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For better or worse I was back in Germany. Despite the above picture I did have some sense of where I was going and this return to a country that I had first reached on Day Four had been deliberate on my part. After my encounter with Юлия in Saint Petersburg I had decided that I would quite like to return to Russia, and to get the visa I needed to send my passport back to the UK as it is necessary to apply for Russian visas in your home country. I didn't particularly trust any of the mail systems in Eastern Europe and so sending it from Germany seemed a safer bet. Plus I had lots of friends in Munich, a city that I lived in for a couple of months the previous summer, and so it seemed a good place to wait for my passport to be returned. Munich had always been on the itinerary anyway as the place that I was scheduled to meet my companion Daniel where he was supposed to join me drinking at Oktoberfest and then assume the role of my hapless sidekick the rest of the way across Eurasia. Of course he had since pulled out after losing his spectacles, which was in a way lucky because due to my tardiness the last beers of Oktoberfest had been downed and the last drunken revelers crawled home several weeks earlier. But another friend from England, who probably doesn't want his full name to be published here and who we shall therefore refer to simply as Dr Dave, was strangely keen to join me for a few days. As a busy professional he had somehow managed to find four free days and we had worked out that the best thing would be for him to fly to Zurich where I would meet him and cycle with him back to Munich, from where he would fly home. This bizarre little escapade would help me kill some time and would mean I could add two more countries to my list, country-bagging the hell out of Liechtenstein on my way to Switzerland.

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I arrived in Munich from the north after a couple of days extremely pleasant cycling through the German countryside. I have said it before and I will say it again but the cycle paths in this country are truly remarkable and the ride was extremely pleasant, largely following rivers, crossing the Danube for the first time at Regensburg before entering into Munich along the river Isar almost without noticing the city until I was safely in the heart of it. It was a Friday evening and I had arranged to meet a good friend of mine, Rufina, at six outside the post office, where she would help me to send my passport and visa application securely to London. I had asked her if she was sure the post office was open at this time, she told me she would check, and then after doing this she said we could meet there at six, no problem.

I arrived at the apartment near the centre of Munich where I would be staying at about five, leaving me not very much time to get ready to meet Rufina. This is the student apartment where I had rented out a room for a couple of months the previous year and where Rufina still lived. She wasn't at home but the door was unlocked and, as I knew my way around, I made my way to the guest room that I would be staying in. Then I needed to fill in the application form for the visa online. I ran around looking for someone that I knew, eventually stumbling upon a man named Son who was very surprised to see me again and then agreed to my frantic request to quickly use his computer.

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Having already used the agency (Real Russia) before for my first Russian visa you would be forgiven for thinking that I might have known what I was doing with the application process, but unfortunately I am an idiot. I thought I just had to fill in the form and then send them my passport but actually I had to print the form. Son didn't have a printer but another guy ran and brought his in. But then I realised that I had to also print the last three months of my bank statements and I thought I couldn't do this without a card reader (some of the services of my online banking requires me to sign in with a card reader instead of a password.) It was already almost six and there was no time. I practically gave up, but then Son told me not to and so I tried anyway, and for some reason my online banking allowed me to access my statements with only the password, and I printed them and miraculously had everything I needed. I gathered it all together in an envelope and, leaving a dazed Son to deal with a mess of printer cables and mistaken print-outs, I ran out of his room and set off for the post office as fast as I could.

I literally sprinted down the street in the Munich rush hour. I didn't want to be late, I didn't want to make Rufina angry, and I wanted to get this application in the post. I finally saw the post office ahead and then I made out the figure of Rufina with her curly dark hair walking towards me. She had her arms raised as she saw me running. "Relax," she said, "the post office is closed."

"What? But you said..."

"It closed at six."

"Rufina! You said we would meet at six. You said it would still be open?"

"Its open until six."

"But how would we have had time to send the thing if we got here at six and it closed at six?"

"I don't know. I thought we could just run in quickly and do it."

"Rufina!!!"

My application would have to wait until the next day to be sent. It didn't matter that much, the most important thing now was to get very drunk. I had probably been alone for too long (I hadn't stopped anywhere since Krakow) but suddenly being in the bright lights of the big city roused in me a stupid desire to paint the town red. The fact that bottles of beer in German supermarkets can be acquired for 29 cents meant I was soon well on my way and, slightly inebriated, I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to see my ex-girlfriend, Rachael, who now lived and worked as an au pair just outside Munich. This is, if you know me, or stalk me, the very same Rachael that I once cycled 240km through a New York blizzard to be with. The fact that she had later gone on to leave me heart broken and abandoned in the Canadian woods was a fact that I had completely forgotten after the sixth beer and I set off by bicycle to the club that I knew she was going to.

We had arranged through the internet to meet outside the club at a certain time, but she wasn't there. This was a fairly typical Rachael move. I went into the club alone. It was halloween and everyone was wearing costumes apart from me. Well, I mean, I had sort of come as a homeless guy. The club was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside and I walked around for ages looking for her face among the goblins and ghouls but it was hopeless, mainly because she wasn't there. I got talking with some guys near the bar and finally realised that it was the 21st century and that people had these things called smart phones and that if I could borrow one I might be able to contact her online. Having acquired one of these strange futuristic contraptions I managed somehow to figure out how to send Rachael a message telling her where I was standing, which happened to be next to a bar, and that she should come and meet me there.

It turned out to be a mistake to stand by the bar, because from this position I was able to see that the price of drinks was only 50 cents for some shots, and one euro for beer. At this point I decided that I was a millionaire and bought drinks for everyone around me, and lots more for myself. By the time Rachael finally arrived I was so wasted that I cannot remember anything that followed but from the bits and pieces of information that I was later able to gather it went something along the lines of; me declaring my forever unending love for Rachael, her telling me she had a boyfriend, me getting somewhat rowdy at the news, then acting aloof towards some of her friends, insulting others, stealing the spectacles of another ("my friend Daniel needs them!") then getting mad when Rachael left in a taxi, hopelessly attempting to cycle home, falling off my bicycle, and then waking up on some steps in a part of the city that I did not recognise.

Or to put it another way, I'm never drinking again.

29/10/13 - 85km (30km in Germany)

30/10/13 - 137km

31/10/13 - 89km (+10km unloaded)