Slupsk, Poland: Hard road, hard wind

August 24, 2015

I DIDN'T see Adam at first. I waited until a shower had passed and slid out of the campground at first light. Then there was a shout and the sound of hurried steps. I turned in the pathway and Adam was beaming like the rising sun.

"I was just drinking coffee when I saw you pass," he said, although I think he'd been waiting to wave me goodbye. A nice guy, Adam.

A while up the road, two cars whistled by and the driver's door came open on the second and there was Adam again, half out of the car and waving.

Something I've never seen before: a breath-alcohol tester outside a supermarket

The wind blew from the off today. And the road bumped. I deliberately rode through the tiniest communities, the heart of a country more than its cities. My early experience of the shabby training school by the port was misleading. Polish cities and towns are neat, clean, brightly painted and at ease with themselves. What the villages aren't in any way is exciting.

Polish villages, a variety of styles, never interesting but always clean and neat

They're hard to describe because they're different from each other and the buildings within them are no more consistent. For the most part, they're single-storey places set in small, hedged front gardens with a greater expanse at the back for clothes lines, vegetables and anything else that people keep behind houses.

I think they're brick or breezeblock, but it's hard to say because often they have been rendered and then sometimes painted, often pale blue or dark green.

Street signs point the direction to each house. Note the emblem of the Compostella trail

There are bus shelters that have function before beauty, the style of the communist era across eastern Europe. There's the occasional block of flats of striking ugliness - all random, ugly windows, and balconies like concrete bath tubs. But they're an exception rather than commonplace as they are in Romania or the former Yugoslavia.

"The Last Tree" is a travelling protest against global warming. Each time the situation deteriorates, another figure is added to the queue to see the world's last tree

A lot of investment has come, as Adam said, from the European Union. Poland is not slow to acknowledge that help and there are signs with the European flag, and that of other partners, wherever it has happened. Find a road improved to western European standards, sometimes beyond it, and there'll be the blue flag with the circle of yellow stars.

But get to one of the old roads and the outer half of each lane, the part that cyclists use, will be collapsing or crazed. There'll be long stretches, an hour or more at a time, of potholes filled by tar that has been poured from a bucket and left. The filling stands higher or lower than the road, never level with it. When you see older locals on their bikes, they have that look of resignation and discomfort that can't have been uncommon a couple of decades ago.

I had a hard time today. The wind blew harder as the day passed, not quite into my face but not so far from it to make a difference. The teeth-shaking road never improved until the run-in - again paid for by the EU - to the delightfully named Slupsk. Nor did the constant traffic.

Poland is one of the most religious countries in Europe

The countryside has been more of the same, the Polish ration, unremarkable, inoffensive and unchanging. There are constant open fields with stubble like a pizza chef's chin.

Slupsk had that "don't know, don't care" air to it. It may not have recovered from its history. Between summer1944 and the second month of 1945, the Germans murdered 800 prisoners in a railway yard here. It was a branch of the Stutthof concentration camp. I went to find the memorial but I didn't succeed.

In 1945, 5 000 prisoners were marched to the Baltic, forced into the sea and machine-gunned. The rest were marched towards eastern Germany, but they were were cut off by the Russians. The Germans then marched the surviving prisoners back to Stutthof. Thousands died.

The Germans kept on killing, although at a lesser rate, until the Red Army took the city without serious resistance. A thousand German civilians committed suicide rather than face their reprisals. The Russians set the centre of the city ablaze.

Not a happy time.

Today's ride: 109 km (68 miles)
Total: 4,778 km (2,967 miles)

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