Not surprisingly, Istanbul makes me feel further from home than anywhere I’ve been yet…both geographically and culturally.
After five days here, I don’t have much desire to move on. I think this is due to the fact that there’s a seemingly infinite amount of things to see here, and I met a lovely girl that’s showing me around to all the best spots.
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The last few days have been filled with some pleasant surprises. First, I’ll go back to Skopje (and earlier). While I was riding the Adriatic coast in Croatia, I passed two people on a tandem bike with a French flag on the back. A few weeks later, shortly after getting off the Lake Koman ferry in Albania, I passed a tandem bike in the mountains (I felt a little bad as I simply laid on the throttle and cruised up such a steep road, while they were in the middle of what I’m sure felt like an endless climb) with a French Flag…was that the same bike?! When I got into Skopje, there was a French couple at my hostel…turns out they were riding to Istanbul on a tandem…and we discussed our routes…it was definitely them that I’d seen twice before. How crazy?! And speaking of crazy, the two of them got married in September, and their honeymoon is a year long trip on a tandem across Europe, SE Asia, and South America. I guess they’ll at least know by the end of it whether or not marriage was the right decision.
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Next stop was Lake Ohrid, on the border of Albania and Macedonia. I stayed on the Macedonian side, at one of my favorite spots yet. A little hostel run by the most hospitable couple I’ve ever met. They made their own wine and rakija, and handed it out very freely.
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After two days in Albania, I consider myself a total expert, and I’m a bit torn between the two extremes of the place. The views of the mountains, and the riding in them was great…from 2nd gear on dirt and loose gravel, to 3rd gear on twisty paved roads with very unpredictable and frequent changes in quality (just to keep things exciting), to 6th gear, wide open, 100+mph riding on an empty highway without so much as a crack in the pavement. Every mile was astounding…and I even had a 3 hour ferry ride on a beautiful lake in the mountains.
I spent a day checking out some of the sights around Mostar. The first was the village of Medjugorje, a popular sight for many Catholics. In 1981, 6 local children claimed to see the Virgin Mary atop a hill outside of town…I’d be curious to know if any of their families were in the hotel or rosary manufacturing business…
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On the 5th, I left Zadar, for Mostar. Unfortunately, it was raining pretty hard in Zadar in the morning, so I waited around a little bit to see if it would die down at all. It did, but the rest of the day didn’t look very promising.
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Last night, I got into Zadar, Croatia. It’s pretty quiet here…the tourism season is wrapping as it’s getting to cold. As I type this, I’m sitting out on a pier, and it’s 70deg…miserable…
After my easy border cross into Serbia, I figured there would be no problem getting into Croatia.
Right away, the agent was asking quite a few more question, but no big deal. He took my passport, registration, and insurance/greencard and started entering something into his computer.
“We’ve got a problem,” (…fuck…what could be the problem?!) “This computer is old and slow” (WHEW!)
So I sat there for about 20 minutes, playing with a couple stray dogs while waiting for them to finish processing everything. And the whole time I was staring at the hillside…my first glimpse of Croatia…a massive landfill.
Well folks, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…another weird address…or directions more specifically.
I left Budapest in the morning and got into Novi Sad, Serbia last night with these instructions, from Google:
Exit route 7, go 4.6km (sounds good)
Turn left on Temerinska/Temepnhcka go 1.2km (will do, thanks for that Latin spelling as well!)
Turn left at Slovak Evangelist Church (uh, ok)
Turn left at Board Shop Novi Sad (really?!)
Turn right at Levi9 Global Sourcing (go to hell google maps!)
A couple days ago, I went to the House of Terror museum in Budapest, which shows the especially dark side of what happened under fascism, and later, communism…quite an interesting place.
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a pat on a motorcycle 