Almost there and then?

After a pleasant night in our tent, we are back on the road towards Odessa. Traffic has become even heavier. Nevertheless, we are in good spirits, because if everything goes according to plan, we will reach our destination after just 30 kilometers today. Shortly before twelve o’clock, we pass the sign for the port city of Odessa. We join the traffic flowing towards the city center. You pass houses, stores, over railroad tracks, through an avenue and many traffic lights. As the road is very wide, we hardly feel threatened by the smelly vehicles. After about four kilometers, we stop in front of a drinks store. Tanja buys water and apple juice. We shove the chimney mixture down our throats to quench our eternal thirst in these merciless temperatures. “Where are you from?” a man asks me in Russian. I am explaining our journey when a woman joins him. It turns out that she comes from Russia, lives in Odessa and is married to an Austrian. She immediately calls her husband, who is sitting in a car on the side of the road. We warmly welcome you. They say they own a store here in Odessa. “We are in the process of selling it. It’s simply no fun doing business in such a corrupt country. You have to constantly bribe and pay bribes. Nothing works without it. Customs is also a nightmare. Didn’t you have any problems with the officials?” asks the woman. “Apparently we were lucky,” I reply. “Well, we’ve had enough. We’re going to Europe. It’s definitely one of the best places in the world to lead a peaceful life,” says the friendly Austrian. “I have now also been able to convince my wife to move to Europe. We recently bought a car to import into Ukraine. The officials want 50% import tax and won’t accept the purchase invoice. As we didn’t pay, the car has now been in customs custody for a month,” we hear. “Well, do the hotels in Odessa cost a lot?” I change the subject. The Ukrainian friend begins to shake his head. “There’s no way you can drive in there. It’s another ten kilometers and the prices are horrendous.” “Hm, what should we do then?” I ask, turning to Tanja. “It’s best to turn back. At the large crossroads at the entrance to the town, turn right. This will take you onto the bypass. This is easy to drive on, always straight ahead and takes you around the city’s traffic madness. You will find cheap vacation apartments or hotel accommodation just outside Odessa. That’s definitely the best and cheapest solution.” “Hm,” I reply thoughtfully. “If I were you, I wouldn’t ride my bikes into the city center under any circumstances. There are huge holes at the side of the road and the old cars with their large steering range have a high potential to simply roll you over. The detour via the bypass is only 15 kilometers. There you are three times as fast as if you were cycling through the city. I’ve also been to many cities around the world in my life. Odessa is one of the worst for me in terms of traffic,” the likeable Austrian convinces us. “Thank you very much. We’ll take your advice to heart,” we reply and say goodbye to the three of them.

Spit on by stinking piles of metalAbsolutely convinced that this meeting was no coincidence and has saved us from harm, we turn around and cycle back. Then, as recommended, we turn right at the entrance to the town and find ourselves on a mega-wide main road. The traffic is absolutely breathtaking and becomes almost infernal. We are covered in soot, dusted and almost swallowed up by the stinking monsters. In the rush hour traffic of a big city, we cycle along in the sun at 50 degrees, stuck in a nasty-smelling snake of metal. Then a wide bridge leads over the highway. For a heavily laden cyclist, threading alone is a feat and above all a matter of luck. “Now!” I shout, and Tanja and I step on the irons like stallions to dash into the middle of the road in front of an approaching heavy goods vehicle. Then the cars shoot over to us from the highway exit, overtaking us left and right, making us dizzy. “Pray. The only thing that helps now is praying,” I curse to myself. We learned it in the monastery. Now it depends on whether it works. We make it over the highway junction of the bypass and roll along with an increased pulse rate pressed to the right side. Then, after almost 20 kilometers, there is still no suburb in sight. Man, what did they tell us about 15 kilometers? A classic case of misjudging the distance. Drivers often simply don’t know what it means for a cyclist to have to cycle five kilometers more or less. Especially in these conditions. Traffic is the height of madness. How can we be sent there? Or is it even worse in Odessa? Who knows? But it’s hard to imagine. At least there are not so many trucks there. Of course, heavy goods traffic doesn’t want to enter the city. That’s why there are bypasses. We wheeze and cough. We huff and puff and I feel like throwing up from the exertion. I curse under my breath. We were only a few kilometers away from our destination. Just before a hotel. And now we are getting further and further away from the city we actually wanted to visit. Turning back is out of the question. We’re too far gone for that now. Our morale is in the cellar. Or rather, underneath it. Our bodies ache and my butt starts to burn like hell. I wonder if he’s just getting sore. No thanks. But not that. Riding your butt off in this heat can mean a longer break. We are dripping with sweat. It itches on the head, drips down the back of the neck, forms a small stream on the back and runs into the top of the head. “Man, who invented cycling? What a load of shit!” I grumble loudly, becoming more desperate by the minute.

Suddenly the road becomes a single lane. The whole traffic jam squeezes into the bottleneck. Sea-like lakes appear to our left. The Black Sea, however, is hidden to our right behind a wide strip of land. The coastal road on which we suddenly find ourselves is bordered by a wall on the opposite side. This prevents the trucks from swerving. And now the shit has really hit the fan. We little lice in the middle of it all. A truck is approaching behind us. He brakes. I see him getting taller in the mirror. Another truck comes towards us at the same moment. Because of the wall, he can’t get out of the way if the heavy goods vehicle behind us starts to overtake. Unless he breaks through it and takes a dip in the lake. In the mirror, the metal monster behind us takes on an oversized appearance. He can’t overtake us. It either slows down to our speed or rolls over us. In a fraction of a second, the dirty sheet metal takes up the entire mirror. “Runteeerrrrr!!!”, I shout and Tanja and I pull our bikes into the gravel next to the asphalt strip at the last second. Wuuuhhhhooo! The big black tires smacking into the asphalt thunder past us. The van’s engine spits out heat, which we can feel. “Man, that was close,” I say as my knees tremble. Tanja stands wordlessly behind me. She doesn’t need to say anything. There’s nothing to say either. Now we continue to pedal our riese und müller over the gravel and dirt on the hard shoulder, while the merciless iron snake eats its way past us. “How can they send us on this killer road?” I shout, stunned. Tanja shakes her head. For the next ten kilometers, we have to pedal and push our steeds over the loose ground with all the power reserves we can muster. An effort that can hardly be described. Now only the moment counts. Survive every moment and get ahead. At some point, even the biggest nightmare comes to an end. At some point, everything comes to an end. Then comes a survey. Tanja pushes, I’m still pedaling. As if in a delusion or trance. When I reach the top, I almost collapse.

The view from up here is disheartening. The road leads back down to a lake and winds around until it disappears behind a hill without showing us the promised suburb. “Watch out,” I warn of the impending descent. We wait until a convoy of trucks has pushed past. Before the next one approaches, we lift our legs back over the center bar and hurtle down the mountain. I keep my bike in the middle of the lane so that nobody can overtake me and push me into the dangerously crumbling hard shoulder. It goes along at 50 km/h. At the bottom I brake and wait for Tanja. She doesn’t come and I can’t see her. A brief stab of pain runs through my body. She won’t have fallen, will she? I search the hard shoulder. Nothing. Nothing to see. Right? Yes. There it is. Clearly. Relieved, I realize how she is rolling towards me. “What’s happened?” I want to know as she comes to a halt next to me. “I almost fell.” “What?” “Not too bad. I was lucky. I lost my balance because of the big bumps. I braked and skidded. I hit the hard shoulder and the bike tipped over. I don’t know how, but I managed to catch it. With my right foot. Don’t worry, nothing happened. A driver behind me shook her head.” “What? What a stupid cow,” I vent my fear and adrenaline. We stop for a few moments. Take a breather and digest. Then it goes on. Again we work our way up an elevation. I’m pedaling along the hard shoulder in first gear at about 4.5 kilometers per hour when I’m suddenly overtaken by a tractor on the right. Its large wheels turn through the gravel and scree of the wide hard shoulder. Now I’ve been put through the wringer between the exhaust gas puckers. Concentrating on not falling over, I pedal on. A cloud of dust settles over me, obscuring my view and covering my lungs until they literally groan. Then this spook is also over.

“Let’s ask at the petrol station on the other side of the road if there’s any accommodation around here,” I say to Tanja when she has also mastered the climb. We stand there and can’t cross the road. Cars keep pushing past us and spitting their exhaust fumes at us. Then a gap. “Now!” shouts Tanja and we push over. When we get there, they can’t help us any further. It also stinks of petrol, so we hurry to get back to the side of the road we’ve just come from. We cross a bridge. I can’t do any more. I have to honestly admit that my strength is gone. Suddenly we read Odessa on the town sign. “Are we back in the city now?” wonders Tanja, “Looks like it. “And where are the little suburbs with the vacation apartments and nice, cheap hotels?” “Who’s to know. Unfortunately, we can no longer ask our guides.” We ask a couple of beer-drinking young men for a hotel. They shake their heads. But one of them describes the way. We only understand half of it, but the thought of a shower, a bed and, above all, getting away from this traffic artery gives us wings. Before we continue, we sit down on a rickety bench at a kiosk, eat a tin of nuts and soon drink two liters of water per person. Then we take on the reality of traffic again. This time in the capital Odessa. The heavy goods traffic has turned off somewhere and is not so bad in here. At a junction, we are shown the way to the right. I keep asking about Fontanka. A small suburb on the coast. Then we have to leave the town again. We turn onto a narrower arterial road. The traffic is still bad, but we no longer need to take the gravel lane. Again I ask for a hotel. “Keep going, keep going,” we are told. “Only five more kilometers,” we hear again and again. We turn our heads from left to right. We try to decipher the signs with the Cyrillic script. Is the writing in Russian or Ukrainian? Yes, that’s the question. There is a difference. But is it possible for us to find out? My despair is great and my remaining reserves of strength are minimal. Morale has been lost among the rolling piles of metal and there is no love for the country at all. “Five more kilometers,” we hear again. Then someone tells us to turn back. The hotel is right behind Odessa. “You’ve gone too far.” So what now? Further on or back?” I ask Tanja. “If we had enough water, we could hide in the bushes somewhere. Nobody would find us there,” I say, catching my breath and looking at the fruit trees in front of us in the dawning twilight. “But we don’t have enough water.” “Yes, we always don’t have enough water. I wonder why that is? We should always load enough water into the trailer,” I mutter to myself, knowing full well that this won’t help us now. “So, which way are we going now?” I ask. “Let’s try a little further down the road. The young men said there’s a hotel coming up.” “Hm, all right,” I say and lift my now really burning bottom onto the hard saddle.

Just five minutes later, Tanja points to an inconspicuous blue sign at the side of the road with a knife, a fork and a bed on it. Finally not confused by Cyrillic script, we understand. We cross the road again and ask two men for the hotel. They point through the trees to a house. Excited, we push our bikes towards the inviting-looking building. “Yes, we have a room,” we hear with relief. “How much does it cost?” I ask. “61 US dollars.” “What? 61 US dollars?” “There,” says the voice, absolutely emotionless. “Is breakfast included?” “Njet.” As the average income in Ukraine is around 150 to 200 US dollars a month, the price of a suburban hotel is steep. Tanja and I have a chat. We agree to lower the price. “Njet,” the voice repeats. “Hm, all right then. We’ll take the room then,” I say meekly, because after 10 ½ hours in the saddle and 70 kilometers, we are no longer in a position to ride just one more kilometer. A man helps us carry the saddlebags into the room. It has air conditioning and is clean. We immediately shower off the road grime. My butt burns like hell. Tanja’s bum doesn’t look too fluffy either. After a short break, we descend the stairs to the hotel’s restaurant. The prices are exaggerated by Ukrainian standards. We make do with soup and two beers. Before we go to bed, we decide to stay here for an extra day. We absolutely have to go to Odessa to send our footage to the TV station. “Njet.” “Kak njet?”, (“Like no?”) I ask. “We’re fully booked tomorrow,” we understand. “That can’t be true. Then we’ll have to leave again in the morning to look for somewhere else to stay?” I say even more meekly than I did two hours ago.

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