PsyBye!

Hello from sunny Belgium!

We left the festival and drove from Croatia to Belgium in a friend's car. It was quite a nice ride and we could not avoid comparing the speed of the vehicle to the speed of our bicycles. We slept on our bed yesterday and woke up in a familiar place, went to the usual supermarket and got stuff to make one of our usual delicious salads.

Glimpses of the trip and thoughts about present and the coming future...

Hugs to everybody!

Lost Theory!

So here we are in Deringaj! Great weather and views, the festival site looks amazing and it is just great to bump into some people we met last year and also get to know new ones and feel the sparkling atmosphere of something great about to begin... We have a lot of pics of the festival build up, but we don't want to spoil the surprise for you, guys, because it looks BIUUUUUUTIFUL, so we'll post them later :)

We went to Gracac City today and remembered nice times from last year, had a rakija at the usual spot and here are some pics... Other than that, ENJOY THE FESTIVAL!!!

Tipsy gipsies and the psycycle express. The final chapter.

So this is the end, it is over, gedaan, se acabo, finito… 7 more kms to the festival site and three days to get ready before it begins.
The good thing is that we still have no idea how we are going to get back and if we spend enough money we won't have anything left and will be forced to pedal back home. Hmmmmm, tempting
but Maria says NOOOOOOO. But she also says she is tempted to go back by bike, see a part of Italy and France, maybe visit our good friends in Austria or spend some nice time with the vikings at the beach...

These last days were quite hard, with the will to get there but also not wanting to get there too fast.
We ended our trip almost in the same way we started it, in a storm of rain, thunders and lightning.
Baby Jesus was sad again, probably because he saw that the end of our trip would also mean the end of our fantastic blog and he would have nothing to read before going to sleep. Don't worry Baby Jesus, don't be sad, maybe we'll keep on blogging about our interesting and wonderful lives in Belgium, ehem.

Everybody was talking about the very much expected storm three days ago. We had just left Bosnia and entered Croatia when the first drops fell and the wind started to blow things away. Of course, we happened to be in the middle of nowhere, but this time we were a bit luckier than in previous storms and there was a hostel right in the middle of nowhere. But yeah, it could not be so easy: we had no cash and the closest atm was 13 kms away, uphill. We had just spent all the left over Bosnian marks in cheap cigarettes and no food and there was, of course, not a single shop in the middle of nowhere. Luckily the owner of the pension arranged things with his son, who would drive us to the atm next morning. It was a big storm, yeah, really refreshing and nice with crazy rain and all sort of colors in the sky. Like 40 shades of grey .
Luckily we still had one tomato and one onion with a bit of pesto and a bottle of white wine and about 300 cigarettes :) Interesting combination. We had just cut up the onions and tomatoes and eaten them when there arrived a young couple from France we needed to share the kitchen with.  We greeted them and talked a bit without trying to breath onion in their direction :)

As miracles do happen due to Kelly's good relationship with God, Mother Maria and their immaculate conception, the son showed up in the morning with a van and proposed to put our bikes inside and bring us up the mountain, which sounded great. We resisted a little bit as Kelly thought it would have been a sissy kind of mountain and we could do it in no time.
Afterwards we were really, really happy we didn't resist too much as it was a climb of 7 kms with trucks and cars and no place for bicycles.
He took us right to the Plitvice lakes and waterfalls, we payed him and got a coffee or two before taking of, trying to make our way thru the hordes of zombie tourists that had come to enjoy the place in the rain like ants in an ant farm.
It was our second time in Plitvice (last year we had came by car) and it was the second time we didn't go to see it although we were like 500 m away.
They say it is beautiful, a must see when you are in Croatia, but we have a natural aversion for overcrowd overpriced overrated tourist traps, even the son that had brought us and who works there as a tour guide said it is to expensive for what it is and that we could find a lot of similar places where you don't even need to pay and you can swim, something that is apparently not possible in Pltivitce. And you don't have to go far away… If you follow the Una RIver in Bosnia there are many spots with transparent water and cascades where you can also swim and enjoy the view and even have a three course meal with the money you would spend in a ticket to Plitvice, without masses of people around you… Everyone to his own taste…

We just left after the coffee and started pedaling towards Deringaj. Very tiring road, we must say, full of cars all day long and having to go uphill pushing the bicycles almost half of the journey.
Now we are in restaurant 7 kms away from the festival site, wishing we didn't stink so much because there will be a lot of hugging and kissing involved when we finally get there, its straight way down the mountain.

So voila , we can say we made it , for all skeptics that thought we wouldn't get beyond the first coffee shop in Holland :)
We did it , almost 3000 km almost 3 months almost dead but never so alive

But there are still some days before the festival and then the festival itself, so there will be surely  another blog entry to be expected, so Baby Jesus, please, don't let it rain anymore... Fans and followers don't end your lives just yet as we keep on going, in circles, squares, loops and eights…

CU all soon!

 

 

 

The route...

So... we'll be in Deringaj in about three days... This has been our route, more or less. Add about 400 kms of getting lost and finding the way in several occasions and wait to see what we do to return to Belgium...

Finally time for a vacation ;)

So we have fallen in love...

In love with Bosnia or at least with this little piece we are in now...

After almost two and a half months of biking we decided it was time for a holiday, it is actually the first time we decided spontaneously to stay two nights at the same place, not counting the technical breaks and the horrible accident that Maria had the luck to survive or the boring festivals we were FORCED to attend ;)

We have found this nice little camping next to the Una River...
 AAAAAAHHH  Bosnia, where the water is clear, the coffee is dark and would make a dead man resurrect or turn somebody sober within minutes.
AAAAAAAAHHH Bosnia, where the cigarettes are cheap, the beer is good and the slivovic make the effect of the dark coffee go away in minutes...

AAAAAAAAHHHH River Una, full of fish and watermelons... I think its the real kind of watermelon, the kind that grows in water and then just floats away with the current...

AAAAAAAAHHHH euh, ok im out of things to say about Bosnia, it just nice to be here, thats all.

It is just nice to be here because people are so welcoming and following the Una River is just eye candy, a whole bunch of kms with forest and  greenish transparent waters full of cascades and little fish that fight for the fries and the bread people throw at them. We wished they offered them to us first, after all we are hungry humans, too... We thought maybe we should just jump into the water and pretend we were swimming and try to be quicker than the fish, but it did not work... Luckily for us they don't feed on humans and they don't even come close.

Croatian Blues...

CROATIA… DAY 0.

We are in a small town in Croatia, near the Hungarian border. According to a few locals, the Information Office is a joke and it does not exist because anyways "there are never tourists here". The town has an old factory and a lot of small modern buildings in the center. No hotels, no camping, no pensions, they said, because anyways "there are never tourists here". So we asked at the gas station and ended up negotiating the price of a nice room on top of a bar. Hamburger night today, plus Saturday night party right downstairs and two people here who happened to never be in a town or a city in any weekend night all over the trip, can you believe it?! So we are going to shower and nap a bit and then we will go downstairs and party a little bit to get rid of the heat inside our heads :)

Where are you from, they wanna know. It is a couple of guys who have not gone back home after last night's party (it was 19h when this happened) and who apologize to us for being drunk and they say we are crazy and amazing for biking all the way… And so we say we come from Belgium  and they ask if Maria has black relatives :) We say it is because of the sun and Spain and they seem satisfied and sort of apologize again…

CROATIA, DAY -1.

We say minus 1 because we are getting closer to the end of our trip  and we don't want it to end, so we try to regress in time. Or something like this.

Its really cool how people live our trip with us without actually being here, like Max who is sending spies to see if we aren't cheating but who is also nice enough to look for places for us where we can stay. For only meeting him once and briefly sharing a dance floor and a few beers it feels like we have known him for years… thanks man!
There is a big response when we send our SOSes to the world when we need a shower or a place to crash. We never really get to any of them because of destiny, I guess, but there really kind trying to help us.

People are nice to us, it is always very good when they say hello from their cars or from the side of the road, where they sit at the shade and sometimes make the "you are crazy" sign with a kind smile. We are sentimental, true, now the end is near. Maybe we'll do a chapter two here, as we really wonder why do we have to come back if we actually have nothing of the things people normally return to… No plants to water or a rent to pay. Cosma Dog is there and she could easily be brought by Belgians coming to Lost Theory. So all we need, have and want is by us and our bicycles. If there is a chapter two, it might take us into Bosnia, Serbia and Rumania, which are very nearby and therefore too tempting to be skipped…

We find ourselves in this forgotten part of Croatia it seems and so this kid in this bar we are @ now affirmed, although we cannot understand why. It is beautiful here and people are far more friendly then at the coastline.

A lot of houses here still have the bullet holes in them, like a monument, not to forget what really happened here.
In these part they don't see to many tourists that are from outside the country so they told us, so they flip, they don't understand what we are doing here, on bicycles coming from Belgium and for what, a festival, electronic music... Don't you have that in Belgium or Spain also?

They are happy to see us anyway, no matter the reasons. We are here, enjoying their country and the area where they live, where they spend their lives and find their loves and basically will end their lives and they are very proud to show, share and explain it all to us.

These are our first days and impressions of Croatia, having a ball in the numerous mountains and the heat is crazy. Somehow this piece between the Hungarian and the Bosnian border seems to be the most untouched and the paths and villages feel authentic and undiscovered, which makes a big contrast with other parts of the route. Just beautiful here, it makes us want to make the trip a bit longer as the end is just 220 kms away… although jumping in the sea before the festival begins does not sound too bad either...
 

We are having quit a few people coming to Lost Theory that we have met along the way and we are thinking about making a special psycycle camp on the festival together with some vikings and psywalkers maybe :)

A couple of days ago we saw an article about a couple who did the experiment of handcuffing together during 48 hours and they talked about it like if it was something amazing… This trip we are taking proves much more, we think. For us it has been quite smooth and easy, we are quite surprised ourselves, but still we are able to count a few potentially challenging situations as it is about living moment by moment without having any control on rain, unexpected closed campings, tiredness enlarging the smallest disagreement and so on… 48 hours together? Try 3 months of biking, lol :)

Thinking about the return is not easy. This hobo-on-a-bicycle life is far too nice and easy, simple, basic, relaxing and inspiring. 

We will post this entry like this, because otherwise you will never end reading it :)
 

Some pictures of the last days :)

  

 

BYE BYE HELLO.

We have tried a few times now to update our blog, but it's so hot the letters evaporated on the spot together with our inspiration, but we will give it a try, here we go :)

We can't believe its already August! Time really does fly by. Or bicycles by, in our case.Tomorrow we are entering Croatia, the 8th border we will be crossing. Just one more to go as we are passing a little bit of Serbia to get to Deringaj as quick as possible. Pity we have to leave Hungary just now that we are starting to fluently brabbel Hungarian… well, not really its still sounds Chinese to us. Although
now we know that "hello" and "bye" are the same word in Hungarian and we start to naturally say "thank you, hello" when leaving a shop or finishing a conversation, if we say anything at all, because there is a heatwave going on that stops one from conversating in a normal manner or from taking pictures or from anything we normally like to do while traveling. Walking straight gets difficult, thinking clearly also. Not to mention the numerous fatamorganas we are experiencing…

Which bring us directly to the last festival we attended, named SUN festival, where a lot of what we mentioned here above was also going on in even higher doses. You can add eccentric and high powered dancing to that, staring at the dj or into the abyss or for some directly into the sun.
SUN festival chose its name well, but for me they ordered a bit to much of it. We have no problem with the sun at all you know, but it is the heat that accompanies it that kills us, we had a day of 41° in the shade to which you can add some more degrees if you find yourself in the middle of the SUN trance dance team… Luckily we had some friends armed with things to spray water on us and everybody else, and there were bits and pieces of shade.
A whopping 12000 freaks from all likes and sides of the world had gathered in peace and harmony for some dazzling days of psychological destruction, dust and of course killer music in a beautiful environment.
We arrived the day before and had our preparty mode on, which lasted until 5 and from there it went all uphill, in a whirlpool of fluorescent lights we danced our way till three days later, when we tried to decide "should we stay or should we go" because we felt great there with the old and new friends, but also we knew we had to start biking towards our family in the Lost Theory playground,  otherwise we would not make it on time… So we flipped a coin and fate made us pack and go amidst a cloud of dust and sweat, although some might have thought there were tears. We left with a satisfied smile in our faces and our legs ready to pedal as soon as possible in search of a pension with a nice clean toilet and a shower to recover and decompress… We found them 40 kms later, the room even had AC and our transition from festival mode to biking mood was definitely good.
By the way, if someone drove over Kelly's hat somewhere between Bercel and Azsod, please bring it to LOST THEORY :)

Now we are here, 350 kms away from Deringaj, our final destination. It took us a few days to return to the bicycle routine, but we are back in business and unexpected stuff began to happen quick enough. A couple of nights ago we were starting to put up the tent in the middle of nowhere when we suddenly noticed we were totally surrounded by weed plants. Kelly went to do some research, his face glowing, but they were all from the non smokable kind, plus dead or dried. Since then we have seen more plants in the sides of the road and in remote corners of gardens, but they are all useless. Frustrating, true, but pretty entertaining as we got tired of playing Scrabble every night some weeks ago, so a little stroll through the fields becomes quite exciting :)

Also our small budget got extra small, on the wrong side of zero so to say.
But we seem to know how to handle these kind of situations: bread, the cheap pate (no more salmon and foie grass) and the occasional trashcan helps us not dying from starvation.

Its unbelievable what people throw in the trashcan by the way , the other day we found an iPhone, a jet ski and a dog
sadly we couldn't eat any of that , except the dog, but we had thrown our camping gas away a long time ago now , so it was pretty useless. we only like hot dogs :)
But with a little help from our friends we are back in the money game, living on the easy side, and enjoying champagne for breakfastThanks friends, God will pay it back to you at the end :)

We'd love to keep writing, but the girls from the cafeteria refused to charge the battery of the laptop and so there is no more time left. We refused their coffee, by the way. Ha, sweet revenge. We were too full of ice-cream anyways. Kelly repeated the Bad Pyrmont experience and ordered strange flavors (Dark Side and Bird Milk) but this time the result was better.

This is about it, we were thinking with nostalgia about the good old days, when we had rain and floods, and temperatures were not this high…

Some photos from these last days :)

I once was lost, but now im LOST forever.

Dear Diary,

We wonder if the lack of doors or curtains in the showers of the campings around Hungary is A: a long tradition of spa's or thermal waters or balneariums or B: just a clever way to make people take their showers faster… Some of these showers are collective rooms, which we explain by the fact that many campings are installed in recreation/ sport areas. Others are cabins without doors. It might make many of you fantasize with girls rubbing each other's backs and having experiences that mortal men will never understand or guys suffering to pick up their soap bars from the ground, but it happens to be a bit uncomfy. Not that we are shy here, but it just prevents us from showering together, so these philosophical conversations that usually take place under the water have to be postponed and then we try to reproduce these talks with a couple of cold beers and one thing leads to the other and we never manage to leave early. Not asking for an iron curtain, a simple cloth would do...

Leaving early is becoming important with the heat. Also with the extra 80 kms we have to do as we got a little bit confused with the location of the festival (again, lol). Because Csobanka is not the same than Csobankapusta, but our gps had no idea.We are okay, though. Enjoying a full moon on the right shore of the Danube after a mini ride on a ferry and ready to bike like crazy tomorrow as we wanna get to SUN one day earlier to mingle with the Belgian colony :)

Kelly wants to make another bonfire tonight. I told him there is no wood around and he replies he would burn an orphanage if his baby wanted a fire. I guess it is a very romantic statement, but somehow I don't manage to know whether loving it would be politically or any kind of correct or just totally immoral. Now that he sees I am writing about him, mouth full of the spiciest sausage in the whole freaking universe, he tells me to write about the fact that he is God, a God; it doesn't matter which one but he's the coolest of all of them up or down there. Which god, I wonder. Bacus probably, at this stage of the trip. Or St BEERnard. But no, all is about being Jesus Junior.
Whoever he thinks he is, he just got back from a spicy chorizo hallucination. And he is mumbling things like "I brained my damage" and "there are coyotes chasing me down the purple green highway of life" and "down is the only way to go if you want to go up". Sounds like Homer Simpson, doesn't it? Still it is a bit hard to convince him that he is not "the chosen one", that he will not "lead the path for the world's population towards salvation" and that in his footsteps there are no flowers sprouting.

We are developing a cat complex too, eating pate from aluminum containers. 

 But, once again, trying to innovate with budget meals after two months of traveling is not easy :) We usually have a nice meal for dinner, lunches are all about bread, pesto, spicy sauces, chorizo, cheese and pate. Miaow. Trying new rolling tobacco, though. Today's tastes and smells incredibly good: licorice.

Sitting by the Danube with the fort/ castle of Visegrad right in front of us. Simple luxury life here.

Just needing to party, we realized we were becoming a bit desperate last night, crossing the river just to get to the colored neon lights and the commercial background music. We expected a fantastic local party and found just a small fun ride, fair like, for children. Bummed. There was this nice little puticasa  /brothel at the other side of the road, and I'm pretty sure we could have had fine party over there, but the fact of the matter is we would have spent probably the half if not all of our budget there on a bottle of champagne and a half lap dance, just some more patience. Just two more days left :)

Aha,
Here I am, the One and Only and there are several of me.
Kelly Thomas Tabak, dj ShinChan aka the Tipsy Gypsy.
We really need to get to some kind of party soon. Maria and the rest of me's. All of us, I mean.
I'm sorry, multiple personalities, I seem to ignore all 20 of you from time to time, but that doesn't mean i don't love you, euh or me?
All this being kinda sober, bicycling and the nice environment make me go a little nuts, and a Kelly that goes a bit bonkers is inoffensive but a weird thing to see, so they say.
Singing out loud "I just want to fuck" and "I want sex and violence", while passing mothers and their offspring, and even with the little English they know, they all understand fuck, sex and violence. At least at a decent psytrance festival I can blend in, submerge in the crowd and fully enjoy my so beloved psychosis.

But let stay on track. After all this is a travel blog and a blog for professional bicycle enthusiasts.
I think that we are in one of the nicest areas we have been to for the moment, next to the Donau.
Lots of bicycle travelers here, it seems this is a very famous route. There are whole families on bikes, couples… coming from all over the flat earth to enjoy the Donau.

This morning we met amongst others a couple from Germany  that was wondering why in big letters it said LOST THEORY on our tent. Because we were speaking Spanish they thought we were part of the Indignados, the 1% movement as you all would know, and that we were traveling around to spread the word, bringing consciousness to the people...
Well, in a way they are right

We bring you the word
You're fucked
We are all fucked
but who doesn't know that, right?

But no, we are not part of any movement except the Anti bikers. We antibikers travel in cheap bicycles and carry no message at all, except bike and party till you drop and then keep biking to the next party. We anti bikers pedal cause we don't have a a reason to grow roots. We carry bread and pesto and wine and talk to everybody and play games before going to bed and enjoy looking at other people while they live their lives and sometimes we allow ourselves to dream of our own dreams, which never go beyond a next trip or tomorrow's destination. And we love being dramatic because life is a pantomime and we all can play roles and dance and sing ballads with made up lyrics.

So yes, fans, followers, and friends, this is what we do. The pure sadness and evil happiness on the road. Mile after mile, meter after meter. There is a full moon going on right now, right here.

Maria said we should procreate, I have no clue what she means, but it doesn't sound bad, I hope it has something to do with dinner or a video game or illicit chemicals. She says she is just gonna read her book. Gonna check the dictionary tomorrow, maybe I am missing something good? Or sleeping outside the tent to procreate on my own?

 SUN, there we go!!! Tonight or early tomorrow morning, depending on the amount of mountains we have to conquer :)

Two months and Hung(a)ry/ Hung(over)y for more :)

It is really cool when you bump into a lake on top of the mountain, with a couple of simple restaurants and a lot of space for free camping. And in Slovakia you can still make bonfires! So we got to this place and we stayed, had dinner and beer with the fishermen and their wives (yeah, you could somehow see them under their make up) and went to our tent and decided to start a fire just to be able to look at it before going to sleep. There were a pair of broken chairs behind a tree and we sat down there in search of the ghosts that manifest themselves in the flames. We only saw the Devil. There were shooting stars and a couple of drunkards that broke the otherwise too nice silent night by singing their lungs out.

 The Devil and meeeee...

It has been a good two months now on the road and it starts to feel like home and we start to wonder how home will feel like when we are back. Maybe we shouldn't go back at all, fabricate some kind of trailer- caravan to our bikes and just pedal the rest of the world happily ever after.
The only problem would be the money, we guess. I was thinking about some fraud or pyramid scheme that we could do along the way, but not speaking the local languages makes that idea a bit hard.
Maybe we should work, euh, brrrr, hell no!
I think i would prefer to adjust my systems to eating grass and leaves, like that guy from Into the Wild. I know it didn't end very well for him, but I guess he had a good time for a while and anyways Maria is not pedaling with me through Alaska, she says, so we would always have a doctor to heal us closer by than that poor guy…

People in Hungary seem to be more friendly for the moment, but we are in quite touristic areas next to the Danube, so you are never really sure how sincere it is.
The only way to go to the heart of a country is going deep into the wastelands of despair, where people don't see tourists yet, and they need to wake up @ 6 in the morning for their morning shot of vodka and then start to work the fields, construction sites or the streets in the case of some.
The friendliest people that we have met these last weeks were gipsies, in Slovakia. Marginalized,  crazy and spontaneous. They lived above the reception of what once maybe was a camping (we camped there) and shared the place with other men that lived there because they found no wives, as they said. We shared beers, cigarettes and a good laugh with the only help of a girl who spoke very basic English and the strong will to understand each other. One of the girls screamed in our ears and all of us had to explain her that we were not deaf, that speaking louder does not turn unknown languages into common ones. She made us believe she was pregnant and we were a bit shocked by the amount of beer and smoke she was swallowing down. It took her two hours to say that it was not true. Then she asked us if we fucked in the tent and other personal details that were considered just too much by her sister, who made her shut her mouth with the same killing glance she dedicated to her boyfriend when he tried to sell us the worse looking weed in the world. Nice people. Wishing them a lot of luck in their trip for work to Germany.

Hungary since yesterday. We crossed the border in a town called Komarno, which is divided by the Danube and each shore belongs to a country.

The Slovakian side was quite depressing. The Hungarian one was definitely more cheerful, had English speakers and bicycle lanes for a while. The river looked beautiful and we followed it directly to our nice camping spot. It was nice to wake up in front of it this morning. And we washed our clothes, which was a while ago now. One could say even a bit too long, I couldn't take my t-shirt off anymore without Maria''s help and mosquitos and flies don't even bother anymore to come to us. Maybe they are a bit confused as we smelled rotten but weren't quite dead yet.

Wondering what to do until SUN, still four days to go and just 55 kms. Maybe staying in this camping to be a bit lazy or pedaling 30 kms to see Ezstergom, which apparently was the former capital city in Hungary and it does not even look pretty in the postcards, but people talk quite a lot about it :)

Maybe we should add some fun facts about our trip, some figures like the things we have lost or given away or thrown away:

LOST THINGS: one sweater, money, a pump, ten kilos of body fat, morals, my passport, Maria's underwear, Maria's flip flops, Maria's shoes, Maria's earring (one), hopes, dreams, expectations, a knife and all the spoons...
GIVEN AWAY THINGS: the bicycle trailer, camping lamp, some spare tires, a book, Dafalgan, Atarax, money...
THROWN AWAY THINGS: lots of torn apart clothes, teapot for making coffee, cutlery, campinggas thing, money, rain ponchos, Kim's soup bowls (sorry, Kim)...
GAINED THINGS:muscles, stamina, fluorescent vests, friends all over this part of the world, pocket lamp, headlamp...

We crossed 6 borders (2 more to cross, really looking forward to Bosnia), went to 3 festivals (still 2 more to go to, not counting the unexpected ones), had 3 flat tires until now, 2 new gearboxes, 2 new rear axles, 3 weeks of rain in Belgium, Holland and Germany (including floods), never got lost anywhere (ok, we did, even with a gps), had 1 terrible accident, crossed uncountable mountainranges, survived starvation, beeing sucked dry by mosquitos, terriefied by lots of trucks and spoiled by extremely kind people: THANKS Annett and Mich, Frank the couchsurfer, the man that lives in Buggenhout and let us sleep in his garage, gipsy friends, Celine and boyfriend, the vikings, Ramed, Mad Max Zukh, God, Baby Jesus who hangs around everywhere by the roads, opened arms and looking quite uncomfy in his cross and their counterpart the Devil...

Thanks to all of you for the shared moments.
Hey, we are just a bit emotional here, this is not a farewell. More blog to come :)