René Seindal

I almost had a nasty accident on my travel by motorcycle from Venice back to Copenhagen, and somebody definitely had one.

I left Venice just after noon on Thursday, and decided to drive through the night to get as far as possible before stopping to sleep.

Everything went smoothly for about a 1000km, until approx. 50km south of Leipzig. It was about 23:30 in the evening, pitch dark, and with some, but not much traffic. I was probably going at about 130-140 km/h – I did so most of the time – when I spotted something large, mangled and black rolling over the road in a cloud of sparks. I must have done something instinctive to avoid hitting it – I don’t know what – but somehow registered that an accident had happened, and I pulled into the side and stopped in the emergency lane as quickly as possible.

I had no idea what had happened, and absolutely no idea what to do about it, but I did mentally prepare myself for finding bloody mangled persons somewhere, and cursed for having left without even a basic first aid kit in my bags. I have several but left everything in Venice as I’ll need them there next year.

Two or three other cars had stopped before me, and stood in the emergency lane with their lights blinking. Two young German men were there, and I spoke shortly with them. My German is very poor, and I doubt I would have been able to place an 112 call if the other end didn’t speak decent English, so I started bullying the two Germans, “Have you called? Have you called?”, until I had them both working on their phones.  Initially they had some problems getting through, but then announced that the police was on its way.

While they called 112 we inspected the scene.  The first car we saw was a white van, turned on its side in the first lane of the three lane motorway. The window was shattered and milky white, and we couldn’t get to any doors – one was downwards and one upwards, higher than I could reach – and we couldn’t determine if there were anybody inside. Lorries and cars were hurling by, and we were scared of getting hit ourselves.

The white van had a trailer, a low one used for transporting cars, lying at the side in the emergency lane.

A bit down the road, still in the emergency lane, were a very badly mangled car which had clear rolled over and then crashed violently into the guard rail. Fearing the worst we looked inside, but there were nobody. Incredibly the door opened easily, and the emergency lights were blinking still. Both air bags had inflated and there was blood on the one in the driver’s side, but there were nobody.

Looking around we found the driver sitting on the other side of the guard rail, with blood on his face, apparently coming from around his eyes. I tried to speak to him, but he was very badly shocked and hardly comprehensible, but he moved, spoke something, and moved his eyes too, so even if I couldn’t talk to him, I was fairly confident he was not in a life threatening situation. He remained where he was, so we let him be.

I went back to the white van because we still haven’t found anybody there, and I feared somebody might still be inside, but we couldn’t figure out anything. We couldn’t get around it properly due to the traffic passing by. It seemed abandoned, no traces of any persons and no blood.

Another person showed up from one of the stopped cars – which had a similar trailer with a car on top – and he was going on very rapidly in Russian, gesticulating wildly, and even though we didn’t understand anything he said, and he didn’t understand any German or English, we understood somehow that he had been driving the van and had crawled out himself. He had been driving with the other Russian car, and had been there all the time.

The German guys found an emergency triangle in the crashed car and put it up a bit down the road. Just as they were doing that, a lorry almost crashed into the van on the inner lane, avoiding it by inches after a frantic manoeuvre. One of the German guys starting signalling the oncoming traffic using the display of his mobile phone, and I did the same, and seeing  that most lorries moved to the middle lane and avoided the van.

The police passed on the other side of the motorway, and it took another couple of minutes before they had turned around and came back to us.

At this point there was little left for me to do. The policemen did the same things we had done, looking at the crashed cars, locating the involved persons and finding out if anybody needed immediate emergency treatment, and concluded that wasn’t the case started taking photos. Shortly after a Red Cross ambulance showed up to care for the hurt driver, and we saw nothing more of him. A while later a doctor turned up in another car and entered the Red Cross van.

I asked one of the policemen if I was still needed and was asked to stay for a little while.

The police started interrogating the Russian driver and the three of us who had stopped, collecting stories and documents. Fortunately, the two Germans had some English and could translate for me, because the policemen only spoke German, and my German is too poor for anything that serious.

It took a while, and after I had written down my name, address and licence number of my motorcycle, I got my passport back, and I was allowed to continue. I didn’t linger, there was nothing for me to do, and I wouldn’t get any wiser for it.

I departed and decided to stop at the first stop possible for think and relax a bit, but it was well over 80km before until the next stop.

Naturally, witnessing a serious accident up close makes you think, it could so easily have been fatal what I saw, but on the other side, I still had about 600km to go, at least five hours driving, and I wouldn’t be any safer having images of mangled cars and bloody drivers  in my head, so I tried to push it away, think of something else and just get home.

In the end I didn’t really feel like stopping much or sleeping anywhere, so I just continued driving through the night, stopping for about half an hour every once in a while for something to drink and sometimes a little nap in the empty restaurants along the motorway. It was rather cold in the night, so I only did short stretches of 50-80km between breaks, stopping when my hands got too cold. I was a the Rostock ferry harbour at 7.30 in the morning, and got on a ferry at nine for Gedser, and I was back home just after noon, very tired.

These photos were taken with my phone after the police had arrived:

What appears to have happened is this. The van was driving in the inner lane with the empty, but very low trailer. The car, probably trying to overtake him, hit the trailer at high speed having only seen the van. At impact, the car must have done a somersault and rolled over, ending crashed into the guard rail turned 180° relative to the driving direction. This was what I saw and fortunately didn’t hit. The van must have received a violent forward push, directly into the chassis through the trailer hook, which turned it over. The trailer was detached as the van fell, and ended besides it.

From what I could see, the driver of the car had injuries around his eyes, but not to his eyes, probably caused by the expanding air bag, which had blood stains on it. His seat belt and the air bag probably saved his life. The driver of the van was completely unscathed, but shocked. Getting the impact from behind he had no forewarning, but the seat belt and having the larger vehicle protected him.

I arrived in Cardedu in the afternoon on Saturday, and I was hardly in the door at Francesco’s before he declared that we were going fishing in kayak that afternoon. It is like that at Francesco’s house. It is very hard not to end up paddling most of the time.

We went to a local camping where his trailer were, picked it up and were off to Cardedu beach for a late afternoons paddling and fishing.

Francesco does a lot of fishing from his kayaks, and he has had some spectacular catches, including a 27kg “pesce luna”, which is a tropical fish not normally found in Sardinian waters.

We didn’t catch a thing. Francesco got a few “tracine” but they either got off the hook or were let off because they were undersize.

Anyway, when we got home after sunset, Elisa, Francesco’s wife, had made homemade pesto with basil from the garden, so we had another dinner that couldn’t be beat nonetheless. Food is good here in Sardinia, and much of grows literally on people’s doorsteps.

I should have written something on the blog then, but we ended up in front of Francesco’s computer looking at photos, websites and leaflets, and at eleven I just collapsed on my bed.

Francesco is a person who prefers to stay active rather than taking half a day off, so Sunday morning we were off again to take a couple of Poles out paddling at nine. Just as we were about to leave, the camping where they stayed called to say that they were still too drunk from the evening before, and that they weren’t going. We had, however, recruited a few others for the excursion on the beach the day before, so we left anyway.

On the beach, only one of the promised three persons had showed up, so the group ended up being of just one persons. After a bit of instructions, communicated in an unholy mix of Italian, German and English, we paddled down the coast for a while, and back again. It was a quite calm day, with a light scirocco and only some modest swells to deal with.

Back on the beach we had a beer with our German paddler, and they and Francesco arranged for next years exchange of German beer for Sardinian red wine.

In the afternoon we went sight-seeing in most of Ogliastra on motorbike. We drove to the Lido di Orri, to Santa Maria Navarrese, over the small mountains and down to Pedra Longa, then back and on to Baunei and up to the Golgo plain behind the Cala Goloritzé and the Cala Sisine I visited last year in kayak. We spent some time there, throwing pebbles into a 270m vertical hole, visiting a 16th century church, and hanging around the local bar.

We then returned almost to Santa Maria Navarrese, before going to Triei where they had a city-wide celebration of the ancient traditions, with people dressed in traditional clothes, stands serving local specialities and many old houses open for visitors. The city also sported a large number of murals, some quite interesting.

There we met some friends of Francesco, who took us up the hills to see an ancient nuraghe and a “tomba dei giganti”. The nuraghe had been really big, but it was in bad shape, mostly a ruin, and it wasn’t even indicated on the street signs like other local sights. Francesco’s friend told us the it had been quite different when he was a kid, almost complete, but it had been ruined on purpose by somebody over 20 years ago. It is so sad to hear than something which has been standing for thousands of years has then been ruined so recently, but of course, human stupidity and ignorance know few bounds if any.

The “tomba dei giganti” is another type of neolithic monument, traditionally thought to be a tomb, but who knows what it was. This one consisted of a covered passage with the remains of an elongated mound, with a crescent shaped series of stones on one side. According to our guide it had the shape of a bull’s head when seen from above.

It was getting late, and we had a pizza appointment at Cardedu Marina a 8, so we had to head back homewards. We arrived half an hour late, found nobody there but desided to eat anyway as we were rather hungry and heard on the phone that the others were coming anyway. Not as soon as we had ordered did they show up anyway.

Today Francesco and I got up early and we’re off for a paddle to Goloritzé and back, which is about 30km along some of the most beautiful coastline in Sardinia, which is saying a lot as most of the coast here is breathtaking.

It is hard to find a bit of time for blogging, as Francesco likes to keep his guests on a tight schedule. After all, you can always sleep when you get old(er)

It also helps that there is no mobile coverage in or near his house, keeping me offline unless I go and sit in the orchard or between the vines.

I’ve spend most of the last days roaming parts of southern and central Sweden. All in all I did some 1500 km in three days, but only managed to keep two of my three appointments.

On Wednesday I drove from Copenhagen to Gothenburg to visit my friends Sara, Johan and Elda at Escape Kajakcenter. The journey up there was event-less, with motorway all the way, except for a few minor mishaps on the ring road of Gothenburg, but nothing the GPS of my phone couldn’t handle. I got there in the end and that is what matters.

The scope of the visit was to present my Venice Kayak project to Sara and Johan, in the hope that they would want to organise some tours down there for their customers. We had a very nice evening, eating sushi, and talking kayaking and Venice. I’m very happy that Sara and Johan liked my ideas and hence Escape Kajakcenter will try to organise a couple of groups to send to Venice in August and September this year.

The next day, Thursday, I continued towards Stockholm after another quick visit at Escape Kajakcenter to pick up a few things. I expected it to be just as easy as the day before, only an hour longer due to the distance, but as I continued on the E20 I discovered that most of the road between Gothenborg and Stockholm isn’t motorway. In the end it took well over six hours to get there.

My first appointment in Stockholm was with Paul Rosenquist from Point 65°N. We’ve been writing together for a while regarding kayaks for Venice, and as I was going to Stockholm anyway, and it was mostly on the road, we’d make an agreement to meet.

Point 65°N has their headquarters in a small house on the Pampas Marina in Stockholm. At first it seemed like such a little house for an company the size of Point 65°N, and inside people were almost sitting on top of each other, so they probably have something bigger next year if they continue to grow at the same rate.

Just besides the offices is Pampas Kajak, the largest kajak store in Sweden. It is owned by the same group that owns Point 65°N, and, lo and behold, mostly sold Point 65°N kayaks.

Paul promised me he’d do everything possible to get one of the first of Nigel Foster’s Whiskey 16 kayak to Venice for us. It does look like a fantastic boat, and I really can’t wait to try it.

My last appointment was with Carin and Lars at Horisont Kajak just outside Stockholm. It was getting late and I hurried as much as I could, following the driving indications I had saved from Horisont Kajak’s homepage. They were very precise and I arrived reasonably quickly at their base. Horisont Kajak is located in the most beautiful of places, in the middle of a forest down to a sheltered corner of the Stockholm archipelago. Too bad nobody was there. I wasn’t really surprised, though, because it was a bit late, so I set out to find the home address of Carin and Lars.

This time the GPS in my phone failed me completely. It quickly gave me a route to follow, which I did. Unfortunately the navigation software didn’t distinguish properly between real roads suitable for a 300kg motorcycle with driver and luggage, and muddy hiking paths in the local forest, so I ended up somewhere completely weird and certainly not correct. A rather scared looking lady with two small dogs certainly didn’t expect to meet a fully loaded motorcycle in there. After about half an hour driving around in the little forested residential neighbourhood I had ended in, I finally managed to extricate myself from the maze of playing children, seniors taking an evening stroll and assorted joggers, by doing the exact opposite of what the nice lady from the navigation company told me.

When I finally returned to the main road, and found a route suitable for motorcycles leading to Gustavsberg, the nice lady fell silent. When I stopped to check the phone, it was dead, out of battery.

I know Carin and Lars lives near Gustavsberg, on a small road somewhere on the outskirts of town, or so it seems on the maps I consulted before I left home, but without a GPS, without a working phone, with a non-working phone number to call, it just disconnected when I tried to call, and with all shops closed, I couldn’t really get any further.

Staying the night in Stockholm and trying to sort out the situation the next day wasn’t really a possibility, as I also had an appointment in Copenhagen at two on Friday, with some eight hours driving to do, so after pondering the situation I decided I could just as well start returning home, and I headed back to the Stockholm ring road and the motorway home.

It soon got too cold to continue, and after a few hours I stopped and looked for a place to sleep. I was fortunate enough to find a youth hostel just minutes before they closed for the evening, and got a good nights sleep. In the morning I was back on the motorway heading for Copenhagen. I was driving too fast because I wanted to keep my appointment in Copenhagen at two, and I almost got stopped by the police for speeding. I spotted the police car just in time to slow down so it looked like I had been overtaking rather than just speeding, and the police car quit following me after a few minutes.

In any case, I did make my appointment, arriving at three to two.

The list of misfortunes during my journey in Italy last year keeps growing, even more than a month after my return to Denmark.

Today a Danish police officer called me at home to ask if I had been driving in Switzerland last autumn, as a fine for speeding down there had ended on his table. Apparently, I had been doing the normal 120 km/h on a stretch of motorway where there was a local limit of 80 km/h. There was little point in denying as he had some very nice photos of me

I have no idea how large the fine will be, but I will know when the Swiss police sends me the fine.

Here’s a scan of a photocopy of the photo:

I’m back in Denmark now. I started Thursday morning from the motel north of Würzburg, with frost on the motorcycle. Fortunately, it started promptly, but it was a cold start of the day.

When I started the thermometer on the dashboard showed 0° C, but as I moved northward it became milder, and most of the day I had 5-10° C and could put on a bit more speed.

The first time I had to get gasoline, I couldn’t open the gas tank lid. The key wouldn’t get all the way in. I had to warm the key in my hands to heat it enough to melt the droplet of ice in the lock.

I almost missed the exit towards Kassel, and did some fairly stupid manoeuvres at the exit to get back on track.

Close to Hamburg I saw a motorbike or large scooter on the motorway, but it turn off the motorway before I could have a look. It is the only two wheeler I have seen since I left Italy.

North of Hamburg it started to rain and it got dark, so I had to slow down again. I only had about 100 km to the border, so I just drove with the lorries at their speed.

I had rain and wet roads all the way up Jutland. My destination was Videbæk between Herning and Ringkøbing, which is were my wife works. The last 100 kms were on main roads in the countryside, which wasn’t a nice experience. The lorries drive fast there too, and when they pass you in the opposite direction, they create a forceful drag full of water droplets they lift from the wet road. Its like getting sprayed in the face with high pressure water.

Würzburg to Videbæk (850km):

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Now I’m relaxing a bit here in Jutland. It seems like I will be driving to Copenhagen on Tuesday, based on the weather forecasts. It’ll be the only day without too much rain and wind in the coming week.
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I’m on my way back to Denmark. I started Monday from Rome and made it to Venice, where I had to wait for the next day to pick up my bag, and send a few things back to Palermo. Tuesday afternoon at 17:30 I was back on the motorway heading home.

The first part of the journey, from Venice to Trento, was OK. The weather was fine and I made good progress. As I started to climb up towards the Brenner pass, and night fell, it started to get really cold. Nominally it wasn’t really that cold, maybe 5°C, but add the chill factor of 150 km/h and you’ll start to feel it a bit. It was dark too so I had to slow down, but at least then I could feel my fingers just a little bit.

I’ve never seen snow clad mountains at night before. Its a very special sight, quite impressive.

When I reached the pass at about eleven in the evening, it started to snow too. I still had 25 km to reach Innsbrück and its definitely the first time ever I’ve been driving at 40 km/h on an almost deserted motorway, being overtaken by the occasional long haul lorry. Driving a motorcycle at midnight in pitch darkness on a mountain motorway while its snowing is not my kind of fun. Actually, it wasn’t fun at all.

I was so eager to get off the motorway that I just picked the first exit that said Innsbrück, which happened to dump me on some deserted mountain road some 5 km south of the city, so I spend another half an hour crawling down the hair pin turns towards the city further down the valley. It was one at night before I had found a hotel and a bed.

This morning I started from Innsbrück and I’ve just been following the E45 all the time. For a Dane with a Sicilian wife the E45 is all you need to know. It starts in Sicily and winds it’s way up Italy, Austria, Germany to Denmark, from where it continues to Nordkapp in Norway.

It was still very cold this morning, and I didn’t dare go too fast, in case there was ice on the road, so I just stayed in the outer lane with all the lorries, doing 90-100 km/h. After about half an hour my fingers were so cold they started to pain, and I had to stop to warm them with some coffee. Most of the day has been like that. Half an hour on the road and half an hour in an auto-grill warming up again.

I found a little thermometer in a shop on the road, and glued it to the dashboard. Its been 3-5°C most of the day, but the temperature dropped a bit at sunset, to 1-2°C at 17:30. I don’t want to drive in the dark if the temperatures drop below zero, so I’m now at a motel on the A7/E45 just north of Würzburg.

This must be the slowest motorcycle journey I have even done. I have managed to do just 400 km on Tuesday, and another 400 km today, so I still have over 600 km before I’m home. I should be home tomorrow, though, because the weather forecasts promise milder weather in northern Germany than in the south. I do, however, risk getting some rain tomorrow.

I don’t dare think about how I look on the road. I have so many layers of clothes on. First I have a set of Merino wool leggings and shirt, then a fleece jacket, then a jogging set, then my old Dainese leather suit and over that my new Kokatat anorak. I wear two sets of gloves, a woolen set under the leather gloves, and still my hands get as frozen as glacial ice. My feet get cold too, because I haven’t brought woolen socks, but they’re not as exposed as the hands. I close the fleece and jogging jackets all the way up, then put a Kokatat turtleneck on top, and close the anorak all the way up to my nose. I also put on the hood under the helmet. It gives me a burka like field of vision, but it is great for keeping out the cold. Driving like that I’m not all that cold, except for my hands.

Here’s the fully loaded motorbike. The rucksack on the top contains the stuff I sent to Palermo, so its not with me anymore. I’ve had quite a bit of problems getting my Avatak Aleutina paddle to sit there, but I think I have sorted it out. At least its still with me.

The days on Google maps

Venice to Innsbück (376km)

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Innsbrück to Wurzburg (450km)

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I’m on my way north now. I left Palermo Sunday evening with the ferry to Naples, from where I went by motorbike to Rome. The crossing was eventless, the ferry mostly empty. The ferry arrived in Naples early, around 6:30, and I was on the motorway before seven, as the sun rose over the Appenines. It was quite pretty, but also very cold. I had to stop every half hour to warm my hands with some coffee in the Autogrills along the way.

I’m staying with some very dear friends whom I haven’t seen for several years now. Now is the time to make up for that error of omission.

It is also the time to change tires on the motorcycle, which means that I will stay here in Rome at least until Friday morning.

So, now the process of importing my old motorcycle from Italy is almost over. I’ve paid the import taxes, which were more than I originally paid for the motorcycle in Italy, I have the Danish licence plate and insurance, so now I can finally enjoy having a motorcycle again.