delight for a cyclist on sandy roads through the few patches of virgin forest. I vividly remember my breakfast at restaurants lining the streets in Sana’a, though busy with clientele I would eat in quietness. Fresh fish perfectly fried, while goat heads would simmer next to where I sat. In the far away past I would wander the streets of Bangladesh and Pakistan in search of a restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet, sometimes it took me hours to find such place, not seldom wandering off forgetting to eat. Though my own prepared sugary tomato paste pasta in the desert was tasty and bread fried in olive oil whether at a soppy wet Patagonian patch, the hostile windy pampa or a sweltering Argentinian yerba mate grove was always good enough. Food mixed up with sand in Mauritania, quick decaying beef in warm sunny Bolivia and constipation enhancing dishes in Paraguay, it all had its charm.

Categories
Hungary

Lake Balaton Around Tour

Distance: 332 km. Days: 7. Average distance a day: 47 km. Maximum speed: 56 km per hour. First week of June 2021.

Time for a tour. The mountains in the distance surrounding lake Balaton beckon me. One hill after another passing a shade onto the one following up, the light crisp, the color of the lake a blue I can not describe. The hills are calling out for me for some months now.

Categories
Hungary

The Little Dutch ‘Farmer’

My new experience of a winter in Hungary, for The ‘Farmer’ I feel, was challenging, to say the least. There was no soil to turn over (well… not that I knew of). There were no weeds to discover (well… not that I knew of). There was no comfort for a tour, not even a little one. I tried. Read more

Categories
Hungary Kickbike

Drava and Deer

Total distance: 170 km. Average speed: 10 km per hour (fully loaded). Days: 6.

My patience paid off: the weather forecast showed more than 7 sunny symbols in a row. It is the second half of February and the temperatures at night still drop below zero. But it ought to be dry, so fires will warm me (and stretching too).

Categories
Hungary Kickbike

A (failed) Winter Tour

Daytime temperature: zero. Daylight hours: 7 AM to 4.30 PM. Distance: a stunning 13 kilometers.

A short tour in January stretching from east to west at the North Balaton in Hungary is a very plausible plan.

Categories
Gear Germany Hungary Kickbike Thoughts

Kickbiking. How’s the set-up?

A set-up of any form of transport is important. Not when you are cycling or rolling back and forth to the bakery but when you try to get some distance done, it better be the right set-up for you. We did not had the chance to test any kickbike before we started the journey through the USA. We ordered straight from the Kickbike supplier and that is not the way I’d recommend. When I ordered my bicycle years prior I had it more or less custom made. This is crazily expensive, something I would not recommend either.

Categories
France Hungary Italy Spain

Short Update

A very short update about the Iveco truck which Geo and I fetched from Spain. In times like these, we´d waited for long to get this done. Mobile diary notes with Instagram snapshots on my creative weblog. 5 days of driving an overloaded truck through 5 countries, how´s that on the pshyche of one who passionately dislikes cars?

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Categories
Hungary Slovakia

Hungary (a tiny bit of Austria & some of Slovakia)

First a taste of Slovakia, a big difference to the absurd neatness and maddening quantity of agriculture in Austria, where I cycled a mere 25 kilometer through. Cycling through a corner of Slovakia goes via a levy surrounded by thick lofty forest. A forest with such an easy access I am tempted to ride right in, if not I have no food. I am cycling for hours without seeing people nor steeples nor villages. When I do see people, I am happily surprised to see they have lost their Czech ‘fearful’ expression.