This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 140
Setting off: Ponchos and Pelting Rain
The Seine glimmered in the pale, morning light as I cycled the empty streets of Paris. I was on my way to Gare de l’Est – new saddlebags latched onto my old Cannondale touring bike. From here, a series of long-haul commuter trains would transport me and my bike to Vienna, my starting point.
I was embarking on a journey that felt momentous – in more ways than one. Six weeks, ten countries, 1,200 miles of cycling. But especially, a 47-year-old history. After all, it was in Vienna that in the summer of 1978 my dad had begun his own, similar journey. As he tells it, he had spotted a bikepacker out the window of a train somewhere in southern Germany, and thought: “Why not do the same?” In the Austrian capital, he bought a Reynolds 531 bike, panniers and a few maps, and began cycling south. He gave himself until the end of the summer to make it to Greece.
Growing up, I had heard my dad’s story so many times that I could practically recite the central dramas by heart. There was the moment Hungarian soldiers came out of the woods and stopped him, rifles at the ready, before carefully combing through his bags in search of contraband goods; the section of rolling hills of eastern Croatia – then part of Yugoslavia – where he raced against an old steam-engine as evening fell over the bucolic landscape; the Greek auto mechanic who chased and proceeded to throw a bottle of wine at him when he didn’t have enough money to pay for bike repairs.
It’s one thing to hear a story so many times you know every word. It’s another to recreate it, to understand that narrative in the most intense way possible: by living it. So in early July 2025 – my dad’s memories swirling around me and my emergency poncho sticking to my arms in the pelting rain – I set off to see if I could see if it was still possible.
Vienna to Budapest: Friends and family
After an hour of urban riding, the Danube finally appeared, grey and choppy on this rainy morning. For the next several days, the historic river – site of Napoleonic battles, buffer zone between East and West during the Cold War and major vessel of modern trade – would be my guide.
Leaving Vienna, the cycle path along the Danube winds through thick, deciduous forests; golden fields and vast industrial zones – the sort of hodge-podge that makes up much of central Europe. The path – part of the EuroVelo 6 cycling route between Saint-Nazaire in France and Constanța in Romania – was generally well-marked, green signs indicating the bike paths. But not always. At one point I found myself cycling in a small pack of cyclists – a German family, an older Austrian man and a couple of British cycle tourists, and myself – in this heavily-trafficked section of route when our group reached a fork in the road. Left to Bratislava, or straight, also to Bratislava. We chose straight – erroneously – and shared a laugh when the bike path gave way to a ravine, impossible to portage with saddlebags.
Only 50 miles separate Vienna from Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Here, the rain transformed into a prolonged deluge as I arrived at my hostel. In the hallway, I met Radu – a Moldovan cycling from Chisinau to Hamburg. Sharing a beer in the dingy shared dormitory, we exchanged contact info and I traded him an extra bungee cord for his remaining Hungarian currency. The next morning, his bed was empty, but he had sent me a message on Instagram: “Good luck with the rain.”
In the end, the weather didn’t slow me down much. By the time I had reached Győr, a picturesque Hungarian town with cobblestone streets and a canal that runs through the centre, the sun had peeked through the clouds. The next day, feeling a bit more adventurous, I cycled away from the river, and toward Hungary’s rural interior. In the small town of Tardos, known for its transistor radio museum, the only hotel in town doubled as a summer camp for local youths. I made friends with Nimrod, a ten-year-old Hungarian boy with a bright yellow bike of his own. As I enjoyed a delicious five-euro goulash stew, Nimrod joined me at my table and taught me my first words of Hungarian.
I had my legs under me by the time I reached Budapest where my brother met me on his way to Berlin. Here, the festive and summery atmosphere contrasted with the quiet of the Hungarian forests and the rainy early days of my trip. Sitting on the left bank of the Danube, watching the sun set over the elevated part of the city, Pest, we toasted my first 200 miles and the 1,000 to go.
Budapest to Balaton: Glorious mud
Unlike in 1978, when my dad pedalled due west along a small national highway, I slogged through miles of Soviet-built high-rises, modern strip malls and eventually, smaller, wealthier bourgs on my way out of the Hungarian capital.
Approaching central Europe’s largest lake, Balaton, traces of the Austro-Hungarian empire began to emerge: castles with belfries and light-blue tin roofs; pink cobblestone paths leading to pink manors; art nouveau entryways to public baths. On my first night after leaving Budapest, I camped near Velence, a sort of gateway lake to Balaton, where in the evening I was treated to the dancing pirouettes of barnswallows diving to catch insects on the surface of the lake as I heated up a tin of goulash on my portable campstove.
Known for its vineyards and thermal spas, Balaton is a cyclist’s paradise, with protected cycle lanes round its 48-mile long lake. Protected cycle lanes round the 48-mile long lake. On the hillier north side, roads dip in and out of quaint spa towns served by small train stations. At a campsite near Balatonfured, the owner greeted me with a shot of palinka, a fruit brandy.
The next day, after rounding the lake, I checked into a cheap hotel in the town of Heviz with a view of some of Balaton’s famous thermal spas. Heviz, I’d learn, hosts the biggest swimmable thermal lake in the world. (Another, larger, thermal lake in New Zealand is too hot to swim in.) The first week of cycling had strained my knees, and the lake, which costs just seven euros to access for half a day, served up the perfect antidote. The heat rising from the earth’s core makes the floor muddy and viscous. I rubbed the warm mud into my knees and let it dry, before eventually washing it out in the lake.
The only thing that made me feel better than that were the three glasses of local wine I drank that night as I spoke to Reszo, a local vineyard owner who had begun working in the vines at the age of 12. Today, the Bakos Family Winery sells to mostly local clients and has won several prizes for its riesling, but – unlike during the Communist-era when Reszo began – the focus is on quality, not quantity.
That night, as I coasted downhill, I thought about where I’d head next. My dad had continued to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where he took a train to the coast. But I decided on a detour: I headed toward Bosnia.
Balaton to Bosnia: Hospitable hosts
The countries of former Yugoslavia look like a jigsaw puzzle – an arrangement that across multiple moments in history has had catastrophic human consequences. To get to Bosnia you first traverse a 60-mile section of Croatia called Slavonia.
On a sunny morning, knees healed from the thermal baths, I crossed the Croatian border and tackled the first of a succession of progressively steep climbs on progressively worse roads. Then, I coasted into the town of Daruvar. My destination for the night was a few kilometres further down the road – an organic dairy farm that doubles as a bed and breakfast. At Sobe Na Farmi, I spent 35 euros (a splurge after my 10-to-15 euro camping nights, but not unreasonable) for two home-cooked meals, and a double bed in a beautifully refurbished bedroom with air-conditioning and a shared terrace.
The next day, I entered Bosnia – crossing my first non-EU border control alongside air-conditioned cars and trucks whose drivers looked at me with a mixture of confusion and pity. At my first campsite, near the city of Banja Luka, the owner cautioned me to cycle on the opposite side of the road so I could pull over to the shoulder to avoid the oncoming trucks. (This of course didn’t help when one semi-freighter decided to pass another going up a hill and nearly knocked me into a ravine.) He didn’t warn me, however, about the mountains.
Near Gradiska, a scenic paved road quickly gave way to a gravel mountain path that I ended up hike-a-biking my way up. Several sweaty hours later, my handlebars shuddering on the rocks on the way down, a police car hailed me and asked me where I was going. I responded, but not before making the geopolitical error of telling him – in this Serbian-speaking region – that I didn’t speak Croatian.
As difficult as the cycling could be, it was equalled by the kindness of the Bosnians I met. At a restaurant where I sat alone journaling, a man sitting with his family struck up a conversation with me. As he left the restaurant, he leaned over and told me he had paid for my meal. At another hostel, two Bosnian women living in Switzerland invited me to share breakfast with them – speaking to me in an enchantingly-accented French. Both were outdone, however, by the auto mechanics who ended up saving my trip.
As I approached the middle of the country, mostly sticking to the shoulders of national highways, the conditions began to take a toll on my bike. The gears were jumpy and the handlebar tape had begun to unglue. Then, as I coasted into the city of Jajce, nestled in a verdant valley, my brakes started to falter. The back brake needed to be tightened, and the front shuddered ominously whenever I gripped it too tightly. I figured that they needed some minor adjustments, so I set to fiddling around by myself before calling on backup. After an hour or so, I had only exacerbated the problem. Before my brakes had worked badly; now they didn’t work at all.
In this part of Bosnia, the nearest bike shop was an 80-kilometre ride away. There was an auto shop, though. To the five or six mechanics at the shop, I must have been quite the sight because everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me. “Does anyone here speak English?” I blurted. After a long second, a young man wearing a Houston Texans football jersey spoke up. I showed him the bike and tried to explain to him what was wrong. “If I can fix a car, I can fix a bike. It’s a simple machine,” he replied.
Over the next fifteen minutes the shock team of Bosnian car mechanics disassembled and remade my brakes like new. When I asked them how I could pay, they waved me away, and said, “Do you drink rakia?” Wiping his brow, one of them pulled out a clear plastic bottle of plum liquor. He took a shot, then handed me one. Smiling, I downed it. Then I downed the hill, too, brakes working perfectly.
Split to Dubrovnik: Dad Goes Electric
You hear the Adriatic well before you see it. Actually, what you hear is the sound of cicadas. These Mediterranean insects live in cypress trees near the coast. As I wound down steep roads between the Bosnian border and Split, on the Croatian coast, I knew I was approaching the sea when the sound of cicadas became deafening. I was anxious to get to Split; there, in a couple of days, I had a rendezvous with my 71-year-old father.
For weeks my dad had been keeping tabs on my journey. A few days before I arrived in Croatia, he decided on a whim to join me there. We found a travel company – Red Adventures – willing to rent him a bike in Split and had it shipped back from Dubrovnik. It was a crazy plan, but I went along with it – and, somehow, it worked.
After outfitting my dad on an electric step-through bike, we mapped out a route quite different from the one he had taken 47 years prior. Avoiding the busy coast road, we decided instead to island hop. On Brač, Korčula and Mljet, my dad ramped up his daily mileage, while I eased up. Our trip was punctuated with cheap ferry crossings where our bikes travelled on deck for a small fee. When, on a day of steep climbing on one of the islands, we had to hail a local with a trailer to summit a 600-metre climb, both of us were secretly okay with it. After all, there was a heavy burden: my dad had made me agree to a (verbal) pact that if he died on the trip, I would not hold myself responsible.
By our final ferry ride, from the island of Mljet to Dubrovnik, he was physically exhausted, but not dead. If anything, the trip had energised him spiritually. And, after a lighter week of cycling, I was ready to ramp up again.
Dubrovnik to Saranda: Mountains and Memories
Near Dubrovnik, I took stock of my trip as I watched planes take off over the Adriatic. I had ridden about 900 miles, and had just over 300 remaining. I needed to be in Corfu, Greece, where I had booked a ferry to Italy, in ten days. Until that point, I had taken my time – resting for a day every three or so cycling days. Heading toward two famously mountainous countries – Montenegro and Albania – I knew I’d have to gear up.
The coast and crowds quickly gave way to rolling hills and small towns that felt far from touristy Dubrovnik. I had been warned to avoid crossing into Montenegro on the main road, the jadanska magistrala, and to instead take a smaller one – highway 516, which ascends into the hills of Croatia’s remote southernmost corner, before dropping into Montenegro.
Another non-European border successfully crossed, I coasted into Herzeg Novi, the first of a series of crowded beach towns dotting Montenegro’s coastline. My dad hadn’t travelled to this part of southern Yugoslavia – instead hopping on an overnight ferry from Dubrovnik to Corfu – and I quickly understood why. Now independent, but not yet part of the EU, Montenegro appears to be positioning itself as the next Croatia – attracting sun-and-surf tourists looking for the next cheap destination. But the infrastructure is not there yet.
The roads I took were narrow and often under construction, beaches flooded with overpriced lounge chairs and Russian tourists. The beautiful coastal towns of Kotor, Budva and Bar, to me, were made less so by the massive cruise ships docking there – visor-wearing tourists spilling into historic old towns where the only traces of former Yugoslavia are in the anti-fascist plaques on the walls of back-alley streets and eroding Communist-era buildings outside of the city centres.
Tiring of the coast and its traffic jams, I decided to cycle into the mountains. But here too, I found myself riding on pot-holed and sometimes gravel roads filled with trash and debris. Only, these roads wound steeply upwards.
Two days later, Albania arrived like an oasis in the desert. I crossed the border at Sukobin - Muriqan. Around me, Gypsies sold fruit and wicker baskets. A Sunday afternoon wedding party was crossing the border at the same time as me, guests blasting traditional music and drinking rakia to the amusement of the customs agents.
After having given up on the idea of cycle lanes somewhere in Bosnia, I was surprised to find myself in a sea of cyclists as I approached Shkodër. This city has earned a reputation as the Amsterdam of Albania, and it was true that bikes were omnipresent in the walkable city centre. Instead of Dutch-style step-through bikes, though, most of the ones I saw were 1980s-era Soviet clunkers. I took my final rest day in Shkodër, visiting the Site of Witness and Memory, a museum built in a former torture centre in remembrance of the victims of Albania’s four-decade dictatorship, and the Mesi Bridge, which curves over the Mesi river to create the impression of an ‘O’ in the water’s reflection. Only in this summer of drought and forest fires, the river had run completely dry.
Descending northern Albania, I cycled along smaller roads through ramshackle towns where locals smiled and waved or rolled down their car windows to cheer me on, doubling up horse carts and small trucks, their beds stacked perilously high with watermelons or bales of hay. At one point, an old man cycling in the opposite direction hailed me over and, without my prompting, began to speak to me in Italian. I deduced that he had invited me to his home for water and regretted having turned him down because I wanted to make it further along my route before the sun got too high.
Near Vlora, I came to what would be my final fork in the road. Continuing to hug the coast, I’d bump into Llogara Pass, a 3,000-foot ascent into Albania’s coastal mountains. The other option was the SH76 highway, which skirts around Llogara slightly to the east. With my saddle bags already overflowing, I opted for this route – vaguely cognisant of the dark, billowing clouds in the distance.
I rode 50 miles before lunch in the hopes of beating the storm. After a hearty meal of kofte (fried meat) and mbushura (stuffed peppers), I set off again. The wind began to pick up. In the span of minutes, the brilliantly sunny day transformed into night. I had been chased by dogs in Croatia and run off the road by trucks in Bosnia, but for the first time I felt truly scared as lightning struck the mountains I was heading toward. With fat rain drops beginning to fall, I saw a small coffee shack with a covered terrace, and ducked under the awning just before the next crack of thunder.
I could write about the next day – my final day of cycling where I summited the final 3,000-feet to Saranda – or the following one – where I took a ferry to Corfu and swam in the Adriatic one final time. I could write about the overnight ferry to Italy or the series of trains that brought me back to Paris. But I would be remiss not to say that the hours that followed the Albanian mountain storm felt like the pinnacle of my trip.
In the early evening, dark storm clouds dispersing, I hopped back on my saddle. My legs sore from the morning’s ride, I trudged up one and then another mountain peak. When I finally reached the top, I admired the green mountains and the dark blue storm behind me, the sea like a wall of blue in front. Then, for what felt like a golden eternity, I coasted down the mountain as the sun emerged from the clouds and cast the whole world a brilliant orange.
Two days later, on the island of Corfu, I sent my dad a picture. In it, I’m sitting on a bench with my bike. Behind me is the Adriatic sea; there’s a wall of blue where it meets the sky. The photo was a callback to one of the few remaining pictures from his own journey. “Classic!” he responded, “You did it!”
The following day, I awoke to another message: “Where’s your adventure today?!”
