The End of an Amazing Adventure (for now).

It was good to be back in Europe, so good. Back in my home continent long-term for the first time in nearly 8 years. Though with the continental border-crossing, my touring style had to downgrade a little - through most of Asia I could ride until tired and wherever that was, there would be somewhere affordable to stay. South Eastern Europe is still cheap compared to the wealthiest countries in the world, but Turkey was a step up in budget from most of Asia, and SE Europe is another step up again, so now I have to check ahead and plan my route to match up with towns with cheaper accommodation, or with a place I can legally camp, otherwise I would rip through the last of my cycling budget way too quickly. It all works out fine though.

Through Bulgaria, Romania and back into Bulgaria I'm mostly cycling through rural areas, farmland, plus a few nice small historic towns. I feel a sense of nearing the finish line which partly energises me to ride further and faster, but the encroaching end of the greatest journey of my life (certainly past and present, maybe future too) casts a small cloud - beginning a journey is always so much more exciting than finishing one! By taking the long road through Turkey (see last post) there was no way I was now going to make it back to Scotland before my new job in Prague began, and there was also a probability I wouldn't make it all the way to Prague before I needed to finish up my riding in time for my new job. But that was not going to be a big problem - I just wanted to enjoy these last few days of total freedom as best I could, and I could take a train to Prague from wherever I make it to.

Veloroute 6 mostly follows the Danube through Central/Eastern Europe and the Loire in France to create a trans continental route connecting the Black Sea to the Atlantic, and it seems the obvious way for me to track West through Europe, so after crossing the Turkish border, I ride north for a couple of days, to reach the Danube and the VR6, then more or less follow the Danube through Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Hungary.

The nicest stretch of Veloroute 6, by many accounts, is the Romanian/Serbian border through the "Iron Gates" canyon, a narrowing of the Danube where the Carpathian Mountains nearly come up against the Balkan Mountains. By now I was cutting corners from the not-too-direct Veloroute 6 to get to the Czech Republic in time to start my new job, but I made time to include this stretch, and I'm glad I did. It was by far the best cycling I did in SE Europe - majestic scenery and good riding

A quick stop in lovely Belgrade and then onwards. Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia had been welcoming and pleasant to ride, but all too brief.

And so on in to Hungary, which I now knew would be my final country before work and normality beckoned. It was a couple of days ride until I reached the capital and I would have 1 night here before catching the train to Prague.

The loud American in my Budapest hostel was of that "certain age", the generation amongst whom so many seem to want to leave as their legacy a destruction of the world order, through voting in Trump, Brexit, right-wing bigotry, etc, etc. The generation who's parents defended a free world for them by sacrificing themselves in a global war; who's parents also paid enough taxes to cover free university education for them; the generation who used their huge population demographic to vote to repeatedly pay taxes well below the governments expenditure during the height of their earning power (leaving debts for their children to pay); voted to make their children pay their own university fees; and who's retirement is being paid for by their children, because repeated governments refused to grasp the nettle of either insisting they pay more into the system whilst working, or retire later. Yes, a boomer (I'm not blaming all of you! But there is a lot of your generation who seem hell-bent on leaving the world a far worse place than it has been for most of their life).

This particular boomer, had some Hungarian roots and bellowed his opinions around the hostel, and when he asked me about my cycle through the land of his forebears, bellowed his rank opinions even louder. Much to his disgust, my experiences of Hungary were not all good!

When I left the UK in 2011, the world was a very different place, the past 7 1/2 years have been the most volatile in my lifetime shaking up the way people think, and the way people act towards one another. I was aware that travelling through the former Eastern Bloc countries might expose me to some people with particularly unpleasant politics and views. Nationalism and ugly politics is on the rise as much, if not more so than in Western Europe, yet my experience in Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia was good. Maybe I was lucky, but people in all these countries were mostly friendly and treated me with respect.

Hungary was different. I'm not for a moment saying that Hungarian people per se are racist or unpleasant (any more than I'm accusing boomers per se of being the same). No, I met a large number of people in Hungary who were nice enough, friendly, respectful, however the percentage of idiots went through the roof. In over a month in Turkey I had 1 bad experience where I was treated with hostility by a guy who accused me of being a Syrian refugee (even after he'd seen my passport), and thought this was an acceptable reason to treat my like dirt. In just 2 days in Hungary I experienced multiple instances of just plain rude, disrespectful people.

There was the guy in the hot spring pool at a campsite, who got up and moved to the opposite, more crowded (whiter) side of the pool with a disdainful glance in my direction when I sat next to him. I sat at least a couple of metres away, didn't talk to him or touch him as I walked past him, or do anything at all that could have caused upset from my side - this was clearly just pure hostility based on nothing other than prejudice.

There was the hugely disrespectful driving, again from a minority - most drivers gave reasonable passing distance, and waited if oncoming traffic made it dangerous to pass. However, the number of drivers who didn't, went up significantly compared to the other countries I've been in lately, and much worse, a few drivers were driving in an extremely hostile manner, which I haven't seen in a long while - eg overtaking from the opposite side and driving directly at me, forcing me to pull over to the gravel at the edge of the road and making me and the bike almost come crashing down because of the draught created by their fast, close driving - I repeatedly signalled or manoeuvred to discourage this before they had fully pulled out, but several drivers ignored this, even making angry gesticulations in my direction, and a few other drivers going the same direction as me wound down their windows and shouted things in Hungarian as they passed me, for no obvious reason (and I could tell that, unlike my experience of so many shouting drivers in Central and Western Asia, these drivers most definitely weren't shouting encouragement!).

As I ride through small villages and countryside all over the world, I tend to smile, or wave or say hello to people. This can often turn a stare into a smile, and again this was the norm from most people in Hungary, but rather than the usual less than 1% of people who deliberately blank me out or make a negative face, here probably 1 in 10 people, or even more responded negatively. Just to re-iterate - I'm not suggesting that Hungarians are innately rude or hostile or racist, just that there is a significantly larger % of idiots here. I wonder whether having a seriously nasty leader (Viktor Orban), leads to those with dodgy character to feel more emboldened? Or if the reason that he got into power is because so many people like this live here! But then Serbia and Turkey also both have pretty lousy leaders, without the same number of people (in my experience) with bad attitudes.

Bellowing Boomer (and quite clearly a Trump-flag-waver and Orban supporter) hardly let me begin my story before he was jumping down my throat - I must be a dirty liberal, who is just a snowflake who is looking for excuses to call people racists and names like that. I explained that I was willing to not judge most of the perpetrators of these incidents, and even assume that my lack of Hungarian language skills might mean the shouting car drivers were innocent, but that the hot spring pool incident had no other reasonable explanation. I explained that I had had no such experiences in Serbia, Bulgaria or Romania, and I had previously thought that Serbia might have a similar level of right-wing xenophobia, so it was not me "looking for trouble" specifically in Hungary. He changed his tack and started ranting about how badly I had dealt with the situation, and I should have used it to educate the poor old boy who was clearly a good guy whose views just come from some bad experiences he has sadly had to suffer. I had not told American Boomer how I had reacted in the hot springs incident, he just assumed, I was not going to waste my breath with the American any more and made a polite excuse to leave. He had clearly made his mind up that the Hungarian people who treated me badly were in the right, and I was in the wrong, and his attitude reminded me that it's not just Hungary, but also the US, and a sad minority in every country that have issues!

This is the problem with the world right now. Instead of looking at problems and trying to see them for what they are, in all their complexity, we are entrenching into tribes who want to see things in black and white and assume everyone in the other tribe is wrong. I'm a liberal, moderate, centrist, so to the American Trump-supporter in the hostel, I MUST be the problem, and yet objectively, to treat somebody in a hot spring pool the way the man had done to me is nothing other than bigotry and racism - without justification. Even American Boomer had to admit this, but instantly tried to turn it around another way to make me (the liberal) appear to be the offender in the wrong.

I rode from the hostel to Budapest train station. This was it. The end of my big, big journey - well for now at least. There is still a good school summer holiday's worth of riding to connect Budapest to Scotland, and complete the circle, but the most amazing 2 year stretch of my rtw cycle - my career-break/sabbatical of freedom and riding closes here.

It's incredibly sad to think that my bigger journey began 8 years ago with such excitement about what lay ahead in the world beyond, and the closing chapter before I return to a more "normal" life was overshadowed with negative experiences in Hungary, and this reflects the wider, sad descent of the world into madness - from the current mess in Hong Kong, through wider Chinese brutality I saw for myself while cycling there, Trump, Brexit, the rise of the far right across the world, Populist leaders in power in India, Brazil, The Philippines, etc. with more of these extremists knocking on the doors of power in most countries, and so on and so on. I knew it was coming. If you read my biography, you will see that I called this descent into madness back in 2011.

It's tempting to leave it at that and yet, and yet I can't do that. Whilst the world is a darker place, the idiots seem to be emboldened, and the sheeple seem to be swayed into voting with the idiots; I still can't help but be amazed by the generosity of spirit of people I've met along the way. From my time in SE Asia, through Japan, Taiwan and China; onwards through Central Asia, across Western Asia, and back into Europe, I have experienced kindness, discovered solidarity, and made friends in the most unexpected places. The vast majority of people know in their hearts what the difference is between right and wrong, and in particular the younger generation are aware of how messed up the direction we're heading in is.

My biggest takeaway lesson from the past 2 years is not anything to do with the physical exertion of riding around the globe; or the resilience gained from making it back on the bike after a massive back injury; or learning from coming face to face with bears, storms, earthquakes, etc.; or "discovering myself"; or being enlightened by seeing so much of the world's great heritage and culture; no, it's the realisation that we as the earths inhabitants must get our act together. As a Christian, I believe that we will never truly achieve this because we are by nature a sinful people. However, there have been many periods in history where we have managed to live alongside one another in relative peace and harmony, treating one another with mutual respect, and it's definitely preferable to live out our time on the Earth this way. We need to tackle this from the top and bottom. We must be good citizens - look out for those around us in trouble, and just be nicer to everyone. And we need to take head on rotten leadership - we all have a responsibility to call out and help bring down those who lie, who use power for their own selfish ends, and those who would drive us towards extremism. I'm repeatedly reminded of Kennedy's misattributed quote that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”, as people who instinctively know how bad Trump and Johnson and the others are, but do and say nothing rather than potentially upset anyone, or support them knowing that they're bad, but because they like a particular populist policy. The next few years will be a roller coaster ride for our planet as those with questionable ideology push every button of confused people to gain power.

And so I hang up my bike in Prague, as I start my new teaching job - my next exciting adventure, albeit a very different adventure from this one. I will be back to add a final chapter to my cycling adventure during the long school summer holidays - Hungary to Scotland: Closing the Circle.