Items tagged with Poland

2008-06-14 00:00:00
Written By: Claudine du Plessis

Cycling Day: 11
Distance: 124km

The road today was much better.  Poland is beautiful with its green fields, patches of forest and little towns.  Everything has a very tranquil and content feel to it.

Not so peaceful - I fell of my bike today while attempting to climb a sidewalk and added to my bruises.

We arrived at our "campsite" before five, but it no longer existed and we got directions to another campsite. This new campsite was at a restaurant Pirat. Searching for it, two giggling girls gave us wrong directions on purpose and we asked another old man who was friendly enough to tell us to follow his van in that direction. After cycling over 100km, your legs doesn't work so well on the hills anymore and we soon lost sight of him, but found signs to Pirat which we could follow. Pirat was a pirate style restaurant and the waiters said we could camp there if we didn’t mind the noise - there was a wedding being held there.

We walked to the supermarket, got some pre-cooked chicken and bread for dinner. While we sat on the pier (there was a big lake at Pirat), eating our chicken and bread with our hands and looking all dirty and scruffy, the wedding guests decided to do a photo shoot there. We quickly moved our dinner to another spot. Their party continued until six the next morning, so we slept to the sound of traditional Polish music and karaoke to Britney Spears.

2008-06-10 00:00:00
Written By: Claudine du Plessis

Cycling Day: 7
Distance: 100km  

We did our first 1000kms today!

Still in the morning we crossed the Oder river border to Poland with no fuss.  Immediately we noticed we were in a different country.  The styles of the houses changed from super neat to more run-down, farm type houses.  Even  the landscape changed to rolling hills with grass and patches of forest.

At the first Polish town we changed some Euros for Zoltes, which are about 4 times stronger the Rand.

At 8 o'clock we arrived at the Glebokie campsite, Lance and I went for a swim in their big lake.  Dinner consisted of pasta with egg and tomato and meat salad sandwiches.

2008-06-16 00:00:00
Written By: Claudine du Plessis

Cycling Day: 13
Distance: 128km

We had a little bit of trouble getting out of the campsite, because the owner was still sleeping, with the keys to the bathroom and the shed that held our bikes.  There weren’t another tap anywhere else, so we had to go to his house and knock him awake.

Today’s cycle went fairly quickly, as we were all anxious to find a place with an internet cafe (since we have been camping for the whole time in Poland and the campsites are usually outside of town, this has been very difficult). The scenery still consisted out of rolling hills, lakes in the valleys and lots of storks’ nests.

We found an internet cafe at the town of Suwalki, but unfortunately it closed before we could do everything we wanted to. The next day we were supposed to cycle to Kaunas and stay with a Couch Surfer host there and I saw I had an email telling me that the address has changed. I barely had time to write down her phone number when we got chased out of the cafe.

The rest of the evening we just boiled some noodles and eggs, had dinner and went to bed.

2008-06-13 00:00:00
Written By: Claudine du Plessis

Cycling Day: 10
Distance: 147km

Today was a real Friday the thirteenth. The whole route to Brodnica was on the main road and at about 5 in the afternoon, it started to rain with no end.

The road felt like it had no end, we got wetter and c older, the skies got darker and the traffic got heavier. Billy fell off his bike again, luckily not in front of a truck..

(will continue post later, internet cafe is closing…..)

Continued:

Eventually, because of the bad weather it got so dark, we decided to follow the little sadn roads rather than risk it on the main road.  We had to use our headlights, because there were no streetlights.

The campsite was hard to find and we asked directions from a couple of people.  A schoolbus with some sports steam stopped next to us and asked us for directions to the same campsite!  Later a friendly shop owner with good English gave us clear directions.

The campsite was up a steep hill in the forests and arriving at 22:30 we were lucky to still find the owners awake (maybe because the schoolbus also arrived at about the same time).   It was still raining lightly, but we quickly cooked food (corn that Ania taught me to make, with tomato and mince), pitched the tent and went to sleep.

2008-06-11 00:00:00
Written By: Claudine du Plessis

Cycling Day: 8
Distance: 130km   

Poland is not as equipped for cyclists as the Netherlands or Germany and some of the main roads only have a narrow shoulder with an astounding amount of trucks.  We tried to keep to the smaller roads, but most are not paved.  The are just sand roads, very dusty and difficult to cycle, so the going was very slow at times.

A funny thing about the Polish people is even though they don't speak English and they know you don’t understand Polish, they will speak long, fast sentences.

On our way on one of the sandy roads, a driver in a big truck did this to us.  We could only answer "Poznan" so he explained for us in detail how to get there (but we couldn’t understand a word).  He then followed us all the way to the main road, where he got out of his truck once again explained this to us.

The rest of the way went fairly quickly, the good (sometimes bad) thing about cycling on main roads is that you can’t just stop whenever you want, you have to keep going.  All the trucks that overtook us also helped to push us along with their slipstreams.

We arrived in Poznan at 6 o'clock and started looking for our host, Ania's house. Poznan is one of the big cities in Poland with trams and a subway.  At some point Billy noticed a thumbnail in his front tire, our first puncture for the trip - luckily a slow one.  In Ania's street, Billy pulled front brake while looking at the GPS and went flying over his handlebars.  Fortunately, it wasn't too bad and nothing got broken.

Ania was not there yet and Billy and I went looking for a phone when we met the second friendly Pole in a shop. He offered his phone for us to use for free. Ania was home already and found Lance outside.

Ania is a very friendly and interesting girl, she was on a detox diet and only ate apples and salad, but she cooked us a wonderful meal.  Her own invention - corn (she calls it buckwheat growths) with tomato and feta cheese. Also, strawberries and sugar for starters.

Ania studies English and writes poems about everything, she even wrote a poem about her little bathtub. After dinner she took us to the old city part of Poznan, where a lot is going on.  Their old church in the center has a wooden door that opens every day at noon and two goats come out and butt their heads 12 times to the sound of trumpets. These goats are the symbol of Poznan and can be seen on everything.

We had hot chocolate (and Lance had beer with syrup - a Polish specialty) at the Cacao Republic  The we had beers at Brewvaria, a bar that brews their own beers, and chatted with Ania  We all slept in Ania’s big bedroom, she really went out of her way to make everything comfortable.

In north east Europe, young people love hitchhiking, Ania hitchhiked for 6000kms to Norway and Russia and back.