boundary conditions

The race started on a Tuesday morning, the pre-race meeting was on Monday, and the bus from Zagreb to the start/finish in Shkodër, Albania, chartered by the race organizers, left on Sunday morning. The bus chartered for the return left about 15 minutes after the time cut at the finish, so at about 12:15 AM on Saturday night, 10.5ish days after the start. I took vacation for the two weeks including the race plus the Friday before; I left on Thursday evening. After the race’s end on Friday I planned to work on Monday.

“no fly”

Like most people who live in rich countries, I use too much energy, fossil fuels in particular, and a big single piece of that is air travel. I began a fan of Lost Dot’s no-fly policy for this race for all the obvious reasons. Now, after, having given it a try, I sound stupid saying it, it’s changed my perspective more than I expected. There’s other overland trips that seem now doable, more appealing.

I made many mistakes in traveling to and from Shkodër. Chief among these was opting against packing my bike in a bag. That meant that I couldn’t take the Zurich–Zagreb night train, and on the whole I was to an uncomfortable extent at the mercy of various bus drivers, train conductors, and hotel staff. A bag would have neutralized about half of the slog factor and almost all the difficulty of the journey.

trains to Zagreb

My plan was to arrive a couple days early to Zagreb. With the bike naked, I had to book an unusual connection: Zürich HB to Wien Meidling (a night train), Wien Meidling to Zidani Most, Zidani Most to Zagreb Glavni kolodvor. I had a bicycle reservation on the night train and the regional to Zidani Most; no reservations are possible for the last leg.

Besides the bicycle, I had a backpack–by a coincidence, my friend and officemate was in Zagreb the same weekend, and he took it back to Zurich–and an Ikea bag with my on-bike luggage in it.

I locked the bike up on the Vienna night train. If you don’t know, Zurich to Vienna by train does not take very long–not a whole night, anyway. So, to give the passengers the chance to sleep the whole night, the train stops for long spells. In these moments it is technically feasible and much reported that theft from the train occur. The conductor tells you to lock the door of your compartment. One hears horror stories about bicycles stolen from night trains, and in an overabundance of misanthropy or caution I had a chain lock (to be returned to Zurich) alongside my cafe locks (part of my race kit) to keep the bicycle secure, and all my valuables were in the Ikea bag, which I had with me.

I found my appointed hook on the train from Vienna to Zidani Most. Like most of the seats, it was taken. A man about my age, vigorous, confident, explained, with who knows what implication, that all the bicycle spots were probably gone. I replied, vexed, that I had reserved this spot. He shrugged. I wedged my bicycle out of the way as best I could, but with the ridiculous 780 mm bar I have on it, it would take a rail gauge of unusual width for that to be possible. (He and his gravel bike got off about an hour later.) While these circumstances prevailed, the conductors were hardly pleased, grumbling not unreasonably at the contortions needed to pass, but it was all fine. I stood by the bicycle, my reserved seat in a different car, but an apparently telepathic Viennese architect–we were to speak for the next four hours–offered that I sit next to him, near to the bicycle. I gratefully accepted.

The architect, in response to my question about the nature of the border between Austria and Slovenia, posited no natural or even cultural division, indicating the similarity of the houses, the churches, the land as we chugged through the trees and villages on our way to Zidani Most. He disembarked earlier than me by a couple of stops–it turns out, with prejudice.

I waited on the platform in Zidani Most for a couple of hours. Nothing in easy walking distance, and, with all my bike luggage in an Ikea bag, I was barely mobile. A dark railway bar was supporting a couple of old timers, drinking beer on some fenced-in astroturf, of which the purpose seemed more the absorption of cigarette butts and malty runoff than natural simulation. Otherwise the platform was quiet. An old man in a uniform and cap would occasionally appear out of an office and step over the tracks, in professional defiance of the signs forbidding exactly this, to talk with the arriving conductor.

It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. It felt like summer, which had not yet begun in Zurich. The station is on a river’s bend, and the bank rises, steep, treed, green, on the side opposite the tracks. I read my book and waited. Long trains freighted with grain rolled between short blue regionals.

After a couple of hours, my seatmate from the earlier train appeared beside me on the platform. More familiar with the connections, he had disembarked to get lunch in something more like a village, and now had a short wait with me for the train to Zagreb. He was intending to sail from Split the next day.

The last train rolled on older stock. The seats were arranged in compartments. My now friend saved me a seat while I followed the gestures of the conductor to the very first car, apparently the best for stowing the bicycle.

We arrived in Zagreb in the late afternoon, I walked to my hotel, deposited the bicycle, showered, and went to dinner. It was my friend’s recommendation–“real Croatian food”–and it was good. I chose starchy and earthy stuff, thinking of the riding ahead. By amazing accident I ran into my traveling companion from the train, and we ate together.

I had an extra day, Saturday, in Zagreb. I wandered around, drank coffee, popped into a museum, had ice cream with my friend, that sort of thing. A beautiful, lively city, though I couldn’t shake Rebecca West’s mention of “toast-colored” buildings. My vocabulary blossomed to about five words.

“The Accursed Express”

From Zagreb the race organizers had chartered a bus, which they called the Accursed Express. It was supposed to leave at 10 AM on Sunday.

On Sunday I had a big breakfast, scrounged up some pastries at a nearby bakery, assuming the bus wouldn’t stop, and rolled the bicycle down to the bus station, or rather to a dubious spot on the curb near the entrance to it, from where we were supposed to leave. I knew I was in the right spot–bikes packed for ten days’ offroad racing have a look.

The bus showed up late. No one was in charge. The two drivers, from Kosovo (the decal on the bus advertised its usual itinerary of roundtrips between Slovenia and Kosovo), spoke little English and indicated that we were to stow our bicycles in the bottom of bus. Chaos.

Those geniuses with bikes bagged were again one step ahead. The rest of us realized that we would need to unmount our wheels, maybe shuffle luggage; some cautious, intelligent types were removing their rear derailleurs. It began to get stressful. Half of us were in the street, juggling bags, wheels, frames, tools. (Because I’m an idiot, I have some loose spacers to adapt my front hub to my fork, which complicate the ordinarily mindless task of removing the front wheel.) The drivers were trying to help, but they seemed to think that our hesitation in stowing our luggage was due to inability or ignorance in the proper application of force. Their interventions tended to complicate, rather than simplify matters. I think we left more than an hour late, some time after 11 AM, partly due to the scattered arrival times of more racers, who would then be tasked with placing their bicycles in an apparently full hold.

My own bicycle was upside down, the rear derailleur still mounted, floating less than an inch from a bike lying crosswise on top of it. I tried not to think about it, or the hours of curves, traffic lights, and bumps ahead. I wouldn’t recommend any of this as a strategy, but my bicycle arrived without problems, and as far as I know that was true for everyone’s.

Arrival was still some way off. We paused at highway rest stops nearly every hour, it seemed, apparently for cigarette breaks. Some of these stops were welcome–everyone has to pee at some point in a 15-hour ride–but one could see from the large crowd remaining by the door to the bus that many passengers would have rather got on with it.

We also learned that we were taking a detour that would cost us a few hours. Apparently the Kosovar registration of our bus was problematic in Bosnia. So we would take a ride down the Dalmatian coast on windy, two-lane roads. Very beautiful, very slow. The time between the screenshot below and arrival turned out to be about 8 hours.

We took a ferry to skip the lap around the Boka. We were delayed more than hour at the Croatian border, around 11 PM, if I remember right, which we learned later was due to some unpaid traffic violations on the part of one of the drivers and one of the passengers. The bus arrived a little after three AM in Shkodër. Bikes became whole again, and we dispersed to our lodgings.

postscript: return to Zurich

The itinerary for the return was worse. The bus wasn’t. I took the Accursed Express to Zagreb–without the stress of having the bicycle definitely functional on arrival, and with some familiarity born of the outbound trip, it wasn’t so bad stowing the bicycles for the return. And I was so beat that sleeping for much of the journey was possible. I spent an extra night in Zagreb, which was nice.

From Zagreb I was to take a train to Villach, but construction on the route meant a replacement bus service for part of the way. Various bus drivers indicated with no uncertainty that it was impossible for me to board with the bicycle. The bus was completely full, they said. Stress. I had enough time (but probably not enough enthusiasm) to ride the rest of the way to Villach–I had a long transfer–but I’d have to push. Mercifully, another passenger, who spoke Slovenian, seeing my distress, or just sympathetic, argued on my behalf–the bus driver spoke some English, but less in a conflict–and the driver was prevailed upon to open the hold on the other side, which was nearly empty. My savior told me that the bus driver had been disinclined to help partly because he thought my bicycle was dirty. (I learned later that he is the one responsible for cleaning the bus, too.) Something to think about for the future, I guess–but another moment where the bag would have saved me some friction.

When I got to Jesenice, I jogged, carrying my bicycle since I didn’t have time to sort the spacers on the front wheel, to the train that was to continue to Villach. The ÖBB person tells me that there is no way, the bicycle spaces are all taken. I am bummed. One of the Austrian border police, waiting with her, asks to see my passport, which is now of course ridiculous since I’m not going anywhere. The other one, sensing perhaps that this is piling on, offers that there is another train leaving in a couple of hours. This will work for me, provided I can get a bicycle spot. I have a surprisingly very good dinner across the street.

When the next train comes, I snag the last bicycle spot–there are four, it is written–on the train to Villach. A group of six Austrian cyclists shows up at the last minute and is turned away from the train by the conductor–there are no places left. They are vocally upset. Two of them leave their bicycles and board, planning to retrieve their cars from home to pick up their friends. This will waste hours. They are even more upset when they find six (6) hooks for bicycles unused on the train, plus space for more bicycles on the opposite side of the carriage. The train is not even half-full anyway. They point this out to the conductor. The conductor points to a sticker saying that there are four bicycle places. A nightmare. (A bag would have saved me here, too.)

From Villach I have a train to Salzburg, from where I catch the dregs of the night train to Zurich. I don’t have a couchette–I likely thought that a bed from 2 AM to 8 AM wasn’t worth it. I was wrong. Two jetlagged, chatty Australians burst into the compartment and implicitly justify their conversation by telling the four of us trying to sleep that it’s probably futile anyway. I’m sitting across from a pensioner who misses his stop. We are both trying to avoid an inevitable game of footsie. It’s not all good vibes.

I had had the foresight to tell my students we should start at 10 instead of 9. My train gets in at 8:20. I take the tram up to my apartment. I shower and shave and go to work.