Alpine Greece

I left the port city of Igoumenista 5 euro worse off after an orange juice and very average toastie for breakfast. The Hotel declined to take payment by card though the machine was there on the table and the VISA sign in the window. Greece is an expensive place, I am finding out…maybe I have been spoilt by the prices in the other countries I have visited so far. Anyhow, I set off for Ioannina on the recommendation of Pat Thynne and took the motorway to get some miles done.Dull, dull, dull. You see nothing on the motorway. Ioannian on the other hand has a nice fort and thousands of teenagers milling about. Maybe it is the school holidays? Lots of mooching and not much studying.

Feeling pepped up by a double espresso and probably a little over confident given I didn't have a paper map worth a damm, I allowed the GPS to navigate me to for the next section, the only proviso being that it was barred from taking motorways or toll roads. As the crow flies, the destination was 80km away and it predicted 2 hours to get there.




Climbing out the other side to 1100m, I nearly ran into two ponies who were licking moisture off the road. When I stopped to take picture, one of them for curious and came over to investigate, covered in a swarm of flies. He sniffed and then walked on, donating a portion of flies to me.

Later, the mountain seemed to be made of a grit like sand and the road was buggered. The whole side of the mountain seemed to be slipping slowly down so no wonder they had a hard time keeping a surface on it.



The next creature trying to block the road was this little tortoise. It was just sitting there sunning itself but I figured it wouldn't last very long so I moved it to the edge.







I blindly obeyed the GPS it it took me down a series of ever narrower roads some only the width of a single car and then into a gorge which had a huge cliff to the left and a huge drop to the right, and lots of sign saying watch out for falling rocks. I noticed this house built into the cliff face which has got to be one of the stranger addresses in the world.








By this time, there was thunder and lightning overhead and I thought it best to get away from the cliffs as the rain can cause rocks to tumble. I climbed up upwards and saw signs that the road was suffering from the regular landslips. By then, the rain had moved on and I could see the lightning show on the next mountain.



At the top, I should see what I though was a fantastic ribbon of switchbacks all the way to the valley floor but it was a mirage. The descent was loose gravel, they hadn't finished the road. I got my first dog chase on the way down too. The German guys I met last night told me to be careful of the dogs here as they can be quite aggressive. I thought they were winding me up but not so.

After 4 hours on the road  I arrived at Meteora. The Meteora is a complex of Greek Orthodox monasteries built on stone towers and date from mid 14th century. Originaly there some 20 but six survive today. Access to the monasteries was originally (and deliberately) difficult, requiring either long ladders lashed together or large nets used to haul up both goods and people. This required quite a leap of faith – the ropes were replaced, so the story goes, only "when the Lord let them break". These days, the monasteries are tourist attractions with fewer than 10 residents each.

Appolonia and on to Greece

As I was checking out of the hotel this morning, the concierge asked me what I thought of the Albanian ladies. I said, I hadn't seen many…..seems to be mostly guys hanging round at the cafes. Next thing he says "would I like to 'see' one"….at 11am in the morning! Declining politely, I went off to see the ruins of Appolonia (or should I say one of the Appolonias….there were quite a few of them) It was occupied for nearly 1000 years but then was killed off when an earthquake diverted the course of the river supplying it and it's harbour silted up. Most of the site has not been excavated and the signature piece you can see in this pic seems to be mostly concrete and rebar…. Still, the local guide I was talking to is very proud of it. The Parthenon it is not.

More bunkers in fields today, and this one is for sale. Some enterprising chap has converted the thing into a little house and built an extension. I wandered south to the town of Vlora over crumbing roads and shook my self to bits in the process. There seems to be a building boom in Vlora, with new large apartment blocks overlooking the beaches. Some rumours of Mafia money financing it but who knows.



Took the coast road south towards Greece and was rewarded with 100km of really fun riding with some genuine jeopardy thrown in to keep your attention up. The area is spectacular and there are views everywhere you look.

The road is mostly fine except for occasional howlers. The usual suspects, animals, rubble from landslips and just plain craters in the road. I went past one particularly steep section where a bus had gone through the barrier last week killing 14 students. Very sobering.

I don't have a GPS map for Albania and the paper ones that are available are rubbish. Wandering round the last town on the section trying to find a road sign indicating which way to the greek border, I bumped into three German bikers and decided to follow them. Two were on Triumph Tigers and on on a Triumph Rocket and 2300cc monster of a bike. But it sounds GOOD! ….and he had to ride it through this lot. This is one bike which is definitely not designed for playing off road.

We wandered on, crossing a river by a cable drawn barge and eventually settled for a bite to eat in Greece before the guys took a ferry to Ancona tonight. Over dinner, they told me that they had followed a route marked on a local map yesterday and there was no surface for 55km….how the Rocket survived, I don't know.

Lake Ohrid and to Albania

I found out this morning that the hotel I was in had only been open for 10 days. No wonder everything was shiny and new and worked. I set off round the Macedonian side of the lake effectively skirting the edge of the national park and arriving back exactly where I started at 130 pm. I couldn't really say I saw a lot of the lake until I climbed a pass to 1600m and looked over it. The lake water really is crystal clear. Apparently you can see to a depth of 20m….






I had a vaguely uneasy feeling about crossing over to Albania. Everyone seemed to see them as some sort of bogeymen. Anyhow, I pointed the bike east and headed over the pass and the world is definitely different over there. For one thing, credit cards are useless. I had been relying on mine to buy fuel everywhere and even though the VISA sign is up, nobody takes them. This is a strictly cash economy and it is pretty buggered. Amazing to think that Albania has such an illustrious history…look it up.




The country is littered with these dome shaped bunkers. Apparently there are approx 700,000 of them of various sizes making 24 for every square kilometre. The rabid stalinist leader Enver Hoxja was big on self defence…so they started digging and building in 1967 and didn't stop till 1986. Now, these things are a real problem as they are everywhere and obviously quite tough to get rid of.

I arrived in Tirana having in interesting ride through the montains and even passed through a village called 'MULLET'. The southern european aggressive driving streak must surely reach it's pinnacle in Albania and especially in Tirana. I thought it was bad in Marrakesh….I was being bullied out of the way left right and centre. Then, stuck in a queue of traffic at some lights, the street kids started on me. First one started stalking my bike testing and pulling at my gear. Then the little shit started trying to steal my USB charger cable….next he made a grab for the throttle trying to rev the engine and pull the brake lever. I thought 10 years old or not, you are going to get a broken jaw matey….. two more were round the back doing what I couldn't see. A truck new to me advanced and nearly squashed one kid into the next car. This didn't bother him one bit. Fearless little Fuc$$rs. The lights changed and I bolted for a gap and thought I am well out of here. I decided I had enough of Tirana….the whole incident spooked me.

I calmed down after about 30 minutes of riding on the highway out of town. That's when I noticed that almost every other car in the country is a Mercedes….they love them. Next best is a VW but Mercedes is definitely king. I checked myself into a hotel in a town called Fier an hour south of the city. I wandered the round town tonight and everybody was friendly. Just watch out for the street kids.

Kosovo and Macedonia

I passed a very peaceful night in my 4* palace in a real dump of a village. The Serbian economy seems to be in the toilet…..there is not a lot of business going on that I could see. It has the feel of my trips to Morocco except it is green and there are no camels. This part is nearly all muslim and my request for a beer with my steak was not satisfied (which is a good thing really, I should take more days off each week). I headed for the Kosovo border and felt like I was crossing no-mans land. First there was the Serbian official checkpoint, then passed two sets of fully armed Serb militiary teams about a mile apart, then the official Kosovan checkpoint with razor wire and a vehicle trap, then two sets of some sort of Serb irregulars a couple of miles apart. Seems like doing check-point duty is a serious career choice here. The north of Kosovo is hotly contested by both sides but I got the feel that this bit is Serb with flags and posters everywhere.

Down the road, I got to Mitrovice where the dividing line between the Serb and Kosovan and populations is very evident.  There is abridge across the river  which divides the town and also the populationa along ethnic grounds. At the moment it is blocked by the Serbs as a protest against Kosovan control of the border post I passed earlier. Last year they dumped loads of gravel across the road and are letting no vehicles past. This could have been a real pain as acceding to the map, there wasn't really a lot of choice about routes south.

Just beside the bridge was a bunch of guys jet washing cars so I paid them a euro to do my bike from the pasting it took last night with the idea chatting to see what my options were. Very proud to be Serb and did some sort of 3 fingered salute which I still don't understand. They looked the bike over and noticed there was no Serbia decal on the luggage and insisted on sticking one on before I left. They gave me directions to an alternative route across the river which is now policed by a great big armoured personnel carrier from KFOR. Good job too.


I went through Pristina which is a complete contrast to anything I saw in Serbia or Bosnia. The place has a real bustle about it with a lot of construction going on on the outskirts. I would have liked to stop there and mooch around but it was only lunchtime and I couldnt spare another day.  The other thing you notice is the security presence, Americans Humvee convoys like they were straight from Afghanistan, Germans in convoys of big armoured personel carriers, and Italian Caribineri in some sort of 1960s toy armoured car painted bright blue. There one thing Kosovo will never run short of is fuel stations. They seem to be every 5km....you never saw anything like it. GAs is 1.20 euro a litre here....



For the past couple of days, the road and driving standards have been steadily deteriorating to the point where I am being extra cautious. You can see and meet anything on the roads here. People droving sheep and cattle on main roads, selling strawberries on the motorway hard shoulder to name a few. Coming out of Skopje (Capital of Macedonia) this thing was setting off to join the motorway……tearing along at 7mph.


Tonight I am pushing the boat out and being really inflationary, paying 35 euro for a box room in a modern hotel in a resort next to Lake Ohrid which straddles the border with Albania. It is apparently one of the oldest and deepest lakes in Eurpope and is approx 350km sq…..so pretty big. I will take a look round it tomorrow and then head for Albania and then Greece maybe tomorrow night....got to be in Izmir at the weekend......Tempus Fugit.

Magnificent Montenegro

I woke with a sound of a very different alarm than usual. Outside the window, a cruise ship blasted the valley with its horn as it slowly chugged past the balcony. I stood there in my scuds looking at the people on the ship doing likewise. Then it started to rain softly, again. Bugger.



I got going by 9am determined to make some miles today and headed over an amazing pass to the old capital city, Cetinje. The road is very narrow, two cars could not pass each over most of it and yet there were tourist coaches going up it at a snails pace. The safety barriers are crumbling and were probably designed to hold back horse drawn traffic only so if you make a mistake on this, you are going flying. The views of Kotor Bay are stunning, even on a soggy wet day with poor visibility. It would have been good to see this place on a fine day but I am still pretty satisfied.


Over the top, the weather cleared and I got some sun. That is a bit of a feature of this trip, the weather can be very different one side of the mountain from the other. After Cetinje, I moved on to the new capital Podgorica which is new and charmless modern monstrosity which is best ignored. I followed a river valley north for what seemed like 30 miles and it got progressively more stunning. A bit like the Ardeche gorge in france.



One one side of the valley is the road and civilisation and if you live on the other, bridges like this are your way home from the pub. Not my cup of tea. I went out about 5-6m on it and it was wobbling quite a bit in the breeze so I wimped out. Obviously some people use this as it has new boards on it…..but they have bigger balls than me.







The valley got narrower and then the road was just a notch cut into the sheer cliff. Every now and then you pass through tunnels, some short, some longer, some straight and all unlit with black wet rock walls so you can see nothing. I had all headlights on and could see sweet FA. A vague sheen from water reflections sometimes and occasionally a reflective stud that had survived the years. Not fun.






I got to the Serbian border and there was a noticeable change in mood. On the Montenegrin side, the guards smiled and chatted a bit. On the Serbian side, I got the 'thousand yard stare' from a guy in blue grey combat fatigues…gave me a bit of a creepy feeling. The reason I came this way is that if you go directly to Kosovo (not via Serbia first) they may deny you entry to Serbia if you want to come back later….Anyhow, the border between the two runs along this very narrow gorge with a road, a river and a railway line all in the space of 30m. The barrier has quite a few gouges out of it so somebody has had a bad day here.

There is no tourism in this part of Serbia at all and I couldn't find anywhere to stay. The scenery is great but no infrastructure. I was well off the beaten path. In fact, I only saw one other foreign vehicle all day. I prefer this sort of wandering,  looking for the underbelly….most of the time. However, at 630pm I was on a plain at over 1000m, with no sign of any town which might sport a hotel.  I was beginning to feel a bit nervous and I considered wild camping but as it was spitting again. I didn't fancy it much. Some farms about but not much else.








The sun started to set and rule no 1 is don't drive at night…..especially in rural serbia where the roads are crap,  really crap and there are loads of animals on the roads.  I was reduced to 25mph for the last hour. I promised myself that I would stop at the first thing I saw...and here I am in a 4 star hotel with a suite of 3 rooms for 20 euro a night.. Result! Except there is a local wedding on and the caterwauling of the signer is driving me nuts.

Dubrovnik and Montenegro

Having dispensed my largess on the BiH economy, I headed for Dubrovnik via an indirect route that only the locals and the Dutch use. The Dutch are great travellers and get everywhere with their caravans. When everyone else gives up, the Dutch will find a way. There is a good chance that the Mars Rover will come across a few of them roaming up there. Still lots of evidence of hard times in the past and people look fairly poor round here. This is where all the old VW Golf Mark 1 s have gone to ret

What could have been a relatively straight forward drive along the coast turned into a more interesting and very much wetter ramble through the villages in the mountains behind the strip of land that surrounds Dubrovnik. But it was very soggy affair and I was glad when I popped over the pass to see that Dubrovnik had it's own supply of sunshine to dry me out.



I was last here about 10 years ago when I was delivering a yacht from France and I had forgotten how beautiful the city is…even if it is mobbed with tourists. weirdly, it still managed to rain while the sun was shining and the sky was blue….go figure.







Imagine having your marriage ceremony here? This couple got a big cheer from the crowd but the official wedding photographer had a tough time trying to shift unwilling tourists out of her shots.

I was in two minds as to whether to quit and stay overnight but then decided to move on south to Montenegro. This is the first border where my papers were given more than a cursory check. Every vehicle in the queue ahead of me was searched and I thought bugger this….I didn't fancy unpacking the panniers and neither did the border guards so they waved me on. Result.



I headed on to Kotor bay and parked myself in very nice 'apartment' overlooking the bay with my very own terrace…all for 30 euro. A bit of a splash out but the clouds were gathering again and I have had enough sogginess for one day.

Coast Road to Mostar

The lardfest for breakfast continues….this time it was some sort of fried sliced ham thing all welded together with fried eggs totalling about 3000 calories. I tried my best and failed to finish it. This must have addled my brain as well as my arteries because when I stopped to fill the tank after I had gone a few miles, I noticed my iPod was missing. A u-turn and back to the motel and there it was on the bed. Plonker. Back on the road again for 1130….I swear it is getting worse.

Decided to not stop and look at tourist traps until the end of the day and just enjoy a day riding for a change. The coast road was after all why I came here. Then I noticed one of these firefighting airplanes overhead and I watched it descend behind some trees….so I had to take a look. Lots of signs round here saying no lighted fires…so I guess the place must burn fairly regularly. I found a gap in the trees and followed a path to overlook a lake/lagoon of sorts where the plane skimmed the surface to load water and then later dropped it again. Cool! This must be what frustrated airforce wannabes do.





The traffic and speed limits here make it possible for me to get over 400 miles on a tank of gas. That might not sound like a lot but for a motorbike, believe me it is. Typically the guys you see whizzing round the country lanes on a weekend are filling up after 150 miles, tops. Then I got a wake up call from a bunch of Slovenians I came up behind at some roadworks. Following them for an hour (at a safe distance of 300m so that they would get done for speeding and not me) put a big grin on my face, got my gas usage back into 'normal' limits and reminded me why people come so far to find this asphalt.




I was heading for Dubrovnik and decided to go left to Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina and take a look at the newly reconstructed 'Old Bridge' (another Unesco World Heritage site), the original having been shelled and destroyed in the war. The name 'Mostar' derives from the name of the guardians(Mostians) of the old bridge (Stari Most). The whole town has a feel of some latent violence about it. Lots of wrecked grand old buildings right near the old bridge and further away, are still buildings that look like something from WW2. The blocks you see in the foreground are remnants of the original bridge.





BiH doesn't have the natural tourism advantages that Croatia has so to even the odds up a bit, I checked into a Motel beside the Neretna river short of the Croatian border. I think I am the only guest…..food and wine are good though and I have a twin room for about £22. Who needs a tent.

Pula to Zadar

Tents turn into saunas when the sun hits them and I woke up up sweating like the proverbial pig. I am not complaining about the sun though, 24C is just dandy to get you going in the morning. I went to see the amphitheatre on the way out of town. It is amazing that it is here at all….so many people have been carting off chunks of the stone to make everything from forts to the foundations of venetian palaces. These days, the arena is used to stage opera, concerts and film festivals. Funny to how entertainment tastes have evolved in 2000 years. You can check out the real story of the place here.

The big draw for bikers round here is the coast road that runs down as far as Dubrovnik. A lovely sinuous ribbon of asphalt that makes you want to let rip. The only thing spoiling the party is the traffic ( very heavy) and the ridiculous speed limits they have put on every corner. I'm not kidding, they put 40 kph on any sort of bend at all. The police only seem to be checking on the straight sections though. I had my collar ticked by one lot but they let me pass though I was clearly over the limit.

Life is full of compromises so I left the coast road and headed inland to see the Plitvice lakes, a Uesco world heritage site. On the way there, I saw plenty of evidence of the 1990s war with bullet and shrapnel scars on many of the houses on the villages. And these are houses that people were living in….Outside in the countryside, there were quite a few burned out and pock marked where their former occupants clearly are not coming back. I saw a security van arrive to take cash from a shop and the 4 guards were all armed, wearing ballistic vests and looked like they could take on a small army. All this for a local shop? Clearly, something is different here.



I arrived late i the afternoon to discover that you need to allow a good 6 hours to see the park. I got chatting to a german guy who was leaving and he gave me some advice about what I could see with my 2.5 hours…. and his ticket. Result. The park is famous for its series cascading lakes separated by dams of travertine. The biggest fall is 110m high and is pretty impressive. If you get here, this is definitely one to see and allow yourself more time than I did.





At 7pm, I decided I had to get back on the road when a gap appeared in the thunderstorms that were drenching the park. I headed south running from a dirty big black cloud which rumbled away. I figured the furthest I could get would be Zadar back on the coast and hauled ass. I have a rule not to drive at night in foreign climes but I figured that I needed to forget that one if I was to stay dry. Arrived at 930pm and stopped at the first open restaurant with rooms to rent and waved the visa card. Beer never tasted so good.

Julian Alps

After yet another vitaminless, fibreless breakfast of bread, sliced meat and cheese, I set off to try and see something before the inevitable thunderstorm as promised by the forecast. The morning's work was to go over the Vrisic pass and follow the Soca river valley round the Julian Alps. The road over the pass was constructed by Russian POWs in the first world war and from the north side is seriously steep with each switchback bend cobbled just to make the cornering in the wet more interesting. I took it easy and was rewarded with an even twister descent.

I worked my way south along the river then east and then north again to Bled to see the pretty Church on the island in the lake and Bled castle on a cliff overlooking the lot. It is all very touristy but definitely worth a look. At this point, after 4 hours riding I was 32km east of where I started this morning so I thought I better get moving south.

Then all hell broke loose and the monsoon arrived. I pulled up immediately at a bar as I wasn't wearing any rain gear but I was still soaked. The town drunk took an interest as I couldn't get up and run away and proceeded to admonish me that I was running away from my problems by travelling on a bike and they would be waiting for me at home. I decided that it was worth putting on my rain gear and getting a bit wet instead.

I headed south for Pula in Croatia at the bottom of the Istrian peninsula. The whole area looks just like Italy; agriculture, architecture, churches even the people. Pula has the 6th largest surviving roman amphitheater in europe….so they claim. I arrived on the outskirts of Pula and was pretty disappointed to see that it is a normal port town with a sprawling ugly grey communist era flats and a small older centre. I almost ran into the amphitheater on the way in, it is slap bang in the middle of town next to the port. I decided to visit it in the morning and hit for the campsite. The campsite is in a great location out on a spit with sea on three sides. I headed to the end and got this snap of the sunset and then heard the rumble of God moving the furniture round upstairs for the second time today. A race against time to get the tent up before the inevitable deluge.