My biggest challenge so far! – Hungarian Divide – Stage 1

The Hungarian Divide is a self supported bikepacking tour that crosses Hungary from West to East. The biggest challenge I have faced so far. Enjoy the first part of adventure! 🙂

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Ahoy everybody i’m jamal and this is my story from the hungarian divide i would like to apologize in advance most of the time the footage you will see won’t be tightly related to what i’m talking about sadly i didn’t have enough power to keep my camera charged up

So that’s why also my english i’m not really used to speaking it so sorry for that but i thought i would give it a try and at least practice it so let’s begin first of all what is the hungarian divide the hungarian divide is a sas supported by packing adventure

The first and most important rule of the event is that it has to be completed on your own power using a back you decide how far you want to go it is up to you to decide whether you want to look at this event as a physical

Challenge a social ride or a tourist rig my goal was as almost always is to push myself to the very limit the full distance divide crosses hungary from west to east through the northern mountain ranges it’s 1240 kilometers long and has more than 19 thousand meters of elevation gain

And about half of it is on gravel road so i had plenty of opportunity to be on the edge the time limit to complete the trip was 11 days but of course i wanted to finish way earlier than that i even had a race planned at day 9 here in budapest

That i wanted to win so i not only had to get back here just for the race but i had to rest and recover as much as possible before that therefore my plan was to finish between four and five days i didn’t know how realistic or on your

Stick this was i didn’t know what kind of roads we will be taking but i knew that there was a lot of rain in the past days and they say the track was not in the best condition at the moment but still i hope for the best

And hoped that most of it will dry up i was thinking a lot about what to take with me i had to be a minimalist but how minimalist i had a 16 liter shadow bag small frame bag where i usually store my tools anyway and i bought a small bar bag

And that’s it i have to leave from this for the next maybe four to five days or even more if things don’t go as well as i hope if you’re an experienced backpacker you may think this isn’t a big deal but this was the first time for me

Also tent was out of the question the weather forecast was promising so i decided to sleep under the sky or in apartments if i could find any i only had an ultra sleeping bag which doesn’t offer too much protection but also doesn’t take too much energy to carry

So my plan was to ride during the night then the temperature tops and the sleeping day so what was the rest of my pack i had the basic necessities like a shower gel tool brush toilet paper a small towel a kitchen towel in fact to spare some weight and space

Very basic tools for my bike plus zip ties tape light raw for general purposes i also had one set of clothes besides the one i was wearing a raincoat visibility vest and since i planned to ride during the night i had two power banks two sets of lights

Six batteries for my hike power light some charging cables affordable solar panel and fuel lots of fuel i packed four kilograms of high five energy pods jazz and powder and i think that’s most of it to be honest with you i didn’t prepare for the server physically i just hope

That the size thing i do in my usual work will be enough i got to restart the day before and after the registration and the mandatory bike and equipment check i went to sem gothad ate the pizza and checked into an apartment it might just be the last good night’s

Sleep i got until the finish in the morning i completely reorganized my equipment everybody could have a small bag that the organizers sent to the finish so i ditched everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for the trick the small empty space that was left in my shadow bag got filled with food

August 20th is a national holiday so there were no shops open there were 99 mountain bikes and gravel bikes at the starting line we started exactly at 10 am soon i positioned myself at the front and i was riding with a group of four to eight people we almost immediately dived into the

Forest there were a lot of mud and puddles some of them were knee-deep but we could always find a way to somehow avoid them even if it took 20 to 30 meters deeper into the woods you really don’t want to ruin your whole drivetrain on the brake pads right at the start

You can dry your feet but you can’t undo the damage nobody closes to your back luckily besides these few very many parts the trailer was mostly ridable and everybody was expecting worse in the first few hours i was hanging with the guys at the front they were pushing like hell it felt like

I was on a mountain bike marathon or something i just really couldn’t imagine how is it possible to keep this power up for like a 1200 kilometers journey but my plan was to hang on them anyway because i could spare a lot of power by riding behind them on the

Long and speedy gravel sections after about two hours we got to be stuck in a battlefield but i managed to get through before them so i decided to use this time to fill up my battles i started to push even harder than before so i could arrive right behind them

After my pistol the problem was that i didn’t know where was the next water source so i ended up going for full gas for like half an hour in the end my plan was successful but my plan was stupid after this i could barely hang on them

But just as i thought about letting them go and the man who dictated the piece got a puncture his friend stuck with him and also the third guy who was still in the group died back a bit the train fell apart and i was alone from this point

Three and a half hours in i stopped for a rest i ate some food and i was just hanging around in the shadows for like half an hour maybe and waving at the others passing by by resting i was preparing for the hell of zola the organizer said that the section from

70 to 170 kilometers is one of the hardest in the whole event it’s a series of small and lot of time steep hills that will vary down quickly because of the elevation change and bad route conditions they weren’t kidding it’s really hard to make distance when you go slow both uphill

And downhill in a sixth hour i completely run out of water too it was well above 30 degrees so i had to find some water very quickly i was in a very rural area but i found some people who were working on a vineyard so i asked them if they have

Any water for me they told me to feel free to use the water this was the first time i operated something like this and i was so dehydrated i could barely pull up the bucket but when i finally got it well that was rewarding sorry not sorry so finally i had some

Liquid in my system again but i didn’t feel like sitting back on the bike at the moment the intense three hours at the beginning really wore me down and since i planned to ride through the night i decided that sleeping right now might be my best option

I rolled out my sleeping bag onto the grass and closed my eyes all together i stopped for two hours and it was totally worth it i felt so much less tired and the temperature also started to drop which made riding easier i hate hot weather my plan was to ride

Until 8 to 10 am from now while covering between 250 and 310 kilometers to keep the four to five day piece i was at 110 kilometers at this moment and about 60 kilometers of the cell of zola were still in front of me but i had like 15 hours

So i wasn’t that worried i quickly called the people who were took me while i was sleeping i could see that some of them were that tired i saw two people trip over basically nothing as the darkness came in i put on my visibility vest and turned on the lights there was a

Loop over light on my helmet for general use to see my immediate surroundings see around the corners see the computer and to have two free hands when i get off the bike i also use the high power front light with a relatively narrow angle so i could see that forward

With this combination i could almost go as fast downhill as in daylight uphill was of course still limited by my power i even turned on the high power light for these sections to conserve energy all together i was enjoying night riding i would not recommend it if you want to

See the landscape but i’ve already seen it and i’m more of a performance oriented person at 140 kilometers i start for a quick dinner in a village by dinner i miss some mixed seeds with right fruits might not be the best thing ever but it gives you energy and sometimes it’s nice

To eat something other than energy bars or jazz i checked my phone and found some water source two streets back next to the course by rolling back i met a small group and told them about the water and they soon followed me we were talking a bit i showed them the crisco

Talk application that shows you the nearby water sources it’s a very useful app by the way they decided to stay there for the night so i filled up my battles and went on my way the next few kilometers are fully roads so it was a good section for making up some time

I tucked in and pushed a bit harder but after five kilometers i had a strange feeling that something is a bit off what do you think i left my phone at the previous tab well so much for that making up time effort read the u-turn

Let a big battle cry in the middle of nowhere and rush back for my phone luckily the graph was still at the water source so my phone wasn’t taken i complained a bit for them on how can i be such an idiot and went on my way a game

The rest of the trip to checkpoint one wasn’t so interesting right before the checkpoint i stopped for a rest where four university students were camping on the top of the mountain at a forest resting place we talked a bit i told them about what i was doing

And i could also listen some nasty meta tracks they were listening to i was already missing but at this point i have to tell you that something burger came in i’ve ever slaughtered done i i love libby borge so anyway from this point i only had to go a few hundred

Meters to the checkpoint and i couldn’t believe my eyes when i got there that site was amazing i never seen something like that before there were a table full of red boots energy bars and chocolates with a soft mood lighting in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night

And so said i couldn’t record it i wanted to put my camera on my power bank but the area was infested with wasps so i could barely get to the table i grabbed my red bull and two chocolates and left the area as quickly as i could

A few hundred meters away i drank my red bull and continued my way with this checkpoint i finally hit 195 kilometers and that i was done no gimbal out on favi deck it’s a much more popular region amongst tourists which usually means better infrastructure so i hoped i could go

Faster and easier here i was right most of the night was when i went full at 4 00 am at 232 kilometers i started a bus stop to get an hour of sleep it helped out a lot also when i sat back on the bike the sun just started to came

Up which also had a positive effect on my internet clock so i felt so much better altogether i was almost at my minimum distance that i set up for stage one but i still have five hours and the other hit set seals so i had no intention to stop sadly my legs

Soon changed my mind my periosteum which is a word by the way that i just learned if you don’t know it’s a thin layer around the bone that hurts really bad if it gets in it so my periosteum or machine didn’t get the heat but i think it was overloaded i had this

Problem all the time when i was an athlete and had to wear spiked shoes that forced my leg into a natural position but i’ve never experienced this on a bike it quickly got worse so i had to call it a day sadly at around 8 00 am at 265 kilometers i

Found an apartment in norwegian and finally i could eat some regular food after that i set up my solar panel took a shower and went to bed with that stage one was over You