The Long Road Home

Well it rained pretty much all of bulgaria. I kind of got used to it, wet feet, hurried cold stops standing up for a hot drink at petrol stations, wet roads.

At Veliko Tarnovo it did stop whilst I sat out in the old streets with some ENGLISH people (first ones) who were visitng the property a friend had jusr bought. People seem to be snapping up houses etc al over the place. Veliko Tarnovo is beautiful, cobbled streets, a mediaeval citadel, church bells. But the water spouts were gushing rainwater onto the streets. I got wet and cold looking for some warm things to wear on my otherwise bare cold legs. It was Bulgarian National Day. A band was sheltering from the rain in a cafe fingering clarinets etc waiting to play for the vice president or somone.. Lots of shops were shut. I was looking for some thick stockings - easy to get in remote chinese villages actually. All I could find in Veliko Tarnovo were some fishnet stockings with patterns. I got two pairs.

Rain evry day. At first didn’t wnt to ride in rain, but no choice really, it’s ok but you can’t help getting soaked to skin, so you don’t stop long anywhere.

I bombed it to the border in one day over low hills with lots of lorries churning up dirty cold spray. The sun came out like a miracle for an hour as I descended to the Danube at Ruse, and I saw the river momentarily a flash of gold on water. There were flyovers and industrial complexes and stray dogs. The sky did amazing effects, light streaming in bars from angry grey clouds, then a sunset pink clouds edged with bronze. It all seemed very dramatic and romantically european, fit for Caspar Friedrich David (is that the right way round?) or some other painter, dark, gothic.

So, across the huge metal Friendship Bridge Danube from Bulgaria into Romania! Grey and brown and wet. But exciting. On the Romanian side people fishing with brown cane rods, man trying control two horses and an alsation at a junction.

I rode to Bucharest (under more rain). Yellow grass on low hills and hill farmers standing by their cars looking at their sheep. The Wallachian plain was just flat wet fields dark brown ploughed earth, to horizon, whole expanses not a single tree or hedge. In the villages, there were low damp green cottages, Little fences round homesteads, chickens, cows inside on beaten earth. I saw ferrets and cats with mice in their mouths.

Some houses with fancy roofs with dormer windows, pointy tops and turrets. There are flyposters in all the villages for ‘personal transport to france and italy’.

I stopped to brew quick tea at roadside milepost. Quiet, distant dogs barking, chilly wind shaking the leaves in a rare sparse avenue of trees, leaves rattling, falling.

In one village I stopped at a barn-like cafe, and some men sitting round a plate of smelly smoked fish invited me to join them picking fish off the bones. They were explaining something loudly to me with big gestures, in Romanian, which of course I didn’t understand. They showed me photos of stag horns. No idea what it was about. And then got out horrendous large daggers in leather scabbards from somewhere, and said something about police and did throat-cutting actions and then they started throwing the daggers at the wall. So much for my quiet quick cup of coffee. They weren’t very good and knives were banging on the floor. Is this a traditional village pastime? Crikey. I got out my minuscule penknife (gift from a sweet Turkish fourteen year old) to try and distract them and make them stop. It worked for a moment, but they threw my knife as well. People were saying ‘no problem’ to me, but I finished my (nasty ‘Ness’) coffee as quickly as possible and thanked them for their company and left. Things like that might be funny if you are two people, but alone and when you really don’t understand, it’s just weird and scary. I leapt on my bike outside and pedalled away.

I plough on, getting soaked and dirty and cold.  The worst is to have wet cold feet all day.  Finally I’m in Bucharest, with tramlines, gorgeous villas with fancy plasterwork, rococo public buildings, statues. Flooded roads, pedestrians (and me) getting drenched by puddles splashed up by cars. I saw a glimpse of Ceacescu’s monstrous palace, but then was battling six lanes of traffic across the huge piatas and up Bulevardul Nicolae Balcescu. A hot shower and dry clothes are just so lovely after a whole day wet and cold.

On sunday there were morning services in the churches all over the city centre, I went to about five, and stood in each with people in headscarves and children and young men alone, packed in, kneeling or standing. The singing was just fantastic. You look up at dark arches and then just shut your eyes and the basses and baritones and tenors are beautiful.

And now I’ve ridden up through Ploiesti and Sinaia to Brasov. The road goes up gentle bends through fields then woodland. Things start like the English arts and crafts movement. There are cottages some with wooden tiled roofs, little porches with columns and fancy arches, curved and humble and endearingly home-made, geraniums in pots. Yellow chrysanthemuns, purple cosmea daisies, dog daisies, roses. Horses and wooden carts,  carrying stones and gravel, horses twitch and kick the ground whilst their drivers stop at cottages and chat or deliver things. Tiny village shops with everything on shelves behind the counter, six different sorts of sausages. War memorials, roadside crosses with little roofs or in special cabins, water wells like jack and jill nursery pictures, with wheels and roofs and buckets to pull up your pail of water. People call out "salve" or "saluti". Fancy talking almost in Latin, couldn’t believe it.

As you climb towards Sinaia, things get gothic, and grander and grander, houses like big swiss chalets with terribly steep pointy gables, fancier and fancier wood panelling and carving, onion domes and towers. At Sinaia is the grandest of all, the Romanian royal summer palace, built between 1880 something and 1914 and which has gloomy marquetry pictures of German castles, stained glass windows with men in floppy berets with feathers, a dark wood library full of Corneille, Goethe, letters of european aristocrats. Creaking, polished, massive, dark, stuffy.

Then I left Sinaia and rode speedily up over the rest of this chunk of the wooded Carpathian mountains, then desending to Brasov. Brasov was apparently a place where German Saxons had a trading colony, it’s GORGEOUS, lovely townhouses round a square with a clock tower. Nice even in the rain this evening. I did an interview with Romanian tv (hello Antena1 and thanks Anca at Reuters Romania) and had nice tochitura cornmeal and sausage etc - had to try one of the six types - at an inn on the square. By the way thanks also Justyna in the bureau for the map and friendly tea!

It’s still cold and rainy. I threw away the fishnets. Not much use. In Bucharest I went to a big old department store where the mannequin models had shocks of sticking out plastic hair and nice middle aged ladies gossiped at counters. I asked for old lady’s stockings and got a thick woolly pair just like in a Chinese village. Exactly what I wanted.

Sitting in a little cafe with a pot of tea whilst a storm passes in the distance.

 

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A knitted loofah of course, perfect for a bath!

 

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Seems to be a rule that it rains when I go over mountain passes. Got v wet and cold again today. Thunder, everything. I was climbing a road over the Stara Planina mountains from Thrace in southern bulgaria. Even my idea to sacrifice the map of Turkey as insulation under my shirt didn’t really work.

Istanbul is only a few 100km away, but feels a million miles from these places in Bulgaria. You would never guess from looking around the bits I’ve been through that Bulgaria was ruled by Ottoman Turkey for 500 yrs. Suddenly no mosques, no bath houses, or baklava shops. And no football pitches, noone seems to support Galatasaray. Just a few lovely 16th C bridges with Arabi=
c inscriptions, and a few scraps of stone and brick wall, an arch here or there.

In Istanbul there were hundreds of tourists, including lots of very English ones from the home counties in straw hats etc. Gorgeous restaurants serving dishes from Ottoman feasts, hot sun, gulls squawking over the Bosphorous, mosques, churches, mosaics, women in chador and veils, men smoking nargileh water pipes. I met my parents at the ferry on the Asia side of the bosphorus waving in the middle of the road. We crossed the water to the europe side on a boat just like the Star Ferry that I started out on to get from HK island to Kowloon.

And Denys Rob and Mary from ADM were there too, amazingly. (Thankyou for taking care of us, including the fabulous dinner…)

My parents had brought maps for the last leg, and spares eg new tyres as the worn-out tread was just shredding off my old ones.

West of Istanbul, there is a whole big chunk of turkey I hadn’t really thought about. There are acres and acres of rolling low yellow brown hills covered with stubble and brown sunflowers with their heads hanging down. There are lovely 16th C bridges, towns with old stone and brick bath houses and mosques. There are big industrial units, textiles, pharmaceuticals, paper packaging plants. It smells of all kinds of strange chemicals as you ride along. I had lunch in an industrial estate layby.

Edirne, the last city in Turkey squashed right next to Bulgaria and Greece, is LOVELY. 16th C mosques everywhere you look, incl one really fabulous one with light just pouring across the patterns inside its huge dome. A caravanserai just like the one I saw way back in Azerbaijan.

A whole quarter where the houses are wood all tilting and peeling or plaster painted blue or yellow. A lady told me they were 19th C homes of Armenians, Greeks and Jews.

A band played for the first day of Autumn term, and Edirne school children all lined up with Turkish flags in front of the statue of Ataturk.

I crossed the border into Bulgaria in pouring rain. The border police spoke really good English and said "you’re crazy". I was soaked and freezing. A toddler burst into laughter when I told its mum I’d ridden from China. Guess you’ve just got to laugh sometimes really.

BLUE FLAGS WITH YELLOW STARS. I’ve crossed the border into Europe a lot of times from Asia, going as far back as rather enthusastic Europe bandstands on the bridge over the Ural in Kazakhstan, but surely this really is Europe now. A lot of things reminds me of Central Asia, cyrillic signs, quite a lot of Trabants, Soviet war memorials, weird monuments at county borders, metal, rusting, some letters fallen off, hideous soviet concrete hotels, derelict factories. But western pop music, little white churches, and the best coffee I’ve had for MONTHS. Even truckers’ 24hr caffs have GREAT coffee. I made a video it was so exciting.

I tried out village roads through southern bulgaria. Easy. No cars. Hardly any people. A few horses and carts with kids with wild sticking up brown hair. Lots of farmland seems to be just covered in weeds and brown dead teasels. Some fields are ploughed, but noone was doing anything the days I rode through. Even the donkeys were most of them not pulling carts or anything, just grazing on village grass. A few old people with wheelbarrows. Abandoned churches with plaster falling off and things piled inside. I looked through keyhole, got spiders in my hair. Tatty bulgarian flags outside village offices with dirty brown curtains. Cafes that have no sign just a doorway with fly strips hanging down, strange furry skin bagpipes pinned on the wall, a radio with all the cities of eastern europe. There are sad war memorials that noone’s weeded. But people are doing wonders with their gardens. Huge mounds of chrysanthemums yellow, maroon, black eyed susan, bougainvillea going all over the place, grapes, tomatoes and beans and cabbage plots. Noone has a lawn, you just let everything mix together in big square beds under trellises, along the path to your front door.

Maybe I’m just so unused to Europe I’m impressed by anything, but places the Lonely Planet says are awful seem quite nice. Stara Zagora had cafes all over the road, parks with benches, people wheeling prams, a church with old ladies polishing things. This town Dobrovo isn’t in the book. Half of it is awful concrete, true, but the other half is elegant townhouses with plaster painted pink and yellow and rococo churches and statues on plinths of people in cravats.

The road I came over in pouring rain to get here went over the Shipka Pass. I wanted to see this place, where the Russians and Romanians and Serbs fought the Turks in 1878, and beat them. After that victory, the Congress of Berlin happened, and after that, eventually, WW1. Strange to think of the armies I guess in those days with cavalry and cannons and apparently 200,000 russian casualties. Yesterday it was just all quiet wet pine trees, a village with a monastery with gold onion domes and glorious deep woods of endless lovely beech trees, bits of mist, dripping, grey.  Today it’s raining again. I’m heading through northern Bulgaria, towards the Danube.

Just thought you’d all be interested to know that Shattered magazine have published an article of Sue and her amazing journey.

Shattered magazine have kindly given us permission to publish the article here for you all to enjoy.

Read article here (PDF)

Hello from Turkey! (still…) This is a special ‘post’ to announce that, thanks to the generous support of Virgin Atlantic HK, we are running a competition to win a pair of economy class AIR TICKETS from Hong Kong to SYDNEY

How can you enter? well just answer the following question:

THROUGH HOW MANY COUNTRIES DID MY ORIGINAL ROUTE PLAN PASS? (Your answer should include HK and England.)

Send your answer by 30th Sep to thelongroadhome@gmail.com with your name, contact details and where you live.

The winner will be drawn from correct entries by Angeline Wong of Virgin Atlantic HK after 30 September.

That’s it for now - off to get some food… will write more later.

Thanks a lot to Angeline and the team at Virgin Atlantic in Hong Kong for supporting us.

And hope you enjoyed the video of me v fed up in Kazakhstan. I forgot I’d recorded it.

Sue seems to be a bit lost on a long road somewhere in Kazakhstan.

Click here for more videos of Sue.

Sue learns to play the “Chopocho” (spelling anyone?)

 

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Well, I am finally in the last little town on the black sea coast before the bosphorus. It’s dark. The wind is tugging my washing hanging here next to me. There’s a lighthouse, the sea washing into a little rocky bay, the moon. This has to be one of the most lovely places to sit and write.

Tomorrow I hope to ride into Istanbul. I’ve now ridden just under 7000km since I left hk in april.

In Amasra, I saw ROMAN stuff. First time I see Roman things here. There were little altars at the minuscule museum, with carvings of people lying on couches with tables of food. Coins with pudgy emperors, perfume jars. Togas and bony feet.

After Amasra, where I was just exhausted, the going got easier. Long sweeps of wide road, low hills, shallow valleys.

There was old gold autumn sun on brown fields of dry ploughed-up stubble. Miles and miles of hazelnut groves. There were quiet villages with quiet houses, you hear people flapping rugs from balconies, cow bells, people chopping wood across the valleys. Chickens scuffling in dust under gates, cocks crowing. Dogs, quite nasty ones actually.

Across the hills and valleys, everything rustling in the light wind, trees, leaves rushing, sweetcorn rattling. Lovely dappled rippling shade of tall thin trees.

As you go along, you smell fires where people are burning hazelnut shell bits. Cidery smell of fallen apples, delicious smell of ripe peaches and apricots on trees.

There are families bumping along in trailers to the hazelnut fields. Goats and lanky old goatherd men. A lot of really huge square old women walking slowly up the lane in enormous soft baggy patterned trousers tied in at their ankles, big cardigans, patterned headscarves.

I met my first Slav, a Macedonian man and his son running an ice-cream shop in Karasu. Came from skopje in 1959.

There were long stretches near a shipyard where the road was flat curving away along the edge of the sea, cars twinkling far off, like they do on the road along the northern coast of hk island.

I went through Zonguldak, with mines and ships and people in suits driving cars going to work. I’ve not seen that for weeks and weeks. In the evening families were out eating fast food turkish pide in restaurants. There were mums in jeans without headscarves.

There are gypsy camps, where the young women are in flappy bright shawls, with long hair loose out of big bright headscarfs, dark brown faces.

I stayed at a "holiday village" one night, a tiny clutch of cabins at the end of a 3km track to the sea. There’s a power cut so I eat an omelet alone in a wood cabin over the rocks by candlelight. There’s noone else there, just the guardian and his dog. The moon comes up huge full white. A lighthouse blinks from far away, eregli maybe, or alpali back east along the coast. The wind blows in from the sea like mad flapping my washing.

This stretch through turkey has been fabulous, but a bit lonely. I wish I spoke turkish.

Some of the nicest people to be with have been young teenage boys. Probably sounds a bit odd, but they have been lovely. Normally a little gang gathers round as I get off the bike and prop it up somewhere in a village. They grin and point. Some race me into the village. They don’t really ask many questions, just hang around me.  A boy in Duragan with an awful bowl haircut delightedly talked all the english words he knew "bike difficult car easy". They hold my bike up, try and help. I had no idea teenage boys could be so sweet. A fat boy came up yesterday and gave me his crisps and a strawberry yogurt drink. A nasty-looking boy with an earring gave me his penknife. A few days ago, two aged about 14 on their bikes (decorated for Fenerbaahce and Galataseray) came to sit with me at an empty beach. I showed them how to set up the stove. We made tea. People love the stove. They went dashing off and found pebbles and smooth glass to show me. They got seawater and helped me wash stuff. They sat and pointed out each scar on legs and arms told me by actions how they got them. They made a tripod out of stones so we could take pictures with my camera. Then we rode on, to their village, going down hills yelling "ingiltera sampiyon". I feel like some kind of wild Mary Poppins.

Hope it’s not too windy tomorrow. I’m aiming to meet my parents; they’re going to be waiting at the ferry from Istanbul Asia side to Istanbul Europe side.