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

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Last we arrived in Athens, now a bit more of Greece, and then off into the wild wonders of Turkey. Few countries in the world have more interesting people.

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We set up camp, bought some wine and sat around feeling miserable. The next day we had trouble at the bank and begrudged the Bulgarians their extortionate fee for a 30-hour visa. A pall descended that wasn’t broken until the Mols arrived, grinning from ear to ear.

Michel and Cathy had left London in the cold and drizzling rain, and had had much the same weather until southern Germany, when the snow had started. On the autobahn to Austria, they had been riding through snowdrifts and had camped in them in Salzburg.

The luggage rack on the XS had cracked from being overloaded, meaning more creative solutions were needed

Finally out of the heavy weather on the Yugoslav coast, they had had a slight argument with a large pointed rock which had bent their front rim and flattened the tyre. Michel had bashed the wheel back into shape with his axe, replaced the tube and they’d ridden on. And they were cheerful when they arrived in Athens!

We rolled out the plastic jug of retsina and sat down for a little party. It was good to see them again. The hangovers in the morning were something to behold, except for Annie. She’s the only person I know who knows her limit – most of the time anyway. We packed up rather gingerly and then flew up the motorway. None of the speed traps were interested in us.

The strain of keeping up with the R100 S showed on the Yamaha’s worn-out shock absorbers, and I wallowed around the corners the BMW was taking in style.

The weather was deteriorating again, but we got away from it by spending a couple of days on Thasos. This island is less than an hour from the mainland by ferry and specialises in honey and having its roads sink into the sea. It’s a pretty, pine-covered place and has a good campsite as well as miles of coastline suitable for free camping.

We had a barbecue on the beach, using a suntan lotion shop display rack as a griddle, and sank a few beers. Then it was time for a run around the island, checking out the sunken roads – there were several places where you could have gone skindiving without leaving the saddle – and back to the mainland.

The bike drew plenty of attention during our travels

On the way up to Alexandropoulis, over those pretty mountain roads, a police car came the other way around a corner while I was way over the centre line – they didn’t bat an eye as I corrected and drew sparks from my centre stand.

The rack on the XS had developed a couple of cracks in North Africa when we had overloaded it so badly, and these were getting worse. Reluctantly, I decided we wouldn’t be able to carry spare petrol in Turkey.

We had another game of hunt-the-gas bottle for our little cooker. You can buy the cartridges everywhere, and you can generally buy large caravan-size bottles, but the little ones are hard to find. A kindly German-speaking cab driver finally took us around the town looking for one, for free, and found it.

A knowledge of German is invaluable in Greece and Turkey, as so many people have worked in Germany. Our cab driver, for instance, had saved enough money while working there to buy his cab, which he had then driven home to Turkey.

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Turkey

The road to the border was indifferent and the service on the Greek side quick if not exactly courteous. The Turks were working at their usual pace – dead slow – and held us up for a while, but at least there weren’t any Customs searches.

The road down towards Gallipoli was initially quite good and for a while I thought we were in the wrong country, but it soon deteriorated, and the Mols took flying lessons on a tricky humpbacked bridge. We had lunch there and a German couple, he on an XS1100, she on a CX500, stopped and told us that a few years earlier they had managed to get a 2CV Renault airborne on that bridge.

We had intended to have a look at the site of the infamous Gallipoli landings of the First Great Unpleasantness, but couldn’t find any cliffs that looked likely. Later we found out that the landings hadn’t been at Gallipoli at all, but on the other side of the peninsula. No wonder it was a disaster.

The ferry to Canakkale in Asia Minor had just left when we arrived at the wharf – it was only running intermittently due to a diesel shortage – so we were facing a three-and-a-half hour wait. A man at the wharf told us about a local ferry that ran from a place a little farther down the coast; I wish he hadn’t tried to help.

Missing the proper ferry had us taking a local alternative…

This local ferry was a mildly converted fishing boat, with extremely flimsy water pipe rails and nothing to tie the bikes to. We shared it with a defunct tractor and a van, and it was so crowded that the bikes were right on the edge. We hung onto them for grim death all the way across the Dardanelles. It would have taken only one largish wave…

Past rows of closed campsites – the season hadn’t started in Turkey – we rode to Troy for a look at the ruins. The place is quite a mess. Apparently there are numerous Troys, one above the other, and it’s all a bit of a chore sorting it out.

It is very impressive, though, to see several thousand years of civilization in a few yards of hillside. You’ll be glad to know that the wooden horse is still there. You can even climb up inside and play Greeks and Trojans.

On the way back to the main road, a kid lobbed a rock at us. My feelings about this kind of thing hadn’t changed since the last time it had happened, in Afghanistan. I turned around and went back with the motor on the red line in first. The kid ran as though all the demons in hell were after him, and I guess the big Yamaha sounded a bit like that.

Turkey offered stunning scenery

I caught him and gave him a dressing down in front of his mates. A bit self-righteous, maybe, but if it stops him and his friends from throwing stones at other bikes it will have been worth it. So there.

Lots of pretty hill country then, and for the night a tiny campsite marked ‘Kampink-Piknik’. It was quite idyllic, but they’d run out of beer. I guess no place is ever perfect.

The BBC World Service news on my little short-wave radio was cheerful and informed us that three people had died in political shootings in Turkey during the day and that a military coup was starting. I’m glad to say that nobody has ever shot at me – well, not for a good long time, anyway – and nobody shot at any of us in Turkey.

I told the manager of the campsite about the military coup, and he said he hadn’t heard about it and anyway who cared. Next morning we had to search for a while before finding a petrol station that would sell us juice, not because there was a shortage of petrol but because the electricity was off. Not all stations have hand pumps.

At one place we looked like being out of luck when three Italian campervans pulled in behind us. A bevy of bikini-clad young women exploded from the vans, and all of a sudden petrol was available after all, even if it had to be pumped by hand.

The road to Izmir reminded me of Greece. As soon as you got into the town limits, the tar stopped and the gravel started. After Izmir we were on the main road again and diced with the buses and trucks down past Ephesus to the coast at Kusadasi.

Finding petrol and gas bottles proved difficult in Turkey

The town is a port of call for many of the cruise liners that ply the Mediterranean and prices in town go up between 100 and 2000 per cent whenever ships are in port. We learnt to do our shopping after they had left.

There were some attractive bike leathers for sale here and I was tempted, but they weren’t all that much cheaper than in Britain, and you get after-sales service in Britain. We lay in the sun for a bit, and I bolted the stays from the top box onto the bike frame instead of the rack. Not quite so elegant, but it put less strain on the cracks.

Going inland, we followed the country lanes for a while, riding through the little villages dozing in the sun, before we returned to the main road and the traffic. At Pamukkale, an area of hot springs and calcium deposits that turn whole hillsides white with dozens of stepped warm pools, we camped in a tiny site with a large pool. The pool was bigger than the camping area.

Our host was a keen man after a buck, as a lot of Turks are (and you can’t blame them), and we had a classic run-in with him. Michel priced the beer, an essential step if you don’t want to find yourself with an enormous bill. He was quoted 40 lire for a bottle. We both hit the roof, as 30 is considered expensive, and our genial host backpedaled rapidly. ‘Oh, you want the beer for drinking! That’s only 30.’

Taking a rest when the road conditions deteriorated

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The beer for drinking wasn’t bad, and almost drowned out the frogs during the night. But our bikes kept lying down.

Source: MCNews.com.au

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

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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A recalcitrant bankie in Titograd and Easter in Greece – the world is a strange and wonderful place.

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An absolutely horrifying detour through the mountains claimed us as soon as we left Dubrovnik. The ‘road’ was a more or less recently graded dirt track, and over the 40 or so kilometres it lasted we counted three trucks that had simply fallen off the roadway; two of them were lying on their sides, and one had rolled over onto its roof.

The bike dealt with the surface quite well, due no doubt largely to the fat rear tyre, but there was chaos at the other end as cars and trucks squeezed past each other on the narrow cliff path. We were more than glad to be on the bike.

Just before Titograd we fell foul of a radar trap. For once, I actually had not been speeding, but you can’t argue with Yugoslav traffic cops, even though their equipment was more than a little questionable.

“Our radar says you were speeding.”

‘That isn’t a radar. It’s a hairdryer.’ It was, too.

“It does not matter what it is,” he snarled and wiggled his submachine gun suggestively. I paid the fine and rode on, seething. Still, if they caught me every time I do exceed the speed limit…

The Titograd campground had been vandalised badly since Charlie and I had stayed there 18 months before. The pretty lady wasn’t in reception, either – in fact, there wasn’t anybody in reception at all. I finally found someone at the hotel that adjoins the site and they told me to camp anywhere I liked, the site was open and free.

We bribed the campground guard in drinks to keep an eye on our gear

Annie thought they just couldn’t be bothered filling in all the forms. The watchman came past, cadged a couple of drinks, and promised to look after our tent extra carefully. I went to the bank to cash a travellers’ cheque and had to scribble my name on it four times before the teller was satisfied that my signature matched the sample.

Then on into darkest Yugoslavia, up hill and down dale on steadily worsening roads. We took the main road, not the track that Charlie and I had taken, but at times it wasn’t much better. Winter had destroyed more than one bridge and undermined the road so often it was like a trials stage. In one tunnel there were great ice pillars, formed by water dripping from the ceiling, but we made it through to Skopje and then over quite passable back roads to Ohrid.

We heard a sad story that night in the cevapcici bar where we were having dinner. A young Yugoslav soldier came over to us and introduced himself in fluent Australian. He had been taken to Australia by his parents when he was two years old and had lived in Canberra for 16 years. Then he’d come back to see his relations and the army had grabbed him for two years’ national service.

They were pleased to get him since he had just passed his apprenticeship as a diesel mechanic, and they didn’t have many of those. He had eight months to go, and was counting the days. “When I got here I didn’t even speak the language,” he told us sadly.

Our landlady gave us a heroic breakfast, including a gallon of coffee. Annie had washed a pair of her knickers and hung them on the back of the bike to dry, something we often did with wet clothes, and the landlady nearly cracked up. She thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and called out all the neighbours to share her glee.

The people at Bitola were helpful and pointed out the road to Greece, which was just as well as there wasn’t a single road sign in the whole town.

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Greece

There were money-changing problems at the border (never change more money than you need) and the obstinate Greek Customs man wrote the bike into my passport, which was near to being full, instead of Annie’s, which had more space. But you couldn’t really stay annoyed long. Spring was with us at last – it had been following us all the way from Sicily, and now it was finally catching up.

After a run through fresh greenery we made camp at Meteora, below the famous rock cliffs like stone trolls with monasteries for hats and long trails of poo from the toilets overhanging the cliffs. We watched the tourist buses rolling up, and it struck me as odd that the monks should be able to reconcile the religious life with showing tourists around all day. Do they pray for a good tourist crop in between counting the admission money, I wonder?

Spectacular landscape was admired in Greece

There was a large chrome and glass establishment in Kalabaka which advertised itself, in large day-glo letters and in English, as a ‘typical Greek taverna’. What would Anthony Quinn have said?

Annie was befriended by a little black dog we nicknamed The Sheik for his habit of creeping into our tent when we were asleep. He followed her devotedly everywhere she went. The proprietor of the site didn’t know who owned him. ‘He just likes tourists,’ he told us.

The Plain of Thessaly, although it sounds good, was dull. The excitement set in on the mountain road after Lamia, where a new road was being built and the old one had been sort of lost underneath, making it pretty rugged. At one point we stopped and were passed by a wartime German Zündapp outfit, pressed into service to deliver vegetables and elderly Greek ladies.

After passing the great olive grove of Itea, we climbed the cliff to Delphi and camped right on the edge of the drop. The scramble around the ruins was well worth it, but it’s best timed for when the tourists are at lunch. Delphi is one of the prime sightseeing spots in the country and becomes badly crowded even in the off season.

We chatted to an elderly, tubby cop who was quite obviously in the grip of a lengthy love affair with his Harley-Davidson. He showed us where he’d painted this antediluvian monster himself, careful dabs of the brush over rust patches. A German arrived in the campsite one night on a shiny new BMW R45, still in shock from travelling on the Lamia road.

We told him to try the Skopje-Titograd highway if he wanted a real experience. He was cheerfully horrified when he saw us loading the bike with all our worldly goods, and asked politely if he might take pictures. No doubt he’s still scaring fellow motorcyclists with them, back in Germany.

The road to Thebes was fine, except that the surface deteriorated badly whenever we went through a town. Often town streets were dirt, not even gravel. Perhaps the powers that be feel that it’s a waste of time tarring them – they’d only wear out again anyway…

On the motorway the radar caught us once more. This time I wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense, and anyway I’m not scared of Greeks the way I am of Yugoslavs with submachine guns. I pointed out, at the top of my voice, that I had not been speeding as they appeared to claim, but only doing 100 on what was after all a freeway and didn’t they have anything better to do?

We were both still angry after the hairdryer episode and Annie joined in with my tirade. They eventually shooed us away, dazed by our combined assault. Around the next corner we found a sign indicating that the speed limit was 80…

Athens was, as always, dusty and noisy, with cancerous traffic. We picked up some mail, including a pair of visors kindly sent by Bob Heath and a note from the Mols saying that they’d be joining us a week later. That night, we were overcharged for our dinner of calamari down in Piraeus, and the waiter plied us with free retsina when we complained – we felt that we were getting this travelling business sorted out pretty damn well.

The week until Michel and Cathy arrived was spent exploring the Peloponnese. A couple of days lying in the sun at Epidaurus with an excursion to the well-preserved amphitheatre were followed by a visit to Sparta. Then we headed over the ranges to Kalamata and ran into more snow. It really is true; you become much more sensitive to nature’s little quirks on a bike…

On Easter Sunday, the proprietor of the ‘Melbourne’ cafe in Hora bought us some cakes and coffee. People kept giving us Easter presents all day — boiled eggs dyed red, biscuits and even a cucumber were thrust into our hands by people standing beside the road. Everyone was out in their front yards, roasting lambs on spits; the countryside smelt like a vast Greek restaurant. Olympia, which we’d intended to make the high spot of our day, had been closed by a strike. Back to reality!

On the tollway back to Athens, the toll collectors in their little hut waved us through for free, but it wasn’t a good Easter for everyone. As we crested a hill, a puppy wandered out onto the roadway. I made a crash stop and Annie scooped it up, but its owners weren’t to be seen. It had obviously been abandoned.

We stood by the side of the road for a while holding it up as we’d seen people in Morocco do who wanted to sell pups, but nobody stopped. A puppy isn’t a terribly sensible companion on a bike trip, especially when you have to cross borders. We really didn’t know what to do.

Finally, we took it along until we reached the outskirts of Athens, found a prosperous-looking suburb and dumped it on someone’s front lawn. We assumed that its chances would be better there than on the motorway. But as we drew away, it was already tottering back out onto the road. A sad end to Easter, both for the pup (I presume) and us.

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Feeling down? Don’t worry, just wait until the Mols get here. Read about their arrival next time.

Source: MCNews.com.au

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