Italy to Yugoslavia

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Now that Yugoslavia has turned into twenty-eight different countries, Customs and Immigration is easy. It wasn’t when it was still just one country.

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There were lots of fellow Australasians at the camp, and we spent most evenings standing around the fire drinking beer and telling lies. Because we’d taken the bike off to be serviced, we had to use public transport for getting around. This consisted mostly of buses like enormous green tin sheds on wheels, which are free.

Well, they do have a ticket machine, but the only people who seemed to use it were the nuns. Nobody ever appeared to check for tickets. We visited the Colosseum and the Capitoline Hill, which was inhabited by a great tribe of tough looking cats. They are protected by law, it seems, and fed by the inevitable little old ladies. The catacombs were closed, allegedly for renovation. Renovating the sewers, how nice.

The Bear leaves Italy behind heading for Yugoslavia in Part 25. but not before visiting Venice

For us, the highlight was the Vatican Museum. Not so much for the Sistine Chapel, which looks and feels like an ecclesiastical railway station with a nice ceiling, but for the superb ethnological section.

With the bike back on the road, though not greatly improved by Italian servicing, we took in the more remote spots like the Villa d’Este, with its hundreds of fountains, and Hadrian’s villa. One night, the Goodyear blimp put on a brilliant lightshow over the city. While we sat on a park bench craning our necks, moving coloured pictures flitted across the sky – we were entranced.

Before departing for Umbria we bought some new clothes, which was a real luxury after living in the same very limited range of clothing for so long. Our first stop was Assisi, with its houses of honey-coloured stone stacked one on top of the other on the hillside and a quiet campsite overlooking it all. The tomb of St Francis, deep in the rock, was very impressive. We had some pleasant sunshine, but it was still cold in the shade – as I discovered when I washed my one and only jacket.

It was wet and windy again on the road to Florence and we were forced to fortify ourselves frequently with coffee and cakes. Having arrived, we decided to cop out for once and stay in a pension. We were sick of the rain and wanted to feel warm, clean and human for a change.

Warning signs for drivers

Punishment came, of course – someone broke into the bike’s top box and stole the only thing in it, our airbed pump. I had locked the steering, put the alarm and the massive Abus lock on as well as covering the bike with the Vetter cover, but all to no avail. I guess we didn’t do too badly, all things considered. The pump was the only thing stolen on the entire trip.

Our pension was comfortable, with en-suite bathroom featuring a working hot shower and central heating. A little time was spent outside – we looked at the Ponte Vecchio, wandered the streets drooling at the shop windows and toured the Uffizi gallery. I become very easily overloaded when confronted with too much art in one stroke, and emerged shell shocked. Annie coped much better.

Conditions were still icy in the mountains

Then it was back out into the rain and off to the mountains and the snow, but the road over to the east coast had been freshly cleared; it was empty of traffic and fun on the bike. We rode up the mountain to San Marino with the big motor enjoying the work. Hills were never a problem for the Yamaha and I very rarely even had to change down.

San Marino was a real, genuine tourist trap of the first order; a gem of a rip-off. The only good value was booze, so we stocked up. It was cold, too, and we huddled in our sleeping bag waiting for the morning, which brought a dullish run to Venice, where we installed ourselves in the Treviso campsite across the lagoon.

Venice rewards the adventurous

Venice repays the effort made to get away from the main tourist haunts; there’s a wealth of interest in the back streets and alleys, and coffee is cheaper, too. Perhaps the place is a little too devoted to chasing the lire, but it’s nonetheless interesting for all that. All the dogs wear muzzles, by the way, although some of them have their pacifiers just slung casually around their necks without interfering with the use of the teeth at all. Very Italian.

I felt inspired that night – perhaps Venice had kindled a fire in my soul – and excelled myself at dinner, even if I do say so myself. With only two pots and one flame I produced hamburgers, mashed potatoes with onions and mushrooms in white sauce. Didn’t taste too bad either…

Venice also offered plenty of inspiration

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Yugoslavia

Italy had seemed tame to us after the rigors of North Africa, so we were rather looking forward to Yugoslavia. We didn’t have long to wait before things got rigorous again. At the border, the official took one look at our pretty blue Australian passports, went into a huddle with his pals and then disappeared indoors.

Here he got on the telephone, looking worried and leaving us sitting in the drizzle without an explanation. All I could think of was that there had been some reports of terrorist training camps for an anti-government right-wing organization called Ustashi in Australia. Perhaps the border police thought we were Ustashi shock troops, on a Yamaha. Eventually they decided to take a chance that we wouldn’t blow up any bridges and let us in.

On to Zagreb with a will, through pretty, agricultural country with the first flush of spring on it and the last clouds of winter above it, but one of Zagreb’s alleged campsites had disappeared. The other was closed, and so were most of the cheap hotels.

We checked into a reasonably comfortable place near the railway station and went out to do the town, but the grim weather made that a rather uncomfortable pursuit, so we retired early and wrote letters.

We had intended to devote a day to the famous Plitvice lakes south of Zagreb. The rain became heavier and colder as we rode out of town, and the bike began to run rough and lose power. I pulled into a petrol station in Slunj – what a name for a town to get stuck with, although it is very pretty – and took parts of the fairing off.

The problem wasn’t difficult to trace. One of the plug leads had come undone and been casually pushed back, which I can only presume had happened during the service in Rome. It was soon fixed and gave no more trouble, which is more than I can say for the Yugoslav weather.

The scenery was exceptional, but the weather fickle

When we got to the lakes the rain turned to sleet, so we decided to get the hell out of there and down to the coast. Then, naturally, I got lost. The bloke behind the counter of a hardware/booze shop gave us directions. It seemed like an odd range of stock for a shop, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

“I’ll take a hammer and a box of tacks. Oh, and give me a flask of brandy. Two.”

Back on the main road I overtook a truck without realising that there was a dip in the road ahead; the dip, of course, held a car coming the other way. The big Yamaha dived off the side of the road into the accommodating snowy ditch quite gracefully, I thought. Annie’s opinion was otherwise. The bloke in the car just shook his head.

We recovered with a terrific meal of roast pork and chips in a cafeteria above the bus station in Otocac and washed it down with a brandy (possibly sourced from the local hardware shop) before tackling the godforsaken plateau above Senj. It snowed again on the pass, but then we were through the weather and rolling down the twisting, lightly oiled and diesel soaked mountain road to the sea and sunshine.

We found a sweet little campsite on the water and it was actually warm enough to eat dinner outside the tent, although not quite warm enough for a dip. The rain came back the next day as we rolled into Dubrovnik and we couldn’t resist the offer of a pension with a garage.

A German couple touring on an elderly BMW R60 joined us and we spent most of the evening telling stories over a few drinks. A lot of Germans seem to speak English, which is handy. A few days in Dubrovnik were a real pleasure.

We did all the usual things – walks through the medieval city, around the walls and out to the fortress, as well as familiarising ourselves with Yugoslav cooking. There was a small bar tucked away in an alley down by the harbour that specialised in burek, the cheese or meat pastry. They also had cevapcici and rasnici (grilled meats) which I knew from Australia and we spent almost every evening there having a few beers with dinner.

A few beers with dinner were welcome

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This is all sounding pretty good, isn’t it? But the gods of the road had noticed that we were having it easy…

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part 24

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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One definite advantage of travelling in Italy is that you can buy wine in bulk. We bought a five litre plastic container for ours.

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Northern Sicily is a rugged place, with awe-inspiring cliffs sheltering long ranges of hills like overstuffed pillows, with a fine needlework of vineyards embroidered on them.

Despite the drizzle, we had an enjoyable few days exploring. Every now and then the padrone back at camp would get worried about us and offer us alternative accommodation – first it was a little wooden house, then a caravan. All free of charge. He couldn’t understand that we were quite happy in our tent.

As the skies looked clearer to the south, we finally packed, had a last cup of coffee in our little bar on the harbour and headed across the island to Selinunte. We rode through seemingly endless fields of yellow flowers and discovered a peculiar system of motorways.

These roads weren’t on our map, and seemed almost like miniatures – a proper motorway scaled down to Fiat 500 size. Altogether in poor repair, the system didn’t seem to lead anywhere. I had some vague memory of the fascists undertaking construction programs in economically depressed parts of Sicily; this could well have been one of them. Later we were told that the Mafia had had the contract.

A chap we met along the way showed us a rather eerie place to have our picnic lunch – the main square of Gibellina, a town destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 and never rebuilt. We were stopped by the police a little later, but our total inability to speak Italian foiled them and they let us go. I’ve found that ignorance is generally bliss when talking to cops.

The Greek temple at Selinunte was in better condition than most of the ones in Greece itself, but the campsite that had been recommended to us there didn’t seem to exist. We carried on to camp at Sciacca, after endless rows of holiday houses in various stages of incompletion and invariable poor taste. The sun came out, and in the morning we were served excellent Espresso coffee right at our tent. A great institution, the waiter-service campsite.

Cobbled streets proved a challenge in some locations on the fully laden XS

As Caltanisetta’s bypass road wasn’t quite finished, we had to go through the town itself. This is the one environment in which a heavily loaded XS1100 really doesn’t shine. The narrow, cobbled streets with their sharp corners gave me quite a bit to do.

An additional problem is that you can’t get yourself out of trouble with the throttle – there’s nowhere for the bike to go if you accelerate. We were caught in a Communist Party march as well, which slowed us down even more. Caltanisetta had good ice-cream, though.

Down past Enna, we took the spectacular autostrada, which just ignores the lie of the land. When it isn’t swinging itself over the valleys on a ‘viadotto’ it’s drilling through the hills in a tunnel. It must have cost an absolute fortune to build.

On the coast once again, this time the eastern one, we found a supposedly closed campground called ‘Bahia del Silenzio’ at Brucoli, which opened just for us. With typical kindness, the people offered us a small bungalow, but we stuck with the old tent. We’d finally woken up to the most economical way to supply ourselves with wine, and bought a five litre plastic container which we regularly refilled with the local vintage just like the Italians do.

After a quick look at Neapolis with its amphitheatre, near Syracuse, we turned north once more, to Catania. The inland road looked good on the map and turned out to be quite exciting, with steep hills and ridgetop runs, but on the way back down it became a little too exciting when we hit a sizeable patch of diesel and went sideways for a little while. No damage, but a bit of heavy breathing and cursing resulted.

A very thorough tour of Catania then, helped by the motorway signs, which pointed around in a large circle taking in most of the town. We both got really annoyed with this and rode around swearing at the tops of our voices until at last the autostrada entry ramp came into view. Fortunately, the Italian motorway cafes serve excellent coffee. We recovered our composure over cappuccino.

Road conditions could be questionable, and road markings at times were confusing, luckily the coffee was good

Camp was at Acireale, just north of Catania, in a clifftop campsite that had a lift running down to the beach. Talk about luxury. Another sort-out left us with quite a bit of gear to mail home, and we parcelled it all up neatly and took it up to the post office. It wasn’t to be that simple, though.

First of all, I hadn’t left enough loose string for them to put their metal seal on. They retied the parcel for me. Then, I hadn’t put a return address on it. I tried to tell them that I certainly didn’t want the parcel returned to the campsite, but it seemed that a return address was required by law.

So I put the same address on the parcel twice, which made them very unhappy, but they took it. Losing a little weight made the bike look much neater.

We rode up around Mount Etna, through hazelnut plantations and past pretty little towns balanced on hilltops, and on north through a national park and a vast hunting reserve. Lovely country up here, with some excellent road over the passes that took us to Milazzo and a German-run campsite called, inexplicably, ‘Sayonara’.

The weather was pleasant but the locals still seemed to find it wintry. At a petrol stop on the way to Messina, the attendant came out of his office shaking his head, pointing to the bike and crying ‘Freddo! Freddo!’, which I took to mean ‘cold’ in Italian. Either that or he’d mistaken the bike for a friend of his called Fred; unlikely under the circumstances.

The ferry to San Giovanni on the toe of Italy was quick and cheap. They once again had excellent coffee on the ferry, and nice pastries, but the signposting out of San Giovanni reminded us unpleasantly of Catania.

When we finally made it out of town, we rode up the coast through Scylla (Charybdis must have given up monstering, it wasn’t to be seen) and on north. People seemed rather offhand and not particularly friendly, even suspicious. When we tried to change some money at an airport, the teller regretted that the bank had run out of money. Fruit and vegetables didn’t seem as fresh as those in Sicily, and the roads were worse.

Italy has some amazing temples and ruins to explore

We really didn’t think much of southern Italy. There was a lovely campsite in an olive grove at Lamezia Terme, admittedly. We took to the autostrada to get us north – it’s free as far as Salerno as some kind of odd economic boost for the south – and we followed it up through the southern mountains, past occasional snow patches, with our warm clothes, heated handlebar grips and GloGloves on. The hills were lovely, with only a few factories polluting the air.

Naples welcomed us with its expensive but invaluable ‘tangentiale’ ring road, which introduced us to a new and, as far as I know, unique hazard. I was used to buzzing up between stationary lanes of traffic, such as the ones queuing to pay toll on the ring road.

Even with the rather wide Yamaha that had always worked. Not in Naples. None of the tiny Fiats I was trying to pass had air conditioning, so when they stopped in the queue they would throw open their doors. Oops! We weren’t going to get through that!

We nevertheless followed the ring road to its western end in Pozzuoli and a campground that had been highly praised. The site featured a swimming pool fed by a hot spring, and we spent as much time in the water as possible. Pozzuoli is famous for two things: it is the most earthquake-prone place in Italy, and it is the birthplace of Sophia Loren.

We did feel some ‘trembles’ but Sophia didn’t seem to be home. I met her many years later at an Italian motorcycle industry dinner. She must have been in her mid-80s, and she looked stunning. Where was I?

Ah yes. Naples itself was a disappointment. It seemed to be little more than a permanent traffic jam; we were glad to get out. Pompeii was the real attraction and we spent some satisfying hours there. With a little imagination, the town comes alive just as it was before the ashes of Vesuvius swallowed it.

Annie and I also looked through the creepy underground ruins at Cumae, with their huge trapezoidal tunnels. On a lighter note, we bought a little chess set and I discovered to my delight that I could actually beat Annie. Only because she hadn’t played before…

Neil and Millie were there, too, both looking well. They had had a little trouble with the GS in the desert when one of the carburetors had jammed and drained the petrol tank in less than 40 miles, without their noticing. The locals had helped them.

Neil and Millie were also in Italy but had issues with their GS in the desert, where the XS was still going strong

We rode up to Rome in bright sunshine by way of Cassino and the Via Appia, picked up our mail and found the ‘Roma’ campsite without any trouble. Along the way, we discovered that the intricate Rome one way system doesn’t apply to bikes. You can ride anywhere you like, in any direction. At one point we scattered the crowds around the Trevi fountain.

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Misbehaving in Rome is all very well, but there was still a chilly winter Italy out there to traverse.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part 23

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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In the last instalment The Bear has just reached the Tunisian border, and was now stuck at the border with no visa, no money and no food. What the hell. Let’s party!

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Tunisia

When we reached Hazoua, the Tunisian border post, a slight problem emerged. The tourist bureau leaflet had assured us that visas were issued at the border, but the sergeant on guard thought otherwise. ‘Not possible.’

I told him about the leaflet and he smiled gently and said, “Ah, the tourist bureau, it is their job to get people to come to my country but it is my job to keep them out.”

Problem. We couldn’t go back, as our single-visit Algerian visas had been cancelled half an hour earlier at the Algerian border, and we couldn’t go forward because this officious idiot wouldn’t let us. We couldn’t really stay there, either. Without money changing facilities or a shop for even the most basic necessities, Hazoua didn’t really make it as a campsite.

But one of the skills you develop if you travel a lot is knowing when to shout and when to whisper and I decided this was a shouting situation. So I waved my press card and introductory letter at the sergeant.

After recently sampling fresh fish off the boats, The Bear and Annie found themselves at the Tunisian border without visas, food or money

The letter, from Middle East Travel Magazine where I had been art director, was in Arabic and impressed the guard sufficiently for him to get on the radio. He came back and said, perhaps, but it would take three days. We sat down to wait. I was fairly confident they wouldn’t let us starve, and I was right.

One of the guards saw me rubbing Nivea (another sponsor, thank you!) into my hands and delightedly shouted, “You are woman! You are woman!” I invited him to look at the monster that our XS11 Yamaha had become with all of its fairings and our luggage. ‘Could you ride that? No? Then beware whom you insult.’ He gave us half his dinner, and some of the others kicked in as well.

Then followed a hectic night for all. The guards were nervous and afraid of the Lybians, who had attacked the nearby town of Gafsa a few days earlier, and they spent the night prowling around with loaded guns and flashlights.

We slept first on the veranda and then, at the guards’ invitation in the Customs post, more afraid of those guns than of the Lybians. A false alarm involving a Belgian camper van which had scared the sentries lightened the atmosphere a little as the terrified Belgians were dragged in at gunpoint and interrogated.

“Do you think we are fools? What were you doing out there? I do not care if you are a policeman!” North African French is relatively easy to understand because it has a small vocabulary and no grammar whatsoever, so we could follow all this. It was nevertheless confusing; why pick on these people? One of the guards came out and winked at us. “Belgians!” he grinned.

Things looked better in the morning. The Chef du Poste (who is the boss, not the cook) arrived and cut through some of the red tape, and with visas in our passports there finally seemed to be a way forward. But we needed duty stamps for the visas, and they were obtainable only in the next town.

“We shall do this,” said the Chef du Poste. “You,” pointing at me, “will take the motorcycle to get the stamps. She,” pointing at Annie, “will remain here.”

‘Ah, no.’

“Then we shall do this. You and she and this guard will go on the motorcycle to get the stamps.”

‘Ah… no. Why don’t we just ride to the town and get the stamps? Of course we will return.’

“Ah, no. We shall do this. The guard with your passports will take the bus. You two will follow on the motorcycle. You will pay for the stamps and the guard will give you back the passports.”

‘Ah, yes. Thank you.’

“No, no, it is nothing… welcome to Tunisia.” All of this in ‘the broken North African French, of course, mine considerably more broken than his.

There was one more hurdle, however, in the form of a police checkpoint just outside town. The bus was checked and went on. Then it was our turn. As I tried to explain in my combination of schoolboy and gutter French that the passports the cop wanted to see were on the bus (voila, les passports, er, marchons dans le autobus!).

He became more and more annoyed and began to toy with his sidearm. Fortunately, the guard on the bus remembered us around about then and made the bus turn back. He was abused for inefficiency by the cop, who then let us pass with a big, toothy grin.

Tunisia didn’t really turn out to be worth all the trouble. We rode up to the coast at Nabeul through uninspiring country, camped and went in to Tunis to pick up mail and book the ferry to Sicily. Annie scouted out a replacement gas bottle for our stove, which was a relief. Nice to be able to do your own cooking.

Setting off to Tunis, the next step was a ferry back to Sicily

We moved to a hotel in Tunis for our last night, because the ferry left at 6.30 am and the nearest campsite was two hours from the port. The Hotel Medina was nice; our hosts insisted that we park in the lobby, which I’d intended to do anyway. Then we went out and bought some English newspapers as well as pate, salami and bread, and had a feast of eating and reading in our room.

We explored the medina as well and found it pretty if a little tame, discovered the excellent produce markets and then slept until one am. Then the alarm on Annie’s little calculator, the desk clerk and the muezzin from the nearby mosque woke us simultaneously.

Getting the bike into the hotel lobby had been easy with a dozen helping hands, but now that it was just Annie, the desk clerk and me it wasn’t quite so easy to get it out. After a 36-point turn – scuffing their paintwork with my front tyre on every one – I managed it and we rode off down to the ferry followed by the desk clerk’s blessings.

While we were waiting aboard the big Yamaha in the light, sprinkling rain for them to open the gates, an XS500 arrived… then an XL125… then two bicycles. I kept expecting someone on a skate board. After an elaborate check of papers, which failed to turn up the fact that we had overstayed our visas, and a confused Customs check, we finally rolled aboard. Back to Europe!

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Italy

The ferry to Trapani wasn’t exactly the QE2, but it got us there; everything was rather shabby and the bar and restaurant were expensive and generally closed. In the third class saloon, where we made our home for the 12 hours of the crossing, there was strict segregation – the Arabs sat on one side, we Europeans on the other.

The curious thing was that you didn’t actually see this division happen – it just developed. When we first sat down, there was an Arab family sitting near us, then, as more Europeans arrived and sat on our side, they moved.

We spent most of the crossing playing cards with the French guys riding the bikes we’d met at the gate. True to form, these two let me struggle along in my idiot French until they wanted to explain something about the game we were playing – and then they both suddenly spoke passable English. The French are hilarious; they always do that sort of thing.

The Immigration check in Sicily must have been carefully designed for the absolute minimum in efficiency, but the Customs check that followed was considerably keener – it involved our first encounter with drug-sniffing dogs. One of them, a cheerful hyperactive German Shepherd, was much more interested in chewing our tentpoles than in looking for drugs. I politely asked the handler to restrain his beast.

Then it was out into the chilly, wet evening and up the autostrada to Palermo. Sicily in the failing light was almost unbearably picturesque, although I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more had I been warm and dry.

Arriving in Italy, saw some dreary weather to kick things off

We reached the ‘Pepsi Cola’ campsite just as it was closing and the padrone took us into the office and poured us a brandy before we got down to the signing-in formalities. Sicilians are very perceptive people.

It dawned wet and cold, so we inserted ourselves into our Alaskan suits and MCB boots – waterproof boots are a real blessing when you get several days of rain – and went exploring. The site watchman warned us to beware of pickpockets in Palermo, but apart from the post office giving us change in stamps rather than cash we weren’t robbed.

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You can never be sure what you’ll get when the Mafia builds your highways – as you’ll find out next instalment.

Source: MCNews.com.au