The Long Road Home

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 6:55 am and is filed under Bulgaria, On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.