Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Atila

From the garlic festival we cycled through the three backstreets of Bajha to avoid police nabbing us for having no lights.  Arriving at Atila's the gate opened to expose a graveyard of bicycles (hopefully not tour cyclists remains).  Shown to the "Sports Hotel" as Atila put it (a garage full of envy inspiring bicycles) he got to work rearranged them to make enough space for us to sleep.



Although our beds had been sorted and it was pushing 2am Atila had other plans and showed us to the bar, where he insisted we have whiskey and listen to Jethro Tull on his record player - good times!  We could see through to the other room his A-Z record collection perfectly arranged and further inspection found a computer direct from 1988 that had an excel spreadsheet listing his collection.  There it was, under F, Johnny Farnhems pearler of a record Whispering Jack!  Shortly followed by more whiskey and Colin Hays stunning album Man at Work, we finally called it a night after flipping through 80's photo albums showing a fit young Atila cycling across Europe. 


An outdoor enthusiast, Atila woke us the next morning with more snaps of his adventures by canoe and cycling in Greece, followed by producing an impressive collection of russian made cameras in perfect condition.  More whiskey, more records being played, more broken English and Hungarian, more drawing pictures to explain our broken English and Hugarian and more whiskey! 



Atila made me do this shot

Atila had a great idea to actually go for a canoe trip right then and there, which really at this stage clashed with our plans of getting closer to the Serbian border.  However, according to our "always say yes" rule, we obliged, and five minutes later there we were paddling down a canal in a canoe, kinda drunk towards the Danube. 




As if this was not already enough, Atila is a bike technician, and got to work on completeing a service on both our bikes. THANKYOU ATILA - your hospitality, love for bicycles, whiskey and map enthusiasim really made for one very special night/day!!

4 comments:

  1. bahahahaha, i just nearly wet my pants with laughter, THATS GOLD. Oh my you guys are so lucky to meet such lovely people on your journey, its awesome!! x Rissa x
    ps, it would take brad 15years to get the same red beard LOL, btw I love it Curtis & Brads jealous LOL!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Always Say YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Xx s

    ReplyDelete
  3. What an awesome bloke Atila is!!! Can't believe you found some Johnny Farnham... That is awesome! A little piece of home! cant wait to hear more!! Yas xoxo

    ReplyDelete