The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

Yesterday we reached country number four, Ukraine. This was a bit less straightforward than I would have liked, but all the same fine in the end.

But first something to sum up our ten days in Poland. The morning after writing my last message, we were invited in for tea and cake by the family in whose garden we had camped. This at least takes care of one regret that I had been concerned about, namely not having seen the inside of a house in Poland. Sometimes it can seem that our constant cycling, punctuated only by visits to cafés and supermarkets, gives us a very superficial view of where we are.

The cake and apple pie was home-made and delicious, cooked in a huge wood-fired stove which dominated one side of the kitchen. On the wall hung a picture of the Pope, this time the current German one and not the previous Polish one, whose greatly-enlarged portrait can be seen all over Poland.

Before we left, the husband who could speak German once again warned us about Ukraine, and insisted that we take some of the delicious cake with us. When we opened the packet later we discovered that there were also sandwiches inside, and some apples. This is certainly a very hospitable way of treating a couple of strangers who turn up unannounced wanting to sleep in your garden.

So, what is my opinion on Poland? What I wrote last week was fairly brutal in terms of describing the state of affairs there, but was no more than the truth. On the other hand, I am being quite harsh with Poland because I think it has a lot of potential. The only thing that separates here from where we come from are the rather unfortunate accidents of history that Poland has had to deal with during the last century (invasion, occupation, Soviet domination, etc.). I expect that things will continue to improve very rapidly here.

What I have liked have been the various sweet things I have eaten, Żywiec beer, plenty of empty forests to sleep in, and strangely enough the Polish road signs; they have an endearing, slightly clumsy cartoonish look. Certainly more interesting than the plain old western European ones.

On to Ukraine. This border was always going to be interesting, because it is the first real border of the journey so far, and the edge of the EU. That would mean guards, customs, and passport checks.

We had the very naive idea that we would just be able to cycle past the queues of cars, wave our passports, and sail on through. This was not to be the case.

The basic problem is that it was not allowed to cycle through this checkpoint. Instead, we would have to place our bicycles into some form of vehicle and be driven through. A border guard on the Polish side helpfully arranged for us and our bikes to ride inside the otherwise empty van of a man who was also queueing to cross the border.

The Polish guard was however not at all convinced that the person in the photo in my passport was really me, leading to more delays, and Astrid had the same problem on the Ukrainian side. Here there was also quite a lot of confusion and queueing, including when we needed to fill out immigration cards. They needed the address of the hotel where we would be staying, when of course we will not be staying in one. The man with the van gave us the name of a (possibly non-existent) hotel in Kiev to fill in just to get the thing finished, and at one point his small son even filled in part of my form to save time. This all worked out OK in the end, although to a Westerner used to open borders it did seem like a huge hassle for nothing. Plus it felt like cheating a bit, since we ideally want to cycle the whole way. 500 metres in a van won’t hurt I guess.

As we were finally leaving the border point, our driver, who of course could not speak English, thrust his mobile phone into my hand. To my surprise there was a voice on the other end speaking Dutch – a friend of the van driver. He asked me some questions about where we were going and whether his friend could give us lift to L’viv, which I politely declined, and expressed amazement when I explained that we would be cycling across the whole country. Before handing back the phone I asked him to give our thanks to our man with the van. A very indirect but still effective method of communication.

And then we were there. The former USSR. What immediately struck me as strange was the four-lane road in front of us with absolutely no traffic on it, save a Polish truck every few minutes. Also, there we suddenly no more tractors being used to work the fields, only horses. These two things together combined to make the whole place strangely quiet. Where the road is asphalt it is even worse than in Poland, whereas in other places it is made from huge slabs of concrete which I found quite okay to cycle over. There was very little traffic aside from a few very old and dented Ladas.

In Javoriv, the first town we reached, there was some more confusion whilst trying to get some money at the cash machine. The problem was that we had no idea how many of whatever the currency here is called is in one Euro. It turned out that it’s about ten, meaning that a pint of beer in the café where we ate later cost about 30 Eurocents. Today I had some and it’s delicious.

On the road near to where we camped last night there was a hotel on a small lake. I had the notion this morning to go swimming in it, but before doing so went into the hotel bar to ask if this was OK, with the aid of some pointing and hand gestures. “Yeah, sure”, was the answer I think, “as long as you have some swimming clothes on”. So I did. I am sure they thought I was nuts.

Soon after, we found ourselves cycling through a thunderstorm. This made the journey to L’viv, the first big city in the Ukraine, pretty horrible. The rain filled up all the holes in the road, meaning you were never sure if the pool of water you were about to cycle through was actually a hole 10cm deep. Not good for the bike and no fun at all.

On the way, we passed a very strange sight: old women mending the road with shovels and hot asphalt. Equality is one thing, but I wouldn’t really want my granny out in the cold and rain doing thins kind of work. I have no idea if this is a leftover relic of Soviet-era collective sharing of public works, or pure necessity because there is no-one else to do it.

As for L’viv itself, we didn’t stay long enough to see much of what looks like a pretty grey and uninteresting place. One other strange experience though was a visit to the supermarket: for some reason they choose to fill the shelves with loads of the same thing. I mean as in six shelves high and three metres long with one type of mayonnaise. And not only in one place; we were looking for Snickers and found huge amounts of them in three different parts of the store. I guess it’s better than the empty shelves of the old days – in fact maybe that’s why they do it.

One thing which has surprised me is how straightforward the Cyrillic alphabet is to learn. I had expected it to be as impossible as Arabic, but in fact it doesn’t take too long to remember that a “C” is actually an “S” and a “P” is an R” and so on. Of course there are lots of weird symbols which don’t look like anything at all in the Latin alphabet, but mostly they relate to a sound which is familiar.

The crappy weather and yesterday’s hanging around at the border mean that we are a bit behind schedule, so it’s time to get to sleep so as to be able to put in a good day tomorrow. This may be difficult since we are camped right next to some sort of railway yard where they are still moving trucks and engines about even at 11pm.

Oh, and that’s another thing. I didn’t realise until we had already been in the country for a few hours, but we are now in a different time zone: 2 hours ahead of GMT. Now it really feels like we are moving.

Monday was supposed to be my one relaxed non-cycling day of the week, but not for the first time things worked out less than ideally.

It all started out well, since we arrived in Cracow quite early on Sunday. This meant that some of the things we had to do could be done then. For example, I really needed to find a sports or outdoor store and buy some new shoes. The discovery a few weeks ago that only my newest and most expensive pair of trainers prevent pain in my knees meant that I had only one pair suitable for cycling, which is not really enough for ten months.

By mid-morning Monday I had found some decent shoes at a good price, and we had wandered round Cracow a bit and had breakfast. One thing that needed to be sorted was that the middle finger on my left hand had become swollen round the nail, and had got worse in the past few days. Better to get it seen to now, rather than later.

I asked at the hotel (actually a student halls with private rooms) where I could find a doctor,and they gave me the address of a medical centre.

When I got there I was told to come back in half an hour and “maybe the doctor will see you”. After half an hour there was no doctor, and I was told to go to a hospital on the other side of town. When I got there it took ages to find the emergency department, owing mainly to my inability to understand Polish. When I had stood in the queue for a while I was told that they could not help me, and that I would have to go to another medical centre much like the first one.

Of course I was already getting quite pissed off by this point, but since there was not really an alternative short of ignoring the finger, I went anyway.

At location number three things got even more complicated because no-one whatsoever could speak any English. What I managed to understand from the receptionist is that I needed to return at 6pm. This I did, at which point a doctor was present, who could also speak no English. German didn’t work either. She just sort of stared at me like I was an idiot, until a colleague who could speak a little English told me to come back the following morning at 8am and see the surgeon.

As frustrating as this was, at least it meant I could stop thinking about it for the rest of the evening. As can be imagined I was very sceptical if anybody was ever going to help me, or whether I would have to hack the damned thing off myself.

The next morning came, and sure enough I was told that they could not do anything about it there, but that the hospital across the street could maybe help. Here, after waiting around once again, hallelujah, I was seen by a doctor.

He knew immediately what it was (I forgot the medical term as soon as I heard it) and prescribed me antibiotics. He said that the thing would swell up quite large after a few days, which was naturally not really what I wanted to hear. When this happened I would need to visit a hospital again and get it cut open. “It is not ready”, he explained. Yippee, can’t wait.

I am reluctant to complain in this sort of situation, because it is after all my problem that I am in a country where I cannot speak the language. What is really annoying though is being passed around and told bullshit because no-one has the time or can be bothered to help you.

This is kind of the nightmare I had of what would happen if one of us got sick on this trip. In this case it was a pretty minor thing, but I would rather not think of what would happen if either of us were to get really ill or injured. Fingers crossed we don’t have to find out.

Meanwhile we have been back on the road for a few days and are spending our last night in Poland. I am currently sitting listening to the rain fall outside our tent, always a lovely sound when you are wrapped up warm inside it. It is pitched in the garden of a farmhouse which we came across while carrying out our usual evening strategy of looking for some secluded piece of forest in which to camp. As soon as we had got the tent pitched, the family who live here produced a set of chairs and a table and tea with sandwiches for us, and there followed as best a conversation as could be managed between us. The youngest daughter if the family was learning English at school and was able to talk a little, although the phrase book she had did not help very much; it was full of such sentences as “I’ll have a Scotch on the rocks, please”, “take these suitcases to my room”, and such like, which were not so useful at the time.

Later the husband of the oldest daughter, who could luckily speak German, arrived. He asked if we were worried about our safety further east, which freaked me out a little bit. Should we be? On the other hand he did say that the Germans consider the Poles as lying thieving no-goods, which they certainly do not appear to be to me, so perhaps they themselves just have some negative ideas about their neighbours to the east.

So, tomorrow afternoon then should see us cross the Ukrainian border, leaving the European Union behind and entering what was once the Soviet Union. Needless to say I am as curious as always as to what will be different there.

And here is a picture of a nun who was behind me in the queue at the first clinic in Cracow. The city is indeed full of nuns. I guess even they get sick from time to time, sore knees from praying or whatever.

We have now spent almost a week in Poland. In the hope of making up some time for the expected wait later in Kiev for our Kazakh visa, we have been cycling 90 or 100km every day. This is quite a lot, and has left us exhausted at the end of every day and me in no mood for writing. But I will try and do so anyway.

First back a bit, to our wonderfully luxurious rest day in Görlitz. You will not believe how good it feels to stand under the shower or to sleep in a real bed after six days of cycling and camping, and the delicious dinner which we ate just made it all seem too good to be true. Görlitz is also a really nice place, a real undiscovered beauty spot. Very pretty, a bit like Prague in fact, and no tourists besides us. And cheap, and friendly folks. Definitely recommended, if you can work out how to get there.

The morning after came, and it was back to reality. After spending the last of our Euros, it was time to make the short journey over the bridge to Zgorzelec in Poland.

This was most certainly a culture shock; I would never have imagined that such a short distance, across an unrestricted border at that, would bring such a change.

It’s a bit difficult to say what this is, besides a few obvious things. Firstly, the language thing; instantly, we could no longer understand anything that was written or said. Secondly, everything is in a notably worse state of repair – I know I have already written that about the east of Germany, but this time the difference was much greater. The roads are full of holes, buildings are cracked and dirty, and there is dust everywhere. The drivers give much less room to cyclists, and judging by all the squashed animal corpses by the roadside, not much room for anything else either.
Our first contact with people was at a petrol station on the road east from the border, since we needed some fuel for cooking. Enough for about a week and a half for 50 Eurocents.

For some reason the guy working there was very interested to know how from me much a certain headlight bulb in his shop cost in Germany. Clearly I had no idea. Aside from this, he and his sullen-looking colleague seemed to have little interest in helping us, even making taking money off us seem like a tremendous effort.

I had heard that people drink a lot here, and being from another hard-drinking country I was curious as to what this meant. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence to back up this claim: I saw countless empty vodka bottles by the roadside, many shops in the remotest parts of the countryside selling nothing but petrol, car parts and alcohol (surely a deadly combination), and at one point even a man in a tractor drinking a bottle of beer. Worst of all, many many sad little memorials by the roadside with names and photos of loved ones killed in car accidents. This may be though as much to do with the terrible roads and the crazy speeds that people drive at, and this is not the only country where this happens – it seems to be very much a catholic thing.

Everywhere that there are houses there is the acrid stinging smell and thick smoke of whatever sort of fuel they burn here. This may now be the EU, but it feels very far away and closer to the experience I have had in Turkey than to Germany or Holland.

All of this makes it sound like I am trying to paint a very negative picture of Poland. This is not my intention at all. I can only go on my first impression as regards to the behaviour of people, and of course it is very easy to focus on superficial differences and lose sight of the fact that in the end things are not so different.

Also, there is progress being made here, and people seem to have a certain sort of pride in the place. When we stopped in the town of Jawor the other day, we were served perhaps the most delicious ice cream I have ever eaten by a guy who spoke perfect English, and who was very enthusiastic to hear about our journey and where we were going next. To the Ukraine, we said. “Oh, I was near the border recently but I couldn’t visit”, he said, “because I didn’t have my passport. Oops, forgot, they’re not in the EU of course!”. Later, in the same town, the guy who served us pizza in a newly-opened, chic but cheap restaurant took me to find a book shop, since I wanted to buy a Polish dictionary. He explained that the whole town centre was being regenerated, and would soon look completely different. Not quite the empty wasteland drained of all talented youngsters lured to the West that I had perhaps expected.

There is a problem which all travellers face, and about which I am sure much has been written. This is the problem of distinguishing the unusual from what is typical. To be more specific, whether what you observe in a new country tells you much about the place, or is instead just a one-off event. If I see something unusual happen in Amsterdam or in Glasgow, I know it is strange because I know the place. A newcomer though has no way of knowing if this is normal or a freak occurrence.

This is what I am always thinking about, and what has been the starting point for trying to work out what I should make of Poland. Is it normal here to drink beer while driving a tractor, or was this just one degenerate idiot?

It seemed to be the case that as we moved east, the level of poverty visibly decreased. Yesterday, in Gliwice, we most improbably came across a vegetarian restaurant. We ate three meals plus dessert between the two of us, so delicious and affordable was it. All this cycling certainly gives you an appetite.

As mentioned above, we have been cycling close to 100km per day. I was quite pleased with this, until a couple of blokes on racing bikes stopped and spoke to us while we were having a break this morning. The one who could speak English boasted that he had been cycling 250km per day, with baggage, in France. This morning they had already clocked up 120km. They proudly explained that they had to get back to work tomorrow, down the mine digging coal. Tough as brick-shithouses these Poles.

After all this, we arrived today in Cracow. Here we will spend a well-earned rest day. It’s a little bit strange to be in a big city once again, and certainly one so touristic as this one; everywhere there are Irish pubs and places with names like “Crazy Bar”, and plenty of foreign faces. I don’t think we have seen one non-Polish person all week before now.

I am happy to say that while it is less easy to find little cafés than in Germany, there are more than enough different sorts of cakes, pastries, and other delicious things to allow something different to be tried every day. I have not learned so many Polish words, but one of the most important would have to be piekarnia – bakery. The Polish seem to have a particular love for toffee and whipped cream, to which I lend my wholehearted support. A nice touch is that you buy cake by weight, allowing you to order little bits of several types or one huge chunk of whatever is your favourite.

As mentioned before, the cycling itself is almost a meditative affair, allowing the mind to wander but without really leaving enough space for any deep thinking. So instead, I find myself focused on the most trivial and bizarre things.

For example, yesterday we passed a football field where a match was being played, right next to a cemetery. I wondered if the ball had ever been accidentally kicked from the one to the other during a funeral, and had landed in the grave. Or, even better, had hit the priest on the head, causing him to fall into the grave, on top of the coffin, knocking him stone dead to the horror of the assembled mourners. I have no way of knowing if this has ever happened, but it is kind of nice to imagine that it could be possible.

And finally something more serious once again. I had no idea until I looked at the map yesterday, but the town next to which we stayed last night is called Oswięcim, otherwise known as Auschwitz. It is possible to visit the former camp and the museum there, but I don’t intend doing so. I know what happened there, and that’s enough for me.