Viennese Whirlwind

Hey there. Thought I'd do one of these blog things again, since I've now almost ridden 2000km (mainly) on my lonesome and have finally made it to Vienna. Quite a lot has happened since Luxembourg, so I'll give you a few of the highlights...

• One of my favourite parts of the trip so far was meeting Tarek and Julien, a couple of guys cycling to the Black Sea. Being the friendly types that they are, they saw me riding past (as one of them was making an arboreal toilet) and thought that I looked like someone who was going somewhere interesting, so they chased after me to find out. We spent a couple of days together, drunk a few beers and generally had a great time. They were both ex-French Foreign Legionnaires, which made their camping style quite different from mine. Basically, they just rigged up a tarp and lay under it, open to the elements. I thought this was pretty hardcore. It was a shame to split off from them in the end, but I'm meant to be doing this on my own, which doesn't really work if there's more than one of me riding along. That sentence didn't really make sense. Ah well, I'm probably still drunk. What else good happened...?
• I saw a snake! It wriggled across the cycle path as I was riding along. It's probably not that big a deal for most people, but it totally kept me happy for the next 20km.
• My bike went swimming. Yesterday riding to Vienna, a 100-metre section of the cycle-path was completely submerged in waist-deep water. Not one to backtrack and find another way around, I took my boots off and plunged in. My bags have now been thoroughly waterproof-tested, since they were quite definitely underwater for some time.
• I rode my longest day so far, which was 132km. This is quite a long way to ride, but at the end I found that my average speed was 20km an hour. Which is fast, for me. I think this is due to a secret fuel I have discovered - a combination of Red Bull, Haribo and Snickers bars. An extra incentive is to deny myself a cigarette for stretches of 40 kilometres. This somehow induces my legs to magically find some extra power when I'm nearing the end of the stretch. Weird.
• I also did possibly the stupidest thing I've ever done. One evening, my tent was being mobbed by flies. I was pissed off anyway because I hadn't hit my daily target due to rain, so the flies were the final straw. Enraged, I got my Deet spray out of my bag (100% Deet mossie repellant - real nasty stuff) and angrily decided to spray it at the flies as they flew past. This was the idea, anyway. But you know the bit in Anchorman where Ron Burgandy and the woman - Veronica Thingybob - are having a fight, and he gets her pepper spray and accidentally sprays himself in the face...? Yeah, exactly what I did. Eyes full of Deet are probably the most painful eyes I've ever had in my head. It was lucky I'd left my waterbottle by my tent, because I literally couldn't see. Splashed water in my face (and consequently all over myself and my sleeping bag and everything else), and eventually sight returned. Leaving me the problem of how to deal with a soaking wet tent that was still full of flies...
• And finally, the thing that can still make me laugh even now when I think about it. I was having breakfast with some Finnish girls, and one of them said something and the others started laughing. I assumed it was because I had toast stuck to my ear or something similarly stupid, so I asked what was so funny. One of them leaned over to me, ut her mouth to my ear and very quietly whispered, 'The guy next to you... he is eating only jam!' I looked round and sure enough, there he was shovelling jam into his face with a spoon like the most natural thing in the world. I think maybe you had to be there, but it still cracks me up to think of it.

Some thoughts on riding a bike in general.

At the start of this trip, I thought I'd coined a phrase that seemed like a pretty good philosophy, but which irritatingly turned out to be printed on the waterbottle of the very first cyclist I met. The phrase was, 'If you don't know where you're going, then you can never get lost.' And I stick by it. It's a good way to stay sane after several days of waking and not knowing where you're going to sleep that night, or even which direction to start pedalling.

However, after a while of this riding, I started to question why I was doing it. Why, in this era of planes, and cars, and other wacky modern inventions, did I still insist on dragging myself painfully slowly across the face of the planet? So I thought, maybe a more pertinent question would be this: 'If you don't know why you're going, can you still get lost?' And I think the answer, mentally-speaking, is yes. Yes you can. Let me explain.

Our daily lives, for the most of us, are based on repetition. We do the same things, see the same people and visit the same familiar places. This means we tend to use the same bits of our brains all the time, which makes for some very well-trodden neural pathways. But when you take all of this routine away, then it's very easy to get lost in yourself. To start thinking differently, to start feeling differently, and to start looking at things differently. Now, I'm (clearly) not a doctor or neurologist, so this is just based on my own observations, but it seems to be the case. I feel very lost inside myself a lot of the time right now, while my legs keep mechanically pushing myself along. There is a strange disparity between the physical repetition and the mental meanderings. But yes, I'm often lost.

But we assume to be lost is a bad thing. Maybe it's good to get lost now and then. Think to yourself, when last were you lost? Getting lost means you can discover new things - things you would never have discovered were you on familiar ground. So for now, alone in Vienna with nothing familiar around me (apart from the ubiquitous MacDonalds' everywhere), I am very happy to be lost.

Buried in Pomposity is brought to you by Dan, who is clearly going crazy out here on his own...