Vienna – Bratislava – 3rd week November 2003

Leaving Vienna by bike

I was very happy to leave Vienna. We stayed for too long. Granted, we didn’t have much choice, as we needed time to rest Stephane’s knee (he had tendonitis), but it was frustrating becuase there were so many museums and palaces and exhibitions to see, so many concerts to hear, and so many restaurants to try, but the city is so expensive that we had to pass up a great deal of these things. Austria as a whole is very expensive. There is a very noticeable difference in crossing the border from Germany, even in something simple like buying groceries. I didn’t verify it, but I heard that prices went way up after the introduction of the euro in 2002.

Our first night out of Vienna was rather bizarre. By the time we found our way out of the city, night had almost fallen (it gets dark by 4:30 PM), and it wasn’t long afterwards when the fog set in. We pedalled along a deserted bike path by the Danube for a while, and then, appearing before us, was a strange apparition. Green men and strange glowing lights in the sky. Stephane said maybe aliens had come to carry us off. And the men were the exact images of movie aliens. Along with the hazy lights, they were the only thing we could see through the fog. I thoguth maybe it was an outdoor movie theater (forgetting that the summer has been long over), but it looked as if there was no screen, just little green men talking to each other in the sky. As we neared and rounded a corner, we saw stadium seating, but the aliens and the lights had disappearedm and there was no screen. We stopped for a moment to look around, but saw nothing. Then we continued, and a minute later, after another bend, saw a couple of men in the back of a truck with a generator. They sprayed a huge fountain of mist into the air, then shone lights onto it, thereby creating the images we had seen. You could only see the images coming from the other direction and rounding the bend in the river. It was odd. It’s not every day I see green men and glowing lights in the sky.

We didn’t continue much farther because the fog made it difficult to find the right direction. In fact, we missed a sign for the bike path and ended up at the tip of an island, between a canal and the Danube. Which we didn’t realize until the next day. The effect of the fog was eery. We couldn’t see a thing except for one or two lights glowing across the river. And all night long, we heard strange sounds. Construction all night long, and then the sound of anearby refinery starting up around 5 o’clock, banging noises in the night, and foghorns in the early morning. Then men’s voices close by. All these noises around us and we couldn’t see a thing. The fog barely lifted all day. Everything was surreal. It was like the twilight zone.

As we approached the Slovakian border, we passed only one person and two cars. True, we rode along a bike path, and not many people bike in November, but we were still a little surprised at how few people we passed in this country. Except for Vienna, we passed only a handful of people in all of Austria. The country is sparsely populated (only 8 million inhabitants), and we’re here off-seasons, so we had the bike paths completely to ourselves from one border to the other, with the exception of a few joggers.

Our last night in Austria, we camped a few miles from the Slovakian border on a peninsula bordering the river and a canal. We passed through tunnels in the rocks (reminding Stephane of the catacombs in Paris) and went along a tiny dirt path between a stone beach on one side and cliffs on the other. After setting up camp for the night, we took a little midnight stroll about a mile farther along the beach where there were ruins of an old castle. The trees we passed appeared ancient. We came across a little shack and Stephane shined the flashlight through the bars on the windows. I was all for leaving at that point, and then he tried the latch and found the door to be open. So we tok a quick look inside. There was a chair inside, and a tiny table. Aside from that, nothing, except for a rectangular hole in the ground, a few feet deep – exactly the size for a coffin. It was empty except for dry earth. Reminded me of Edgar Alan Poe’s “A Telltale Heart.”