Flashbacks - Through Eastern Europe

Place: Satu Mare

Tunes: Eisbrecher, Sparanza and many others

The morning was pretty normal with nothing too much out of the ordinary. Early wake ups mean that we get to the destination sooner, or so I thought. Countryside roads in Slovakia was the theme of the day and the sport was road racing.

A Slovakian farmer and his best friend.

Some of us got separated from the main group (as the asphalt warriors wait for no-one) at some point and as we were looking for them, the main body of the group decided to vote on going to the Ukraine (while having some lunch). Why, I still do not know. You have to love democracy. Maybe the idea was to get some stamps for one's passport. The rest of us were informed of this on the border. I have to say that it was a surprise that we were actually precisely where we were supposed to be for once.

During this fantastic process of decision making, Ari and I got some speeding tickets after a tiny little bit spirited riding after a couple of hours of the best behaved driving on this whole trip. Shows you that it pays off to drive like a hooligan.

The roads were mostly excellent with nice countryside scenery and not too much traffic.

We got to the Ukraine as the sun was setting. I will try and describe the first city we saw to you (the border town of Uzghorod). Imagine a junkyard. Throw in some hideous concrete apartment buildings and roads laid out completely at random. Then fast forward 50 years. Add drunken people, many Lada's, drunken people in Lada's, suicidal pedestrians that appear to be blind and wild dogs. That's what it looked like. I thought I had seen smog before, but no, I had not seen smog before. You needed a machete go to through this smog.

Seriously, why do people live in this junkyard that is falling to pieces? Is it that hard to organise some kind of maintenance to the buildings and the collection of trash.

The countryside was better and you could also breathe. All in all, we spent more time on border crossings than in the country itself. Democracy sucks! And we did not even get Ukraine stickers!

Can you get from Slovakia to Hungary and to Romania without going to the Ukraine?

This is the road to Uzghorod.

Monuments from WW II greet you on the border.

And so do the first locals.

When we finally got to Romania, of course we had to take the small countryside roads, in the middle of the night with the ever present stray dogs running around. I still have no ideas about the speed limits in this country, but we went through these dark little roads at about 100kph. 120kph when overtaking traffic.

You can imagine what a dog jumping in front of you from the bushes less than two meters away does to your cornering lines! You may have to break and unless you downshift at the same time, you will also have the wrong gear on for exiting the corner. Not optimal for power delivery. Thankfully no-one had to change their lines and we had a good race to Satu Mare taking only twice as long than we would have if we had stuck to the main roads.

On all of the roads going through the villages etc, everyone seemed to be outside, just hanging out with nothing to do on the main road. Some with chairs and little tables. Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like fixing all the fucked up shit surrounding them? Gypsies on the side of the road just look at you with hostile faces cooking with open fires. Some shout at us. I assume that they want this whole convoy to stop for them and to give them some money just because they shout at us. Have they seen that happen ever with a group of motorcycles that drives past?

We got to Satu Mare eventually and found the hotel after some searching at some time past midnight, after around 15 hours on the road. Not a bad day and there was action all throughout. 

One hour later we had an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet and beer. This was good as there was no time to eat after breakfast but chocolate. The hotel staff, and the guard dog also got a decent meal as Peter decided that no-one should go to bed hungry and ordered a sufficient amount of pizza.

As there was no disco next door, we decided to call it a day. Sleep came pretty quickly for some reason.