My bike tour 2016/2017

From Berlin. With bike. Start: October 21th

Stage 1 - Attac Villa, Könnern

cycled 175km in one day, started 7.30, arrived 20.00

Departure: October 29th

Stage 2 - WuppDays Witzenhausen

Cycled to Sülzhayn the Harz forest (100 km), started 10.30, arrived 20.00. Depart October 31st to Witzenhausen. Gear shift broke down in hilly terrain, tried to find bike shop, but all closed or I didn't find them. Asked at a random house for a Torx T15, which allowed me to switch from 2nd to 8th gear. Much better to cycle. Fixed the bike on the next day in Witzenhausen. Then stayed at the WuppDays for almost two weeks, partly coding and partly with Janina. Amazing lively atmosphere!

Departure: 2016-11-13

Stage 3 - visit my grandma in Langen (Hessen)

Cycled to Saasen (135 km, 1000 hm), in zero-degrees temperature. Made good progress, picked pears on the way, arrived in the afternoon. The Projektwerkstatt was completely empty and cold, went to bed at 6pm. The house is really interesting, but needs people to live there (IMO)! On the next day, I slept long and continued cycling at noon. Direction of Frankfurt is relatively flat, nice sunlight, but still very cold with snow visible. Arrived at my grandma's house after 4.5 hours at sundown (90 km). Nice day!

Went to Darmstadt to visit Lars on 2016-11-20 and stay there one night.

Departure: 2016-11-21

Stage 4 - go south

It's so cold in middle Europe, I should make some distance.

I contacted Foot not bombs in Strasbourg and Besancon, as well as Les Gars'Pilleurs in Lyon on November 18th via mail, but no reply so far.

21: went really far, slept rough before Strasbourg
22: trustroots host in Müllheim
23: short trip to Montbeliard/Bethoncourt, warmshowers host Odile
24: cycle to Dole, warmshowers host Eric
25: cycle to Mâcon, warmshowers host Floriane
26: shorter trip to Lyon/Villeurbanne

Retrospective: Warmshowers works great, even for spontaneous travels. I wanted to plan more in advance, but it was hard due to unknown route choice, weather and general sleepiness. The route planners "cycle.travel" and "openrouteservice.org" are good for finding small roads to cycle along.

Stage 5 - Lyon/Grenoble

All stays via Couchsurfing.

2016-11-26 to 12-04: Estelle in Villeurbanne
2016-12-04 to 12-09: Lucas and his flatmates in Collognes du mont d'or
2016-12-09 to 12-12: Beatrice and her family in the western hills
2016-12-12 to 12-16: Jean in Part-Dieu

I met with Valentin from Disco Soupe, Hadrian from Another Man's Treasure facebook group and went dumpster diving with him. We offered the food over the fb group.

A lot of coding for the foodsaving tool, yay! Also huge amounts of fun and social interaction (does Estelle's cat also count?).

Stage 6 - Nimes

310 km from Lyon

2016-12-16: Tournon-sur-Rhone, Pierre-Arnaud
17: Charmes-sur-Rhone, Jocelyne
18: Pont-Saint-Esprit, http://www.pont-dardeche.com/ by lucky coincidence
19: Nimes

Planned departure 2016-12-28

I'm thinking if I should take the 1 EUR train ticket from Nimes to Perpignan to arrive in Barcelona before 2017. It's only 220 km from there, albeit 800 m up. But why do I want to speed up, why do I want to arrive early? Do I have any time pressure? I think it could be the feeling that I might enjoy my time more elsewhere. But that's a very common feeling inside me, I should rather dive in me and confront my inner demons instead of trying to find better places.

Stage 7 - Onto Barcelona

In the end, I left on the 28th as planned, but just went to Montpellier, where I could even stay for multiple days at Nina's place. She didn't use it anymore, and so I spent a few quiet days until New Year, where I left to Perpignan. There I had a wonderful time at the coloc (flat share) of Ariadna, who were incredibly welcoming. So I mostly felt the "pull" of Barcelona, and the agreed stays on the way. On the 5th, I started my tour into Spain and crossed the border around 2pm.

In Girona, I stayed with Pau whom I found on Warmshowers and he suprised me by his outgoing and joyful manner. He even rode with me around 35 km on the next day, showing me a depleted volcano nearby. Later in the day, I discovered a small rupture in my back rim. I took some rest, tightened the other spokes and continued my ride with a slightly deformed wheel. I was quite out of energy during this day, but I also found some Romanesco in a Lidl dumpster (to cook & eat later).

My further plans: finding places to stay in Barcelona, getting replacement parts for my bike and maybe help organizing a yunity event.

Stage 8 - Barcelona

In the first three days, I stayed with Ansel in L'Hospitalet, who contacted me through my public trip on Couchsurfing. Then, I moved to the flatshare of Fabia, a contact that I got through Arno. Both hosts provided me the space to look for bike parts, get them and fix my bike. Ansel also gave me the hint to look at the "La Experimental" squat, which is located near the top of the Tibidabo hill, one of the tourist highlights of Barcelona. I emailed the squat and first visited them on one afternoon. We planned WuppDays together with Alberto, Nacho and the Danish girl (sorry for my leaky brain) and I even joined them for a dumpster diving tour at night (lead by Joan). Trivia: dumpster diving is called "recycling" in Spain.

I liked the challenge of cycling up the Tibidabo, it's a constant climb from (almost) sea level to 450m above. It made sure that I arrived sweaty, but definitely happy.

On a Friday, I went again to La Experimental to join them for the jam session evening - an event that they organize to attract visitors and donations, but also because most of the inhabitants really love music. I stayed in the tower of the squat, freshly made into a guest room by "Wandergesellen" from Oldenbourg, Germany. Unfortunately, I got a bit sick in the following days, so I couldn't participate much in the daily life, but instead was hiding in blankets and drinking water. I felt slightly stressed at the squat during that time: the cold temperature; the windy weather; the toilet was quite far from the sleeping space; my sleeping bag got wet from sweating..

Luckily, Janina had the contact of Sabrina, the girlfriend of a foodsaver that she met in Berlin. She could host me in her apartment in Barcelona city, where I recovered quickly. Some days later, Janina joined me there after a long bus travel. We stayed for some days before WuppDays at La Experimental were supposed to start.

WuppDays (2017-01-25 to 2017-02-07) were quiet and peaceful, with participation of Chandi, Fritz, Selina, Lara, Adrean, Martin, Janina and me. I was mostly working on the Foodsaving Tool, cracking almonds, preparing meals and cuddling with Janina. I also looked through old PCs that were "recycled" by the squat to build some fast public workstations. The success was limited due to a lack of screens, but at least Chandi and me identified the fastest parts for the audio recording workstation.

After two weeks, it was time for me to leave Barcelona and head to Valencia, where Janina and me want to start Foodsharing.

(TBW: about Fabio, Helen, the bike parts)

Stage 9 - Valencia

I embarked late afternoon to cycle 380 km to Valencia, assisted by a tent borrowed from Chandi and a lot of sweet food (Turron, almonds). It was a challenge to find nice camp places when it's already dark - I was sleeping in fruit plantations and in a river bed. It took me a bit more than three days to arrive, a bit more than expected. But I was also working on the foodsaving tool: on long morning in the tent and then in a library in Torredembarra. Also, there was strong head wind while cycling through the Ebro delta, luckily no rain! On the second camping night, I broke one of the poles. The tent was still functioning, albeit with less foot space. I felt disappointed and sorry, but Chandi cheered me up later and said it would be fixable.

After arriving in Valencia, I got the address of the "casa de los payasos", a loosely squatted place in El Cabanyal. I stayed there for about three weeks, mostly working on the foodsaving tool and occasionally going recycling.

Our initial plan to start Foodsharing didn't manifest, partially because we didn't have many local contacts and the few that we knew (Marian and Henning) were busy. I still consider it highly productive and appreciate the disturbance-free environment. Note that the squat didn't have water or a toilet, so that meant to take a 5-minute walk to the next train station to refill water and refresh my body. I washed myself not very often, once I jumped into the Mediterranean at night and another time I could use the shower at Luke's airbnb.

Through yunity's Philip, I got the contact of Robert, who lives and works in Valencia. I stayed at his place for another week, having a great time with him and his flatmate Monique. After some days, also Cille arrived and stayed at their place to visit the Internet Freedom Festival. I left shortly after to finally go south to meet up with Johanna, but before, I wanted to use the chance to meet with Ivan, a software developer and activist who recently moved back from Berlin to his parents' place in Xeraco (Beach), south of Valencia. I really enjoyed the time there, having time to code, to play at the beach, to talk and to do a mountain tour.

Stage 10 - To the south-west

After a huge rainfall that covered almost all of Spain, I started on Tuesday morning on my journey to Algeciras (700 km away), where Johanna would wait for me to cycle together in Morocco. I didn't have a tent and the weather forecast looked rainy and windy, but it seemed to improve. After contacting the few Warmshowers hosts from the closer area (<200 km away) and receiving no reply, I found the profile of Marc & Mallory, who live in Galera, somewhere in the Altiplano of Andalusia. I wrote them and somehow was sure that it would work out, so I started my trip on the next day, also because Ivan had to take a flight back to Berlin.

Cycling went perfectly, with slight clouds and strong tailwind the conditions couldn't be better. I cycled up the mountains with little no effort. After I checked my mails on public wifi in Caudete and saw the positive reply from Marc, I was even more motivated to arrive there - on the next evening. The distance was a bit over 300 km, with 2000 m of climb, so I knew that I would have to spend one night without tent, but at least on my new camping mat. However, it was surprisingly had to find a comfortable place where dogs didn't bark at me all night long...

The next day started with quite low energy, I found it really hard to cycle up the slightest hills. Even after breakfast it didn't get better. The route consisted of a constant climb of 1000 m throughout the day. So I decided to lie down again in the next field and rest for another hour before continuing. After that, I felt much fresher and my condition improved a lot. The day went by amazing and the evening at Marc & Mallories' was great! We ate a rich Raclette dinner, they gave me route recommendations, showed me Mongolian music, told stories about their bike travels and even offered me to borrow their unused tent for my next days (being worried about my lack of good sleep). In review, that was one of the most lucky events during my bike tour...

Instead of starting very early on the next day and cycling to Granada as originally imagined, I rested until noon and went westwards along steep mountains, to the city of Jaen. There, I would take the long "Via verde del aceite" and take another mountain road from Ronda to Algeciras. That means 6000 m of climb and took me 5 days. I arrived happy but exhausted at Javier's house in Algeciras, the Warmshowers host where Johanna already had stayed for one night. I spent all my nights before in the newfound tent, because all last-minute Couchsurfing requests didn't work out. I covered more and more parts of my body to protect them from the constant sunshine and the wind, bought some canned food because my reserves were running low, although I was successfully dumpster diving once!

(cycled roughly 3500 km from Berlin to Algeciras)

Stage 11 - Jumping over the Strait (to Morocco)

From here on my descriptions are lacking somewhat. It's nice to live in the moment, no need to write everything down.

Without a detailed plan and without time pressure, Johanna and me wanted to try hitchhiking the ferry to Morocco. Trucks are allowed to take another "driver" for free, so that was easy, but the bikes were a problem. After two days of trying to communicate with hands and feet (only common language), getting invited by Moroccan truck drivers for food, dumpster diving in Algeciras and camping close to the beach, we decided to accept our fate and bought return tickets for 30 EUR per person.

We arrived at the Tanger Med port on March 23rd at night time, which meant finding a nice camping place soon. It wasn't easy, given the hilly landscape, the crowded north coast of Morocco and the rain that occurred shortly before, but we managed to sleep on a field close to Ksar Sghir. During the night, it rained again and the tent floor & my mattress got wet, so we used the half-sunny weather on the next day to dry our stuff, before continuing along the hilly coastal road to Tanger city.

(family close to Ksar el Kebir, waterfalls in Akchour, Ahmed in Oued Laou, couchsurfing in Martil and M'Diq, Easter visit in Ceuta)

Roughly 500 km

Stage 12 - Back in Spain

Arrived April 17th?

Coming back from Morocco felt like returning home. Algeciras seemed so familar!

Janina already arrived in South of Spain two days ago. She had a host in Alceidesa named John, who also invited us over. As there was a conflict, we decided to leave on the next day. Johanna to Portual, Janina and me along the coast without clear direction. She didn't have a bike. We first spent two days at the windy beach, then did a mixed walk/cycle trip across the mountains to Barbate. The EuroVelo 8 does not really exist in these regions.

The last night in Chiclana had torrential rain and we didn't have a host. Tent proved to be waterproof! Janina then had to go back to Germany and I wanted to continue to Portugal to meet Johanna again.

135 km walk/cycle with Janina - deepsouth.gpx

Cycling over Sevilla to Portugal

325 km to Portugal

Stage 13 - Portugal

Arrived May 2nd at Jo

Then a long relaxed tour with Johanna along the south coast, along the west coast to Lisboa and to Porto (800 km). Johanna's sister cycled with us for a few days, really nice!

I wanted to reach Germany until July, so we decided to cycle across the country into Spain. Oh so many mountains!

220 km, 3500 hm from Porto to Verin

Stage 14 - Spain and Basque Country

The mountains didn't stop! Well, the Camino de Santiago gave us a nice break between Leon and Burgos. We confused the pilgrims by riding it in the wrong direction

From Verin to Vitoria-Gasteiz 540 km

Here Johanna and me parted ways, she took a bus to South of Spain and I continued to Germany. But there is another country in the way....

Stage 15 - Racing through France

950 km - first down the Basque mountains, then flat across French countryside

Finished for now!

In Paris I arrived during on noon June 21st and took a bus (that had a bike carrier) to Germany in the evening. That was exactly the right amount of time in the city.

Aftermath

From Braunschweig I cycled 80km in sunny and rainy weather to Harzgerode, where I arrived at night when a thunderstorm was directly over me. That gave quite a motivation to cycle harder up the Harz hills.

Finally replaced my bike chain, it was really saggy!

Some smaller tours followed:

Finsterwalde to Berlin (120 km)
Berlin to Wurzen (180 km)
Wurzen to Neuried (475 km)

= 7825 km