SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

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dr_bar
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Re: SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

#1201 Unread post by dr_bar »

My daughter loved France, she even went out of her way to hit the Canadian Memorial at Normandy. Took pictures of the tile commemorating my father...
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#1202 Unread post by drumwrecker »

Hi, Richard,
Sorry I wasn't around to say a late goodbye. Keith sends all his best wishes and his equivilent of bon voyage.
Kathy and I are at ED and Sue's in Saint Antonin Noble Val. We are leaving Friday morning early to get to Calais for the 8pm ferry. Wouldn't it be strange if our paths crossed.
By the way that was a great description of Northern France. I always imagine tank battles in WW2 across that open ground. Whether there were any at that point I don't know.
Good luck mate.
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#1203 Unread post by blues2cruise »

Boo Waun Journo.....Como Sty oji ? Disregard the spelling...I spelled it how it sounds.

Good Day....How are you today?
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#1204 Unread post by sv-wolf »

LOL. I know your French is better than that blues! :-) Thanks for the wish. I'm finding it hard to get wi-fi connections and the time to blog, but here's a few thoughts about Slovenia.

Half an hour ago, I was putting up my tent in a campsite on the outskirts of Bovec in Slovenia when a young couple out walking their dog gave me an enquiring look. I smiled a hello. “You are a long way from home,” they said in English, pointing to the GB sticker on the back of my motorcycle. And what they said was true, I was a long way from home in more ways than one. I crossed the border from Slovenia just five hours ago and I have already been overwhelmed by this place - several times over: by the sheer beauty of this land, by the slow and easy pace of life here and by the unaffected kindness of the people. There was nothing in the interminable industrial and commercial landscape of Northern Italy, still just one day and thirty kilometers away to prepare me for it.

Until this morning I was enjoying enforced three-day stop-over in Udine, in the Italian province of Friuli, following a minor accident on the bike in which I cracked a rib. I do not think it is a serious injury, but it was initially painful and while the muscles around the bone were spasming it was dangerous to ride. They haven't entirely stopped, but they are a lot better, and this morning I headed east away from Udine across the valley floor towards the distant mountains on the Slovenian border. I had no idea until now that mountains could be so varied or so inviting. Entering the steep-sided valley world of these almost vertical crags was like entering a fable, a time and place not quite like the one I ordinarily know. In a short while my mind and body, stressed by the experience of the last few days, began to absorb the silence and peace of these glorious mountains.

At some point on this journey, I crossed the Italian-Slovenian border. The border here is an entirely social entity, existing somewhere into the law books of various government bodies and in the minds of the modern robber barons they represent. It is marked in physical reality only by a sign that welcomed me, in various languages, to Slovenia. There were no guards, no border post, nothing - just a sign.

At first, the slow pace of life here was not apparent as there was no one to be seen. The grassy meadows and sunny hillsides, the towns and roads were entirely deserted for kilometer after kilometer. The only cars I saw had Italian registration plates. And I saw only one old man on a motor mower. And yet the effects of human ordering of the land are everywhere. When at last I did at last arrive at a town, a mountain-sport centre with a heady buzz to it, full of outdoor types, brimming with health and fitness, it came as an almost physical shock. It was here, that I realised that in crossing over an unmarked border, I had taken a further step outside my comfort zone. Leaving England for France required only minor adjustments. I can get buy quite nicely in French. Italian poses few problems for someone who knows English and French and learned Latin as a schoolboy. But with the change from a romance to a slavic vocabulary, a change I had anticipated but not prepared for, I was lost. Nothing was familiar, and my few words of Russian were of little use. For someone like me with serious allergies who has to know in detail what he is ordering or buying, that makes life complex and potentially fraught with difficulties. My new smartphone with its translation ap, was a useful though tedious tool, helping me to understand ingredients labels on processed foods, but I got through this first social problem thanks, rather, to the natural friendliness of the people.

On explaining my dietary needs to the owner of a bar serving food, she told me that unfortunately they could not be met. All her sandwiches came pre-made with cheese. (The Italian influence in this border town is still strong.) But then, to my surprise, she then suggested that I take a trip over to the supermarket opposite, buy something to make some sandwiches. I could then bring everything back to the bar and assemble and eat it at her tables – an offer I duly accepted. Without being asked, she then produced a pair of scissors, so that I could open a packet of smoked salmon, I’d bought. Such eager and unforced kindness is something I’m frankly not used to. I was moved to mention it to her when I left and offered her my appreciation. I'm beginning to understand just how dependent on the kindness of strangers a solo traveller actually is. ‘Oh it’s just my job,’ she said with as laugh, which is true, of course, but the same is also true of bar owners the world over who might learn a thing or two about regaining the human values the commerical motive has crushed out of them. She added though, “And I like to talk and be kind’ which I suspect came closer to the underlying reality.

And it was a truth I found to be repeated several times more in my short time here. As the mountains grew higher and more elegant by the minute, and the beautiful and empty twisting roads of Slovenia drew me further into what is for me this most unexpected land, I had several other encounters of this kind, from the shopkeeper who offered me a naïve kind of temporary friendship for ten minutes when I went to buy a bottle of water in his shop, to the camp-site attendant, who returned to me unbidden several times with bits of useful information because he wanted to make sure I had a good night. There is a kind of grace to people here that I have not met elsewhere.

The cracked rib has had unexpected consequences. It made me slow down. I've always understood that all journeys really take place inside, but I now know that to make a journey it is not the same as to travel. Staying put can be part of the experience too. 'No hurry; in your own time' seems to be a common phrase here.' I've always been slow to do things. I need to recognise that is my pace and be true to it.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Re: SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

#1205 Unread post by blues2cruise »

Cracked rib...minor accident....we need details.....

Also....if you need something to read...the fellow in the story meets quite a few kind people on his journey....I can't say any more than that or the story will be not the same...

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It's worth reading. It takes place in England.
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#1206 Unread post by sv-wolf »

Cracked rib - ah well it was all a bit embarrassing really. I ended up after a long day's riding in Sondria in northern Italy. I was tired and couldn't find a campsite so I asked a woman in a shop if there was a B&B or a pensione (a cheap hotel) nearby. As it turned out there was one just round the corner. The owner of the pensione told me I could put the bike in his back garden, which involved riding down a passage at the side of the building, doing a sharp left turn and then riding up a steep ramp (40% I'd say) and then doing another sharp left turn immediately on reaching the top of the slope (to save running into a concrete wall). The DR is a fairly top-heavy bike when unloaded. When loaded and carrying a full 25 litre tank of petrol, or something near it, she takes a bit of handling in ways I'm getting the hang of but am still not fully used to. I was fairly wobbly on the turn at the top of the ramp, but I did OK. The next morning, after paying for the night and packing up, I was determined to make the turn with a bit more style. Pride goes before a fall - literally in this case. I turned the bike neatly onto the ramp (or so I thought) but as soon as I got her onto the downward slope the angle turned the bars to the right unexpectedly and over she went. The bike was unharmed (apart from a first tiny dent in the new panniers) but I cracked a rib. How it happened, I don't know. I was moving at very slow speed and I went down relatively slowly. I didn't realise for several hours later when the adrenalin wore off that I'd damaged myself. It still hurts quite a lot from time to time now. Odd though, that for hours at a time I don't feel a thing and then all of a sudden it's aching again.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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#1207 Unread post by sv-wolf »

I’m holed up in a cheap hotel in Zadar, Croatia listening to the drunken singing of a wedding party down in the restaurant. For the last half hour, the guests have been lurching their way through a string of pop favourites. Out in the car park they are making short work of a hog roast. How exotic is that? So unlike customs in England that we Brits all know and love (!)

On entering Slovenia I imagined I had accidentally stepped out of the world and into Narnia (an impression that lasted as long as I stayed up in the mountains). Crossing the border into Croatia, however, I felt more like I was on a trip to Stevenage. Croatia is as different to Slovenia as E M Forster is to Jeremy Clarkson. In Rijeka, Croatia, I saw women so brassy-looking that I had to blink. Some had such stony faces you could whet a knife on them. The place was full of plain or punky teenagers and men in tank tops and skinny jeans, and all the usual displays of urban masculinity. The loo walls of the restaurant where I had lunch were adorned with a giant mural of Andy Capp worshiping a pint of beer. Not far outside the town I passed the Garfield restaurant and was shortly afterwards almost taken out by a car with My Little Pony shades in the windows.

That all said, the coastline of Croatia is spectacular, and the motorways that span its gorges and tunnel under its mountains are magnificent pieces of engineering. One thing is sure here, Croatian bikers are unlikely to square off their tyres even on the motorways. The twisty coast and mountain roads are a joy to ride. Roads like this make even top-heavy Felix feel like it is flying. Felix is the DR650, by the way. (It revealed its name to me last week.) And on these roads there are hundreds of bikers: super-cool riders on custom bikes, ‘committed’ superbike riders with arses in the air and loads of couples riding two-up on BMWs The speed limits are very restrictive here, but that hardly matters since there are no speed cameras and no police, so no-one takes the slightest notice of them. Unless you ride at least 15km an hour faster than the posted limits you will be overtaken by a local driver – no question. And you would be unwise to assume than when said driver does overtake he will recognise that you have a physical need to occupy space. I’ve had some very close shaves here already. I suspect swapping paintwork is a common experience in Croatia.

I stopped off for a cup of tea at Senj, a coastal town which seems to be a popular spot with bikers, and fell immediately into conversation with Wojciech. Wojciech was lounging in a local bar when I met him, chilling out for all of one day, having ridden down from Poland in two days on his Varadero – and planning to ride back in two more. I’m taking nine months to do this journey; at his rate I would do it a little over two weeks. We chatted in broken English and managed to communicate for a couple of hours with lots of hand signals, and generally hit it off. He wanted to ride down to Split with me. I wasn’t sure about that. I think there might be a few issues about pace and compatible riding styles. On another bike and without a cracked rib, it might have been fun. We swapped addresses though, and promised to think about a joint European trip next year.

After that, fate lent a helping hand. I took the wrong road out of Senj, and instead of continuing along the coast as planned, found myself riding up into the mountains. According to the map, the two roads met up some seventy kilometres to the south. So I decided to carry on and make a detour. The mountain road climbed steeply, twisting continuously around the contours of the hills. The air grew cool and fresh, helping my contracted lungs, and the mountain forests that lay everywhere about were beautiful. At the top of the climb, the forests retreated and the road levelled out onto a high mountain plateau dotted with farming communities and small towns, a very different world from that of the coast with its souvenir shops, restaurants and bars. As time went by, though, the towns grew fewer and smaller, becoming little more than tiny hamlets: a string of isolated buildings strung out along the road. In one lonely area of rocky pasture, I rode past a vaguely military vehicle in camouflage colours, permanently set up by the side of the road and accompanied with crosses and signboards. I was getting too cold and hungry so I didn't stop to investigate, but I wondered if it was a memorial to the Balkan conflicts of recent years. That thought was reinforced a few kilometres down the road when I began to see ruined and deserted houses, just a few at first, and then dozens of them. Some had mature trees growing out of them and were clearly abandoned long ago, but others looked as though they had been recently occupied. I couldn’t tell whether this was the result of rural depopulation, or military conflict. [On arriving later in Zadar I looked up Gospic, the main town in the region and, sure enough, up came the 'Battle of Gospic'. There was a battle here between the 'Yugoslav People's Army and the 'Croatian National Guard, and there were massacres in villages all along the road I was travelling.] It reminded me that despite the sunny, Mediterranean climate and the tourist traps on the coast, the Balkans are one of the especially tragic parts of the world - like Wojciech’s Poland. The old people up here will have seen a great deal of violence in their life-times and been affected by it. The youngsters will know nothing of it, but they will hear the stories, and carry those stories into adult life. Their lives and identities will be defined by them. In circumstances like this, it takes a lot of courage and a widening of experience, to throw off the constraints of our early ideologies.

By six o'clock my ribs and chest had started to spasm again (that seems to be a pattern), and it was becoming painful to pilot the bike. I needed to find a campsite or cheap hotel quickly for the night, and it was clear that wasn't going to happen in this remote region. Fortunately the motorway down to Zadar on the coast runs along this part of the plateau, too. I didn’t want to leave these little roads, but had little practical choice! I made for the coast at top speed and then enquired at the first cheap looking stop-over place I could find. Here in the hotel, the ‘singing’ continues, each enthusiastic number, now concluding with loud, self-congratulatory cheers. How long this will go on for is anyone’s guess. I don’t think I’m going to get much sleep tonight. (No wonder the receptionist was willing to bargain for the price of the room.) But what the hell: a happy life to the bride and groom, whoever they may be. They're the ones taking the big risk, I think.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
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#1208 Unread post by sv-wolf »

(See pics in post below.)

I’m blogging this Sunday evening from the home of Ato and a young woman who seems to be his daughter or niece – I’ll call her his daughter. Ato, I would guess, is in his early 70s, wiry, strong as an ox, and with an easy laugh. He was an engineer (though ‘was’ is probably a little premature: the contents of his garage are sufficient to make any practical man weep). His daughter restores furniture and paints, and is as lively and as much fun as the old man. Ato runs a Soba, which here in Montenegro is similar to a B&B except that for £11 a night I get a very comfortable bedroom, an en suite shower, and small separate kitchen with all facilities including as much Chai as an Englishman can drink. I also get entertained by this amazing pair.

While it was very easy to install myself in this little flat for the night, it was a little more difficult when it came to Felix (the DR650). Ato’s house is in a side street just off the main drag in Cetinje, and his street is currently being dug up. To get Felix into Ato’s garage seemed an impossibility to me, but not to Ato, who, you will remember, is an engineer and is also a former Norton rider with a passion for motorbikes. The first problem was that the footpath, the only access to Ato’s garage, had been reduced to a series of mounds of rubble by the workmen. (I always thought I ought to get some more off road experience before I hit Central Asia; I never thought the opportunity would arrive under circumstances like this.) The second problem was that running alongside the main road and therefore across the entrance to the footpath is a large open drain. I pointed this out to Ato. ‘No problem’ he said. (‘No way’, I thought.) While I was debating whether I should give the whole thing a miss and try and find somewhere else, he walked over to the barrier where the workmen had closed off road, picked up the movable Stop sign and started examining it. You know the sign: it’s the universal, red, eight-sided sign that tells you to stop and think before you act. It took a second before I realised what he was intending. He walked back to the footpath, laid it across the drain, jumped up and down on it a couple of times and repeated: ‘no problem’. I crossed over to Felix, still debating whether I could trust my judgment on this, and second whether I could trust my nerve. As dubious as I felt, it seemed like a challenge, and possibly a lot of fun. I’m perfectly aware the Felix is far more competent at this sort of thing than I am. It is just his rider that sometimes lets him down. I fired him up and headed for the drain. The stop sign didn't shift under Felix's wheels as I had feared it would. It did the job, just as Ato indicated. It was then returned, slightly kinked, back to its former position and function. I got temporarily stuck on a couple of rubble mounds on the way to the garage, but apart from that, arrived in one piece. Ato muttered something I didn’t quite catch at first. I then realised what he had said was ‘Paris-Dakar’.

I arrived in Montenegro last night, stayed at a campsite and then headed for the Bay of Kotor. The air in the bay is damp and the land is green. The entire bay is surrounded by high mountains, which plunge down into permanently calm waters, leaving just enough room for the road to skirt the bay. Here and there, where a river has gouged out a little valley for itself in the mountainside, small towns have sprung up. Some, in ancient times were Greek colonies, and the Romans were here too. All the towns I passed looked a little run down, and dismal. Many tourists come here in the summer, but there has been no commercialisation. The one modern-looking hotel complex, when looked at closely, appeared dirty and neglected. This is a poor country with little capital to build infrastructure. Arriving in the town of Kotor, then, gave me something of a surprise. Kotor is a prosperous port with deep harbour, pavement café’s and a booming tourist trade. It has ancient walls that surround the old city at sea level and climb high up the mountain beyond, presumably to prevent an attack from above. I’m already way behind the schedule I set for myself, but I couldn’t help stopping here and having a meal in a pavement café overlooking the bay. Eating at pavement café’s in a hot sun is a temptation I can rarely resist.

Beyond Kotor the road charges uphill for fourteen kilometres to one of the highest passes I’ve crossed so far. I was told in advance that it had a total of 27 hairpin bends. It wasn’t told however, that these are only the hairpin bends on the final ascent. None of the other hairpin bends and near hairpin bends in the lower part of the road were mentioned. (And by 'the lower part', I mean the part I managed to ride before my ears popped). The right-handers were nerve racking. I wasn’t concerned so much about getting round, - that was easy enough - it was getting round when there was a car coming the other way. Here as elsewhere in South-East Europe, drivers don’t always stick to their own side of the road. And I sometimes rode wide, too. At the top of the pass I stopped at a restaurant with terraces giving spectacular views of the valleys, the lower mountains, and the entire bay. After the ascent, I decided it was necessary to have another meal. And while eating, I got into a conversation with a group of Italian bikers who were travelling around visiting war memorials in the region. Beyond the pass, the road dips down again into the village of Njegusi which sits in a hollow in the top of the mountain. It’s an idyllic-looking place at this time of the year, but hell in the winter, I imagine. The houses all have very thick walls. After Njegusi, the road continues to twist and turn for another 10 kilometres down into Cetinje. The landscape on this side of the mountain is entirely different. Peaks extend beyond peaks into the distance. The rocks and small trees make this road exquisitely beautiful. There is nothing I know in the Alps that can even begin to compare with it.

Cetinje is a big town, located high up in the hills. It once the royal capital of a mountain kingdom. Set away from the lowland areas, no one speaks English here. I picked up a few groceries as I passed through, and carried on, intending to camp wild in the valley beyond. A couple of miles along the main highway to Podgoricia, the capital, I turned down the steep hillsides on a windy, single-track roadsides that drove ever deeper into the mountain forests. After 8 kilometres, though, it became very clear that I would find nowhere to camp here tonight. The road clung to the hillside and nowhere was there any flat land. The only village I saw was a tiny community cut into the slope. I turned back to Cetinje hoping to get back before dark – which is how I met Ato and his daughter, two of the most genial and funny people I have met on the whole trip – and that is saying a great deal.
Last edited by sv-wolf on Sun May 03, 2015 1:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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#1209 Unread post by sv-wolf »

Some recent pics of the trip so far:

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Part of the walls of old Dubrovnik, Croatia.

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And from another part of the city.

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Inside the old city

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Dubrovnik and tourism go hand in hand.

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More of Dubrovnik. The old city is paved with marble. There are no cars.

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Nightlife in the city

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Looking down on the old city. Pantiles weather to a pale yellow. Where they are bright red, they are new, indicating that they were damaged by the Serbian shelling in the Balkan war.

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The Bay of Kotor, Montenegro.

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Coming into the City of Kotor

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Down on the docks. In an extremely poor country, little Kotor does very well. Because its harbour is so sheltered, it is never affected by storms in the Adriatic, which its larger competitors often are.

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The medieval fortifications which protected the old city of Kotor from above.

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One of the squares ('Trg' in Montenegran) in Old Kotor

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Another quiet corner of the city.

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The city seen from above

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Another view of the city from above

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Yet another view of the city as I travel up the mountainside to the pass above through 27 hairpin bends.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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#1210 Unread post by blues2cruise »

Stunning city.
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