The UniCyclist

The UniCyclist takes his final exam, but his epic bike journey across Europe continues.

The studying part of UniCycle50 is now over. On 18 June I sat the exam for MT365 in Riga, Latvia, in a test room all alone. Well, there was also an invigilator. Pity.

The empty exam room probably hints that there aren't too many OU students in Latvia, but I did meet one. Paul lives on Latvia's remote coast. I visited him on the way to Riga. His tiny village, Jurmalciems, is a long way from anywhere. His home, whose garden is separated from a beautiful and beautifully deserted beach by a row of sand dunes, is a shrine to self-sufficiency. Here he grows onions and leeks, carrots and beets, all types of fruit and even his own tobacco. A lot of the fruit is turned into a range of delicious country wines. His house is like the lair of a mad scientist, with large demijohns containing fermenting liquids of various colour. I sampled a couple of his wines, a light bilberry one and then a richer chokeberry, and for a nightcap I tried his blackcurrant port. They were all much tastier than home-made wine has any right to be. You should have been there. You would have enjoyed it.

Two days later I was taking the final exam of this bike ride. I feel like I perhaps didn't do Riga justice. I was too preoccupied with revision. The day before the exam I spent so long revising in my hotel room that a couple of staff members came to check if I was alright. But what I saw of Riga was lovely. Well, the Occupation Museum wasn't lovely. Between Stalin and Hitler the Latvians had a tough time of it.

But now MT365 is done and I've nothing to study for, which is an odd feeling. Normally there is a slight sense of guilt whenever I'm somewhere and not reading or revising, but now I'm entirely free for the first time since I started cycling in March 2011. Luckily, the Kindle is stuffed full of books.

So , without an exam to revise for, or an OU course to complete, I decided to award myself a little holiday. Since my Russian visa isn't valid until the 1st of July, I have more than two weeks to kill in what little remained of Latvia and in Estonia. I've planned a lazy, 60 km per day (usually it's twice that) coastal tour of Estonia and its islands. The Baltic states are beautiful countries. The weather is as changeable as Scotland's, which makes sense given that they are on similar latitudes, but once again I've been lucky with more sun than is usually expected. The Sun God, he loves me. Unfortunately, the Wind God hates me.

The studying part of UniCycle50 may be over but there are still a lot of kilometres to be done - approximately 6,000 if I've calculated correctly. This includes 1,900 in Russia - a country that I seem to get warned about on a near daily basis - and 1,600 km in Scandinavia, 800 km avoiding a very expensive Danish ferry by cycling to the Dutch coast instead, and a final 1,600 km tour of the UK and Ireland. That should take me close to 35,000 in total. I still find it hard to comprehend how large a number that is.

And then, in September, the cycling will be done too and a big, joyous chunk of my life will be over, a chunk full of new friends, like Paul, bizarre food like the pig's ear I ate the other day, and the most wonderful places one could imagine. But the memories will last forever.
 

Every country that ever freed itself from an evil oppressor found a way to celebrate its release, but few countries have done it with as much style, beauty and humour as Lithuania. There are two options when it comes to having the last laugh: the first is to create something from the heart and the second is to stick up two fingers and really split your sides. Lithuania does both.

The city of Siauliai, in the north of the country, sits on a plain. Despite the flatlands that surround it, a hill has appeared. Now, if you've read either of my two blogs before, you'll know that I'm in no way religious, and, yes, what happened on his hill has everything to do with God but, more importantly, everything to do with being human.

In 1795, Lithuania became a part of the Russian Empire, a curse it wouldn't truly shake off until just over twenty years ago. Uprisings against the Russians would periodically happen and Lithuanians would die with their bodies lost in forests, never to be returned to their families. People took to remembering their unburiable loved ones with a cross on this hill. During Soviet reign, religion was banned. Still, the crosses came. The KGB stationed men around the hill to prevent the addition of crosses. They also twice builldozed the site and even went as far as to scheme a reservoir plan that would put it under water. Even so, by the 1980s, after all this time, the hill only had a couple of thousand crosses.

Then, on the 11th March 1990, liberation came and the people of this little country, with a population of just over 3 million, had the freedom to follow their faith and, by extension, to add crosses to the hill. And they did. And then people abroad heard about the hill and they started coming to Lithuania to add their own crosses too. One of those people was Pope John Paul II. He came here in 1993, added a cross, and celebrated mass for around a hundred thousand people.

The hill is now the most surreal religious location I've ever seen, bunches of smaller crosses hanging from larger crosses in an almost infinite regression - several hundreds of thousands of them - each one a symbol of a loved ones who died, or prayers for those still managing to cling on. There is more beauty and humanity on this tiny hill than in the grandest cathedral. This place was built with love, not money. For me, it's not the release of godliness here that is to be celebrated - I have no connection to that - but the release of what a nation really wanted for decades that was suppressed by the Russian Empire and then the USSR. They wanted to express love for someone and they were denied that. Freedom eventually overcame all.

Less serious is another magnificent Lithuanian gesture of freedom. In 1997, the bohemian residents of Užupis, a once-neglected district of Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, declared independence. They had an anthem and a flag and an army of 11. To understand the tongue-in-cheekedness of their claim, their national day is April 1. But what is the point of this elaborate joke? It's simply because they can. In the centuries previously, even a jokey insurrection would have been quashed. Now Lithuania was free. Satire was possible. And like all good satire, the humour is allowed to be daft but the message is serious. Once again, freedom overcame all.

The impression one gets is that liberty is very important for Lithuanians. It's odd coming here not long after Belarus. Life there seemed to be getting along adequately, albeit under a dictatorship. But if Lukashenko, the boss of Belarus, didn't want a hill full of crosses or a silly breakaway republic - with a constitution that claims that a dog has the right to be a dog - it simply wouldn't happen. Sometimes it's the little victories that are the most important.

Jolanta, the director of tourism in Vilnius, who gave me a certificate signed by the mayor, said that I could now be an ambassador for Lithuania. Yes, I can. Come here. It's nice. And it's free.

 

Sorry, it's been a couple of weeks, hasn't it? I've been busy with the cycling but also revision for my MT365 maths exam on the 11th June in Latvia. Since last time, when I was banging on about phony vampires, I've seen three more capitals. I wrote about Bucharest on my other blog, so that leaves Moldova's Chisinau and Ukraine's Kiev.

What can I say about Chisinau? Well, I can't see many people adding it to their bucket lists. It's got no real sights to see and none of that magic that you sometimes find in smaller cities, like the joyous Sarajevo. Moldova itself was lovely, a giant allotment of a country with, it seemed, each household growing fruit or vegetables in its back garden, maybe out of necessity but it still looked pretty. Moldova does countryside very well. But its cities are not up to much. And the country as a whole is desperately short on roadsigns. Finding your way out of a strange, car-stuffed city with half a million inhabitants and without any help at junctions or roundabouts is a bit taxing. Perhaps it's the Moldovan government's way of keeping you trapped in town spending your money.

Luckily, using the power of my trusty compass, I escaped the city. The first road sign confirmation that I was on the right road out of town came about 20 kilometres from the centre. I was heading to Orhei or, rather, a small village, Trebujeni, nearby that has a little, pink house. And after the traffic, noise and dirt of Chisinau it was lovely to spend one evening sat in the garden of the little pink house, reading as the sun went down, being served up way too much Moldovan home cooking. Don't worry, it didn't go to waste; I took cakes and pancakes with me the following day to sustain me on the next leg. If you fancy a trip to Moldova, skip Chisinau and go to the pink house.

A week or so later I was hauling myself into Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. I'd been warned that hotel prices in Kiev were inflated. Although my first Ukrainian night cost me only €8, the cheapest bed of my entire tour, elsewhere in Ukraine I'd been paying around €25 for a room. Kiev would be double this, giving my budget a good kicking. Ten minutes after hitting the city proper, I found a hotel that €50. I was all ready to accept this when the glum receptionist added that she wanted another €4 per night to lock up my bike. Every other hotel on this trip has done this for free and so I walked away. If I'd found an offer so soon, how hard could it be to find a second?
It would be two hours before I found another room, cycling around a 2.5 million inhabitant city without a map. The first hotel I approached was full, the second was, ahem, a dog hotel (OK, I know the Ukrainian word for 'hotel', but not 'dog'). The next was full, the next's only remaining single room was 'premier', whatever that means, and was going to cost me €170. Er, no thanks. The next was full. I was beginning to think that I might end up sleeping in a park. But then I found a tiny place, with only seven rooms, and they wanted the same price as the very first hotel and were happy to include the price of the stored bike. Result! Much longer searching and I might have returned to the dog hotel and given them €20 for a cage.

So, having cycled around much of Kiev already, the next day I went out to explore. I wonder if all this city seeing is making me slightly jaded. Kiev has some lovely churches, the glittering, onion-domed towers of Orthodox architecture, but it also has a lot of the crap that comes with a successful tourist market, people dressed up in costume to winkle the cost of a photo out of a passing tourist. You could choose from a rabbit, a pharoah, Scrat from Ice Age and a manky-looking home-made Bart Simpson with a nose that would have been more more suited to Squidwood - all national icons of Ukraine, as you well know. And you also had plenty of those turnips who dress up as statues and then stand about. I think if you've looked at the balance of your talents and decided that your only chance of income comes from standing still for hours on end, it's probably time to get that CV moving with an OU course.

Chisinau and Kiev may not have been this year's Rome or Istanbul but I'm glad I've seen them, and even happier that I saw all the places in between. But now it's time to go as eastern European as it's possible to go. Next stop, Belarus!