Well, how times fly...one minute you are in Budapest starting on what seems like a huge journey, and the next you are sitting in an internet cafe in Istanbul, with a tan a few shade darker, thighs of iron, and a sore ass. But if you look more closely, quite a lot of things happened during these few weeks...First, we saw the second craziest cyclist in the world: a few kilometers out of Budapest, he was holding onto the back of a truck which whizzed past us at 80km/h. We were half tempted to follow him, and to get to Istanbul in three days, but thought better of it. (For those wondering, the overall craziest cyclist in the world is that egyptian guy we saw in Cairo cycling against traffic in a massive roundabout, while balancing a huge tray of pittas on his left hand, and another one on his head).
Then, we followed the Danube through the south of Hungaria. We rode mostly on dirt roads, more often than not on top of the dike that was built in many places to prevent flooding. We met three Spanish cyclists on their way to a music festival in Serbia, two German girls cycling the Danube route with rusty old three-speed bikes while smoking cigarettes, and an English cyclist on his way from London to India. We slept by the river in a beautiful spot with the Spanish guys, and in a miserable muddy hole with the English guy. Chloe managed to lose both her shirt AND her shoes on the same day. But Tom (the English cyclist) gave her a proper professional cycling shirt that was handed to him by a one-armed handisport cycling champion of Germany. Oh yes. And this one did survive all the way to Istanbul. As for the shoes we just had to buy new ones. We ate countless dishes of pasta (oh the priceless look on that waiters face when we ordered a side dish of gnocchi with our spaghetti and gulash...) and drank silly amounts of coffee - one of the enjoyable aspects of travelling in east Europe is definitely this: great coffee everywhere (not to mention the beer of course).
After a few days we crossed to Croatia, where we rode through beautiful marshes, in a nature park where we saw many birds, some wild pigs, and very very few human beings. The ride was quite tough, on a dirt road, but well worth the effort. This led us to the city of Osijek where we collapsed in the first hotel we found. At that point in the trip, having covered 260km in 4 days, we realized that we weren't going to make it all the way to Istanbul in time propelled only by our (nonetheless incredibly powerful) little legs. We thus decided to get onto a bus to Belgrade, saving us a 200km ride along what looked like a not very pleasant highway.
Belgrade was amazing. And not only because we got to rest. Its first of all a beautiful natural site, where the Sava river meets the Danube. Like both Budapest and Osijek, Belgrade too was dominated by the same political powers that ruled Jerusalem for at least 3 times in history : the Romans, the Byzantines and the Ottomans. Ad to this the complexity of the former Yugoslavia collapse and the tensions between Croatia and Serbia and you get a very interesting story (or rather, stories - a great case study in comparison of historical narratives!).
At least, from Hungary to Bulgaria, on one thing everyone agree - thanks god for releasing us from the Turkish yoke! :-)
We then hopped onto our bikes again for some more Danube route: for two days we followed the river as it entered into steeper and steeper scenery. This area called the Danube gorges is certainly one of the most beautiful landscape we saw on this trip. This part of the route is quite popular, and we met a good number of cyclists including a hungarian couple on a tandem. Our competitive spirit added to whatever it is they put in Serbian energy bars brought us to an average of 120 kilometers a day, which we were pretty proud of considering the few nice climbs on the way. We even did a 135km day where however about 10 of those were due to a stupid navigation error (we learned the hard way that after 120km we cannot read a map or a compass anymore - would be interesting to see what other intellectual faculty get lost as the daily distance increases). But we still found time to visit the amazing archeological site of Lepenski Vir, a village dating back to 10,000 BC. The most striking exhibits were the beautiful statues of fish people reminiscent of native american totem poles. That, and the fact that the diet of its inhabitants consisted of 70% of fish, which made them an average 10cm taller than the other guys around at that time. Here's something they should write on fishfingers boxes.
We finally arrived to the Iron gates, a huge dam built in the 70's between Romania and Serbia.
We crossed it without too much trouble and Eran set foot for the first time of his life in what could be considered as one of his many Motherlands… He had rehearsed all the Romanian phrases he knows for the occasion ("Bite the kid" being one of the favorites), but these included neither Hello nor Thank you so we had to learn these from scratch. However the two days we spent in Romania were not so fun. The first town we crossed, Drobeta Turnu Severin, was interesting enough, with just about the amount of Roman ruins to keep the archeologist inside Eran happy (remains of a bridge spanning the river built by Trajan). The rest was an endless succession of tiny villages crossed by a single asphalted road (the one we were riding on), of tough uphills under the sun and headwinds which made our progress difficult, and of a constant search for the one minimarket in town (some villages featured more than a dozen) which would be open/sell something other than processed meat or frozen fish. In desperation we stopped by the side of the road where some peasant was selling his products and ate a full watermelon for lunch. We had a cute encounter with a couple of old people, who stopped their horsecart to have a "chat", and kept handing us whatever was in their bags: peppers, tomatoes, an energy drink plastic bottle full of Zuica de Pruna which we dutifully tasted though it was 8am…
After two days of this we finally got to Calafat, where we took a ferry to cross to the town of Vidin in Bulgaria. Vidin is one of those town you would never get to on a backpacking trip. It is the poorest city in the EU, it is out of the way to anywhere, and yet it's a really nice place…we strolled the promenade along the Danube, visited the Baba Vida castle , and sneaked into the abandoned synagogue whose roof had fallen in and in which tall grass and huge plants of marijuana were growing. The next day we rode to Montana, leaving the Danube river for good after one last goodbye swim. The Balkan mountain ridge loomed in the distance, growing nearer and taller every kilometer. And the next day after an early start and a couple of hours cycling along with a bulgarian guy on his sunday morning ride, we started climbing our way up to the Petrohan pass, at an altitude of 1430meters. Five hours of uphill cycling, 1300meters higher, and a few peanut butter sandwiches later we finally made it, not a little pleased with ourselves. After a night in the mountain and another half day ride, we made it to Sofia.
We spent a couple of days in Sofia sightseeing, and discussing what to do next…we met two ascetic scottish cyclist on their way home from Korea, and talking to them made us think a lot about the way we want to travel, as they seemed to take their trip much more as a physical and psychological challenge than as a way to see interesting places and to have fun…nonetheless we decided to still ride a few more days in Turkey, from Edirne to Istanbul, partly because we didn't want to see much more in Sofia, and partly because of Chloe's stubbornness to arrive to Istanbul by bike.
These last three days of riding were hard, though, constants uphills and downhills among endless sunflower and corn fields, and a few unpleasant highway stretches. We did manage to avoid most of the big roads by riding north of the main Edirne-Istanbul highway…and we met lovely people along the way: a turkish cyclist-lover restaurant-owner who gave us a free lunch (yes, there is such a thing!) and showed us his notebook full of the adresses and thank you notes of the travelers he'd welcomed and fed, and a couple of cyclists who had been on the road for two years and who, after our meeting with the ascetic scottish guys, reconciled us with the idea that longterm cycling trips can be fun! We slept our last night in a park full of incredibly friendly stray dogs and cats, ate our last dish of soggy pasta, and on the next morning met up with
a group of lovely middle aged mountain bike riders, one of whom had started to chat with us in perfect hebrew the night before as we were looking for a map in a gas station. They showed us the way through the beautiful Belgrade wood through which we reached the Bosphorus. It then took us almost two hours to reach the center of Istanbul, along the beautiful promenade where Saturday morning joggers were slaloming between Saturday morning fishing enthusiasts…all in all a great way to reach the center by bike, avoiding the nightmare highway ride described by many cyclists entering Istanbul.
The official end of the cycling part of our trip was reached when we proudly posed for a picture in Taksim square, among a crowd of teachers demonstrating for better pay. After three weeks of travel of which we spent 15 days cycling, after 1340 kilometers on the bike and 600 by bus, we had finally arrived in the mind-boggling city of Istanbul…of her we will say no more, as she deserves a whole post to herself.
