Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

The road to Lake Van was long and arduous. We met a Dutch cyclist on our way. He was cycling around the world. It had taken him 8 weeks across Turkey.   Lake Van was enormous and beautiful. It had giant storm clouds above it. Van was, however, a total smeg-pit. We were disappointed- the guidebook had tricked us again. We rode back down to the shore to find a place to camp. There were no campsites, only picnic-parks- a unique Turkish and Iranian phenomenon which consists of a park with dusty-looking trees, some picnic tables and bins, and a shack to rent barbecues from. We rocked up to one of them, where a weaselly-looking man with a lazy eye that made him look villainous tried to charge us the same price as a hotel to stay. We found another one, and an old drunk man held up his hands at us. We pitched the tent in the rain while a young, retarded boy watched us. A serious guy appeared and brought us to the picnic area for chai. He was brilliant, and fed us chai after...

Mt Neermut has giant heads placed on a fake summit. That’s what the guidebook says. It was a beautiful ride up to the top. But I would dispute the word ‘giant’. The heads were there, granted. ‘Giant’ they were not. The view was good though, and worth the killer journey. There were more tortoises. There were villages with 12yr-old cowboys on horseback. There were giant black lizards on rocks. There were storks on sticks. There were old men on donkeys. There was a crazy wedding procession in the middle of the dirt-road. Young hijabed girls were dancing to a car stereo, surrounding the bride in her meringue dress. Lots of little children surrounded the bike.  We waited for the dancing to stop so we could carry on. They said ‘Hello’, and ‘Bye-bye’. At the next village people stood on roofs waiting for the wedding procession. We got a ‘ferry’ across towards Diyabarkir. The lake was stupidly blue. Mindblowingly, inconceivably blue. We crossed and found a petrol-pump. We were in ne...

We met a tortoise the next day. We stopped and fished it out of the road. I was ecstatic. I’d never met a tortoise. I considered it a good omen. Then it shat all over my leg. The road was just through more bush. Nothing else there except for a road, and dust. Rocks, rocks and more rocks. The sky was yellow and heavy. It felt like another planet. We were going about 50kph over a bridge, when suddenly a white car hurtled straight at us on our side of the road. There was 50cm left on our side. Adam steered out of the way between the car and the bridge railing. We swerved into deep gravel, skidded and came off. The white car raced off at high speed on the wrong side of the road. Adam scraped his leg, I bruised my foot and the oil filter was dinted, but we were fine. We were quickly surrounded by well-wishers, handing us painkillers and business cards, and trying to take us to hospital. We rode on. The roads got un-road-like. The gravel got deeper, the sky got yellower and the tar...

The next morning a fire-breathing dragon belched in my ear and I woke up. It was 5am. The noise was deafening. Adam asked me in his sleep why they were mowing the lawns. He is quite deaf. We snuck out, ready to attack. It was 40 hot-air balloons, readying for take-off in the next field. They were like incredibly noisy jelly-fish, half inflated and hanging in the air. There were touts cramming rich tourists into the baskets, 30 to a basket. Japanese couples photographed each other. Halfway up a large hill we met a biker, on an Enfield. He was a Frenchman riding across to India, with no documents, no helmet, no boots, no jacket… he made us look like wusses. He was very clean, despite sleeping in caves. He was going to sell the Enfield in India, and invent a crash story for the carnet people. His bike was leaking oil. We wished him luck and swapped advice about Iran. We haven’t seen him since.   He left us feeling like over-prepared muppets, with all our bike gear.....

We rode down to Goreme. It all started looking a bit odd.  The rocks became boulders.  The boulders turned into giant lurking formations. We stopped in the 50 degree heat to sit in a cave.  It was 2000 years old. It had shelves cut into the rock, steps and a fireplace. You could see where a very long time ago someone had put a beam up to hang their pots off. There were miles and miles of caves, as far as you could see, with a whole lot of nothing in-between. It was very hot. The road had a heat haze on it. I had a heat haze on me. The sweat made big white marks on my trousers. Goreme was a little tourist town, only there because of the rocks. There were bars with Shisha pipes, embroidered wall hangings, floor cushions, and backpackers in various stages of decay. We got lost in the sand-towers. A dog adopted Adam. There was a cave-house, still obviously occupied by someone, with vegetables planted in neat rows in the cave entrance, and pictures on the walls...

The receptionists of the hotel were matching magical girls in uniforms with pigtails and symmetrical eyebrows. They smiled at us, told us we were beautiful, and filled our pockets with sweets.   We got a taxi to the bus stand and the taxi man put us straight on the right bus, where all the passengers helped us to pay and get to the right stop, and two young students took us off the bus and directly to the hotel we’d needed, leading us by hand to the door. It wasn’t their stop and they had to walk back to where they were supposed to be going. The reception man in the hotel said we could park in the hotel lobby for free. Turkey was going to be hard to beat… We moved in, and marveled at having real walls, and almost a bathroom. Our hotel was in a seedy part of town on a crossroads. To get to the hotel you had to walk past strange beggar-men selling bits of tat they had found or swapped- old Harry Potter books, fake Diesel boots, parts of mobile phones, all thrown onto the ...

The Turkish border was quiet and serious. We showed our documents 5 times and rocked into customs, where a pumped-up young official in a pink shirt talked about us in Turkish, and mocked us when we didn’t know what to do. We completed swine-flu forms.   The landscape changed at the border. It was very dry and desert-like, still with rolling hills, but no green plants. I wondered how it knew to change. Turkey is bloody enormous. I mean, really, really big. You drive for a day and then look at the map, and you’ve covered an inch of the country. It is amazingly friendly though. There are lots of women looking beautiful in hjijab headscarves. How do they look so stunning with such an odd frame round their faces? I look dreadful. We stopped for coffee at an internet shop in a little country town, and a very dignified gentleman came over and invited us to his wedding. It was happening right then, next door in the giant hall. When we said we had better keep going, he paid for our...

We stayed at a campsite on the Black Sea coast and met a nice young German engineer who got us very drunk in a bar. I threw up secretly into a bush.   We rode down the coast, stopping briefly to gawp at the tourists in the resorts and the Pub Crawls being advertised by young touts in different languages. We rode past more prostitutes along the way-side and watched a young flashy girl in the back of an old man’s car, leaning over to him and giggling. There was a big coach-load of young Bulgarian city-kids, resplendent in giant earrings and high heels, and the Cuban-styled boys checked their quiffs in our wing mirrors. We were almost in Turkey, but it was evening again and time to start the hunt for a sleeping place. There were supposedly campsites everywhere in the area. Maybe they had all slipped off for a little holiday of their own. There weren’t any. We spotted some caravans from the highway and found a route down to them. It was possibly a campsite, though you coul...

The next day we ended up in Bucharest in the rush hour. Bucharest was big. Very big. And strange, with Communist blocks with shops underneath and massive roads all jam-packed. We got lost for 2 hours 4o minutes. We rode down a one-way main road the wrong way, and it all went very wrong, with giant jeeps heading straight for us, beeping. We stopped, solely to curse. It started to rain. We skidded through a dead dogs head. It squished and our front tyre went haywire, flying out to the side and we wobbled and wobbled and eventually came to a stop. We reached the border crossing back into Bulgaria, and rode up to the ticket booth. We discovered we only had 6Lev left. There was no-where to change money. The ticket cost 10Lev. The counter-lady was fairly unforthcoming, but she must have taken pity on us, because she gave us a ticket. We couldn’t read the ticket, and didn’t know where it was for, but it was a Ticket. Hallelujah. I very nearly crossed myself. We got onto the floa...

Our idea was to reach Transylvania. We rode on some great roads. Not great as in maintained perfectly. Possibly not actually maintained at all. The potholes could have been entrances to other worlds, they were so large and deep. But they were still great roads from the pillion perspective- winding and hilly and interesting. Romania changed suddenly in Transylvania. There were Dracula-esque castles and the normal typical Transylvanian sights, and nestled in amongst them there were BMW and Mercedes dealerships, and big foreign cars instead of horses & carts, and industrial towns. We reached Brasov, intent on spending a couple of days sight-seeing and then moving on. It was a nice enough place, a tourist town, with historical buildings, pizza restaurants and tourists in those dreadful beige knee-length shorts. We rode to the campsite. It was by a main road, 3 miles from the town, in an industrial estate. We asked a churlish-seeming fellow the price. Then we sat outside for about an...

After a few days we had had enough of dry ski-slopes and said goodbye to Frederick the cat and set off for Romania. The border is a river. The crossing involves a miniscule and dilapidated floating car park. It couldn’t really be termed a car ferry as such. There is no cabin, or front. The only other border-crossers were truckers, all chain-smoking, all in stained vests pulled over their big bellies, all driving vast articulated lorries. We stood out. The river was pretty good though, it looked very exotic and wide and Amazon-like, especially considering it was the Danube. Maybe we caught it on a good day. Southern Romania is 150 years behind Europe. The gypsies far outweigh non-gypsies, the horse & carts far outweigh engine-driven vehicles, and all the buildings are wooden with very ornately decorated tin roofs. I watched an old peasant woman in holey tights pull a turkey along on a red lead. The women were all in headscarves and knee-length skirts with wool tights unde...

We were in Samokov. We’d arrived. There were signs saying Samokov, amongst other things, that led us to understand this. Campsites, however, there were none. There were plenty of scruffy communist apartment-blocks, some of them even with people in them. There were plenty of scruffy bars, nearly all of them with people in them. But definitely and emphatically, no campsites. We rode around for a while, stopping occasionally to stare at the little malevolent tent symbols on our Bulgaria map. They didn’t go away. Eventually we plucked up the nerve to enter a large, plush hotel with a symbol on its sign that could, if you squinted quite hard, have been meant to represent a tent, once. There was a giant fat man with a handbag in the lobby, sat amongst very cheesy 80s décor, like an authoritative walrus. He agreed with us- there was no camping in Samokov. And certainly none in his hotel. And: ‘You know ees dangerous outside? And virry cold? But I hev gud room for 50Lev? No? Ok, ok, 40Lev. No?...

We rode past the nice-looking campsite and onwards- 150km in the wrong direction based on a border crossing on our map that didn’t actually exist. The towns got smaller and smaller. We stopped and asked a burly army officer how to cross into Bulgaria. He looked very surprised when he eventually understood, and sent us back exactly the way we came. We stopped at a disco garage for strong coffee to buzz us back towards the Bulgarian border. Bulgaria awaits. The border had a brilliant soviet-style ‘Republic of Bulgaria’ sign, and we passed the now-defunct ‘Disinfection Bay’ without anyone trying to hose us down with anything. Everyone was whizzing through without showing anything, so we got stopped and asked for our passports. some communist-looking flats in the rain. The crossing was great though, and the bit of Bulgaria we arrived into was excellent, with very shabby little villages, and Lada cars everywhere, and dodgy-looking huddles of young men at roadside bars. We changed some mon...

We headed off towards the main roads, with our new desire to visit Halkidiki driving us forward. We rode down the first prong of Halkidiki and immediately ran out of petrol. Just made it on reserve to the petrol station though- our luck was really in that day what with bears and all. We spotted our first snake, about a meter long, but with its head squashed as though someone had run it over on purpose. The prong was fairly pretty, but possibly not quite as beautiful as expected. We rode through a strange deserted tourist resort with a few rich Greeks eating over-priced fish in a beach-side restaurant- one place had a fish dish for 65 Euro. We got sneered at for only ordering coffee, and the coffee itself was undrinkable, with the grains lurking in the bottom. It was possible a very refined way to drink coffee, but I am of the Nescafe school, and I took a gulp and had to discreetly spit. It transpired we weren’t going to be able to afford restaurant food in Greece either, and we fou...