Trip miles so far 6,618
By Jon Newey
My hosts in Assos, Ahmet and his family, are delightful people. They are full of questions about where I have come from and where I am going.
The ‘UK’ on my number plate makes Ahmet’s dad think I am from Ukraine. Ahmet has heard of Scotland, England and Ireland but has never heard of Wales. Ahmet struggles with the concept that it rains every day in Scotland. “Every day?” he keeps asking me “Every day?”
When I tell them I am going to Greece they look blank. It is only later that I realise Turks call Greece Yananistan. The Greeks’ own name for their country is Hellas. So the word ‘Greece’ means nothing to anyone here.
By 9am a huge breakfast has been served and dutifully eaten (I’m the only guest. Ahmet’s mum likes to feed people and they have home-grown olives to spare, so I have to do my best…) and Tigger and I are off, up the winding road past Assos town and onto the dual carriageway heading back to Canakkale. Previously, on the way east, I took the ferry across the Dardanelles strait but today I’m going back across on the new suspension bridge, only completed in 2022. It is nearly 4km long and the deck is 70 m above the water apparently. There’s a bit of a breeze today and there are warning signs on the overhead gantries but the warnings are in Turkish so I assume they don’t apply to me…. Tigger charges across with no bother. Once we get to the other side it is dual carriageway all the way to the border.
I follow the signs to Yananistan. I have not yet been to any of the other ‘Stans’ on this tour so I’m claiming this as my first one!!
As usual I’m aware that I’m approaching a border because of the long queue of waiting trucks. Here, though, there are also two lanes of waiting cars, all stationary, doors open, occupants milling about. A police woman waves me on, encouraging motorbikes to queue-jump. Carefully I weave my way through trying not to scrape my big panniers on anything shiny and watching out for car doors being opened, children, dogs, courtesy gaps etc. By my measurement the stationary queue is 3.5km long.
Towards the front of the queue there’s no longer sufficient room for me to get past so I have to join the cars moving forward at a snail‘s pace. Finally, I reach the window where a man asks for my passport. He stamps it and waves me away. Half a km further on there’s another window where I have to present my passport again. The lady here scowls and say ‘No. You go back’. Somehow I’ve missed a step. I have to turn around and now join the equally long queue of people trying to go in the opposite direction. An hour later I’m presenting my passport to a different official and trying to explain that I don’t want to go from Greece to Turkey, I want to go the other way. Round I go again, back into the west-bound queue. This time I hook up with a small group of other bikers, three Greeks and one Dane. The Greeks have done this border crossing before so I reckon that if I follow them I’m less likely to miss anything out. The Danish guy is interesting. He’s called Ben, he’s 75, and he’s ridden his Super Tenere from Ishoj in Denmark to Istanbul. Istanbul was terrible, he says. A nice city to visit but not on a motorbike.
Another hour in the west-bound queue and I’m back at the first passport window. The man there looks surprised to see me again, but checks that he really did stamp my passport and then waves me through. I follow the other bikers to the next window along. This is the police-check for the motorcycles themselves. Aha! The step I skipped first time round. All four of the bikers I’m following are handed speeding fines which they must pay in cash before they can pass. They dash off to find an ATM and then they queue up at the counter where fines must be paid. The queue of cars behind us lean on their horns in frustration. I’m police-checked and waved straight through. Goody-two-shoes! No speeding fines for me! That rap on the knuckles that I got in Romania must have kept me focused. The lady at the final window waves me on this time and so four hours after I arrived at the border I’m now out of Turkey. The sun is beating down. Tigger’s temperature gauge shows 42.5 degrees C. I ride across a badly maintained no-man’s-land bridge past armed guards and border flags. Now I have to get into Yananistan. Surprisingly, this final challenge is very simple. A stamp on my passport, no paperwork check for Tigger and voila, I’m back in the EU (wasn’t that a Beatles song…?). It has been a 5-hour process in total. I hate to think how long it would take if I hadn’t jumped past the 3.5km tailback right at the start. Admittedly it is a Saturday, and mid-day to boot, but this, my friends, is the harsh reality of a busy land border between a non-EU country and an EU country today. Scotland, be very careful what you wish for!
Thankfully my final destination for today isn’t far beyond the border. The Greek town of Alexandroupoli has a leafy municipal campsite with a beach, a shop and a restaurant. Within an hour my tent is pitched and I’m cooling myself off in the Aegean Sea. There’s loud music all night but I don’t care, I have earplugs and I know how to use them.
Camped next to me is a group of three Turkish bikers, two on GS 1250’s and one on a KTM Super Adventure. We get chatting. They make me coffee and offer me water, as is the Turkish way of things. Two of them are Agriculture Consultants so there is a lot of chat about crop rotation and sugar beet. I learn that the Turkish word for sugarbeet is…. ‘sugarbeet’. Every day is a school day! They’re only staying one night and are off to Kavala tomorrow.
I take an extra day off to recover from the stress of the border antics. Alexandroupoli is a neat, clean little town which has been fought over for centuries by Greeks, Bulgarians and Russians all of whom wanted access to a little bit of Aegean coastline. Today the key point of interest is the lighthouse, but I also visit the Ethnographic Museum (a nice little sandstone Palladian villa, quite out of place among the modern mid-rise blocks) and the Archaeological Museum (brand spanking new marble and glass building, directly opposite the campsite and worth the 6 Euro entrance fee just for the air-conditioned interior).
Dinner is at the restaurant on the campsite where there are no menus in English and no-one can translate for me – even the photo-translate app on my phone fails the test - so I point randomly and hope for the best. Moussaka appears, and souvlaki and a couple of Mythos beers. I’m happy with that.
Next morning I pack up the tent and, already sweating in the heat at 8am, I get on the road. We’re heading further west. Today’s ride is all about clocking up some distance to get Tigger and I as close to the Albanian border as we can be so that we can get across it the next morning before any crowds build up. I spend most of the day with Tigger’s cruise-control on, winding back the A2 toll-road. Toll booths are a frequent inconvenience, but the fees are tiny; just 20 cents at one of them. Around lunch time I stop at a service station and grab a pastry filled with feta and spinach. There’s a young French biker there so I practice a bit of my Franglais. I must have mangled it pretty badly because he felt compelled to reply in English. He’s been to Istanbul too and confirms the story from everyone else – don’t go there on a motorbike if you can avoid it!
The road skirts round Thessaloniki and then heads north in and out of tunnels, up into the mountains that form the north borderlands of Greece. My ABnB tonight is in a small village called Neo Korstarazi. I’m hot and sweaty when I arrive but I have a whole bungalow to myself and a gated courtyard for Tigger.
There’s even a hosepipe so Tigger gets his first wash for a month. There are no restaurants within walking distance but there’s a grocery shop and I have a fully-equipped kitchen so tonight I can cook for myself and drink beer sitting on my own veranda. Sorted!
The border with Albania is only 25km from here. I plan an early start to get to the border before any queues build up, but then I realise I’ll be crossing a time-zone and I will need the Albanian insurance office to be open when I get there so there’s no hurry. I arrive at the border at 9:00am Albanian time. There’s no queue and I get two weeks of insurance for Tigger for 13 Euros. There’s no ATM at the border so I have to ride to the next town to get some Albanian cash. Other bikers have told me that Albania is a cash-based society with very few places taking card payments, so I get out 15,000 Lek, enough for two tanks of petrol and a couple of meals.
Albania has been closed to tourists for decades so I’m not entirely sure what to expect here. Its true, though, I really am in Albania!
Initially the Albanian countryside is surprisingly beautiful. I ride past the Ohrid Lake and find lake-side hotels, beaches and resorts, lovely scenes that are at odds with my rather limited preconceptions about Albania. I stop in the busy town of Korce to see the mosque there. I sit to do a sketch and am watched carefully by a young lad called Bujar. He’s very interested in what I’m doing and speaks a little English so we manage a short conversation. He says he likes my picture. Built between 1484 and 1495 this is Albania's second oldest mosque.
Leaving Korce I ride further north, getting closer to the big city of Tirana. As I approach the city everything changes. Here I find the concrete bunker-like factories, truck parks, wastelands and tower blocks that I had half-expected to see in Albania. Is the centre of Tirana an attractive place? I don’t know, but the outskirts certainly are not. The sat-nav isn’t quite up to date here either. There all manner of underpasses and overpasses that Garmin doesn’t know about. None-the-less, before long we’re heading out of Tirana towards the coastal town of Durres. My ABnB for tonight is a small wooden cabin at the top of a hill, a very steep hill, with a badly made road of lumpy broken concrete. I stop and walk it first and then go back for Tigger. Tigger’s suspension bottoms out and the sump-guard hits the ground at one point but we make it up to the top with me standing up on the foot-pegs gunning the throttle in second gear. Once again I’m hot, sweaty and tired but thankfully the cabin has air-con and a good shower so I feel human again after a while. There’s a panoramic view over the city from the balcony.
Eventually I venture out to find food. I won’t go into too many details because some of my readers are vegetarian, but let’s just say that parts of Albania don’t seem to have progressed into the 20th century yet. I choose the cleanest, smartest looking restaurant I can find. I’m the only customer. No-one speaks English and I don’t speak Albanian. There isn’t a menu. I’m taken into the kitchen to choose some meat. The meat is all in one big vat which includes every part of several whole sheep. I know there was more than one sheep in there because there is more than one head. Back at my table my chosen chunk of meat appears on a plate and a plate of French fries appears beside it. Meanwhile I can see through the window that more, live, sheep have been delivered and are being slaughtered on the pavement outside. Fine dining Albanian style…...
My ABnB host, Chelo, is a mechanic. He’s keen to take me for a coffee but I turn down the offer. I need my bed. Beside which, he speaks no English and I speak no Albanian and I can’t use Google Translate because there’s no mobile signal for me here. There’s no WIFI either because the power has gone off. With no power there’s no air-con and the pumped water supply in the cabin is off too. I breathe a sigh of relief when the power comes back on again. A cockerel seems to live underneath my cabin and he crows at random moments. A truck reverses into a car in the street and drives off and no-one seems to care. Some of the manhole covers are missing.
By the time the morning comes I’m very ready to move on to Montenegro. Chelo tries again to take me for a coffee in a nearby café but again I decline. I just want to put Albania behind me now. Fortunately there are no ill effects from yesterday's meal! It is 7:30am and I want to be at the Montenegro border by 10am to avoid any crowds. I ease Tigger down the steep road. It seems even steeper this morning. Then it takes an hour to battle my way through the chaotic Tirana traffic. After that I’m in open countryside all the way to the border. It is slow going, though, with 50kmh speed limits, chaotic driving, horses and carts, stray dogs and such. But I make it to the border on schedule. At this border there’s no queue of trucks but there is a long, long, queue of stationary cars. Tigger and I creep past them up to the front and within 30 minutes we’ve been stamped through. A week’s insurance in Montenegro has cost me 10 Euros, easily arranged. Ta-dah! Montenegro becomes the 17th country of this tour!
At one stage I had planned to ride straight through Montenegro in a single day, but having swapped some messages with David, who I met at Motocamp in Bulgaria, he has encouraged me to spend a bit more time here. So I have booked myself into a ‘motorcycles welcome’ hotel near the World Heritage town of Kotor. The Montenegro coast road is fantastic. The twists and turns and ups and downs and the views out over the Adriatic Sea are jaw-dropping. Every town has beaches, hotels and beach-side restaurants. Bigger towns have crowds of tourists and slow-moving tour buses. The tourist industry is clearly booming in Montenegro.
The problem is that the bigger resorts are choked with traffic and my rate of progress slows to a crawl. The temperature is up to 34 degrees and the snarled-up traffic is a draining my energy levels.
As I get near to Kotor the road enters a mile-long tunnel. As I reach the middle of the tunnel the traffic grinds to a halt. I can’t filter past because my panniers are too bulky. I have no option but to sit there, deep underground and wait. It takes an hour of walking-pace slow-manoeuvring (thanks for the practice sessions, Dave). An hour of slow crawling later I’m out of the tunnel and slowly progressing towards Kotor itself. It isn’t roadworks, it is simply the crush of tour buses causing the traffic jam. The temperature is 35 degrees, I’m hot and tired (again) and the crush in the town is unbearable, so I decide not to go into Kotor at all and instead divert Tigger straight to my hotel. There are other bikers - an MV Augusta, a Ducati Mulistrada and one of the omnipresent GS1250s. There’s air-con, there’s a proper restaurant serving proper tasty food and there’s a stunning view across the bay. It has to be said: As far as I’m concerned, the Gulf of Kotor is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. No question about it, I have to come back here, even despite the tour buses and cruise ships!
The WIFI here works well, so I spend the early evening planning my next 3 days of riding – Croatia tomorrow!
Next morning I’m up early. I have an interesting ride ahead of me. Breakfast first, and then Tigger and I follow the south shore-line road on the Gulf of Kotor until we reach the town of Tivat. Here there’s a ferry to take us to the north side of the gulf and then a coastal road to take us to the border with Croatia. The ferry runs every ten minutes and costs me 2 Euros. There are four other bikes on the ferry with me, two from Poland, one from Bulgaria and one from Austria. The Austrians are Tom and Martina who call themselves ‘Box87’ on their webpage. They’ve been to Romania and Bulgaria. In Romania they crossed the Transfargasan pass (which was closed because of snow when I was there) and they saw more than twenty bears on the way. They show me some videos to prove it. They are heading along the same route as me so perhaps we’ll meet up again later.
At the Croatian border there’s a queue of cars but no trucks. A Montenegran rider on a Kawasaki VN900 pulls up beside me. He’s off to Dubrovnik to get a new set of tyres. The border formalities are simple and within 20 minutes I’m through – so much better than the Greece-Turkey border thank goodness! Once again I'm back in the EU. Country number 18 = Hrvatska (Croatia to you and me).
I have previously said that this tour is like a computer game where every border heading east has been a new level of complexity. The flip-side, of course, is that the reverse is true when heading west. Every border I cross now makes my life easier. Croatia proves to be a very chilled, relaxed and beautiful place. Not only is it in the EU but it now uses the Euro, a new challenge for Croatians. I understand how the place works. They use contactless payments! Croatia has embraced the 21st century….
Like Montenegro, the coast road swoops in and out of towns and villages, in and out of tunnels, and the views over the blue Adriatic are to die for (or they would be if I didn’t keep my eyes on the road). There are wildlife bridges over the road for bears and wolves to cross and there are signs warning me to beware of the boars.
I pass by Dubrovnik – I’ll be back for sure – and soon I’m on a brand-new dual carriageway that Garmin knows nothing about. It’s slightly unnerving to look at the screen and see myself riding along through blank space, but the mountains, tunnels and bridges are all amazing. There are constant warnings of bears and wolves. Occasionally I see Tom and Martina ahead of me or behind me as we take turn-about to stop for fuel and drinks.
Mid-afternoon I stop for more fuel and decide to book a room in a hotel. Normally I don’t leave it to the last minute like this, but I knew today would involve a ferry and a border so I wasn’t sure how far I would be able to get. I could camp, but the local campsites have bad reviews so instead I choose a hotel in Biograd which offers breakfast, dinner, free parking and a beach all for 40 Euros. Perfect. Within an hour I’m there and half an hour later I’m paddling in the Adriatic. The coast here is idyllic. The water is warm, there are beach bars and cafes and tents offering massage. All very civilised. Back at the hotel I order dinner and get offered free schnapps. Who could refuse. Zivjeli!
Friday morning arrives and after a good solid breakfast Tigger and I are soon motoring north towards Pula. For most of the day we’re on the fast toll road in and out of tunnels. The longest one is more than 5.8 km.... Eventually I stop for petrol and switch the sat-nav to non-motorway mode, so for the final two hours of the ride we’re in and out of small towns and sweeping past vineyards and olive groves. By early afternoon we’re in Pula. Tonight I’m staying in Pula hostel in a 4-bed dorm. Reception allows me to bring Tigger through the locked gates to park him right under my window, so that’s good. The hostel is a bit basic but it has its own bar, its own beach, and it is just a short walk form Pula’s main attractions. It’ll do just fine, provided my room mates behave themselves. You never know who you might meet in these places and I can always bail out and go elsewhere if I feel the need. I'll visit Pula tomorrow. Next week Slovenia, Austria and Germany, perhaps….? Ride safe everyone!
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