Mosquito Coast

Palac, Serbia – Budapest, Hungary

When my Dad was a young boy in Duluth his parents forbade him from swimming in the nearby St. Louis River. At the time it was a cesspool of industrial waste. 

And then I remember when I was young my Grandpa showing me the river and talking about how it needed to be cleaned up. I didn’t really understand until later – but by the time I lived in Duluth in the early-90s we were swimming and fishing in the root-beer-colored waters. (Don’t worry, the root beer color is from natural tannins). Pretty cool that my Grandpa spearheaded the legislation that was responsible for the cleanup!

I found myself thinking about all this the last few days as we have begun to encounter lakes that are pretty, but too polluted to swim in. Once again, makes you realize how good we have it in Minnesota.

As we were approaching the border between Serbia and Hungary we arrived at Lake Palac – one of those lakes that’s too dirty to swim in. Sad.

But Lake Palac was full of history. Historical old buildings – that looked like they belonged in Germany more than Serbia.

And tributes to Lajos Vermes, who founded the Palac Olympics in 1880 – sixteen years before the first of the modern Olympics. The Games included fencing, wrestling, boxing, and biking around the lake.

Sounds like Vermes was a man after my own heart. He had big dreams, and invested his own funds into things like a track for the bicycle competition. He ended up going bankrupt, and I suppose you could call him a failure because of that. But the Palac Games were a precursor to the Modern Olympics. People like Vermes, and Tony Wise of Hayward, Wisconsin – who started the Birkebeiner, but later went bankrupt himself – are the kinds of big dreamers that make the world fun and interesting!

After hiding out in Serbia and Bosnia, it’s been a few days since we’ve been through a Schengen border. Pretty easy, as usual.

But after we were through I realized that there was no one behind us – so I went back to the passport guy and asked him if he could tell us how many Schengen days we had left. 

He seemed happy to oblige, and asked for my passport. Then he started going through the stamps. There are a lot of them. Entered Spain on . . . Left Croatia on . . . Entered Greece on . . .  Left Greece on . . . Entered Serbia on . . . Now coming back in . . . And those are mixed in with Mexico, Guatemala, etc., along with Morocco, Turkey, Montenegro, Albania, etc.

After a few minutes he conferred with his colleague and then they told us that they weren’t sure how many days we had left, but we were fine. 

We explained that we didn’t want to overstay our 90 days.

”You are American, so you have 90 + 90,” they told us. 

“What do you mean?” Diana asked.

”Americans get a 90 day bonus.”

We pursued the question a bit longer, but they insisted that we had 90 + 90 because we are Americans. 

“It’s on a chart,” they said.

Unfortunately, we have not seen said chart, and we have not been able to find any other corroboration for this theory. 

So at this point we’re thinking we’ll just stick to our current “new” plan: bike to Finland, and then fly to England before our 90 days run out. 

I suppose we could keep going, and then just show up for the ferry from Amsterdam to England on day 110 or so. Because based on what we saw of the guys at the Serbia-Hungary border I’m not at all sure that they would figure out we had overstayed. I had been thinking that the Schengen data was computerized – but it looks like it’s just up to the individual border guard to figure it out. With all our stamps it would be like a solving a Rubik’s Cube to conclude that we had been in Schengen more than 90 days in the last 180. (By the way, the inventor of the Rubik’s Cube is from Hungary). And if we went to a busy a border crossing I really don’t think they would worry about it – way too much time to figure out . . .

And even if they did figure it out, now we could claim that we had been told by the border patrol in Hungary that we had 90 bonus days because we’re American . . .

Seems like a pretty good defense . . . 

Or we could just mention Donald Trump. That might work. 🙂

But in the end we kind of like our current plan anyway – allows us to explore a little more of the British Isles. 

Thoughts from the Peanut Gallery? Does this seem right?

One other encounter I wanted to share . . .

Diana and I occasionally manage to watch shows on Netflix as we travel along. Most of the time we try to find movies that have some tie to where we are. So, probably 20,000 kilometers ago, we watched Mosquito Coast – much of which takes place in Central America and Honduras.

It’s about a family led by Harrison Ford, a bipolar inventor who is brilliant but doesn’t know when to stop. One day he decides that the rat race of American life is too much, and he moves the whole family to the jungles of Honduras.

Things start out okay, but eventually, after everything goes to hell, he tells his family that there has been a nuclear war and the United States is gone. Crazy people will believe anything…

So on our way to Budapest we stayed at kind of a lonely campground. All good.

But late in the evening I notice that there are some people on bikes just putting up their tent. They’re hammering in the stakes. Which is interesting because, who brings a hammer along on a bike trip? Don’t think much more of it though…

The next morning we’re having breakfast when an older guy limps by. We end up chatting a bit. Never got his name, but he’s from Austria and has the commanding German accent to match. Let’s call him Rolf.

We connect a little because Rolf has done this three day ski race in Greenland like twenty times. Last year he fell, broke his leg and had to be airlifted out. Thus the limp.

After talking a bit, and meeting his wife and one of his two children, we come to the subject of Russia and how we are not biking there because of the Ukraine situation. Rolf mentions that in the EU you are not allowed to go there at all (which is in contrast to the US – where you can go if you get a visa, it’s just kind of discouraged).

“Makes sense,” I say, “to punish Russia.”

“For what? They have done nothing wrong!!!”

“You don’t think it is wrong for them to invade the Ukraine?”

They proceeded to explain that the CIA led a putsch in Ukraine in 2024, and afterwards the Ukrainians killed 80,000 Russians who were living in the eastern part of the country. “The Russians are just defending their brethren from the Ukrainians,” they say, with more than a little undertone of anger in their harsh German-accented English.

And then they talked about how Ukraine is stockpiling biological weapons, and German and American scientists are conducting terrible biological weapon experiments there.

When I said I had never heard of any of this they said: “Of course, the media does not tell you about any of this.”

Then they invoked the infamous “they.”

“They don’t want you to know . . .”

All in their German accent, and, for Rolf anyway, not even the hint of a smile.

Who is this “they?” Why doesn’t “they” want me to know? And how did we arrive at this place, where otherwise smart people seem so eager to believe alternative versions of reality?

Oh, Rolf and his wife also talked about the European Union. I don’t remember their exact words, but what I gathered is that they see the EU as an overreaching bureaucratic machine that is just protecting its own Byzantine interests.

My suspicion is that, like so many in the US, they have grown tired of feeling talked down to and told what to do by a well-meaning but impersonal bureaucracy. These alternative stories allow them to channel their anger – to kind of rage against the machine …

What’s confusing to me is that Rolf and his wife are cross country skiers. They are obviously big bikers. In other words, I would usually just assume they are our people.

How did they come to such a different place? I mean, I don’t mind different points of view. But different versions of reality? There’s no arguing with that…

It’s like Harrison Ford declaring that the US is gone… (For reference, Harrison Ford’s character dies in the end after going completely crazy – but the family seems to have hope to survive after escaping his influence…)

The riding through Hungary so far? Dead flat. Which allowed us to cover ground quickly – but it dies get a little tiring to never use different muscles.

And Budapest? Love it. Huge parliament building.

A big castle and what I think of as German influenced architecture generally. And the Danube.

I guess what I love is the orderliness of the place. No trash. Big streets with real sidewalks. None of the chaos of Latin America and so many of the cities we’ve been through. And there are tourists – but there are not so many that it becomes almost claustrophobic.

Our next stage: biking with our girls to Vienna. I might sneak a post or two in, but thinking my focus will be elsewhere during this next week…