(Re)cycling home: Yes we can(s and bottles)!

You would think that putting a deposit on a can or bottle would lead people to hand them back in and retrieve their money, but at some point I started noticing that in Sweden, apart from a lot of forest, there is a lot of trash to be found next to the road. That a considerable part of this rubbish is made up of deposit carrying beverage containers, started making sense after a couchsurfer I met mentioned that he often asks for his team mates' cans. Slowly I began to understand the potential of this thing: picking up the cans I passed on my way could sponsor my daily lunch. The reality showed several practicalities too, like cans that have been going through the lawn mower are not accepted, nor are the tax-free beers that are brought in from other countries, but at some days where for instance the weather was so shit that I could use a bit of distraction, I was able to harvest over 40 SEK (€ 5,00) in tin and plastic, once even topping 100 SEK. Grabbing the optimism, I even thought up (and directly discarded) a new slogan: (Re)Cycling home? Yes, we can(s and bottles)! Heading south from Oslo, it seemed I was almost there.

A few days later, when the ferry is about to dock in Helsingor, and with view on Hamlet's castle, my phone buzzes. "Welcome in Denmark! Your tariffs are.." reads the message. I smile contently: I have officially arrived in Danish territory. With the demise of passport controls throughout Europe, the little booklet has lost it's function as tool for destination bragging when it comes to the trips closer to home, but the mobile phone has moved into the gap with a completely private initiative. But the result is the same, and thus I find myself casually drawing my cell and waving around the message of "Welcome to Liechtenstein" and "Welcome to Latvia" when demanding appreciation for my recent cycling bender. In the meantime my new and virginal passport sits brooding somewhere deep in my luggage, plotting his revenge on trips that include other continents and trigger happy stamp handlers.

Sometimes something happens and at the exact same moment the first thing that comes to mind is: "What a bugger, absolutely no-one is going to believe this!". Sometimes when you write down events as they exactly happened, you end up with fiction of such imaginative poverty that you wonder why it actually had to happen that way. Sometimes you wonder if your life is shaped according to the logic of some moralist tale, judged by the quirks of fate dropping in on your own narrative. But when I rolled my bike onto the boat that would take me from Scandinavia unto the continent after thousands of kilometres, and on the ship's ramp my chain snapped, those were exactly the thoughts that went through my head.

Not a heroic ending at the hands of a reckless motorized barbarian, nor over-exhaustion, dehydration or anything. No, making the boat in a frantic race against the clock, I lost my chain upon boarding. And without that mechanic 'thread of life', (and where can you find a bike shop in Germany that is open past Saturday afternoon?) a steel stallion like mine becomes as useful as a wheelbarrow or a step scooter. And what gives? A whole bunch of Dutch truck drivers just happen to return home empty and don't mind dropping me off on the way. So with that unconvincingly surprising finale, my bike trip ends on the edge of Scandinavia, right before docking in Luebeck, a town I passed on the way up. Yes, this story includes a sudden defeat, an early return, but at thesame time a full circle and a mission completed. So I apologize for all the cheesy and misplaced symbolism here, but sometimes my life just happens to read like bad fiction.

Swedish delight

It is as summery as it will get in Scandinavia, so with a balmy 23 degrees Celsius I have to praise the weather gods for this leniency on the part of my trip that I most need it: hitting a cold front this far North wouldn't be pretty.

Heading on its north/south axis for a while now, it is hard not to notice that Sweden is looooooong. It should be called Sweeden or maybe even Sweeeden, to emphasize how much Europe's Chile stretches out on the map. The population density, especially in the North, is very low, so even the big towns are with there several tens of tousands of inhabitants not your average metropolis. In between there is lots and lots of forest and some mean, big highways that you simply cannot escape.

The first time I met the E4 was just outside of Umea. I had done soem research priorly and found that, noted with a green line, the road was classified as a European highway. That tis minor fact didn't change the likelyhood of me encountering it again to a definite 0% was the most frightning of things. You can

look it up on the map yourself, even the official government's created bike route 'cykelsparet', a route that simply loves dirt tracks and detours, every now and again sends shivering cyclists for tens of kilometers along its haphazardly designed and narrow shoulder.

Now this isn't the first time I find myself on a highway, but one expects Sweden to be, well, better than that. You'd think that the friendly folk wouldn't like to find a squashed foreign cyclist on their plate, but clearly there are other priorities in traffic.

Like saying 'hi'. In Swedish it is actually a 'hei', a higher pitched sound that does simply not exist in English (correct me if I'm wrong), and is usually followed by a second one, resulting in the colloquial 'hei hei!', best answered with a 'hei hei' of your own. After the sturdy Balts and the fleshy Fins that would rather stare you down than usher even the slightest nod, going around the Swedish coast is a bloody wave-a-thon.

But not only the weather is surprisingly great, so are the roadside snacks (and I'm not talking about the flat rodents often encountered). The blueberries are great in number and taste, encountered in any random patch of wood entered and free of charge to be picked by all. But this was also the case in Finland, and the blueberry has ever been my favourite. That position has been held by the pretty pink raspberry, a rare delicacy in the Netherlands where it is grossly outnumbered by the blackberry, its evil thorny twin brother. In Finland I started running into bushes of my pretty pink favourite, where I wanted to describe the encounter as "there were almost too many to eat", but by now, my raspberry affair has gone through some quantity time and I cant even say that I could almost eat all of them. And being full because of eating raspberries, my dear reader, is the greatest sense of wealth one can achieve. Berry nice indeed.

Estonishment

I was prepared to find a sturdy naked man bent over a small stove against a wall filled with an empty beer bottle collection. I wasn’t even flustered by the glistening sweat dripping from his back through his body hair. It was the green felt cap on his head that really got me.

The sauna keeps an almost sacred place in Estonian households. Removed a little from the main building to prevent possible fire to jump over to the main house, the older the sauna, the better. It is a place for relaxing and socialization, with its own little particular rules. Like the fact that during the breaks in the relax room, grandfather gets the first sip of every beer passed around. And after a few rounds, there is the beating with the warm wet branches to get the blood to the skin surface, but this only happens once or twice a session. As all negativity are kept out of the sauna, it is also the best place to ask someone a favor, especially if a few cans have been emptied already.

I was assured that sauna will help against every small physical discomfort, so after three consecutive nights of sauna I found myself down with a nice case of sinusitis. Maybe I should have stayed in the sauna longer.

It seems that Baltic cities are still trying to find out how they feel towards cyclists. Their attitude is rather ambivalent: at one point there is a fantastic asphalt bike path going through a green part of the town, parallel to the main street, but away from the heavy rumble, and at other moments there is a shadily drawn bicycle on the side of a potholed cobblestone road where trucks turn, or the fancy bike way suddenly ceases on the opposite side of the highway leaving you facing oncoming traffic and a separating fence in the middle that could not be cleared by a human alone, let alone one with a bike full of packs.

My experiences in the Netherlands and Cyprus have told me how it can be different in opposite directions. In Cyprus, cyclists are seen as adversaries by all other traffic. Bike roads don’t exist, traffic is a jungle and you are lowest in the food chain. In the Netherlands, we do not know how well we have it. Like third generation feminists, we wonder why the rest of the world is so up in arms about. What, “Critical Mass”? Cycling in a monthly tour around town with as many bikes as possible to stop the traffic? Doesn’t that smell of activism? But the truth is not that we Dutch don’t care about our rights as road users. We don’t need Critical Mass because we already have a critical mass of cyclists on the road going from A to B on their steel studs, without anyone but the odd tourist raising a single eyebrow about it.

But not only empowered cyclists play a part in the proliferation of cyclification in the Baltics. Another reason is more down to earth: when requesting funding from the EU to build a road, a bike path needs to be included or the cash machine says no. This explains why sometimes on the weirdest places bike roads pop up and suddenly disappear: the road renovation paid for by uncle Europe got lost in its own silly set of rules.

With too much admin surrounding the Russian visa, I have decided to stop the Eastern move and continue North-West for now, circumventing the Baltic sea. Tomorrow I take the boat to Helsinki, and from there it will be slowly honing in on home via Scandinavia, once again strange terrain for me. Enough room again for improvisation, so all tips and ideas about this part of the world are welcome.

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Hit by a Polonez

I'm not sure if it is because German drivers expect me to carry an extremely contagious infection that will jump straight through their windows if they pass me within two meters, or if they genuinely care about me (and their no-claim car insurance payments), but I can't help to get nervous when I'm driving on the shoulder of a two lane road and a car slows down and keeps driving behind me slowly for half a kilometre because he's not able to see if a car might be coming from the other direction in the next kilometre. The slow roar of the car is enough for me to imagine the cocking of a semi-automatic so favoured by the Balkan freelancers well known in the Dutch underworld since the late nineties. So far the burst of gunfire never came, but the suspense has been unbearable. Since I crossed the border I have experienced the Polish road use, and I definitely prefer the Polish method of honestly offing cyclists by means of 10-ton wood trucks thundering past within centimetres.

All around in Poland, budget supermarkets are taking over the scene, like they already dominate the German landscape. The funniest looking one is Biedronka, which translates into ‘lady bug’, and has a smiling specimen as its logo. In small towns the chain is fervently building and opening and on my way from Szczecin to Gdansk I met several stores in varying stages of construction. Hiding from an approaching massive thunderstorm I sat down under the overhang at a Biedronka that had not opened yet, but was busy being stocked. As I inconspicuously ate my sandwiched while the rain was thundering down around me I was the witness of the following scene. A car approached, laden with what seemed a family, and two people sprinted out through the rain, leaving the grandparents in the car. As they stood in front of the doors, water glistening on their bald skulls, I gestured to no avail that it was closed, but they still expected the sliding doors to open sesame, ignoring the weirdly dressed up bike enthusiast sitting on the floor and focusing hopefully on the visible personnel filling the racks. Then one looked closer at a note displayed near the entrance, spat out the word “Kurova!” and ushered the others back out through the rain into the car. As I continued eating my sandwiches, the same amusing and relatively absurd scene repeated itself three times over, only the protagonists and words of disappointment changed.

Even though the weather has kept balancing between unbearable and unpleasant, the people welcoming me through Couchsurfing have been fantastic, the glacier made landscape phenomenal and the food has been amazing. Strawberries and cherries have been in season and are offered in large, rectangular shaped baskets. In the last week and a half, I must have eaten 6 or 7 pigs. Its been a great week and a half.

Bremen on a rainy date

To my horror, I notice that by logging in into the new Blogger while in Germany, my domain name has been changed to .de. And wherever I seek to change the error, Google does not allow.

As I speed through the peat bogs, another shower hammers down on my back, the big drops bouncing off my jacket, but finding their way into the running leggings I'm wearing on top of my bike shorts. They give off a cool sensation on impact, but lose their chilling potential as the wetsuit-like material protects me from the raging wind. I feel like eating, sitting down, or having a look at the surprisingly frequently appearing megaliths, but I pedal on. I have a date in Bremen.

I've had better weather during my cycling tours before, but this time I have brought what it takes to battle the cold and rainy weather. I agree, it is shitty to be packing your gloves and beany on a legit summer trip, but I'll pack whatever is necessary to keep the elements at bay. Just pretend it's autumn in Turkey.

Or summer in South Africa. My thoughts go back to another trip, two years ago, when I was in a similar hurry to keep a time. The occasion was eerily similar, it had snowed that night on the wet plateau we were crossing in the direction of Port Elisabeth. I was in a car with Jono and Jonty, two soon-to-be friends who later both visited me in the Netherlands, and we sped to the next town to be on time. When we hurried into the local Steers (a SA steak chain with the worst kind of native American theme), we found ourselves lucky enough to catch the Fifa World Cup's Dutch opener Netherlands-Denmark on the big screen.

The last football tournament I experienced in the Netherlands has been the 2006 World Cup, after that I've spent my even-year summers elsewhere. But whether it was in the Southern hemisphere winters of Oz or SA, or this year in the German summer: the weather has failed to impress.

Once again seated among strangers in nippy circumstances, the Dutch love for their team amped up to a alienating high in the last few weeks in a display of orange in simply everything imaginable, is put in perspective by group B's first matches. Even though I have seen German households also sporting flags and other paraphernalia in the local tri-colore along the road from the border til Bremen, a short look at the score today shows that they do have a striker in their team. As the crowd of blanket-clad Bremeners roars when Gomez finishes an opportunity beautifully, I consider sailing on under a different flag. No better place to be on group B's opening day then in cloudy Teutonia; and I have a feeling that the same might count for Wednesday to come.

Maybe changing into reinierkicking.blogspot.de isn't such a bad move after all.

The big drop

Geographical location becomes irrelevant once, cocooned in metal; fuelled by fossils, landscape morphs into a mere backdrop of our movement placated with convenience enhancing little rituals. The road you walk down differs from the road you cycle on; the mountain you fly over is a different piece of rock than the one whose snowy pass you subject your fully inadequate little Japanese vehicle to. Speed is one factor here, affection the other.

Temporally subjected as we are, by hurdling past we simply 'get' less from our surroundings, as there is a maximum of impressions finding a way into our head. Running down a hill we simply spend less time doing so than climbing it on the way back. But as logical as this principle works, so veiled is the subject of affection.

Affection describes the case in which something proves able to influence your well-being and become 'of value' to you. This can be both positive and negative in nature: people are affected as much pheromones as they are by nerve gas. The higher the intensity of affection, the stronger the passing of time is felt; the more a landscape affects the traveller, the brighter the imprint left on the mental retina.

The workings of affection are harder to explain than those of speed, and the reasons for its occurrence as playfully multivalent as bound up with personal whims.

It's three in the afternoon as I suddenly wake with a start to find myself drowsily sprawled on a couch, the doors to he balcony open and an oppressive heat touching my freshly sunburnt skin.

It's six in the morning when I exit the house where we ended up after a night around the snowy white town. Whitin minutes on my bicycle the icy pins and needles in my
face go a uncanny kind of numb, as I stand on the pedals to get myself to safety quickly.

Everytime I try to understand how these two occurrences fit within a time frame of 48 hours I realise I can't. The monumentality of affection of each is simply too large. Combined with the unnerving workings of speed in air travel, I find myself wondering how skating on the Amsterdam canals relates to swimming in the Indian ocean, how getting stuck on a frozen rail network ties in with a combi driver who forgot to put diesel, and how getting stung by mosquitoes relates to the feeling that your toes are falling off. And since my still spinning head doesn't seem to produce an answer, I will be grateful for anyone who can enlighten me.