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Showing posts with the label motorbike

Bulgarian beer and singing gypsies

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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...

Northern Greece and the bears we didn't meet.

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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 ...