Alive again
It was the morning of my last week and I was in Ukraine on a public holiday, about 50 kilometers from the next big town and with a dysfunctional bike. I took a nice shower with the built-in radio and massage, so I felt quite good till I went down. It was then that I discovered that I was locked in, the door to the street was closed and I saw no one around. After some screaming and banging on the doors, a sleepy girl woke up, who somewhat reluctantly opened the door for me. I learned that there was no breakfast in the motel I stayed and the shop next door also did not have a huge selection, so I had some biscuits for breakfast.
Then it was time to hitch a ride. A woman and her child were standing there, somehow they explained a bus would be coming. It was really hot and similar to the previous night, the cars just whizzed by. The woman with her child gave up the waiting for the bus, it never showed up. Still, I was hopeful someone would stop and a guy with his pick-up car finally stopped, telling me he is going to a town ways from the border. I was still happy to have been picked up, anything closer to a large town was a small victory. He spoke some rudimentary English and then I did something to help my own situation: I offered a small bribe, asking me to take me to the border. The Eur 10 certainly was worth it and he drove me to the same crossing I had entered the country the previous day.
Going across this border was even slower than last night. There was a long line of local cyclists, hoping to enter Romania (and hence the EU…); I thought, wow, this will be a long wait. Then they all looked at me, including the officials, and for some reason, asked me to cut the line, so I was there right at the front. They looked meticulously at my passport, disappearing for some five minutes with it, then even looked at my luggage (consisting mostly of my somewhat stinky clothes, yikes), but then I was back to Romania. As luck would have it, it also was a public holiday, them celebrating the orthodox Whit Monday. A guy on a very funky bike was standing around and I asked him in English if he knew of a bike shop. He started calling around – in Hungarian. Then we became best friends, I explained my situation. It turned out he was waiting for a Ukrainian girl to cross on foot, she was also of Hungarian nationality. So the three of us set off in direction of a bike shop, which was officially closed that day, but them finding out I was in trouble, they opened up for me.
The owner was a sympathetic young guy, Csaba Sarkady, he was smiling the entire time and we talked about his achievements when he biked in one day from Sigetu to Budapest – over 400 kilometers! Looking at his athletic stature, I believed him. He promised to have my bike repaired in a couple of hours and I set off to see the town. There I saw a religious procession, where the Bible was carried around a church with people singing, the people forming a circle, bending down and the Bible being placed on their backs; while the priest was chanting. Nothing like this have I seen before. The town has an expansive museum on the sins of the Communist regime, in a former Securitate prison, the rooms were turned into exhibition rooms, showing the past of the Romanian secret service and how it worked to oppress the enemies of the state, which was pretty much everybody. There were rooms about the Hungarian, Czech, Polish, East German revolutions – it was quite interesting.
Csaba did a good job, but as it was a public holiday, he had to do some creative thinking and had to replace quite a few parts – still, I was thrilled to see my bike back again in working condition. I thanked him by inviting him for a nice pizza. It was getting rather late when I finally started riding – and I did not get too far, stopping at an open air museum, displaying an entire wooden village and how it looked like a few hundred years back. The day had been a hot one, but now a thunderstorm was nearing, but I refused to be deterred by it, moving on. I got in Desesti to yet another UNESCO wooden church – you might ask if I had enough of them – but no, I really enjoyed seeing these.
Just as the road started climbing, I found a nice B&B, something like the Pension Lara few weeks back, located right next to a pond full of trout (which eventually become the dinner at the restaurant next door). I got some pancakes filled with cottage cheese, then it was time to go to bed.