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IT'S STILL early morning. Sunday. I haven't ridden far and it's all been through heathland or woods. The roads have been slender and calm. They've been lined by tall, plain, unwieldy pines on one side and smaller, prettier, green trees with silver bark on the other. They're like rival tribes, staring across an agreed border. Or a dance for under-14s, each camp on its own side of the hall and too shy to go to the other.

Here, in the first village, I'm sitting at a wooden table outside the single sklep. I have a bike path to somewhere unsignposted in front of me, the shop at my back, and the combined library and police station to the right.

There's no road traffic but plenty of people. The men for the most part go into the shop and emerge quickly with bottles of beer and spirits. Hans said last night that drinking was a problem in Poland and they may be the evidence.

Somewhere behind me must be a church. The women, some men but no children are headed that way. They're dressed smartly, more grandly than at work but without the self-consciousness of a wedding. Not for the first time, I reflect that nations in which religion was suppressed, or at any rate not encouraged, are often now the most fervent believers. It's those in western Europe, largely untouched by dogma, which have adopted religious indifference and atheism.

I reached Torun towards the end of the afternoon. I wish I'd spent more time exploring it. Any time exploring it, because it's one of the oldest cities in the country. And full of gingerbread, apparently.

Torun is the birthplace of Copernicus, or Kopernik as he's known here by his original name, who calculated that the Earth went round the sun. This got him into awful trouble with the church, which had God's word that it was the other way round. The more Kopernik got out his notebooks, the crosser the clerics became. In the end, for his own safety, he had to say he'd got it wrong, that years of detailed study had misled him.

I didn't go into Torun because tomorrow's train station was on the other side of the river. I was anxious to put foot to ground somewhere near it. And because, after 144km almost all against the wind, I'd lost interest in anything but eating and resting.

Did I say all against the wind? If I did, I apologise. For the last hour, I had it thumping along behind me. Just as well because I was on a dull, ever-busier road, separated from it most of the time on a bike path. When the path ended, I went off to see if a sandy trail went anywhere. But it didn't, so I turned to much barking by irritating dogs and rejoined the traffic. Minutes later, the bike path started again.

Most of the day has been not on busy roads but on undistinguished lanes through more of those neat but haphazard villages. Poles are strong on solid home cooking and the smell of roasting Sunday meat has been rising from every house.

All regions have quirks and Poland's is that it's full of friendly people, often touchingly friendly - but nobody acknowledges strangers. A nod or a smile at the only person in sight is returned by a brief stare and a turning of the head.

The moment you establish a link, on the other hand, the opposite happens. It grew hot today and the wind against me was dry and dusty. I stopped at a sklep. Two women sat on plastic chairs outside the entrance. One was wifely and dark-haired, perhaps 50, and wearing an apron. The other was older and looked it because her fleshy, disapproving face suggested she was the town grump.

They watched silent and expressionless as I rode on to the little forecourt which perhaps once had petrol pumps. I turned the usual half circle to bring the bike the right way round to prop against the wall. My dzien dobry was returned and I was then inspected, assessed as an eccentric but perhaps diverting enough for an otherwise dull afternoon.

It's not easy for people to grasp, in a small and rarely troubled community, that there are people in the world who haven't the least idea what they're talking about. And so it took several long bursts of Polish acknowledged by bewilderment and apologetic shrugs and smiles for them to grasp that, no, I didn't understand a word.

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But you don't need words. We managed, with a map I sketched, that I was from France. I drew in the countries of Europe and marked each with the letters that cars have on their number plates, ending with PL for Poland, then CZ for the Czech Republic. I then drew a line of where I'd been and where I was going.

"Rower?" the younger woman asked in disbelief.

Rower, I knew, was Polish for bicycle, but pronounced "Rover". The Rover company had been first to bring bicycles to Poland and the Poles, not having a word for what they saw, just read the name on the bikes and picked that.

"Tak, rower."

Well, you'll know the rest. You've been through it all, every time you've stopped. The gasping, the looking at each other. All that.

The women asked what Polish I knew. I listed the pleasantries: yes, please, no, goodbye and so on. I knew the word for a bicycle and for water. I knew, but couldn't explain, a lot of words I recognised from roadside signs but had little reason to use. Not unless the conversation turned to beauticians, tyre menders and car washes.

"No verbs, then?" the more talkative woman asked in Polish that I could guess. No, I agreed, no verbs. And no numbers. There is no link between Polish and English or with the Romance languages, although there is with Russian, Czech and Serbian.

Anyway, when I stood to go, both beamed and the one-time grump beamed even more and used the long, warm phrase that I'd heard before to wish me a good journey and God's grace.

And that, along with blank faces and uncomplaining car drivers, sums up Poland for the traveller.