Wednesday the 29th we left Budapest early, our host Viktor went to work and we started pedalling at 8am. Leaving the city wasn’t too bad even though we were initially on the main roads that split into the various highways and motorways out to the country. Changing lanes, going up and down ramps and bridges, keeping an eye on the street signs and traffic lights surrounded by traffic was actually a really fun precision game and we made no mistake (at this point!). We arrived in Keckemet with light tail wind at around 1pm and had a huge lunch – so good in fact that we had to stop from the bikes after about 20minutes to let the food go down. It’s been a trend on this trip that we always reach some kind of hill within 10minutes after lunch!!! Anyhow, we were moving fast and decided to push till Szeged, 170km in one day… arrived with no maps but luckily a keen cyclist saw us and helped us finding the town’s camp site on the East bank of Tisza river.
Since we had done so much distance Wednesday we thought we'd take some time to see this Hungarian city: most of our Hungarian stage was a race so we would arrive in Serbia on time. We enjoyed the campsite's thermal pool then went sight seeing, had the famous fish soup recommended by Viktor and took off towards Subotica. Barely out of the city we bumped into an american girl, Erin, biking around the world! Unfortunately we couldn't ride together because she was going towards Romania, and we had a rendez-vous with a Serbian rider the next day at mid-day.
Soon after we parted on route number 5, rain started and we hit the motorway, with no other way towards Subotica, a mere 20 to 30 km away!! We knew there would be a train from Szeged to cross the border, so we back-tracked to the train station, but the next train was Friday morning. The weather was not promising so we decided to go back to the camp site and catch this train the next day. It was a good decision!! Rain all day and super windy.
Friday was action packed!: short train to the border, train change and border control (finally a stamp in the passports!!!), ride out of Subotica to Backa Topola where we had rendez-vous with Sasha from "Ride for your Rights". Unfortunately he was going slow because of headwind, so we agreed to meet in Sirig instead, closer to Novi Sad - our final destination. This last day was so fast, strong tail wind allowed us to be in top gear all the way, so we arrived in Sirig real fast, waited with ice cream and bolted arrived in Novi Sad quite relaxed. Big thanks to Sasha for guiding us into the city, there we met the coordinator of Ride for your Rights and friends and had a couple of beers to savour the ending... Stunned / stoked.
20km/h !!!
Next post: Novi Sad and handing over our bikes at Ride for your Rights !!
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