The Long Road Home

This is from Francesco, one of the team at the M’Lop Tapang street children project in Cambodia, with news about the sports playground being built with the money you’ve been giving:

"In M’Lop Tapang (MT) street children’s refuge courtyard, children now discuss daily on who’s going to play the opening game, and what sport (basketball, volleyball, soccer) will be the first one to be played.

"The total area of the playground is about 600 square meters. We will divide it so that there is going to be a small playground for young children (50m2), a small deposit room and a good shower room (40m2).

"The sport facilities will occupy around 500 m2. The area will be multi functional: it will be a 18 meters wide and 25 meters long. This means that it can be divided into 2 regular size (18m/9m) volleyball courts, or into a basketball court and also a soccer court (5 on five).

"The first work to do is to pave (concrete) the access (a 10 meters long alley) and the whole area. At the same time the kids will paint the internal walls and the access to the playground in bright yellow, M’Lop Tapang’s color. The walls (over 100 meters in total length) will be a permanent board for kids to draw and will be always happy and bright. We want the kids to be in charge of most of the work.

"Since the rainy season is ending, we will not build the roof cover immediately, so that the playground will become available sooner.

"Our idea is truly that of creating a community playground that can be used by kids from 4 to 18. Mothers working at the market will be able to bring their children to play in a safe and happy environment. Here our staff will be able to build relations with the children and their families from an early age, the best strategy to prevent children from working in the streets at a later age.

"The sport facilities will be accessible throughout the day, both on a drop in base and on more structured training activities. Particular attention will be given to girls, who too often have no access to any sport facility nor are allowed to "play".

"Children working in the streets will be able to drop in at the playground for a basketball or volleyball game. At the same time they’ll be able to take a shower and our staff will provide life skills training and learn how these kids can be best helped by other activities at M’Lop Tapang, such as the clinic, remedial school, or drop-in centre for drug users etc.

"Kids have been involved in the decision to create a multipurpose playground and will be the centre of the development of the centre. They will paint it, advertise it, manage it through our team of street volunteers (ex street children working as peer educators).

"Our outreach team expects more than 100 children will use the facilities every day, while tournaments will be developed during the weekend.

"The street volunteers are excited by the fact that they will be able to reach a greater number of their peers and build strong relations. In the words of Tren (17), a street volunteer with a background of drug use and life in the streets, sport is what helped him to quit drugs and learn to live in the community, and this playground will be his tool to help many other kids like him. Watta (16), who until 3 years ago was living on the beach and now is the top student in his class, is keen in teaching volleyball and soccer to younger children as that is "the best way for them to learn to accept rules". Danin, a 13 year old girl who attends the centre daily and lives in a hut a few meters from the playground suggested that we have activities for girls, especially volleyball.  Danin is keen for the centre to stay open until sunset because many girls will be able to play after 5pm, when their mothers go back home and they do not have to look after their siblings.

"Setha, the outreach manager, who will supervise the activities run at the playground, is extremely excited: hundreds of kids he meets daily cannot attend the other MT centre facilities because they need to make money on the streets for their families. The playground in his opinion is the best way to provide happiness and "a break" in their lives. He’s convinced that he and his team will be able to make sure this break from work and dangers in the streets becomes longer and eventually last all day long.

"Finally, as part of an educational campaign on the environment, the outreach team is planning a small clean-up/recycling initiative linked to the playground: the idea is that kids will bring some plastic (from the slums, their homes, etc) as a token to use the facilities.  The plastic will then be picked up by the public garbage company and properly disposed rather than abandoned in the streets.

"We are approaching a few sports people in the hope that they will take part in the opening day, and without a doubt some will accept to witness a special day for the kids of Sihanoukville."

That’s the letter from Francesco. You can find out more about M’Lop Tapang, and the street children and the centre at  www.mloptapang.org

A huge thankyou to everyone who’s making all this possible, especially the top corporate sponsors Deutsche Bank, Prudential, Crosby Capital, ADM Capital, and also Virgin Atlantic, Kodak and Beeline Bicycles.

AND if you have been enjoying this project, please also think of BEN HAINES from Reuters who is a VOLUNTEER, and who set up and run this website in his spare time from his bedroom or somewhere, uploading files etc thru the night, and making podcasts etc possible. He is the top behind-the-scenes person without whom this project would not work.

If you have ideas on what more we could do to help at M’Lop Tapang or elsewhere, pls just drop a line.

Today I rode through a small slice of Slovakia into the Czech Republic. Before that I spent a few days crossing Hungary.

Everything today was soft and green and yellow and brown. It was easy. The roads are SMOOTH. All the roads from china even through to Romania and Bulgaria had continual bumps and lumps and the tarmac would be squashed up in ridges from heat or broken off or rutted. And then heaps of gravel, or whole sections just earth and gravel etc. You get jolted and pitched and bumped all day long. Now on these European roads I can just ride smoothly along. It’s gorgeous. You can look around. Easy peasy.

You can refelct on things. I was riding between lines of towering yellow shivering poplars that looked just like the ones far away in the Uighur oases of north west china. I saw the Morava river a flash of blue water just like the river near Borjomi in southern Georgia. A train went by rusty red engine and line of container wagons slowly overtaking me, like the huge trains did sometimes on the steppes in Kazakhstan. When I think of it all, I can hardly even believe myslef how far I’ve come.

Hungary’s Great Plain east of Budapest was actually quite tough. The wind was against me so I battled for two days across the open land, betwwen huge expanses of wild yellow grasses tossing in the wind and marshy green tussocks. At the end my hands are cramping with squashd nerves and it’s monotonous and I just want to GET OFF THE BIKE. But I saw wild ducks splashing out of reeds, white egrets standing alone, lapwings crying and flapping up from still water. Occasionally there are old wayside inns, white with huge roofs and arcades of low arches, geraniums. The wind was just sweeping over the open land. Around Hortobagy, the few houses there cling together, the wind scouring over the village. There were ww2 tanks left in the villages as memorials of the huge battles fought across the Plain.

Hungarian towns seem terribly well behaved sober and clean. People walk little dogs on those long retractable leads. People have their toddlers in HAMAX CHILD SEATS on the backs of their bikes. So safe and proper. There are bicylce paths with people standing nicely at the kerb when the little red bicycle is showing. Children are being taken to violin lessons. Students are carrying badminton racquets. There are TOURIST INFORMATION CENTRES with people in green shirts to help you. There are CAMP SITES. The petrol stations have astonishingly clean toilets and shops with coffee machines and CDs. There was a quiet demonsration going on in the middle of Debrecen, people politely listening to speeches in front of the reform church.

In the villages there are spanking nice houses all well painted with sharp square corners and rows of flowers. Ladies are buying flowers and pedalling home on their bikes. There are shops with trays of pansies for sale. I haven’t seen any donkeys for ages. It’s all so affluent and comfortable compared to anywhere else I’ve seen. It’s dramatically different from Bulgaria and Romania.

The huge pale brown fields have huge tractors, you see lines of dust far away as the tractors turn. The earth is fine and dry. I sat in fields to brew tea and watched the tractors go to and fro.

I arrived in Budapest in glorious late afternoon sun. I thrashed through massive suburbs. Traffic was snarled up for miles. Finally in the middle, the Danube looked fantastic. The Parliament building also looked fantastic all spires and gothic pinnacles. In the old city, you heard pianos from open windows, and peple practising trills on trumpets. Lovely lovely Europe. Tourists were listening to guides and pushing prams on cobbles noisily, the wheels going all the wrong ways.

West of Budapest, I saw numerous pairs of well-turned-out mostly middle-aged german and swiss people on cycling tours with nice clean bikes. So many!! Up till now, if I’ve seen another foreigner on the road, it’s a BIG EVENT, as you only meet one about every two months or so, so you absolutely STOP and talk frantically for 20 minutes in sheer delight at the company. I was all readyto stop and chat, but there are so many of these Euro ones that of course people don’t stop to chat, they just bowl on by. Some did stop. Each pair had a little ring-bound guide with maps, and notes saying there’d be no shops of this section for 10km so remember to carry food etc. I just boggled at it all, to be honest. In my head were those Kazakh steppes over 40 degrees, Kyrgyz mountains with hail coming down and the ice-white Pamirs under black clouds that I was too scared to even look at, and China’s remote wildernesses where I made so many mistakes and floods in Azerbaijan and lonely hills of Turkey etc.

When you’re there, you just battle on with getting through each bit, and it seems normal, but this week amongst the green and in the soft kind sunshine of europe, I stood there by the road with my little bike, talking to people, and even I could hardly believe what I’ve managed to get through. I felt I wasn’t explaining anything properly at all. Riding alone thru those places suddenly all seemed so far and so different from riding these gentle lanes. I didn’t know how to explain what it was like.

I stopped for a day in Bratislava. Sweet squares, towers of the city walls, the little cathedral. Cafes. Well dressed people (not me). Most exciting was (a) seeing my parents for a day and (b) a WASHING MACHINE.

Today I crossed the border into the Czech Republic on a minor road south of Breclav. Ther were two chatty policemen, one czech, one slovak, standing in the road listening to a music radio station. No stamps, no fuss. No huge queue pressing on foot for hours to squeeze through a stupid narrow turnstile (kyrgyzstan-kazakhstan); no long series of barriers, and trucks piled with scrap metal (china kyrgyzstan). No soldiers and border police at questioning me at 2am (georgia-turkey). No men with mustaches singing oh susanna (georgia-azerbaijan). Quite tame really.

I’m aiming for Prague now.

Yesterday I rode into Budapest in Hungary. Today I’m really tired and havng a day off the bike. In the next couple of days, I’ll write about what’s now happening in CAMBODIA with the money you’ve given for that project, AND also announce the winner of the Virgin Atlantic competition… Meanwhile today here’s a short update about the project in Pakistan.

The media have been reporting quite a lot this week about the South Asian earthquake, because it’s now one year since it killed more than 73,000 people in north pakistan. During the past year, NGOs such as UNICEF, and the Red Cross Red Crescent have been helping people rebuild homes and schools etc.

But the NGOs also say there’s still lots of rebuilding to be done. And they say people’s mental state can be poor, with obvious signs amongst children especially of post-traumatic stress (eg nightmares, bed wetting, unexplained sudden crying, manic behaviour changes). Thousands of those who died were children, who were killed when their schools collapsed on top of them.

Parents and community members tell field workers that they would like to see activities in addition to education which could bring normality back to the surviving children’s lives.

In the affected areas, children play in the streets, mainly cricket, and girls and women do not normally participate. Sports and games are almost never implemented in schools, there are=A0no after-school sports or recreation programmes, and no sports/play facilities exist.

In this context, we are raising money to enable NGO Right to Play (RTP) to set up simple sports programmes to help the earthquake-affected children have some fun, stay safe and healthy, and regain confidence.

RTP has already run similar programmes in Pakistan, for children at Afghan refugee camps, with great success reducing problems such as truancy and drug abuse. The RTP field workers have left the Afghan camps now, as planned, but sports activities, including girls’ cricket and badminton teams, are now still running as a result of their work.

To run similar initiatives now with pakistan’s earthquake survivors, RTP needs just under 300,000 USD. We are trying to raise a chunk of this, and RTP has meanwhile been hunting other sources to raise the rest.

We’ve raised over 25,000 USD thanks to Deutsche Bank, Prudential, Crosby Capital and other corporate donors, and lots of individual contributors.

The very good news is that RTP has now received 280,000 USD from a group of Swiss donors for this Pakistan programme. This means that the RTP project, which aims to reach 5,000-10,000 children, can get started late Oct early November.

So we look forward to see how the implementation progresses… Thanks to the RTP staff, especially Julie, for updates, including photos, which I hope we can put up on this site (thanks Ben - again).

As I mentioned above, there’s also news from the Cambodia project working with street children. I’ll write up about that later (thanks a lot Lisa at ADM for your update from Sihanoukville. ) AND, with help from Angelina Wong at Virgin Atlantic Hong Kong, also let you know who won the free flights competition, which lots of people entered, especially from Deutsche Bank and Reuters.

Goodnight from Budapest! Now I’m going to plan my route up from Hungary into Slovakia, and then sleep.

I’m now in the town of Oradea, in western Romania, close to the Hungarian border. I’ve been riding through Transylvania for the last few days.

It’s quite easy - hills, but nothing like turkey, never mind NW china etc. These are wooded gentle hills, mild hairpins from time to time, nothing drastic. There are villages dotted everywhere with church spires and autumn sun and the shadows of trees and smell of woodsmoke. I’m doing long days, over 120km, just rolling and rolling from one valley to the next.

Now there are foggy mornings, chilly, then mostly blue sky and sun later. Loads of insects and bugs are out, sometimes I’m going through nasty clouds of flying ants getting in my ears and everywhere, grass full of furry caterpillars, and very thick spiders webs which stick across you when you go into the verge.

Places are hungarian, german, romanian. You see all different styles of houses including (a) small old pink and yellow cottages with arches into farmyards, (b) wooden cabins with wide eaves where people pile their stuff and sit out (c) squat square bungalows mostly dark green, with roller shutters. Etc.

There are farmyards with wells that have a huge tall post, and then the bucket on the end of a beam. Chickens running (surprisingly fast), dogs chasing pigs, barking, other pigs just flopped at the roadside.

People are ploughing fields with tractors, collecting sweetcorn by hand, grubbing for potatoes, cutting grass with scythes, loading hay or marrows onto horse-drawn wooden carts. There are loads of horses and carts clip clopping along, all registered with wood number boards on the back. Men in green hats with cord hatbands (look sort of Austrian to me) say bun giorno (or something). There are bent old women in black, standing alone, clutching a tree, or leaning on sticks.

The verges by village houses are covered wth roses, michaelmas daisies, yellow chrysanthemums, and there are rows of marigolds and mysembrianthemum (?not sure spelling) down by the wall, hanging baskets with petunias, pots of geraniums.

Along the fields there is purple clover, dandelions, pale blue cranesbill (a new plant), and a thing with spikes of yellow flowers like snapdrogons. Hillsides of thistles and teasel, rose hips and blue sloes, and grassy fields dotted with purple autumn crocus (very nice).

Sometimes I take the minor roads cross country, especially if it’s a more direct route. Mostly it’s been ok, but I got lost on the hills east of of Cluj-Napoca, where the road became one of those awful rubble tracks, uphill, confusing junctions etc. After ages scrabbling uphill, I stood at a sunny windy road junction, white tracks leading here and there across hillsides of green and yellow stripes, a wayside cross. No idea which way I should go. In a car you’d just think how annoying, and bash on till you got somewhere, but on a bike you really don’t want to go up extra hills etc. Very frustrating. I eventually got to a place on the map, and sorted it out from there.

I’d not thought about him for a while, but TIMURLANE even came here. How extraordinary is that. His Mongols raided in 1241, and apparently the German towns here started out because Germans were invited to fill up land timurlane laid waste. I went through Sigisoara, one of the Saxon German towns, which has huge clock tower, Lutheran churches with the hymn boards in old gothic writing, and a lovely graveyard all ivy and horsechestnuts and tombs of german people, identified by job - tradesman, railway official, mayor. Scruffy schoolboys were shouting to each other in german, organising football games.

There are also people in most surprising costumes - men in startlingly big black wide-brimmed hats like Zorro, and women and girls in enormous pleated long skirts. I think these are Hungarians, but not sure.

I am a bit scared of some of the people. Barefoot kids and wild looking people roaming about, especially at the edges of towns. I haven’t seen such poor wild children since I left the tibetan bits of china. And lots of dogs. After that knife-throwing incident, I stopped in another village and was buying some bread quite normally, but when I tried to get out of the shop, the door was blocked wth people. I heard shouting and barking and saw there was a horrendous dog fight going on outside, a black big muscly dog was biting the neck of a white fluffy one and lots of poeple gathered round. A man was ramming a wooden hand cart at the dogs, but bits broke off his cart and the big dog still was going at the little one. Finally poeple threw water and it got sorted out but then the men started fighting, and it was all awful. I got quite worried about stopping in little places.

BUT I have to stop, and of course most people are perfeclty normal and nice. In one Hungarian village I was chatting in a huge half-bare shop, and they forced me to take a whole bag of bananas, chocolate, salt crackers and drinks without paying. I’m still eating their stuff.

The towns are just full of very proper Culture. They were doing Aida at cluj napoca, Ploeisti has a huge list of art and dance classes you could enroll for, there were organ recitals at Sigisoara, chamber music by Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov in Targu Mures, and plays by Ibsen, Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams. That’s just in October.

Now I’ve pretty much finished Transylvania, and Romania. I’ve now reached flat flat land in its far east. You see the lorries driving towards Hungary’s Great Plain silhoutted against the evening sun, far ahead. That’s the way I’m going too, aiming to cross the Great Plain and get to Budapest.

Sometimes these days I feel suddenly really lonely. You look bakc at the road you’ve just ridden and it’s empty, and you sit sometimes for a moment finishing a cup of tea by a field and it’s lonely. Don’t know why I feel it more here than in places before. It’s ok, you just have to turn back round look forwards hum a tune think of people smile at someone - and it’s ok. In fact, I should be fine, I’ve had quite a lot of poeple to talk to, after I was on Romanian TV news. Fame! Actually I wasn’t sure if they’d broadcast any of the film which they did on a dull rainy day in Brasov when I was really cold and wet. But they did, and in the days after it was on, people even asked me for my autograph etc in the street. One big lady clapped her hands, knew my name, told me all about myself, and gave me kisses on both cheeks. Bit of a surprise. Nice of her really.

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.

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.

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

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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.