Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

The next day we set off in convoy, sat in the truck.  We opted for the rear of the truck and started in a buoyant mood, chatting rubbish and settling in on our drybags.  The Uruguayans followed us.  The German put up his hammock.  The Uruguayan boys jumped in with us, and we all had a party. A stop for tea in a little shack in the desert saw us taking more gun photos, at the escorts instigation.       We hopped back in, high on sugar and pleased with our adventures. Then the road deteriorated.  It wasn’t the best to start with, but now it really took the word ‘road’ to its limits.  We bounced over horizontal stripes across the metalled road, and were flung from side to side.  It became impossible to sit in the back of the truck, so we stood and ‘surfed’ the bouncing, balancing on the balls of our feet for hours.  The sun hit my face and turned me a pleasant shade of beetroot.  I wrapped my hijab all the way round my head and c...

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...

snow-topped mountains in Greece? We arrived into Igoumenitsa at 6am. It was freezing and an icy mist gathered about our ears. We were a bit fed up, but the scenery was at least impressively Greek from the outset. There was no-one else on the roads and we felt like Adventurers, and stopped to make coffee by the road-side. A French woman pulled up in a Renault (what else?), and gesticulated bizarrely at Adam. We rode on. The mountains were stunning, with the mist still swirling, and lots of pine trees and craggy rocks. We stopped to make lunch in one of the prettiest logging sites I have ever seen, and fell asleep on a convenient log and got covered in tree sap. It was a good snooze though and we needed it after the bloody ferry experience. lunch and a snooze... There were lakes with salt-flats and marshland and we resolved to wild-camp. see, quite nice isn't it? We looked around for ages for a good spot, following little dirt tracks to nowhere and having to heave the bike back ...

Our next day took us through some very good villages where people waved lots and tractor drivers beeped at us. I think it was friendly. We went through Avignon with lots of cypress trees, and Chateau-Neuf-du-Pape where we watched farmers doing whatever it is they do to their vines. We ended up stopping for a real French cafe experience and accidentally stumbled into a historic walled village of some sort where harrassed-looking teachers showed city kids round, and it all looked very old and pretty, except for the enormous metal grilles on the front doors. It all started getting very southern-looking, with a bright blue sky, and slightly scrubbeir vegetation, and we decided to head for Arles. Our route took us through miles and miles of marshland, sort of wilderness-looking, and a couple of strange skeggy towns with mechanics sat around outside cafes looking mean. We came into Arles, on the coast, expecting great things, and it was about 8pm when we arrived. It was getting dark, and...