Feck Arse Bollox

The great thing about having to huff and puff up a hill in the evening, is that there is usually a downhill to look forward to at the start of the day.

We awake with a feeling of lightness. Yesterday was something that we had dreaded a little and having it over feels like – ridiculous I know – a holiday! We eat a leisurely (and fairly scant) breakfast at our guest house and take some time to stroll around and enjoy our surroundings. The centrepiece of the town is the white church and spire and there is a stairway (dubbed the stairway to heaven, by us) that leads from the level of our guest house up to the church which of course, in the best European fashion, sits atop a hill. The stairway is covered and we make our way up, just as the first of the tourist buses start to arrive. We congratulate ourselves on being just so amazing that we are doing this tour on our bikes and that we are not at the mercy of some tour company’s schedule. It is easy to be smug. I dread the day one of us is no longer able to ride and we need to become more mainstream.

During our walk the sun comes out, the sky is picture postcard blue – life is good.

We eventually point our bikes downhill and ride carefully, aware of the traffic heading upward. We rejoin the main road and ride into Banská Bystrica, feeling quite gleeful that we did make our stopover at Špania Dolina. Banská Bystrica is just, well, a bit of a city. Nevertheless we stop for coffee and a snack then hit the road again, negotiating through the busy city traffic before finding our quieter bike path. Today’s ride is largely flat as we weave across and back over and under our friend the E77 before leaving it behind and forging our way up the side of an extinct (I hope) volcano to Banská Štiavnica.

Not far out of Banská Bystrica we come across the wooden church at Hronsek. This is a Protestant church, part of a UNESCO Work Heritage Site that consists of nine wooden religious buildings in Slovakia. We’re both taken by the workmanship in this eighteenth century building.

When researching this trip I came across a great article The Mother of all Cycling Trips, written by John O’Mahony, about the trip he and a mate took on the Amber trail. While they did the trip in the reverse direction to us, it gave a lot of hints and pointers and also made me realise just how hard it was going to be.

I nicknamed this article the “Feck Arse Bollox” article and referred to it frequently. Today we climbed the “Feck Arse Bollox” hill (reverse side). Perhaps it is the four days of hard work so far that make me feel smug and much better able to climb than the author of the article. Or perhaps it is that we are climbing the other side of the hill (that is, the side that he came down), I don’t know, but this climb is nice and steady and none too taxing.

Today we see, for almost the first time, other cycling tourists, laden as we are. They are all coming downhill. We are clearly making this trip in the complete wrong direction. We do overtake another upward-bound group along the way, cyclists travelling with a support van and NOT carrying panniers. It is my wont to feel smug at these times and though I dearly, dearly, want to stop and rest, my cycling ego makes me ride on past, as if my bike did not weigh 30kg and as if I was as fit as Cadel Evans (even now that he is retired).

But my smugness catches up to me as the last stage before Banská Štiavnica is much steeper. Fortunately I find all sorts of good reasons to stop as we round a corner and catch a first glimpse of the Upper Church ofBanská Štiavnica’s Calvary – an open-air representation of the crucifixion of Jesus.

Having caught my breath – I mean, captured the view – we continue into the town. Banská Štiavnica is a pleasant surprise, with picturesque cobbled streets (that give us a good old shaking as we ride into town) lined with churches and elegant, colourful houses. It is an old mining town, with its main drawcards being the calvary, the old castle and the new castle, however, as a town it just exudes a pleasant stop-and-linger ambience which we, as weary cyclists, are happy to join.

We struggle to find our accommodation initially, until we find the coffee shop nearby which turns out to be where we check in. We are shown to our apartment which appears to be a room in somebody’s house, with the entry area strewn with personal objects such as children’s toys and computers. Nonetheless it is pleasant enough and gives us a safe place for the bikes while we go out and explore.

First stop is a beer in a café in the cobbled main street, then another in the town’s Pivovar (brewery) where we also indulge in some very tasty and welcome onion rings. We decide the Pivovar is a pleasant place to eat and discuss this with our waitress, who, we are sure, tells us we must wait 45 minutes to order. Strange, but we wait. When we do try to order we are told that the kitchen is closed. A few meagre words of language can be a good thing or a dangerous or confusing thing. No, she was not telling us we must wait 45 minutes; she was telling us we had only 45 minutes to order!

If you’ve ever cycled, even a fairly short distance, you understand that it makes you very hungry. You would also understand that if you had waited nearly an hour to order, only to be told you cannot have food, it makes you somewhat anxious, especially when the day is getting long and you don’t know what time the town starts shutting down.

We hightail out of the brewery and hunt down a restaurant in a back street, where, joy oh joy, they have a tofu dish on the menu. We enjoy wine and dinner at Restaurant Matej (part of the Grand Metej hotel), directly opposite the prettily lit Kostol Nanebovzatia Panny Márie (Church of the Assumption of Virgin Mary) and with views of the equally pretty New Castle. After dinner we take a late evening stroll up stairs near our apartment to the Old Castle. Like we need more exercise.

We have ridden up and over and survived the mountains called the “Low Tatras”. I am so terribly glad that we didn’t hit the High Tatras! From now we are cruising to the Danube. Rivers are in low areas, right?

Stats for today:

• Distance: 62.1km
• Climb: 484m
• Average speed: 17.9km/h
• Average temperature: 24C
• Moving time: 3:27:42
• See our ride on Strava

The beer picture

At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today there were two beers as it was a very thirsty day. The first was at pretty much the first cafe we found after we dumped our bikes and headed out. The second was at the town’s Pivovar, where we enjoyed the beer and suffered the consequences of not speaking the language (ie, we went hungry!)

Along the way today: