From Poland, my original idea was to cycle through Ukraine to Romania, but the border police wanted it differently. From Biała Podlaska, where I’d rested for three nights with friends of my mother, it took me three days of cycling to the small border southeast of Belzec. From the evening of the first day and onward, a persistent rainfall from a dense, grey sky. I camp a couple of miles before the border, but the next morning is a no-no. The Ukrainian border police tells me that only cars, trucks and buses may pass – the border is too small for bicycles. I try with some cash – an extra page in my passport – but nothing helps. Their facial expressions are as helplessly grey as the sky above.

Instead of – as the border police suggests – enter through a somewhat larger border a day’s cycling south, I quickly decide to instead travel through Slovakia and Hungary to Romania. It’s a journey that will practically follow the new frontiers of the European Union until Turkey. A question kept occurring in my mind those days: when in history did we as humans do wrong in order to end up with borders that accept machines but not ourselves?

The rain continues until Hungary: A dry night at a cheap hostel I Przemyśl; a great camping night next to the house of a family in Poland’s southeastern corner – shower, dinner, breakfast and a jar of their home-made honey for the road; a beautiful, winding road along the Laborec River after passing the Slovak border; three nights indoors – two in Slovakia and one in Hungary – with people along the road that kindly invited me.

After a served breakfast of six fried eggs, ham, bacon, bread and vegetables, I continue the last kilometers from my host in Hungary to the Romanian border. I soon meet Parisian Jean-Luc, and we make company during three mountainous days across the Transylvania region. I’m now resting at the house of Razvan in Suceava – a friendly architect student whom I got in touch with through the usual Hospitalityclub.

Come next week, I will continue south along the Siret River. It was flooded to catastrophe only a few days ago – the region having received even more of the rain than I had – leaving at least four people dead in the country’s northeastern region, Moldavia. I shouldn’t have much more than twenty days to go until Istanbul. I hope that the Turkish people appreciate bicycles more than the Ukrainians!

After only 40 kilometers – the last bit uphill through a misty and beautifully mysterious forest, I cross the border to Slovakia. A magnificent, wide view of steep hillsides, green grass and cattle; blue mountaintops in the distance. The road winds down to the Laborec River in the valley below and then follows it together with a railway heading south. It’s a great, easy route for cycling. There was no actual border – it’s all the European Union these days – but I’m able to change my Polish money to Slovakian in a small shop in the second town that I pass, although the rate was probably not the best as their was no competition.

Most of the road reminds me of cycling in Gabon – no monkeys of course, but deer and birds. Constant rain. Fog lifting form the dense forests. The road following the railway and the mighty – by rain made dirty brown – river. Its force gives me energy.

I find it difficult in the afternoon when I ask people for a place to camp – nobody seems to understand, or worse maybe it is that nobody cares. I’m relieved when I finally find a family whose daughter Zuzana is fluent in English after having worked in London. She is also the fastest ever to tell me not to pitch my tent, but instead come sleep inside. Five minutes after arriving, my bike is in their garage, my most precious belongings in a room upstairs, I’m newly showered in a borrowed pair of slippers and food is on the kitchen table. We sit there for hours talking about life, work, travel, Slovakia and whatever more comes to our minds. I’ve rarely found such relaxed, open and easy-spoken hosts. The next morning, they give me some of their homegrown tomatoes, cucumbers and paprika for the road. Delicious!

I’m greatly hosted in Tarnawa Dolna, some thirty kilometers from the border of Slovakia, where a family invites me to join them for dinner and use their Internet. I’m camping outside, but it’s been raining madly for the past three days. I’m invited to stay inside; surf the net. They mother gives me a ‘Tropic’ soda drink – a stark contrast to the rain and thunder outside the window, making noise as if heaven was being torn down.

Before I leave the next morning, they give me a jar of homemade honey – ”from the best region” – with their address on the label. Absolutely delicious on a piece of rye bread.

At the border, I’m turned away by the Ukrainian immigration: ”This border is too big for bicycles. Only trucks and buses can pass. No bicycles.” I try with a few loose pages in my – a five, a ten, a twenty – but nothing works. They really think that the border is too small for me. I’m pissed off to be honest, but try to be keep cool. Hide my hand in my pocket before showing them my finger. I turn back; have to go through Slovakia and Hungary instead to reach Romania.
Again, the rain is hailing through-out the day. I’m soaked wet and cold; pay myself a warm stay at a cheap government hostel in Przemyśl.
I can’t stop thinking of how silly we can be as people when we just go by the book and not by reason. When machines – trucks, busses, cars – can pass between two nations, but people can’t.

I pedal the last bit to the Ukrainian border, to try and make an early crossing come next morning. A family allows me to camp between the apple trees on their front yard. The man warns me: ”Ukraine is dangerous,” he says after I’ve explained my intended route. I hope he says it in the same way as people say ”Oh, but Africa is dangerous!” I.e. because they don’t know. Fear of what is unknown, or maybe different. “G. W. Bush-fear”.

Rain, rain, rain. The whole evening yesterday, the night, the morning today, noon and afternoon. Only by three pm, the rain abates and the sun breaks through the dense cloud cover for a minute or two.

I get going from Pokrówka an hour later, and reach 26 kilometers further south to a small village. Friendly Peter and his family give me a place to camp. An hour or so of early evening sunshine before the rain returns. I’m given a little bit of food and a taste of Ukrainian sweet red wine by the kitchen table. I’m warned – not for the first time – of Ukraine: ”Corruption – give them five, ten or maybe twenty.” Extra pages in the passport.

Peter himself will travel there tomorrow morning by car – a lot of goods, especially petrol, is much cheaper there, so they go for shopping and intend to come back that same day.

After a long day on the saddle, I finally find a place to camp in Pokrówka just after Chełm. The owner of a big farm allows me to pitch my tent on some grass behind the main building. His companion – Marcin – soon arrives to make me company and chat. Having worked as a bouncer in London for a while, his English is fluent and a rare opportunity for me to both be understood and understand. The wife of the owner comes by in the late afternoon with both delicious food and a cake.

Marcin himself will soon travel to Cuba or Mexico with his wife and some friends. He shows me his wedding ring: ”We call it GPS. Someone keeps track of me wherever I go.” Seconds later, his cell phone rings – it’s his wife calling.

Again through my mother’s work colleague Anna, I get to stay in Biała Podlaska with her wonderful parents Ela and Jacek. On my second day in town, Anna arrives too after having quickly decided to take a short vacation from work back home in Sweden. It’s good for me to organize a few things in town, and to speak some Swedish with Anna. Her parents are wonderful hosts, too. Before Anna arrived, they drove me to the Belarus border and back on a tour through the neighborhood. It’s an interesting border these days, as it is now also the border between the European Union and Belarus (which in turn is quite close with Russia).

The food that Ela made – almost solely based on vegetables, fruits and herbs from their garden – was amongst the best I’ve ever had.

Through a colleague of my mother, I get to stay with Pawel in Siemiatycze. He and his mom welcome me greatly, and Pawel shows me around town and the vicinity in a car-borne tour. Come evening, we visit the nearby bar for a try-out of the local beers. A few beers later, I’ve met with journalist Marek for a small piece about my journey in the local paper.

Cycling through larger city Bialystok, I pass an old red brick factory and hear through the small, elevated windows the weaving machines as if still mid-19th century. The noise is deafening.

Camp the night behind house of farmers. The son, Jarek, is just a day older than I, and I’m treated as part of the family. Dinner by the small kitchen table with Jarek; his mother my the stove. A hot soup of broth, something green, some pieces of meat and boiled eggs. Bread with margarine, various sausages, and giant tomatoes from their own green houses. Yoghurt with 17% fat with the soup. Boiled coffee. Sugar.

Jareks mom is also cleaning vigorously – her third daughter will wed in just three days. I join them in the car – combining a quick tour of nearby Bielsk Podlaska with fixing this and that for the wedding: collecting a dress at a friend’s house, a dress for the priest at yet another house, baking forms for the cake, flavorings for drinks. One of Jareks sisters who is driving is all stressed-up; his mother in the back seat is laid-back, giving a facial expression of it all being ‘just another wedding’.

I get a small introduction to the family’s religion, too. They belong to the minority 19% Orthodox in Poland – most of whom reside in the east of the country, with its proximity to Belarus and Russia. We visit two of the churches.

Camp by house of a friendly family. Shower, dinner and the next morning a filling breakfast. The family has a son in Chicago; a daughter in Florida, and it’s not the first time that hospitality towards foreigners has reason in the family’s own international background. There’ll be sunshine tomorrow, they say.

Hospitality, as expected, increases on a daily basis as I travel south. Today, after knocking the gate of a roadside house in pursuit of a shelter from a heavy rain, a wonderful couple invited me for coffee and food by their living room table.

When I’m looking for a suitable house at which to ask for shelter or a place to camp, I look for flowers or children’s toys outside, or for the house to be newly painted – signs of care-taking and life. This couple had plenty of flowers, and so I knocked. In Poland, someone told me that there is a saying: ”Bad people never sing”.

Sitting beneath colored black and white portraits of their grandparents, the man and woman first serves me coffee – here usually the grounded benas and hot water directly in the cup, drunk once the grind has settled/sunk to the bottom. Then bread with sausages, and tomatoes and cucumbers from the adjacent garden.

We communicate best we can through a mix of my English, French and German, and their Lithuanian and Russian, as well as body language and paper-drawing. Unfortunately, they were on their way back to town that same evening (this was their simple retreat for the weekends), but when I left the sun was shining.

I continue across the border to Poland and find a camping site by Lake Zelwa, some 20 kilometers from the border. A beautiful setting, a beer from some fellow campers and a caretaker that never showed up to collect the 8 Zloty camping fee made it an excellent finish of a long day.