Tripoli at dusk is a dispiriting place. As I cycle from the boat into the city centre, around me loom a series of sombre, grey tower blocks, rising like skeletal sentinels among a wasteland of debris. Several are sprinkled with bullet holes, I note with mild alarm, and I nudge Maud along a little faster. I’m fairly sure the local mercenaries have downed tools for the time being, but I’m already far too far behind schedule to risk being shot on my first day (though it would admittedly do wonders for my social media profile).
I’m hoping to stay with the friend of a friend of a friend, but am yet to hear back from him. It’s worrying, as the motels look poky and miserable, oozing an aura of indecency and regret. I distract myself from my plight by buying a tea in a grimy café and counting the perplexing number of passing Mercedes and BMWs, which seem by far the most popular car in this far-from-affluent city.
Two hours later, I finally hear from my contact, B. I am hugely relieved, and almost immediately the city’s shadowy nooks seem sunnier, its sharp edges softer. Within ten minutes, I’m being warmly welcomed by B and his Filipino housekeeper (apparently all houses have one) in his carpet shop just half a mile away. The sectarian conflict in the city is under control now, I’m told, and I feel a little foolish for conjuring spectres out of the undergrowth. How different everything seems when you’re no longer alone and abandoned in the dark!
B is a 27-year-old Australian who moved to Lebanon seven years ago. He enjoys the ‘freedom’ here, he says, which seems to boil down to driving without a licence and not paying his taxes. I ask him about the cars and he tells me it’s due to people’s idolisation of Germany and their superficiality. Plastic surgery is reportedly huge, and often deliberately conspicuous. Everyone wants to flash their cash and status.
‘It makes my job easy,’ B says. ‘When I sell a carpet, I say, “You don’t want that one, they’re for ambassadors’ wives,” and hey presto, it’s sold!’
In Tripoli, curiously, this showiness goes hand in hand with a strong social conservatism. Most women wear hijabs, and B tells me he wouldn’t want to be seen drinking in public. Here, the vast majority of people are Sunni Muslims (80%), with the rest divided evenly between Alawite (similar to Shia) Muslims and Maronite Christians.
Another friend later tells me that the city is surprisingly tolerant, despite its image. ‘You sometimes get burkinis and bikinis on the same beach, and nobody minds,’ she says. ‘But all people remember are the bloody jihadists splashed across the papers.’
We meet a Christian friend of B’s at dinner, who grew up in a remote mountain village called Bikaakafra. There, people marry young, he says; his cousin was just 13. Yet their conservative values clearly have limits. He recently found a stash of porn mags under his Dad’s bed involving women, horses and dwarves, he recounts, and brought it up over the family Sunday lunch. ‘Nobody was bothered,’ he says cheerily. ‘We talk about everything.’
The next morning, as I prepare for my cycle to Beirut, B warns me that ‘the biggest storm of the year’ is due to hit today. But it’s sunny in the morning, and therefore – with the logic of someone who’s never lived in Britain, or indeed anywhere – I reason it will most likely stay that way forever. Plus, I’ve been looking forward to this for a while: the retracing of a cycle I did in 2013 that planted the seed of this trip in my mind. So I vow to try my luck nonetheless.
As I stand drowning under a lashing sheet of rain that soaks me instantly to the core, following yet another puncture 30km down the road, I can’t help feeling that it may have been the wrong decision. For half an hour I wait, helpless and sodden, as the sky turns leaden and swampy and slowly engulfs the entire Mediterranean sea. Then, just as I’m losing hope of rescue, a car finally stops beside me and two textbook murderers (dirty trousers, rakish facial hair) get out and offer me a ride – an offer I know I should on no account accept.
Minutes later, we’re zooming down the road to Byblos. The men give me a satsuma, which I devour like somebody who hasn’t eaten for ten years (it’s been about ten minutes), and stop every mile or so to check Maud hasn’t fallen out the back (she hasn’t). They then drop me directly outside the restaurant where I’ve arranged to meet a friend; and, with a wave, they’re gone. Once again, human kindness trumps doom-laden distrust, I think relievedly. Is the world really crawling with as many psychopaths as the media would have us believe?
R, my friend, is a 34-year-old atheist from a deeply religious Maronite Christian family, who lives with his parents in Byblos. As we devour a feast of shawarma (kebab), makanek (sausages), tabouleh (parsley salad), mahshi warak enab (stuffed vine leaves) and baba ganoush (aubergine dip), he tells me about the disastrous state of Lebanese politics.
No president has been in office for 20 months and no effective government since 1975, he says. ‘There’s a semblance of democracy, but it’s actually a feudal system based on who you know. It’s corrupt to the core.’
Politically, the balance of power in Lebanon is designed to reflect its tripartite demographic: a Christian Maronite president, Sunni prime minister and Shia parliamentary speaker. The country as a whole is reportedly 40% Christian, 27% Sunni and 27% Shia, though no formal census has been conducted since 1932 for fear of stoking sectarian tensions.
In truth, Lebanon’s socio-politics are unforgivably complicated for such a tiny sliver of a country. The Civil War alone illustrates its complexity. Here, you had Christian (Lebanese) vs Sunni (Palestinian); Shia (Syrian) vs Sunni (Palestinian); Jewish (Israeli) vs Sunni (Palestinian); Shia (Syrian) vs Christian (Syrian); Jewish (Israeli) vs Shia (Hezbollah); Christian (Lebanese) vs Sunni (Lebanese); Shia (Syrian) vs Christian (Lebanese) – in no particular order of significance.
Throw in interference from the West (Christian/Jewish), Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia), plus a devastating conflict on their eastern flank, and it seems less surprising the country is on the constant brink of collapse and more surprising that any of it remains intact at all.
For me, Lebanon barely exists as a political entity in its own right. It’s more a proxy for the region as a whole, reflecting the chaos and discord of its neighbours, with little substance of its own. Yet this is also perhaps also the country’s strength. Suffused in a state of permanent perplexity, the momentum and sheer uncontrollability of the forces whisking it into a frenzy seem to give it its unique character – like a vortex that must spin and spin to ensure survival.
As the storm continues to swirl down around us, R drives me the final few miles to Beirut. I am spending the next few days at the flat of Paddy Cochrane, another friend-of-a-friend who owns several bars and (I later discover) is the son of renowned Lebanese aristocrat Lady Cochrane Sursock, owner of the stunning 19th century Sursock Palace. I suddenly feel like Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, and can’t help wondering who the poor lass is who’ll be assuming my role as a bummelling wino for the remaining 5,000km of the journey.
Worryingly, my first night in Beirut is New Year’s Eve. Event tickets can cost hundreds of dollars, but Paddy has kindly invited me to his party free of charge. He tells me to ‘dress us’ – and just as I’m wondering how to fashion a slinky gown out of some thermal leggings and a pair of padded underpants, I discover a scrunched up silk scarf from Turkey at the bottom of a pannier. I wrap and tie it around my torso, brush my hair and put on make-up for the first time in six months – and suddenly feel less like Eddie and more like Eliza Doolittle. Will they know I’m really just some vagrant imposter with a leathery arse, I wonder? I genuinely feel nervous.
The bash takes place at P’s bar on Beirut’s fashionable Gouraud St, frequented by expats and the Lebanese elite. For me, the night is fun but exhausting. It’s a long time since I quaffed endless spirits and bubbly with society’s haut monde, even in London. But Beirut is basically a city on a permanent bender, and nobody is exempt from its hedonistic clutches. Here, you party until you’re 60, and then you move seamlessly into your second childhood. Middle-age, like the middle-income, has been squeezed into submission.
Around 4am, at the after-party, the discussion turns serious. ‘It’s got to the point where people don’t mind the corruption,’ one man says, in reference to the mountains of garbage piling up in the streets, which the government has failed to clear for half a year. ‘They just want the government to do something. Anything.’
The rest of the night is a bit of a blur, and I spend the next day mainly lying in the foetal position in the dark. On January 2nd I go to visit the father of a friend, C, another property mogul with a Gouraud St penthouse. He tells me how lots of Christians prefer to speak French to avoid identifying as Arab, with merci frequently used instead of shukran for ‘hello’.
‘The Muslims need the Christians to have a foothold in the West,’ C (a Christian) says. ‘But they don’t want them gaining too much control. Hence the power struggles.’
We talk about women and C tells me that Lebanon is deeply patriarchal. Women are severely discriminated against, he says, and sexual violence is common. ‘Women won’t get promoted unless they’re sleeping with the boss,’ he says. ‘There’s a strong cultural impulse to see men as the providers.’
The next day, I brave the sprawling glut of Beirut traffic, which seems constantly paralysed yet somehow faintly functional – reflecting perfectly the general state of the country – to buy a pair of the city’s best tyres. They look distinctly flimsy to me, but I’m reassured that they’re ‘puncture proof’ – and it turns out they are, for a full six minutes. I do a swift calculation: if things continue at this rate, by the time I complete my trip I’ll have racked up an inconvenient-if-impressive 15,000 punctures. I decide to grab a few more patches.
My second host in Beirut is the sister of a friend, B, and her family. They are lovely and welcoming, and the flat is enormous. As she shows me around, she points out a small cubbyhole off the kitchen around six metres square. ‘That’s where migrant workers are meant to sleep,’ she tells me. ‘Most homes employ housekeepers, but they’re often treated terribly.’
I learn about this in more detail at a meeting with the Migration Community Center (MCC), which provides support for migrants and refugees. Their members come predominantly from Africa and Asia, and earn around $200 a month as domestic workers. All need Lebanese sponsors to work here, and most are forced to give up their passports. The majority suffer some form of abuse, I am told.
‘There are lots of problems,’ says MCC co-ordinator Ramy Shukr. ‘No-one’s checking if workers are being overworked, locked in, beaten. Sometimes they don’t get paid for months.’
On January 7th, I take a trip down the coast to Tyre. My plan is to spend the night, before returning to Beirut to fly to Jordan: the only escape route that doesn’t involve illegally entering a war zone or plunging head-first into the Mediterranean. Escaping the city proves a challenge, however, as a fiendish gauntlet of gridlocked Mercedes conspires to cast me and Maud prematurely into the afterlife. We then lose our way – a particular skill of mine on straight roads with little scope for error – and find ourselves deep in Shia territory in the south of the city.
This area is clearly poor and neglected, comprising a labyrinth of winding alleys, maniacal children, errant mopeds and blackened shacks. Old tyres and husks of rusty cars line the streets, while mangy dogs snuffle in swampy puddles and furtively lick their balls.
However, after a brief and mildly traumatising stop in the public loo, I finally escape Beirut’s clutches and reach the ‘old coastal road’ to Tyre. This transpires to be neither old nor particularly coastal, and the next few hours are spent rolling through a series of shabby, nondescript towns, with occasional glimpses of the sea. After a series of army checkpoints, I stop for lunch in Sidon – one of the oldest Phoenician cities, dating from around 4,000BC – before resuming my journey south.
The light starts to fade as I approach Tyre. Here, the Shia Islamist group Hezbollah, funded by Iran, rules the roost, and large portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, loom from the sidelines. Alongside hang dozens of photographs of young men, who I later discover are ‘martyrs’ killed by the Israelis.
Then, with unsettling swiftness, night falls and – having cleverly forgotten my lights – I struggle to orientate myself in the gloom. Tyre seems to comprise a series of interlocking construction sites, and I soon find myself lost in a maze of covered walkways filled with garbage and shisha smokers. Just as I’m about to give up hope of finding my friend’s flat, a hand extends from a darkened doorway with a cup of tea.
‘Everything ok?’ the man asks – and suddenly, with that simple gesture, everything absolutely is.
To be continued…
Follow my journey on Twitter at reo_lowe, Instagram at bexio8 or Facebook at facebook.com/bexbicyclediaries.
]]>The main problem with carrying a satellite tracker is that everyone knows where you are. This is generally A Good Thing, as my mother has beaten into me on regular occasions. But when you’re desperately trying to convince people that you’re not planning to become an ISIS bride or join the fight for the caliphate and then you’re seen wending your way inexorably towards the Syrian border, it can start to feel a little bothersome.
Yet contrary to popular belief, the Turkey-Syria border has more going for it than just suicide bombers and marriage opportunities with theocratic maniacs. It also has astonishingly tasty baklava. This is not my opinion; it’s objective fact. Both UNESCO and the EU have endowed Gaziantep’s pistachio nuts with protected status, giving each one its own armed sentinel and hotline to the president. Bearing this in mind, a small 300km detour seems the least I can do to pay my respects.
I arrive in Gaziantep – or Antep to its friends – three days before Christmas. My Couchsurfing hosts are two male cousins aged 29 and 40, H and E, who live in a brand new, predictably beige apartment downtown. H works for an NGO that helps Syrian refugees, while E owns a local construction company. Neither are fans of Erdogan, unsurprisingly. But E clearly isn’t interested in talking politics; he just wants everyone to love each other. Soon after I arrive, he whips out his guitar for a sing-a-long, before realising he’s too stoned to remember how to play (which is a blessed relief, as far as I’m concerned — ISIS I can take, but baked beatnik crooners on a bonding mission may well be a step too far).
The former are a slight concern, however. They have control of the border, just 30 miles away, and terrorist sleeper cells are known to operate in the city. During the week of my stay, Syrian journalist and vocal ISIS critic Naji Jerf is shot dead in broad daylight, and a police raid uncovers a large cache of explosives in an apartment. While most people reassure me I am safe, rumours abound that ISIS operatives stalk foreigners, and I am advised – as a conspicuous western, female cyclist – to be on my guard.
There’s certainly something unsettling about Gaziantep. On the surface, it emits a curious, bland sterility, with endless half-built high rises doused in milky-white sunlight extending as far as the eye can see. This veneer is thin, however, and below I am aware of a latent, throbbing pulse; the muffled creak of fault lines under pressure. Syrians and Kurds, diplomats and activists, spies and sex workers, terrorists and traffickers — all walk in shadows here, in cagey co-existence.
There are reportedly over 500,000 Syrians in the city, and – once I’ve finished eating as much baklava and kebab as I possibly can – I set about meeting some of them. My connection is a young American woman, E, who works for the Center for Civil Society and Democracy (CCSD), a Syrian NGO. When we meet, she gives her take on the neighbouring war. While ISIS (or Daesh, as they’re known in the Middle East) are ‘brutal murderers’, Assad is ‘far worse’, she says. Statistics from the pro-opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights seem to support this: of the 16,000 civilian deaths in 2015, 75% were reportedly at the hands of the regime.
E introduces me to the head of CCSD, R, who projects a maternal steeliness and clearly commands the love and respect of everyone at the organisation. She tells me about the vast network of civilians working with them inside Syria, and the voice of the moderate opposition that has been ‘silenced, but not killed’. ‘The vast majority of people are still calling for freedom, justice and co-existence,’ she stresses. ‘The revolution remains alive.’
Female empowerment is a key focus of CCSD, and through R I meet several incredible, courageous women. One is 37-year-old N, from Zabadani, a Syrian town currently under siege by the regime. Before fleeing in June 2014, she and a group of women helped to broker a ceasefire between the military and opposition, as well as negotiate the release of female detainees and the removal of women from checkpoint blacklists. All while campaigning. And surviving. And maintaining the education of their children.
Many of these women remain in Zabadani now, I am told, along with 22,000 other civilians. They are completely cut off from food and aid by the regime and Hezbollah. A kilo of rice costs $110. Milk costs $250. Babies are surviving on cornflour, while adults eat grass and steamed apricot leaves. Just yesterday, six men were killed by mines trying to escape: all members of N’s family.
During our talk, N calls her friend in Zabadani. ‘People are devastated,’ the friend says. ‘But we know we have to go on. When you help a child to eat, to study, you know you are building the base for the future of Syria.’
The strengthening role of women, and civil society as a whole, is one of the ‘great untold stories of the conflict’, I am told by another Syrian activist, who works for an NGO called Ihsan. ‘Before the revolution there were no NGOs in Syria,’ she says. ‘Now there are hundreds. We are seeing a cultural revolution.’
She and her colleagues are deeply frustrated by the West’s obsession with ISIS, she adds. Not to mention its apathy and reluctance to impose a no-fly zone, ‘which could have ended the war long ago’. But she concedes Syria has now become so complicated that even those closest to it have little idea what’s going on. ‘Nothing is quite as it seems. There are hundreds of armed groups, each with their own interests and narratives.’
That evening, I walk home alone and get lost. It’s very dark and creepily silent, and I feel myself becoming increasingly jittery. A black Mercedes with tinted windows passes twice in ten minutes and I convince myself it’s some Baghdadi henchman at the wheel. I walk quickly and determinedly, hoping to look like someone with a concealed Kalashnikov rather than someone who dropped their rape alarm into the toilet a week ago, but I’m tense to the core. It’s all foolish paranoia, I know. But if I’m beheaded by ISIS, I’ll never live it down with my mother.
Fortunately they leave me be, however, and I go on to spend a lovely Christmas Eve with a CCSD activist, W, her family and some friends. We eat hummus, drink red wine from their Syrian village and listen to Arabic singers: Kadhim Al-Saher from Iraq; Fairuz from Lebanon; Dalida from Egypt.
W’s husband defected from the Syrian army and is now in Holland, I learn, and she hopes to join him there shortly. ‘The regime couldn’t get to us easily because my family was quite influential,’ she tells me. ‘But they used to constantly watch our house from cars across the road. It was very intimidating.’
N, a Kurd from Aleppo, sits next to me at dinner. She is scathing about both sides of the conflict. ‘The FSA came to “liberate” Aleppo,’ she says. ‘But they just gave the army an excuse to destroy it.’
At 2am on Christmas morning, I find myself walking the streets of Gaziantep with W’s brother-in-law, my chaperone home – which makes a change from the past 34 years, when at this time I’d usually be prematurely raiding my stocking for satumas and Terry’s Chocolate Orange. He used to work for the US Embassy here, he tells me, but quit because he was frustrated by their obsession with ISIS. ‘Daesh Daesh Daesh, that’s all they cared about,’ he says. ‘They didn’t care about the Syrian people.’
I awake a few hours later feeling tired and a little empty. It’s my first Christmas away from home and I suddenly realise how much I miss everyone. Fortunately, there’s one thing I love more than my family, however, which E treats me to at lunchtime to help me through my gloom: a festive lamb shish. What a legend!
In the evening, I’m invited to a CCSD party. The group are more like family than colleagues, and clearly care deeply for each other. Many have lost homes and loved ones, but the occasion is a happy (if gruellingly sober) one, filled with food, chain-smoking and communal singing and dancing. As a conga forms on the dance floor, one young woman tells me about her escape from Syria. ‘I hid in the car boot of a sheikh who was secretly helping the opposition,’ she says. ‘He was taking a huge risk. Assad has killed all the opposition sheikhs.’
Later, to my horror, I am requested to sing an English song, and perplexingly find myself belting out that well-known Christian psalm ‘I Will Survive’. Looking back, I’m still not entirely sure how this came about – suffice to say that neither I nor the entire Syrian community are likely to let it happen again anytime soon. I’m here to build cultural bridges, I remind myself, not blow Gloria Gaynor-shaped holes in them.
Gaziantep proves so fascinating that I stay an extra two days and am forced to get a bus to Mersin, 300km away, in order to catch my ferry. Here, I stay with a half-German, 50-something, divorced food technology professor, N, who dedicates most of her time to cycling and trying to create purple dye from black carrots. We talk over dinner and she tells me she is dismayed by the rise in social conservatism among her students. ‘Women are more covered and the teaching is more religious than before. There’s no mention at all of evolution.’
Since her divorce, N says she’s experienced constant problems with men, who tend to believe she’s ‘fair game’. She’s also had trouble with society more generally. ‘Turks love visitors, but if you live here you have to fit in. As an atheist with lots of random cyclist guests, I don’t fit the mould.’
It’s a reminder that, as a mere passing hobo, my level of social insight will always be limited. I dip in and out, with no threat to custom or conformism. I cut deeper than the average Thomas Cook rubbernecker, perhaps, yet I’m aware that much of what I see is performance; a cloak of civility, where the ruts and rough edges are concealed.
On Dec 29, I cycle 100km along the coast to Tasuçu – an easy, pleasant ride – where I pick up my ferry ticket to Tripoli, Lebanon. After enjoying a heartfelt valedictory kebab, I join about 30 people and their Kilimanjaro of luggage at the ferry office. We’re then taken by truck to the dock, where we’re herded through security into a series of prison-style compounds. My bike and panniers are waved through without checks (terrorists take note), and then my passport is confiscated by the police. This to prevent those going to Syria from absconding in Lebanon, I learn. Instead, they will be driven directly to the border, where their passports will be returned.
We finally leave five hours late, at 1am. I discover I can’t afford the severely overpriced food on board (twice the price of other ferries, apparently, despite the poverty of its passengers), so instead go exploring. With just 30 people on board, nearly all Syrian, most cabins and decks are empty. Through one porthole, I spy a sink full of fetid, swampy water; through another, a group of crew members smoking. Who needs the QE2, I think with forced exuberance, as I desperately try to reattach the toilet flush that has come loose in my hand.
I hope to get some sleep in one of the small lounges, but am awoken at 3am by a rousing medley of Arabic songs, courtesy of my female companion. Worried I might have some kind of Pavlonian Gloria Gaynor moment, I decide to up sticks and snooze elsewhere – but instead get talking to a man, M, from Damascus. He is on his way to see his elderly mother in Atmeh refugee camp in Syria, he tells me, where conditions are ‘desperate’. Everyone there lives in flimsy, makeshift tents in freezing temperatures, he says. There’s no electricity or running water, while food deliveries frequently go missing due to robberies by mafia groups.
M, a Sunni Muslim, left Syria for Sweden several years ago, but returned in August 2011 for Ramadan. After he arrived, he says he was arrested as a foreign spy, hung from the wrists in prison and beaten with sticks. He never confessed, however, and after a month he was released. He will never return to Damascus while Assad is in charge, he insists. How does he think the conflict will end, I ask? ‘It won’t,’ he replies encouragingly. ‘When the groups stop fighting Assad, they will fight each other.’
By the time we disembark in Tripoli, it’s 3pm and we are seven hours late. This is normal, apparently, and nobody seems overly concerned. No wonder services never improve if everyone just rolls over and accepts them, I think frustratedly – channelling my mother, as I seem to do more and more frequently these days. One woman is clearly upset they are being taken directly to the Syrian border, however. ‘I have no money!’ she wails hysterically. The guards simply ignore her.
And then, suddenly, I’m alone in the growing twilight. To me, the city is a nebulous lair of unknowns, and I feel tired and apprehensive. It was only recently that Tripoli was suffused in sectarian conflict between Sunni and Alawite jihadist groups: old rivalries exacerbated by the Syrian war. The fighting has now reportedly been brought under control – but has it really? As Maud and I wind tentatively through the chaotic glut of flatulently honking traffic, attracting stares and comments, I feel myself bristle with wary caution. I don’t know my place here yet. I can’t gauge the risk.
It strikes me, as it has before, how intimidating it can be to arrive on your own in a completely alien place. I often find it tough, and I’m a white, middle-class English speaker with a huge support network. And I’m here by choice. What it must be like for those with no help or way out, it’s hard to imagine. You must need phenomenal strength.
To be continued…
Follow my journey on Twitter at reo_lowe, Instagram at bexio8 or Facebook at bexbicyclediaries.
See the picture gallery for Lebanon here.
]]>Read an edited version of this blog in Cycling World magazine.
So this is how it ends, I think to myself. Sprawled face down on a granite slab, rump in the air, being pulverised by a leathery female sumo wrestler with a troubling sadistic streak. It’s not quite how I imagined it, I have to admit. I’d probably prefer not to be completely starkers, for a start. Or surrounded by a group of equally starkers women, all eyeing me with wary curiosity.
I’d probably also prefer if the women weren’t quite so disconcertingly enormous, if I’m honest. This is a little sizest of me, I know – but they truly are enormous. Not tubby. Not even fat. But unashamedly, lumpenly Leviathan; a raw, fleshy orgy of contour and crevasse. They lord over me in the midst of my torment, voluminous and aloof, like a clique of imperial blancmanges.
Why on earth did I come here, I ponder, as I’m wrestled into one particularly undignified contortion. I arrived in the spa town of Haymana just an hour ago, following a week of frosty slogs across central Turkey, and rashly decided to give myself a treat. I opted against a massage – mindful of the fact that every one to date has ended in disaster, including an incident in Uzbekistan that almost certainly should have resulted in some kind of criminal prosecution – and instead punted for the more innocuous-sounding ‘deep clean’. Having now been straddling Maud for nearly half a year, my feeling was that it was probably not before time.
It’s a decision both I and the spa drainage system swiftly come to regret. As I’m brutishly scoured and buffed, endless torrents of inky sludge pour into vast swamps on the white tiled floor like some kind of fecal magic porridge. Before a dozen pairs of increasingly alarmed eyes, I morph from brown to grey to red to pink, and lose about two-thirds of my body mass. By the end I am a pale shadow of my former self, lying weak and spindly on my stone plinth like a broiled baby langoustine.
Miraculously I survive the ordeal, however. And about an hour later, I’m feeling great. I’ve never felt so utterly violated and wonderfully clean in all my life. Unfortunately, I’m fairly sure my post-spa cleanliness won’t stand much of a chance against the £8 ‘pension’ I’ve booked into, located in a dilapidated tower block with a filthy communal bathroom and impressive range of ornamental body hair. But I vow to enjoy it while it lasts.
I spend my one evening in Haymana with a 20-year-old, Sydney-born Turk, A, who recently moved home to enrol in Islamic studies at Istanbul University. He is keen to undo the ‘bad habits’ of drinking and smoking he adopted in Australia, he tells me, and now prays five times a day. He shouldn’t even be talking to me alone, apparently – the seductive, newly sterilised temptress that I am.
I tell A that I have a serious issue with women being seen as sacred sex objects to be avoided/protected/demeaned/dominated (delete as appropriate), and he nods sagely. ‘They are different from men, though,’ he says, after a pause. Different meaning inferior, I ask? He hesitates again. ‘Um. Possibly.’
We get on to religion and I am told that this life is just a test for the afterlife. There are seven levels of Heaven, and God tots up your sins when you die to decide which one’s best for you. It’s possible to hang out in Hell for a while until you qualify for the lowest rung of Heaven, A says. Rich people have to wait a hefty 500 years, apparently. However, he’s not clear on what ‘rich’ constitutes, or what happens to nice rich people who work hard and gives lots to charity.
A describes Heaven for me. Everything is ‘amazing’, with constant sex, drugs and alcohol, and seven virgins to cater for every whim. They need to be virgins, he insists, because their vaginas are tighter. That’s also why he wants a virgin as his wife.
I’m beginning to wonder by this stage whether A is the unqualified Islamic authority I was hoping for. He certainly seems unusually preoccupied by vaginas, which crop up a few times during our chat, often without warning. He’s on safer territory where ISIS is concerned. When Muhammad speaks about killing infidels, he means it as a last resort of self-defence, A tells me. ‘The Koran is very clear that you cannot murder or convert someone by force.’
I’m somewhat relieved to leave my new friend and retire to my hovel for the night. I sleep badly, vacuum packed inside my sleeping bag, and am out by 8am the next day. It’s now below freezing and my breath puffs thick and foggy in the glacial morning air. After just a few minutes, I find myself high in the clouds, carving my way through an anaemic, watery landscape, barely discernible through the gloom.
And then I get my first puncture. Swiftly followed by my second.
Each one take nearly half an hour to fix, my fingers numb and swollen like frozen chipolatas. By the end, I’m feeling particularly grumpy and go into a nearby cafe to warm up. Here I’m given free tea and a pair of earmuffs by the kind owner, and meet R, a 49-year-old experienced tour cyclist from Washington DC, who cycled here from Budapest. R is a friendly chap, and we decide to ride together to a pleasant, affordable hotel down the road run by the Turkish Automobile Association.
We part ways the next day near Tuz Gölü, Turkey’s vast salt lake. I continue to the town of Şereflikoçhisar, a grey, overdeveloped urban smudge that proves as unattractive as it is unpronounceable, and leave the next day for Ürgüp, Cappadocia. I then get another puncture, realise I’ve run out of patches, fail to find a shop selling any – and, knowing I’ll now never arrive before dusk, jump on a bus.
It’s a comfortable journey through craggy, russet-red terrain, and I’m picked up at the end by U, my Couchsurfing host. U is a cheery, balding 30-something, who immediately wins my heart by whisking me out for a glorious kebab feast. As we eat, he confirms my belief that Turkey is a country irreconcilably divided. ‘You say Erdogan’s a liar; they say he’s fixed the roads. You say he’s a dictator; they say he’s strong. You say he’s destroyed the legal system; they say he’s created stability. It’s impossible.’
U tells me about Fethullah Gülen, an exiled Islamic leader who established a vast network of schools across the world, and once had widespread political influence. He and Erdogan, a former Gülen student and ally, fell out in 2013 over allegations that Gülen orchestrated a corruption investigation against the president. ‘Now Erdogan justifies many of his repressive measures by claiming organisations are connected to the Gülen Movement,’ U tells me. ‘He’s a useful scapegoat.’
I leave U the next morning to spend a few days in Goreme. It’s a magical, otherworldly place, clustered with phallic, rose-tinted ‘fairy chimneys’ formed 30 million years ago from the ash of three volcanoes: a kind of Narnia meets Disneyland meets Spearmint Rhino. As it’s close to Christmas, I treat myself to a snug guest-house run by an attentive, swarthy fellow called O, who grills a mean kebab feast each evening and emits a reassuringly gentle hint of lechery.
First on my itinerary is a quad biking tour. I get this for a huge discount as tourism is down 80% due to recent terrorist bombings and unrest (I can fully recommend holidaying in alleged ‘atrocity’-ridden areas, where media hysteria guarantees a bargain). The brooding M takes me out, a Muslim who smokes, drinks and dates, and prays once a day. He is a great fan of Erdogan. ‘I used to wake up and my money was worth half what it was the day before,’ he says. ‘Now I can afford things.’
I ask M about ISIS and he repeats what I’ve now heard many times before. ‘They’re murderers. In Islam, you can’t even kill a cat without going to Hell.’
What is Heaven like, I ask, thinking of my friend A and his genital preoccupations. ‘It has nothing mind altering,’ M tells me. ‘You don’t need it. It’s just your perfect place, forever.’ His is a house on top of a mountain, with a cow and a goat – which, to be honest, sounds deathly dull for a week, let alone eternity, but each to their own.
I get my own brief taste of Heaven during my second Cappadocia activity: a hot air balloon ride. This is P’s Christmas present to me, and is truly spectacular. Our overcrowded basket drifts up, up, up, high above the clouds in the early morning mist, where fluorescent streaks of pink and blue electrify the sky. It’s magical, mesmerising, and only slightly ruined at the end by the fraudulently mis-sold ‘Champagne’, which transpires to be a distressing mix of Red Bull and apple juice.
Before I leave Cappadocia, I visit a Kiwi friend-of-a-friend, R, a who owns a carpet shop. She arrived here 25 years ago when there were donkeys and chickens everywhere, and no tourists. Now the place is barely recognisable, she tells me ruefully, and ‘anyone with money’ is permitted to build a hotel.
There are no rules here, yet lots of rules, R says. ‘You just need to know them.’ She enjoys the licentiousness of Turkey after the officiousness of New Zealand. Here she can do business in cash, no questions asked. However, she admits the counterfeit notes in circulation can get frustrating.
How is it for women here, I ask? ‘It’s getting better, but domestic violence and honour killings remain serious problems,’ R tells me. However, women are usually the dominant force inside the house, she says. And they’re often not as innocent as they seem. Recently, a group of her friends decided to dress up as men and perform an erotic dance with a broom. ‘Everyone thought it was hilarious. But I thought it was deeply pornographic and shocking!’
It’s also possible to use being a woman to your advantage here, R points out. You can get two seats on the bus by refusing to sit next to a man, and ‘for every crotch-grabber, there are four men who come to your aid’. I know exactly what she means. People often forget that with chauvinism comes chivalry: the other side of the patriarchal coin. Sometimes in London, as I’m struggling with a heavy suitcase or opening yet another door for myself, I do wonder if we feminist sorts have pushed this equality thing too far.
It’s dropped to -5C outside by the time I leave Cappadocia. Dressed like the Michelin Man in almost all my clothes, I spend the first 30km crawling up a succession of steep hills through a thick, bitter fog. I feel leaden and sluggish, but am spurred on by the knowledge that stopping would mean either instantly freezing to death or being devoured by one of the many neurotic mutts on my tail.
Eventually, after six hours of unremitting dreariness, I stop in a small village called Ovacik. It turns out to be a lacklustre, barren hole of a place, filled with tractors, dung heaps and small cement huts. After a brief search, I discover the entire male population in the café: about three dozen of them, in a collection of leather jackets, flat caps and beanies, some talking, most just staring into space. All turn to me as I enter, and silence descends with a crash. Have I misjudged this terribly, I wonder? Have I stumbled into some malignant backwater where visitors are fed to livestock for sport?
No, as it turns out. Half an hour later I’m eating a kebab with the local mayor, chatting pleasantly through Google Translate. One of the older men invites me to his family house for the night – an elegant, simple place filled with colourful wall-to-wall carpeting – and I spend an enjoyable evening eating everything they own and being introduced to everyone they’ve ever met. All the older female family members are housewives and stare at me fondly. Do they like Erdogan, I ask? An enthusiastic yes. Am I Christian, they ask? No, I admit. Married? No. I detect a flicker of disappointment, but no judgement. The maternal mollycoddling continues unabated.
I sleep well in their toasty living room, and leave by 8am the next morning after a feast of chips, bread, jam and olives. The chill continues to curl its spindly tentacles about my bones as street and sky meld into one, a white gossamer ghost. Everything seems weak, brittle, blanched. When the inevitable pfffffft occurs, I half expect it, but my heart sinks all the same. It’s clear that Maud’s in desperate need of new tyres, but she’ll have to wait until Beirut – a mere 500km down the road.
My morale remains low as I climb high into the Taurus mountains, only briefly uplifted by the sprightly whoosh of the Turkish Cycling Federation passing me by. Then, as my arse and thighs start to pulse and smoulder from the strain, the fog suddenly lifts to reveal thrillingly bright blue skies. I turn my face to the sun and feel its warmth for the first time in weeks, its rays dappling my skin like electrolytes.
The following day, I reach the summit – and narrowly avoid plunging headfirst into the Mediterranean after a gloriously breakneck 50km plummet all the way down to the sea.
Next stop: the Syrian border…!
Follow my journey on Twitter at reo_lowe, Instagram at bexio8 or Facebook at bexbicyclediaries.
See the full picture gallery for Turkey (Anatolian side) here.
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Istanbul – Sivrihisar, Turkey (26 Nov – 12 Dec)
Total miles cycled: 2,740 (4,410km)
Thigh status: Two fat ladies
I spend nearly a month in Istanbul. This wasn’t the plan, but it turns out to be a very difficult city to leave. Gastronomically, there’s almost no reason not to stay forever. And physically, it’s a nightmare. The roads are ten lanes wide. The hills are practically vertical. Every time I imagine leaving I have visions of the film Labyrinth, with Maud and I clambering up Escher-like staircases and plunging head first into the Bog of Eternal Stench, while David Bowie the Goblin King looks on in contempt (this may be an exaggeration, but it’s not far off).
It also doesn’t help that I’m having such a good time. My hosts are a lovely bunch, for a start. After a few nights with a Couchsurfing contact in Şişli, a pleasant commercial district in north Istanbul, I move in with my new cycling BFFs, M and M, who are staying in the elite grunge-chic neighbourhood of Beyoğlu.
I then impose myself on a lovely American couple, K and B, who have a stunning apartment with panoramic views of the Bosphorus, before catching a ferry to the Anatolian side of the city (where most people live) to spend my final few days with a friendly young chap from the cycling website Warmshowers.
From these friends and other contacts I make during my stay in Istanbul – a medley of lawyers, activists, journalists and NGO workers – I start to piece together my fragmented understanding of Turkish culture and politics. The majority of this involves food, and can be summarised as follows:
– The street snacks are phenomenal and should be eaten at every opportunity. Gorge especially heavily on börek (cheesy pastry), Nutella-slathered simit (sesame dough), midye dolma (rice-stuffed mussels), cig köfte (raw meat & spices) and the counter-intuitively delicious kokoreç (fried sheep intestines & offal).
– The chocolate baklava is a wanton orgy of the senses and should be bought solely from Sakarya Tatlicisi restaurant, off Istiklal St. The tavuk göğsü can probably be missed, however: a milk pudding made from chicken, which would be pretty scrummy if it weren’t for the fact it tastes quite clearly of chicken.
– The traditional Turkish breakfast is obscene and needs about four hours to do it justice. K and B treat me to a real humdinger, including bread, egg, cheeses, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, dips (spinach, cheese, tahini, chilli), Nutella, honey, clotted cream and endless tea. It is ‘imperative’ to get the ratio of honey and cream correct, B tells me, or the entire endeavour’s been a waste of time.
I learn a few things that are not food-related too. I learn that everyone is born a Muslim and needs a court order to change this. I learn that weddings last for days and everyone gives gifts made from gold. I learn that tea is not just a drink, but the lifeblood of social cohesion.
I learn sex pests are common, in all shapes and sizes. And that women outside the cities rarely socialise in public. (How would men react if a woman walked into a café, I ask? ‘They’d be delighted,’ I am told. And if it was their wife? ‘They’d be horrified.’)
I learn that Gezi Park, the proposed development of which sparked mammoth countrywide protests in May 2013, is a feeble scrap of turf beside Taksim Square, recalling the disappointment I felt when seeing the pitiable grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, for the first time in 1999.
I learn that Turkey has responded extremely well to the refugee crisis, dealing effectively with 2.5 million migrants and putting Europe to shame.
I learn that Erdogan has gone power mad but there is nobody even close to competing with him.
I learn that the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has been a damp squib for decades, and it was merely Atatürk’s charisma that maintained its popularity under his rule.
I learn that everyday bribery is dying out, but institutionalised, state-sanctioned corruption grows by the day.
I learn that the media is heavily controlled and the police are all but untouchable.
I learn that the courts are in the pocket of the state, and human rights a chimera.
I learn first-hand the fear and danger of living in a lawless autocracy when a leading pro-Kurdish lawyer – Tahir Elci – is shockingly killed by an unknown gunman during a public speech about peace and justice just two days after we meet for coffee.
I learn all these things. And the upshot is an impression, deep and abiding, that Turkey is a country in turmoil. Split irreconcilably down the middle – like so many others – the schism is clearly growing: pro-state factions on the one hand, crying religion, stability and security; pro-liberal factions on the other, crying secularism, justice and freedom.
I swiftly become both fascinated and disturbed by this conflicted, desperate quagmire of a country. Even the weather unnerves me. During my time in Istanbul, the city seems to have skipped a season, shifting straight from summer to winter. Despite the strides I’ve made in recent weeks as an enigmatic trailblazer of cycle fashion, I realise reluctantly it’s time to replace the socks and sandals with some joylessly conventional trainers. I buy these from Decathlon, alongside thermal leggings, long-fingered gloves and a fleecy top. The Turkish tundra won’t take me down without a fight, g’dammit!
My exit from Istanbul is far more civilised than my entry. The Sea of Marmara separates me and Bursa, so a 1.5hr ferry helps me evade the urban maelstrom blocking my escape. When I reach the other side, I remount Maud for the final 45km schlepp (with neither helmet nor bungee cords, which I cleverly left behind). Weighed down by over three weeks of rest and kebabs, it’s tough back in the saddle again. The sharp, sunny air seems coated in a frosty glaze, and my limbs hang limp and heavy, like hunks of raw brisket.
When I arrive in Bursa, a woman immediately dashes over to say hello. She’s studying for a PhD in ‘medical English’ at Sheffield University, she tells me – and is no fan of Turkey. ‘There are no rules here,’ she says. ‘Not for traffic, politics, business, anything.’
Everything is based on corruption and nepotism, the woman claims. She doesn’t even have a room at university, as she ‘doesn’t know the right people’. She warns me to ‘be careful of men and thieves’, and tells me that ‘Turks hate other Turks’, as opposed to the Brits, who she views as ‘very kind’. It makes me wonder about the impulse to romanticise cultures other than our own. Do we view them more favourably due to their unfamiliarity, just as we might prefer a passing acquaintance to a live-in relative whose bad habits and bodily functions have long destroyed any residue of respect?
Bursa is unusually both a university town and one of Turkey’s most religious cities. Most women are dressed in black abayas and colourful headscarves, and look rather old. My Couchsurfing host, O, doesn’t seem to fit in well here: an aggressively anti-Erdogan atheist who sees the government as a bunch of mercenary crooks. Over an Iskender kebab – Bursa’s traditional dish: a doner with tomato sauce, yoghurt and chopped up pita bread, and maybe one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen – he gives me his take on his country.
‘If there was just a semblance of justice here, that would be enough,’ he says. ‘But there isn’t.’ Wouldn’t there be chaos without Erdogan, though, I ask? ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘I choose chaos.’
I hit the road the next day. It’s an unpleasant trudge along a six-lane highway, and bitterly brisk. After a nasty 10km hill, I stop outside a shop and am invited in for tea, bread and olives. The sweet owner gabbles away pleasantly and incomprehensibly as I eat, a slight shadow momentarily flicking across her face when I explain I don’t have children. As I leave, she gives me a big smacker on the cheek and an armful of apples. What a sweetheart!
I arrive in Inegol in the early afternoon. It’s busy and grotty, but is redeemed by a lovely middle-aged man who insists on buying me lunch: a feast of lamb stew, chickpeas, yoghurt and rice pudding. He then finds me a discounted room in a new apartment block – and, his duty done, slips away. ‘Beware of men and thieves,’ I remind myself; yet curiously, neither has proved a problem as yet.
The next morning I discover my bike has developed a puncture overnight. I spend 30 mins peevishly fixing it, casting accusing eyes on the suspiciously cheery old crone vacuuming nearby, before hitting the road to Eskisehir. It’s a long 110km slog, and I spend the entirety of it grumpy and numb in the extremities. Why did nobody warn me Turkey was a cold country, I mutter to myself. How the hell was I to know?
I like Eskisehir immediately. It’s a thriving university town, and a haven of liberalism in a largely conservative region. The old Ottoman district of Odunpazari is a charmingly preserved Technicolor palette of autumnal reds, greens and yellows (see pic), as well as the world’s only trade centre for meerschaum, a soft white stone used to make pipes and jewellery.
Bikes are clearly a big part of the culture here too. My Warmshowers host, A, goes out every Monday with a local cycling group. ‘A few years ago you wouldn’t see anyone on a bike here,’ she says. ‘Now there are loads.’
A is a 30-year-old university English teacher, married to a private maths tutor. Both are atheists. She used to be religious, she tells me, until Erdogan ‘turned it into something hateful’. The 2013 protests were huge, she says. ‘Fear was broken. Gay people and minorities mingled with the crowds and were accepted. It changed attitudes forever.’
After buying an array of meerschaum Christmas gifts and posting them home, Maud and I take to the road once more. The highway is stale and relentless, with a chunky hard shoulder strewn with a perplexing amount of string and broken glass. Lorries thunder to my left, while forlorn brown fields unfurl to my right. Despite my multiple layers, an icy chill writhes and coils about my bones.
After about 100km, I turn off into a small town called Sivrihisar. A hotel doesn’t look hopeful as I trawl the deserted streets with their bleak tenements and corroded dumpsters – but help is soon at hand, it seems. Moments after I sit on the curb to ponder my meagre options, a young policeman approaches me and (speaking via Google Translate) offers to find me a suitable place. He then, wonderfully, buys me a köfte kebab in the local café before darting off to save the day.
I wait in the toasty café for his return, which simmers with the dull murmur of young men playing cards. It’s cosy and welcoming, but I can’t help feeling an essential lifelessness here, a sensation of blood stilled in the vein. Everything seems muted, somehow; monochrome. Later, two girls with uncovered hair, short skirts, black leggings and platform boots arrive to play backgammon, but the atmosphere remains subdued. I am thankfully left alone.
After the policeman returns, I am taken to his colleague’s small apartment nearby. The colleague is a polite, earnest 28-year-old who gives me tea and a pair of provocative lion slippers to warm my toes. He then cooks an incredible feast of chicken, rice, beef stew, stuffed vine leaves and pida (minced lamb pizza).
As we eat, my policeman calls my mobile. We talk hesitatingly over Google Translate, and at first I’m touched by his concern. Then his true motives emerge. ‘How old are you?’ he asks, out of the blue. And then, moments later: ‘You like spend night with me?’ Taken aback, I bark a few unrepeatables and hang up.
Afterwards I’m unsure if I’m more angry or amused. Here are the extremes of Turkish culture in a nutshell, I think to myself: the warmth and hospitality on the one hand; the untempered male libido on the other. But he is a naive, small-town 20-something in a sexually repressed Islamic state — and (more importantly) he bought me a kebab. I can probably forgive him an errant hormone or two.
Over dinner, I grill my host over Google Translate. Is he Muslim? ‘Of course.’ Does he pray? ‘Once a day.’ Does he like Erdogan? ‘He’s ok. I don’t like politics.’ Are you married? ‘No. I’m picky.’ And your friends? ‘Most were married by 22.’
When I get on to ISIS, he livens up. ‘They are murderers,’ he writes. ‘Terrorism has no race, religion or language.’ After a few more ISIS-related questions, he bristles slightly. ‘Your questions show you have no idea about the real Turkey,’ he tells me.
He’s right, of course. Is there even such a thing? Adele’s quest to find the ‘real India’ in A Passage to India results in a nervous breakdown and ceaseless echo that drives everyone deranged. But I am keen to learn what I can – and just hope I can stop thinking about kebabs and chocolate baklava for long enough to focus on the task at hand.
View accompanying photo galleries here and here.
Follow my journey on Instagram at bexio8, Twitter at reo_lowe or Facebook at bexbicyclediaries.
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For all wannabe crooks, swindlers and general ne’er-do-wells out there, I have a word of advice: become a tour cyclist. Everyone trusts you and welcomes you into their lives, without question. You’re a source of unending intrigue, confusion and concern. Why on earth are you on a bike? Don’t you have a car? Do you need some kind of help? Money, lodgings, a few extra marbles? As criminal ruses go, it couldn’t be more perfect.
One of the best places to try this is probably Turkey, where warmth and hospitality know no bounds. Getting there is the hard part, however. The border guards are perhaps not quite so credulous when it comes to believing you’re exactly as you appear – i.e. a shabby itinerant with sensational thighs – and even seem to verge on the suspicious at times. My personal bid to gain entry involves five passport checks, a thorough once-over in the visa section and a portly old curmudgeon who objects strongly to a snatched photo in the queue. By the end I’m feeling thoroughly nefarious, and only wish I had the criminal credentials to justify the whole endeavour.
When I finally reach Turkish soil, however, I realise I’ve had it easy. Stretching for miles in front of me is a vast line of bumper-to-bumper lorries, all patiently awaiting their chance to enter the EU. Behind them, the 30km barbed wire fence constructed by the Bulgarians is clearly visible, snaking insidiously through the woodland. With Western Europe placing the bulk of the migrant security burden on its southern allies, neither country is taking any chances. The message to refugees could not be clearer: keep out; get lost; go home.
Cycling alongside the stationary 5km tailback, I feel a mixture of deep relief, guilt and pity. Thank god I have the good fortune and privilege to be swimming against the tide, I think (a kind of cycling salmon, if you will). Thank god I was born where and when I was. Thank god I am free: politically, economically, socially, emotionally. Thank god.
Once inside, I warm to Turkey almost immediately. Hypnotic Islamic music wafts from the border station, while truckies wave cheerily and invite me for tea. The roads are far better than Bulgaria, too. I continue along the highway for a few kilometres before turning onto a smaller country track. Cars are soon replaced by tractors, while men in flat caps idle serenely outside cafés. Coiling around me as I ride is a strong scent of manure, interspersed by an occasional waft of something pungently alcoholic.
It’s late afternoon by the time I pull up in Süloğlu, the biggest village on my route. Unfortunately this still isn’t very big. Populated by just 4,500 people, there’s no hotel or restaurant to be seen; not even a sizeable shop. In the end I go into the least grotty place I can find, a pharmacy, and ask for help. It’s a good move, as it turns out. ‘Did someone send you here?’ the pleasant man behind the counter asks. ‘I’m the only English-speaker in town.’
I am advised to go to the police station and – channelling my 1960s bummler idol Dervla Murphy, who spent much of her time exploiting the hospitality of local gendarmeries – I duly oblige. Once there, they clearly have no idea what to do about me. Two hapless young chaps mutter and look mildly alarmed, before fetching their superior, who proceeds to fetch his. Finally, a dynamic-looking fellow appears, who leads me down to the basement. It’s warm and clean, with invitingly resplendent sofas (see pic), and I’m told I’m very welcome to stay there. Dervla eat your heart out!
The police turn out to be perfect hosts. I am given a heater and access to the tuck shop, and even bought dinner: my first authentic Turkish doner, complete with salad, yoghurt and ayran (a salty yoghurt drink). As someone who has long suffered from a debilitating, chronic kebab habit – an illness, not a choice – it’s a very special moment. At last, after years of social stigma, I’ve finally found a place where I can be accepted for who I am. I’ve finally found a place to eat doner meat with impunity.
I am enjoying my 14th cup of tea and cigarette with my new friends, none of whom appear to do anything except drink tea and smoke cigarettes, when the man from the pharmacy suddenly appears. He told his wife about me, he says, and she insisted I stay with them. So off I go, to my second home and second dinner in as many hours. Turkey, I think as I say my goodbyes, is it too soon to tell you I love you?
The wife turns out to be a lovely Greek woman in her early 40s, who met her husband in Athens four years ago. She is Orthodox Christian, while he is Muslim. Both hate Erdogan’s ‘Islamification’ of the country. ‘The Koran is very clear,’ he stresses. ‘It explicitly says you mustn’t force people to convert.’
Both are keen to visit the UK, but Turks find it hard to get foreign visas ‘because of the Kurds’. The low wages don’t help either: around ₺2,000 (£520) a month, on average. Their home is modest and beige, with laminate flooring and décor trimmed with traditional Turkish flourishes. I am put up in a cosy pull-down bed in the dining room and fall asleep in seconds.
I leave the next morning for Kirklareli following a hearty breakfast of feta cheese, cold meats, tomatoes and boiled eggs. It’s an easy, uneventful ride, and I arrive at noon to find a fairly sizeable town with a few nice old bits scattered about. Tonight I am staying with a couple from Warmshowers (not as exciting as it sounds, sadly — just a cycling couch-surfer site), who transpire to be a young pottery student and hirsuit electrical engineer. Neither is Muslim, unlike 95% of the population.
‘Erdogan only favours the rich metropolitan elite,’ the hairy engineer tells me over some delicious, homemade vegan slop. He holds regular protests against development projects in rural areas, he says, and hopes soon to build an eco-farm. ‘Agriculture here is dying.’
The next day, I set off for Vize. I am just 30km from my destination when I am accosted by a couple of friendly Antipodeans: a Kiwi lawyer and Aussie economist (known henceforth as the Ms). They are also headed for Istanbul and we decide to ride the rest of the way together. It feels comforting to have a little company for a change – if only due to the pocketfuls of enormous rocks they’ve accumulated to ward off our furry foes on the sidelines.
Vize is a semi-attractive, gently bustling town with a pleasant 6th century church-turned-mosque. After lunch, I leave the Ms to track down my host, another engineer and friend of the eco-warrior couple. We meet at his vast, empty, new-but-grimy flat, before he reads my mind and whisks me out for a kofte. While his English is poor, he goes out of his way to welcome me, and insists on paying for dinner. ‘My home, your home,’ he writes over Google Translate. ‘Stay longer?’
I reconvene with the Ms the next morning for an 82km ride to the tiny town of Subasi, where there’s apparently a hotel. It’s so enjoyable cycling with them that I find myself wondering at what point it was that I became lonely. The Ms are not only brilliant fun, but native English speakers on the same cultural wavelength. My gravitation towards them is partly a mark of the old familial, tribal instincts within, I know; the ones that sow discord as much as encourage kinship. But it can’t be good for the soul to store up four months of bad puns and dirty jokes with no outlet.
We arrive at 2.30pm to disappointment all round. Subasi is a bit of a shithole, it turns out; the kind of place where dogs pee on old tyres and everyone is fixing a broken carburettor, yet nothing is ever fixed. A lone donkey chews the corner of a disembowelled dishwasher, while plastic bags waft forlornly in the air, buoyed by stale currents of gloom and decay.
Yet somehow, the Turkish spirit still finds its way through. We devour a delicious beef stew with beans, cold chips and aubergine for just £4 a head – the price arbitrarily plucked out of the air at the end, as usual – before making our way to the local café, where we are given several rounds of free tea. By the time we’re handed complimentary cereal bars in the supermarket, I can already feel my defences softening.
We go searching for the hotel and are pleased and a little surprised to discover that it does actually exist. It is impressive in its way, perplexingly disproportionate to the small size of the town and with the faded grandeur of a D-list-celeb-turned-wino. Outside, the swimming pool is a deep pea green, bordered by the types of statues almost certain to come alive at night, while a cluster of mannequins in the foyer could easily be extras from Andy Warhol’s 1960s Blue Movie. The rooms themselves are spacious, with parquet floors and hunks of oak furniture, plus a few rogue pubes thrown in for free (it’s a night for sleeping bags, we decide).
The next morning, we set our sights on Istanbul. The six-lane D0070 is the lesser of the evils available to us, but turns out to be fairly evil nonetheless. For four hours we make our way along the hard shoulder, with regular roadworks nudging us sadistically into the path of monster, rattling trucks. By the time we finally hit the outskirts of the city, we’re thoroughly fed up and more than ready for the celebratory lamb doner we’ve been promising ourselves. Settling down at a restaurant, we tuck in with gusto. There’s just 7km left to Taksim Square from here, we rejoice. We’ve pretty much made it.
Or so we think. Little do we know that between us and Taksim lies a torrid, labyrinthine mass of urban barbarity designed to vanquish even the hardiest of bummlers. Ten-lane highways, unhinged motorists, vertical hills, inconvenient cats and tunnels of death all conspire to finish us off, swiftly and unceremoniously. Imagine Hunger Games meets Takeshi’s Castle meets Theseus and the Minotaur, but with bikes. That’s a wildly exaggerated scenario of what it’s actually like, but imagine it all the same.
Three hours later, we finally make it to the flat of Ms’ friend in the bohemian grunge-chic neighbourhood of Beyoğlu. We shut the doors, hit the bottle and vow never to cycle anywhere near Istanbul ever again.
The next day, after a long and glorious sleep, I’ve recovered sufficiently to make my way to Sisli in north Istanbul to meet my next Warmshowers host, leaving Maud under the safe guardianship of the Ms. En route, I take my milk-doused laptop to Lenovo (an official sponsor) to see if they can fix it. Sadly nothing is salvageable, but they replace the hard disk, motherboard and keyboard immediately, all free of charge. What legends.
My host, S, turns out to be a 30-year-old banker who advises insurance companies and lives in a large, cosy flat with a friend. He has a 26-year-old girlfriend, but ‘isn’t yet ready to marry yet’, though it’s normal here to be hitched by your mid-20s, apparently. Both he and his girlfriend are atheists, and deeply critical of their president.
‘The government is very corrupt and geared only towards the rich,’ he says. ‘But the poorer, uneducated people vote for him as he gives them bribes and coal before elections, and they think he’s defending Islam.’
S tells me the story of a tape recording in February 2014 that caught Erdogan — or an impersonator — instructing his son to dispose of millions of dollars from their home in the midst of a huge corruption investigation. The president claimed the tape was a fabrication, and many believed him. I later look up Turkey’s rankings on the Corruption Perceptions Index table and see it sits at 66 out of 168 countries. It fares worse on the World Press Freedom Index, at 151 out of 180. That’s lower than Pakistan, South Sudan and Russia.
Was S at the Gezi Park protests in June 2013, I ask? Yes, he tells me. ‘There was an amazing atmosphere. Real hope and excitement. But the government was clever. They did nothing for two weeks until everyone got bored. Then they cleared everyone at 5am, shut down social media, closed the metro and the roads. They arrested thousands. They killed and beat people. They spread false information that people were smoking and drinking in mosques. And that was it.’
In more uplifting news, my host tells me he eats at least two kebabs a week, and his flatmate eats about five. It sounds almost too good to be true. I’d always secretly feared the Turkish kebab obsession might be some outmoded custom or puffed up propaganda to entice the tourists, like dancing Masai warriors or Cairene papyrus painting. But when I tell him the lamb doner is not acceptable fodder in the UK unless you’re too drunk to remember having eaten it, he looks confused and a little crestfallen. ‘Maybe I won’t try to get a visa there after all,’ he says.
I spend the next few days meeting people and exploring the city’s enchanting jumble of roaming passageways and plazas. I won’t go into all the stunningly beautiful architecture to be seen in Istanbul – the Süleymaniye Mosque, the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the Topkapi Palace, the Hagia Sophia etc. – as this is all old hat. But the city as a whole I find captivating. Historical yet cosmopolitan, Asian yet European, reassuringly ‘Turkish’ yet exquisitely diverse, it feels unlike anywhere I have been before. As Constantinople, it was the capital of both the Catholic Roman Empire (from 330AD) and Islamic Ottoman Empire (from 1453), and a palpable aura of its former religious and socio-political stature seems to linger even now.
The first friend I meet is B, a septuagenarian South African who has lived here for 16 years. ‘Erdogan is mad, but there’s simply no alternative right now,’ he asserts over a lunchtime kofte. ‘After the Gezi riots, he got paranoid about a coup, detained half the army without trial and trained up hundreds of loyal, uneducated youths as his personal police force.’
Another friend, a Turkish lawyer-turned-freelance-yoga-teacher, says Erdogan was ‘originally a decent guy’. ‘He supported the poor against the moneyed elite and tried to talk to the Kurds,’ she tells me. ‘But then he got drunk on power.’
My friend advises me to ‘watch out for the men’ in Turkey, and recounts the story of an artist who was raped and killed in 2008 while hitchhiking. It’s a sobering tale and I reflect on it at length afterwards. This happened eight years ago, I ponder, and was a one-off event; should it really have a bearing on my journey now? What are the mathematical probabilities of it happening to me? One in a million? A billion? Ten billion?
And there’s the rub. Crimes like this are tragic, and they are what people remember when they hear of lone female travellers to Turkey, or Bulgaria, or anywhere outside the glossy brochure supplements. They are what people base their opinions on, and their fears. But they are not the norm. They are the exception. In my mind, the media is too often a distorting lens, selecting the worst and making it the whole. So much colour can be missed by focusing solely on the shadows.
Read about my journey on Twitter at reo_lowe or Facebook at bexbicyclediaries.
]]>Harmanli, Bulgaria to Hamzabeyli, Turkey (2 – 8 Nov)
Total miles cycled: 2,130 (3,428km)
Thigh status: Barrage balloon
As soon as I arrive in Harmanli, I’m approached by a small, swarthy man with a wolfish grin. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ he says. ‘Can I show you around?’ It’s probably not the most attractive offer I’ve had all week — that came from the farmer in Stoykovo who asked me to help him milk his longhair goat — but it turns out he’s exactly what I’m looking for: a Syrian refugee from the camp. We agree to meet in an hour.
The man, H, is a Kurd and a dual Syrian/Turkish national. Three years ago, most refugees here were African and Afghan, he says, though most now are Syrian. Only a few hundred remain as so many have fled to Germany. This is the destination of choice, he tells me, as most other countries send people back to the first place they sought asylum, under the EU Dublin Regulation.
H is 32 and is desperate to flee too. In 2013, he made it to Germany via Serbia, Hungary and Austria, and applied there unsuccessfully for asylum. He then travelled to the Netherlands, where he stayed for 18 months before being sent back to Bulgaria under the Dublin rules.
H tells me he left Syria because of the war, and he cannot return to Turkey because he was caught with a fake visa for Norway and absconded. The story later changes. His uncle killed someone, he confides, in revenge for an attack over money. The victim’s family then turned on the uncle, prompting several of his family to flee. ‘Life is cheap for Kurds,’ he says.
I am introduced to some of H’s Kurdish friends, including a flashy fellow in luminescent yellow Adidas trainers who drives a black Mercedes 4×4 and makes a living as a human trafficker. We drink tea and they tell me how they hate Islamic State (‘they try to convert everyone who isn’t Muslim’), but have no problem with Assad. This surprises me: the Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in both Syria and Turkey, and have been discriminated against in both for generations. But, as the maxim goes, your enemy’s enemy is your friend, and IS is proving an effective if unsettling matchmaker across the world.
I am told how the flight to western Europe works. A ‘chief’ (like the Adidas guy) is paid to organise the entire trip, and everyone travels at night in a group. It costs €600-800 to cross the Bulgarian/Serbia border and thousands for the trip as a whole. It’s much harder now than it used to be, apparently. A 30km wall has been built between Bulgaria and Turkey, and is due to expand further, while guards have become more militant.
We wander around town and end up in a smoky, sour-smelling bar. I order a coffee and buy H a beer. He would reciprocate, he says, but he’s squandered €12,000 on gambling and is waiting for money to be sent from his family. I humour him, but am sure he’s lying. Gambling debts are clearly more acceptable to his male ego than admitting he’s poor. ‘We get nothing from Bulgaria,’ he says. ‘But we’re ok. We’re men; we have money.’
We meet another group of young Kurds sitting outside a petrol station. They all have shaved heads and tattoos, but are welcoming and talkative. They buy me a juice without me asking and all want to know the ins and outs UK visa rules – about which I know nothing. What do they do here for fun, I ask? Talking, smoking, exercising, reading, watching TV, working, they tell me. So you’re allowed to work, I ask? They look at each other. Yes, they say. Kind of.
Then H takes me to the camp. I am not confident of success. The general public is not allowed inside and I’ve heard Bulgarian camps are notoriously difficult to enter. But the guard is a Bulgarian Turk and H sweet talks him in Turkish. ‘We’re in!’ he tells me jubilantly. ‘We’ve got 15 minutes.’
Inside, we walk into a vast, bleak courtyard, then past rows of grim, corrugated metal porta-cabins where people used to be housed. These lead us to a second courtyard beside a large concrete block. Inside, it’s worse than I imagined. The floor is mottled with stains and puddles, while the bathroom is filthy, with several taps running and flooding the sinks. ‘Be careful of the rats,’ H calls to me encouragingly. ‘They’re as big as dogs.’
We go to H’s room, which he shares with five other men in three bunk beds. It’s small and grimy, and I feel a deep, cloying heaviness just looking at it. Then our 15 minutes are up and we rush back to the entrance. On our way out, H suddenly reveals his money hasn’t come through. Can he have 20 lev (€6) to catch the bus tomorrow? I’m hesitant, but agree. I know he’s a bullshitter, but he’s still a bullshitter in need, I reason.
The next day, I hear that H never made the bus. He overslept, he says. And he’s also in love with me. I spend the day ignoring his ever-more-persistent calls and instead explore the town. Harmanli is an odd place, pretty in parts but with a stale inertia at its core. Young men in jeans and leather jackets slump in doorways, skin ashen, gaze brittle, living life in the cracks.
Back at the hotel, there’s a knock at my door. It’s H. His eyes are bloodshot and bulging. ‘Where have you been?’ he demands. ‘Why didn’t you reply to me?’ I’m shocked he’s found me, but try to remain composed. ‘I don’t want to see you,’ I tell him. ‘You’re a liar. You say you need to leave urgently, but you miss the bus. You say you have lots of money, yet need more. You say you’re a Syrian refugee, but you’re a Turkish fugitive. What’s the truth?’
To get him out of my room, I agree to have a final drink in a bar beside the hotel. When we arrive, he immediately orders a double vodka. He tells me he loves me, then slightly undermines the sentiment by saying he loves ‘all British women’. Have I ever met a man like him before, he asks? Small, sleazy and desperate, I reply? Plenty.
Gradually drunker and more incoherent, H tells me he respects me deeply. And wants to sleep with me. That’s sweet, I say, and will never happen in a million years. He shifts tack and tells me he doesn’t respect me and there’s something funny about my eyes. I say thank you and leave. As I rush off, he follows me shouting: ‘I will kill you! And have sex with you!’ – in that rather macabre order. Then I dart into the hotel and up to my room, locking the door behind me. A few seconds later, I hear crashes and a scream below. And then silence.
Later, I discover that H lashed out at the receptionist and was arrested. At first I feel guilty. He’s not a malicious man, I think; just a desperate, misguided one. But I needn’t have worried. A few days later, I hear he made it to Munich after all. And he’s sorry. I ignore him, but on some level I find I am pleased. Maybe, at last, he can sort his life out.
From Harmanli, I set off on an ambitious 118km venture to see a ghost-town called Matochina near the Turkish border. It’s a long, hilly slog to get there, the last 15km along an almost impassable muddy track that flays my tyres and pummels my rump. Occasionally the mud switches to sand, and my wheels slip, sink and drag as I heave my way along.
Then, finally, the town emerges in the valley below, glowing dusky pink in the late afternoon light. The place looks eerily alive, but it’s a mirage of vitality; a cadaver enlivened by an embalmer’s brush. Only a tiny handful of residents remain, all of whom I meet outside the village shop (which doubles as cafe and bar): two old women, one elderly man and one ancient shepherdess.
After buying a lemonade for 7p (including complimentary chocolate), I have a swift nose around town. I visit the old school and museum, both boarded up, and the 4th century Bukelon ruins, reconstructed in the Late Middle Ages. There’s history and cultural significance here, in this dying ember of a town. But its heart and soul clearly departed years ago.
Then, as the sun kisses the horizon, I hit the road again. I am aiming for a town called Shtit, 20km away, where I hear there’s a guest-house. I start making my way across the empty, heavily rutted roads as the light gently fades — and suddenly find myself surrounded by five deranged hounds, barking and snarling in deafening chorus. Dismounting, I glare at them with what I hope to be a confident steeliness, but my heart is thumping wildly.
Then, just as the game seems up, a stick appears swinging wildly over my left shoulder and a shrill banshee cry fills the air. Three shepherds have come to my rescue! They holler and swipe fiercely at the dogs with their crooks, baring their yellowed teeth, while Maud and I cower helplessly on the sidelines. It’s truly a rule-by-fear world out here in the Bulgarian boondocks, and wimpish British bummlers seem to be at the bottom of the food chain.
After gratefully distributing a few cigarettes in exchange for my life, I push onwards. But it’s slow going. The sun is gone and the night drapes thick and black over the landscape. My lights barely make a dent and I can no longer see the gnarly cracks and craters in the road. Just please don’t get a puncture, I think to myself as I crawl tentatively along. Not now. Not here.
A few kilometres later, I get a puncture. I can’t believe it. It’s almost pitch black now, and deathly quiet except for a gentle breath of wind. I stop and dismount wearily – and it’s then I hear the jackals. They sound just metres away, cackling with maniacal glee. Oh god, I think. I’m going to die here. I’m going to end my days as some crass horror movie parody, aiming for a town called Shtit. I take out my thermos and have a large gulp of emergency Cabernet Sauvignon Khan Krum. I feel better and have another. What to do?
And then, suddenly, I am saved for the second time that day. A truck pulls up, and the man and young boy inside offer to give me a ride. They speak no English, but I can see the kindness in their eyes. Yes, I say. Yes yes yes!
Half an hour later, I am safely ensconced at the guest-house being revived by a bowl of tripe soup and pint of Johnnie Walker. It’s a homely place, designed like a log-cabin with an impressively eclectic range of décor, including weaponry, stuffed fish and paintings of bosomy women being slain in battle (see pics below). I am the only guest, and I spend a very enjoyable evening watching 90s pop on the Balkans’ answer to MTV with the owner: an octogenarian cowboy with a lustrous, Freddy Mercury-meets-Tom-Selleck moustache, who never utters a word, but occasionally comes over to squeeze my arm and top up my whiskey. It’s the perfect refuge and, after patching Maud, I zonk out exhaustedly under my cosy leopard-print sheets.
I leave early the next morning after a curious but not unwelcome breakfast of Coke and chicken soup (the cook misunderstands my clucking, which is meant to indicate an egg) – and swiftly get another puncture. I forgot to check the blasted tyre for thorns, I realise. Could I make any more mistakes in such a short period of time?
As I fix it, a policeman pulls over to chat. They last caught a refugee 1.5 months ago, he tells me. Not too many come this way anymore. But I should be careful; there’s a lot of crime. The Roma are the worst. Last month one of them stole his bike. ‘Bulgaria’s dying,’ he says. ‘There’s no work. Gypsies and refugees get money, but not the old people who survive on €15 a month pension.’
The policeman says he only gets €300 a month. But he is proud of his country nonetheless. ‘Bulgarians were Thracians. We were fearless and fought the Romans.’
After the policeman leaves, I meet M, a Brit who moved to Bulgaria ten years ago as he was ‘sick of working and getting nowhere’. His wife died recently and he now spends his time trading cars and tending to his garden. I ask M about the Roma and he says they are ‘perfectly nice’. ‘If you are doing a deal they might try to fleece you, but otherwise there’s no problem,’ he says.
Until recently there were ‘hundreds’ of Syrians, Eritreans and Afghans making there way through his village, M tells me. He would often give them lifts to Svilengrad near the Turkish border. ‘Police sometimes beat them up, steal their cash and dump them back on the Turkish side,’ he adds. ‘They broke the legs of a couple of guys and they later froze to death. And an Afghan was shot and killed. But these things are rarely reported in the press.’
I look up the incidents later. The first involved two Iraqi Yazidis fleeing ISIS and was reported in March 2015 by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee. In the second, the man was allegedly killed after resisting arrest on 15th October. A little more googling pulls up more disturbing information. A recent joint report by the Belgrade Center for Human Rights and Oxfam found that all 110 refugees consulted for the study reported some form of violence or extortion by the Bulgarian police. In response, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry accused the NGOs of using ‘flawed research methods’ and suggested refugees may be lying to avoid being returned to Bulgaria.
M offers me a lift to Elhovo and I readily accept. And it’s fortunate I do as it turns out the bridge I was intending to take has collapsed. All infrastructure here is terrible, he tells me. ‘All the EU grant money goes into MPs’ back pockets.’
I intend to visit the refugee centre in Elhovo, but am denied entry twice and told to ‘come back tomorrow’. The building is a huge concrete block, hemmed in by a metal fence with minimal outdoor space. Its entrance is littered with rubbish, while washing lines sag cheerlessly across the windows. Unlike Harmanli, residents here are locked inside. What would I find in there, I wonder? What are they hiding?
On my way back, I pop into the tourist office. The woman there tells me there’s no problem with crime in the Roma community, and most of them work in construction or other manual labour jobs. I go to visit them out of curiosity and discover a ramshackle semi-shantytown full of half-built houses and scrawny goats chewing on trash. The residents at first eye me with suspicion, but soon soften after a few handshakes and exclamations of ‘Eengland, tourist!’ (for some reason I think stressing the first vowel is helpful in situations like this). They give me tea and a tour of the area, and I snap pics of a few young male posers: a consistent breed across the socio-economic spectrum.
The next day, I head for the Turkish border. As the edge of Europe approaches, ominous signs crying ‘danger zone!‘ flash up on my right. Is it, I wonder? I’ve never been to Turkey before, and certainly not on a bike. What dangers may or may not lie in store, I have absolutely no idea. But I am very excited to find out. And just a tiny bit terrified. To be continued…
Follow my journey on Twitter at reo_lowe or Facebook at facebook.com/bexbicyclediaries.
]]>My first day in Bulgaria doesn’t bode well. The sky is black and buckets of rain thump down outside my window. I spend an exhilarating 20 minutes wrapping all my electrical equipment in plastic bags, then venture tentatively out. Ten minutes later, I venture back in again. I can’t see a thing through my glasses and my padded underpants are already sodden. This is almost certainly how I’ll be spending my dotage so I’d rather not start now.
Instead I make my way to the Tran bus station. This transpires to be a grim concrete bunker with water pouring through the roof into oily pools on the floor. A woman in a dark, grimy cubbyhole tells me the next bus to Sofia goes at 1pm. So I return to the hotel to wait it out over a cup of tea and bowl of intriguingly titled ‘paunch soup’ – an experience I still have troubling flashbacks about today. Suffice to say, if a soup costs under 30p there is usually a reason.
When I return, I discover the bus is tiny with almost no boot. But I strip Maud down to her bare essentials and a supportive group of about 17 bystanders help me squeeze her indelicately inside. Then we’re off, and for the next three miserable hours, we plough sluggishly through the tsunami towards Sofia.
By the time we arrive, the rain has slowed to a funereal drizzle and I cycle the final 8km in the growing gloom over heavily cobbled streets and thick traffic. Pavements appear and disappear on a whim, along with the occasional half-arsed bike lane. I have a vague idea where I’m going, having located it earlier on Google maps, but find myself wishing not for the first time that I had a sense of direction. It could come in handy at moments like this, when trying to find somewhere.
I finally arrive at the house of my hosts, a family I found on the cycling couch-surfing website Warmshowers. They have a newborn baby and hyperactive two year old, and the flat is in disarray. She is exhausted and barely able to speak, while he does his best to drag the infant off me while serving cold red wine and pizza. What possessed them to host me, I think to myself? Are they some kind of cycle-obsessed sadomasochists?
Maybe, as it turns out. They are keen cycle tourers, they tell me, and like to take the children with them. This to me sounds like the worst kind of self-inflicted torture – unless it’s possible to harness the wee cherubs like huskies or use them to hunt for food.
They are a sweet couple, however. He is Welsh and works for the British Council, while she is Bulgarian and an electrical engineer. They are gentle sorts with a beatnik edge and unkempt charm. He tells me about the quirks of the country through the eyes of an ex-pat. People shake their head when they mean yes, he says; except those who have been abroad, who tend to nod. So the country exists in an almost constant state of unresolved ambiguity – which may go some way towards explaining why nothing has really been achieved over the past couple of decades.
Tensions still exist between the majority Orthodox Christians and minority Muslims, I learn, and there are concerns about the influence of Turkey that hark back to the Ottoman Empire. We then get onto food, and he confirms my belief that all waiters here are miserable cretins. ‘They expect tips no matter what. There’s no sense of paying for good value.’
On the positive side, the family culture in Bulgaria is very useful, he says. His wife’s mother takes their son every weekend, allowing them some much-needed relaxation time. Wow, I think, watching little P eat the curtains while destroying the parquet floor with his plastic Triceratops. Poor woman.
The next day, I venture into Sofia to explore. Everyone is huddled up as if braving an arctic tundra and seems sad, brittle, brusque. The city itself is attractive, however, full of striking buildings, musty churches and handsome, stray mutts. The architecture is grand and diverse, from the Roman-Byzantine Rotunda of St. George and Neo-Renaissance market hall to the Stalinist Gothic public buildings and Brutalist tower blocks. There’s also a pleasant aura of tolerance about the place, with a church, mosque and synagogue co-existing happily on one of the main squares.
Over coffee, a young lawyer gives me her take on the country. It’s difficult to get anything achieved here, she tells me. Bureaucracy is huge, its cogs oiled by bribery and corruption. Everyone takes their cut: the politicians, police, judges, doctors. ‘Nobody has the will to reform the system,’ she says. ‘Because everyone hopes they’ll eventually benefit from it.’
Despite being an EU country, Bulgaria’s average wage is just €450 a month. Few pay their taxes because they can’t afford to and don’t trust the government. ‘Many people are leaving,’ the lawyer says. ‘Though it’s getting better. Young people have more job prospects than five years ago.’
I move to my second Sofia home later that day. My new hosts are a pleasant young couple with a baby, who chat with me into the early hours. Tensions are growing between Muslims and Christians, they report ruefully, with a climate of fear fomented by nationalistic parties clambering for power. Only a few weeks ago, the Orthodox Church called on the government not to let any more Muslim refugees into the country to prevent an ‘invasion’, they say.
Is the country safe, I ask them? ‘Be wary,’ R, the woman, tells me, especially where the Roma are concerned. ‘One village might invite you in with open arms, but the next may rob you blind. And you have no way of knowing which is which.’
This makes me a little nervous, but I’m aware that fear-mongering is often worst among locals, who are exposed daily to media and political hype about the wolves lurking at the door. In my experience, the reality is almost always better than the perception. And the Roma have long been the last vestige of socially acceptable discrimination, even among the most progressive of souls.
In the morning, R makes me cheese on toast while breastfeeding the baby. Very few people breastfeed in Bulgaria, she tells me, as they think it’s not as good as vitamin-heavy formula: a hangover from the Soviet era, when women were encouraged to return to work quickly.
Plus, there’s apparently a prestige inherent in buying things rather than squeezing them naturally from one’s nipples. ‘We’re a proud nation,’ R says. ‘People have a chip on their shoulder about being poor and see western consumerism as allied to progress. They buy Ferraris and can’t afford the fuel.’
Resignation and disappointment are clear in R’s voice as we talk. Their flat is large and clean, but dingy and cluttered. Both she and her husband have good jobs, but they are evidently struggling. It’s a dull, normalised poverty; unremarkable, unrelenting, unsexy. A low, heavy hum.
Like some kind of pathetic fallacy, it rains constantly in Sofia while I am there, so I spend a couple of days catching up on admin and work at the cafe +TOVA. There I meet O, an art teacher from Washington DC, who kindly warns me about Bulgarian dogs. They can be large and dangerous, he says, though since he arrived five years ago he only knows two people who have been killed.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Killed?’ Yes, he confirms. But they were both fairly old, so not to worry.
Later on, I meet a woman who provides legal support to refugees and Roma communities through the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee. Once Roma enter the spiral of poor education and crime, the battle is already lost, she says. ‘There’s no policy to deal with these issues, just systematic discrimination. Until a couple of years ago, even schools were segregated.’
Where refugees are concerned, Bulgaria was caught entirely unprepared, she tells me. In 2011, it had around 1,000 asylum seekers; in 2013 it was ten times that amount. There were no refugee centres, and integration centres were overwhelmed. ‘The media calls refugees illegal immigrants, while far-right parties say they are terrorists. It scares a lot of people.’
My final host in Sofia is D, a keen cyclist who lives a small, grubby flat in a dank ex-Comecon tower block. Over the next couple of days, he generously buys me food and drink, helps me service my bike, takes me up Vitosha mountain and gives me a spork (not a euphemism).
When I finally leave, he leads me 16km to the outskirts of the city before leaving me to continue on alone. It’s about 2C now and my hands and feet are numb. Having originally intended on outrunning the winter, I am not prepared for this weather and have had to pull together an impromptu outfit that involves four top layers and ankle socks alongside my sandals. It’s so important to be a leader not a follower of fashion, I think to myself, before posting a picture of my new look on Facebook.
My mother is quick to comment. ‘Well, at least you’re less likely to get raped,’ she writes. And with this ringing maternal endorsement in my ears, I head for the Balkan mountains.
After overnighting in the small, sweet town of Markovo, I set my sights on the traditional village of Koprivshtitsa. It’s a damp, grey flannel of a day, and I pass tractors, timber farms and a surprising number of incredibly slow-moving wrinklies hunched double, who I estimate to be somewhere between 300 and 400 years old. At one point, one of them beckons me over and asks me to set a large pile of dry leaves on fire for her. It doesn’t seem a very sensible thing to do, but I oblige helpfully.
Then the day brightens and the mountains appear on my left, glowing red, orange, ochre and green in the soft morning sun. In my excitement, I accidentally veer off the main road onto a rocky, muddy track that draws me high into the hills. But it doesn’t last long, and the final climb through the mountains to the village is pure heaven.
Koprivshtitsa turns out to be a charming place full of vivid, multicoloured houses, ruggedly elegantly under neat terracotta roofs. The 19th century buildings have all been perfectly restored, and I learn that it was here where the first shot of the April Uprising against the Ottomans was fired in 1876.
Two days later, I am back on the road once more. And what a ride! Seventy-five glorious kilometres of downhill, my spirits soaring higher with every metre I plunge (though I have to admit being a tad put out by how easily cheered I am by a simple slope, having always thought of myself as a fairly complex emotional creature). At lunchtime, I arrive in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second biggest city and reportedly one of the oldest in the world, dating from 5,000 BC. It’s a lovely place, and has a bohemian artiness and vibrant architecture that resembles Koprivshtitsa writ large.
As I check into my hostel, I see a leaflet for the mayoral elections on the counter. Is the owner going to vote, I ask? He shakes his head. ‘They’re all mafia. You have to pay for everything: 1,000 lev for an operation, 10 lev for a speeding fine. Companies have been shut down for not paying under-the-counter fees.’ He sighs deeply, adding: ‘Bulgarians don’t have enough money to worry about anything but today. We have a word for it: prahostnici.’
I leave after a couple of days for the refugee town of Harmanli, planning to stop in a hotel along the way. As I head off the main road to take a more scenic route, a man stops to warns me in German not to go this way as the road is ‘sehr klein und sehr schlecht‘. I thank him, but say I prefer small back-roads. Nobody understands the ethos of the cyclist, I mutter to myself as he drives away. They just don’t get it.
Half an hour later, I’m lying face down in the road feeling a bit foolish. The holes had worsened, as predicted, until the asphalt resembled a pair of fishnet tights after a heavy night on the voddies. Then disaster struck. While ogling a particularly handsome donkey on a grassy verge, I failed to notice the railway track and ditch in front of me – and off over Maud’s frontal lobes I flew.
Excepting a few minor surface wounds, both Maud and I are fortunately ok. But my laptop is a different story. On impact, a carton of milk exploded in my rucksack, drenching everything. My computer, foolishly, was on, and I look on helplessly as the system short circuits before I can shut it down. Why did nobody warn me about the hazardous combination of milk and donkeys, I think to myself? Where were they on my risk assessment form?
I schlepp on miserably to the hotel, which I discover in the middle of a wood. It’s large, pink and ominously empty. An old man takes me to my tiny room, which seems clean except for a couple of friendly cockroaches. At least, the sheets are refreshingly pube-free, which is my new yardstick for luxury.
After an hour or so, I cheer up. This is helped considerably by the bottle of 2006 Zagreus Premium Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon I discover behind the dusty bar, which I tuck into with gusto. As I do so, the old man shuffles over to take my order. ‘What would you like?’ he asks (in German). ‘What do you have?’ I reply. ‘What do you want?’ he repeats. ‘Pasta?’ I say. ‘We don’t have pasta,’ he says. ‘We have sausages and potatoes.’
About four minutes later, he brings out a plate with a slab of dry beef and chips. ‘We didn’t have sausages,’ he says apologetically.
To be continued…
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]]>It is miserable and pouring with rain when I arrive in Mitrovica, Kosovo. My first impressions, noted in my diary, are alliteratively unequivocal – ‘grey, grotty, grisly, gloomy’ – with thick furrowed eyebrows etched over the two ‘o’s to iron out any ambiguity. I am clearly in a bad mood.
Keen to hunker down somewhere warm and dry, I enter the first motel I can find. This transpires to be a half-finished, oddly cavernous place with faint hints of The Shining, run by a gnome-like man with no neck. My room is large, but the bathroom is filthy and I force the man, in the absence of any staff, to clean it himself. If nobody complains then nothing will ever improve, I find myself thinking. Three months on the road and I’ve already turned into my mother.
The motel is located in the south of the city, linked to the north via a bridge over the Ibar river. The bridge is closed to traffic, blocked by broken slabs of concrete and a meagre patch of grass known euphemistically as the ‘Peace Park’. At first the significance of this is lost on me. I am aware the city is divided: ethnic Albanians in the south, Serbs in the north. But the nature and intensity of this partition only becomes apparent during a chat with a friendly Albanian waiter over dinner.
‘I’ve lived here for 15 years and only gone across the bridge twice, when my father got sick, as they have better doctors over there,’ he tells me. This is especially surprising because the restaurant is located right beside the bridge on the southern side and his brother works in the north for a Serb construction company. He insists he doesn’t have a personal problem with the Serb population, however. ‘It’s mainly Pristina and Belgrade that have the problem, not the people.’
After dinner I walk outside into a city gone wild. Albania has won 3-0 against Armenia in a UEFA Euro qualifiers match and everyone is celebrating. Car horns screech, fireworks blaze, crowds swarm and chant in the street. It’s primal, tribal, intoxicating in its intensity. What a powerful urge it is to be a cog in a big, baying machine, I think as I squeeze my way through the throng; that deep, primordial instinct to belong and exclude. It all seems harmless at this level. But when does this change? When does the game become reality and beeping horns morph into bombs and blocked bridges?
The next day I move to a cheaper, cleaner motel across the road run by a wiry man with a terrifying Adam’s apple and spend the afternoon chatting to people working for the European Union Rule of Law Mission (EULEX). The mission arrived in February 2008, operating under the UN to provide policing and legal support to the fledgling country. Not everyone is pleased to have them here – including members of government – seeing them as unwelcome and ineffective mediators between the state and Serbia. But without them Kosovo would arguably be in far worse shape.
‘The Kosovo government has really captured the state,’ a senior EULEX officer tells me over coffee. ‘It controls the media, money, privatisation, judicial system, everything. Rolling this back is very difficult.’
Meanwhile, everyone is leaving. Kosovans were the third largest national group seeking asylum in Germany after Syrians and Albanians in 2015, with nearly 40,000 requests. ‘At least there was vision under Yugoslavia,’ my contact says. ‘Now there is no vision – and for a lot of people, no hope. They are asking what tangible benefits independence has brought.’
Kosovo, which is 90% Albanian, unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 1998, prompting a brutal crackdown by Belgrade that ended with the intervention of Nato in 1999. Nearly two decades later, relations remain tense. Kosovo has now been recognised by 108 UN member states (56%), but Serbia still refuses to do so. Since April 2013, however, Belgrade has grudgingly accepted Pristina as a ‘legitimate governing authority’, maintaining control over only education and health.
Why is Serbia so keen to cling on, I ask? Isn’t it time to cut the cord? ‘There are lots of myths about Kosovo being a key part of its historic national identity,’ the officer tells me. ‘It also has substantial mineral wealth. And there’s the principle, of course, that unilateral declarations of independence are not acceptable.’ Most importantly, he adds, it’s a crucial negotiating tool. ‘They want to keep some leverage with the West. Especially when it comes to EU membership.’
It must be sad being Serbia, I reflect. Once a dominant drill sergeant with an iron fist and flock of pliant minions. Now, one by one they have all fled the coop, leaving it poor, humiliated and alone. It’s the tyrannical father whose kids finally work up the balls to abandon, bounding out to freedom while he screams obscenities and chases them with his battered Kalashnikov, before sinking into a bitter ball of inebriated senility and muttering phrases like ‘after all I did for them!’ and ‘they’ll be back, mark my words!’ from the folds of his baggy corduroy cardigan.
Later that night I walk to the north to meet my friend, another EULEX employee. Crossing the bridge feels like entering a new country. Here people speak Serbian, not Albanian, and use the dinar rather than the euro. Changing money isn’t a problem, however; you can do it easily on the black market with no bothersome police interference. In fact, you can do pretty much anything, within reason, according to my friend.
‘You’d be surprised what you can get away with. Changing money, driving without licence plates – nobody cares. The joke in Mitrovica is that you have to shoot three times for the police to turn up.’
It’s not a complete rule of law vacuum, he says. But it’s close. ‘If you’re looking for a terrorist recruitment region then it’s not a bad place to start. Cooperation between intelligence agencies is weak. Education is very shoddy, especially in rural areas. Religion is filling the void that communism filled before.’
Yet there’s ‘lots of resilience against extremism’, he adds. Most people are moderate Muslims, who see no contradiction between their faith and drinking, smoking and sex. ‘It’s more about culture and tradition. The main religion is Albanianism, as ethnic belonging took over from religious during the decades spent fighting against Muslim Ottoman rule.’
The Berlin of the Balkans, Mitrovice is a vibrant but confusing place. Littered with NGOs and UN agencies, its unsettled identity is forged from conflict, chaos and international interference. Plans to open the bridge are constantly postponed, while tensions simmer unchecked. ‘It’s two very different cultures and languages,’ my friend says. ‘It’s difficult to see how the north could become fully integrated.’
Before leaving for Pristina, the capital, I meet someone working on the Anti-corruption Campaign for Northern Kosovo. Investigations are currently ongoing against two-thirds of the Kosovan parliament, she says. Many of these involve the tender process. ‘Someone will give a job to his brother’s company and not even be aware he’s doing something wrong. “It’s my brother,” he’ll cry. “He’s great!”’
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) is doing its best to uncover some of the dodgy activity, but it’s not easy. Reporters work under difficult conditions, and are constantly pressured and harassed. One man was recently caught entering their office with a hand grenade, while another threatened to kidnap a reporter’s son. Meanwhile, those at the top remain untouchable. ‘We can report on mayors and ministers, but not the prime minister or president,’ the campaign officer tells me. ‘There are limits.’
After my friend leaves, I’m told my coffee has been paid for by the man at the next table. I assume it’s a come-on – Balkan men are feisty beasts when it comes to preying on weak, vulnerable fillies such as myself, I’m discovering – but it turns out it was his young son’s idea. ‘He overheard you’re a journalist and he likes journalists,’ the man tells me. Wow, I think. I wonder how long that will last?
This thoughtful little journophile is not the only Kosovan youngster I develop a soft spot for. Generally, I’m not a huge fan of kids, who I tend to view as a worryingly feckless bunch of miniature sociopaths. But dozens of them run and wave and shout cheery greetings as I cycle towards Pristina, and one even rescues my pannier after it flies off over a rogue speed-bump. During a rest stop by a school, I tell a teacher – the only person I meet who speaks English – how sweet they all seem. ‘Yes,’ she concedes. ‘They’re our best hope for the future.’ However, in many schools they are poisoned against the Serbs, she says. ‘For me there is no good nationality and bad nationality, just good people and bad people. But if you poison the children then what hope do we have?’
My first impression of Pristina is of an attractive, modern, functional place with few obvious signs of the precarious instability at its core. There are also few obvious signs of its rich history of Ottoman occupation, the city having fallen victim to the Communists’ ruthless modernisation drive. I spend an enjoyable afternoon visiting what remnants of its past remain, however – including four striking mosques, the Great Hammam (bathhouse) and the charming 18th century Emin Gjiku museum containing traditional tools, textiles, furniture, pottery, handicrafts and weaponry.
Overall, the city seems something of a muddle. A quick scoot around the centre reveals a clutter of old and new (or new and newer) buildings thrown together like clothes at a jumble sale. This is mainly due to historically lax enforcement of planning laws, I am told – as well as the fact that much of of the construction industry is controlled by the mafia, who use housing to launder their loot.
In Pristina, I meet a EULEX prosecutor for dinner near ‘small cafe street’ (roads are known by colloquial, descriptive names here), who tells me that organised crime remains a massive problem in Kosovo. ‘But rule of law is strengthening,’ he stresses. ‘Change is visible with the naked eye. You don’t need a microscope.’
The lawyer is a great fan of the Kosovan people, who he believes have ‘warm hearts and curious minds’. I find myself agreeing with him. Here, I’ve only encountered friendliness and goodwill, and I find myself reluctant to leave. But leave I must, and after just a couple of days of rest and recuperation with my lovely hosts – an American investigative journalist and Irish lawyer – I reluctantly hit the road again.
Over the next two days, I work my way across Kosovo and Serbia towards Bulgaria. Despite my intention to keep abreast of it, winter has now caught me in its spindly claws. Wind whips and blusters around me as I pedal up and down the hills towards Gjilan (dreary) and Vranje (marginally less dreary). The usual melee of half-built houses, hopeless mutts, semi-deranged livestock and dusty, ramshackle shopfronts line the road en route, and I find myself itching to reach the border.
In Vranje, I chicken out of camping as the temperature is outside my optimum range of 19-22C and instead check into by far the best budget hotel I’ve stayed at yet, boasting both clean sheets and a towel rail. To mark the occasion, I venture into town for dinner, where I am invited to join a chirpy Serb who is celebrating his 36th birthday with his brothers. He is originally from a small, east Kosovan village where Serbs and Albanians ‘live happily side by side’, and now works in a Vranje factory making heating equipment. He chats me up while showing me dozens of pictures of him and his friends feeding ducks in Geneva. ‘Serbia isn’t a good place to live,’ he says ruefully. ‘Everyone is sad. Nobody laughs enough.’
The next day I set off on a tough schlepp towards Bulgaria, along a fat, single-lane road where lorries compete to send me hurtling into the afterlife. At about the halfway point, the road starts wending uphill, following the gentle contours of a stream deep into the mountains. For the next 30km I climb and climb, my skin tingling in the sweet autumnal air. The beauty of my surroundings is invigorating, and soon the cars and houses fall away and it’s just me, the road, the sun and the sky. Then, suddenly, I’m at the top, and off I swoop down down down through the thick, sunkissed forest, the cool breeze wrapping about me like a silk chemise.
At the bottom I hit the border – and I have to admit it’s a disappointment. I am expecting some glorious Ozymandias-style relic of gnarled, rusty decline; tangled coils of symbolic barb heralding empires’ inevitable decay. But no hint remains of the Iron Curtain now. Instead, I find just a normal, uninspiring checkpoint with a smattering of pleasant guards, who unsportingly let me through without a second glance.
About 18km later, after following a lovely, leafy road through the fields, I arrive in Tran. It suddenly dawns on me that I’ve hit my 12th country out of 20 and my last fully-fledged European state. I am excited to have made it this far, and feel obliged to crack open a bottle of excellent, earthy Domaine Pesthera 2011 in celebration. What’s in store for the remaining eight countries, I wonder? Will I make it through intact? Will Maud ever truly be tamed? Will I finally be blessed with the firm, shapely calves I’ve hankered after for so long?
As I squint with my mind’s eye, however, what lays beyond the horizon remains little more than a grey smudge; a misty morning sky yet to clear. I have absolutely no idea what’s in store. Except that it’s going to be an adventure. And begin with a god-awful hangover tomorrow morning.
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]]>‘Politics, problem!’ says the man, handing me a spoon of home-made honey. ‘Corrupt-zion, problem! Arsenal, problem! Arsene Wenger, catastroph!’
P and I are at Lake Skadar, Montenegro, sampling a few of the local grapes during a week-long, bike-free holiday that my buttocks are already embracing wholeheartedly. Our host invited us in on our way past his winery and is now plying us generously with his wares. He doesn’t seem entirely happy, however, either with his country or the plight of Premiership football.
‘Mourinho, problem!’ he cries, throwing up his hands. ‘Money, big problem!’
To avoid adding thankless tourists to his problems, we buy a bottle of strong, creamy Vranac – a dry red unique to Montenegro – and extricate ourselves before the third round of rakija. We are on our way back to Virpazar from a lakeside beach in Murici, 25 km to the south. The road there was breathtaking, snaking high through the lush, luminescent hills. When we arrived we found the place almost deserted, save for a Russian in a provocative pair of speedos, some frisky goats and a tortoise.
We could have stayed longer, but sunshine and Slavic tackle is no match for our baser British instincts and we return to watch the England vs Wales rugby World Cup match. After setting up my laptop in a bar, we are joined by a couple from Leeds – and, later, by some locals intrigued by P’s unpatriotic roars of support for Wales. ‘If it was Serbia vs Montenegro, you’d never get two men at the same table supporting different teams,’ one of them says. ‘They’d kill each other!’
One of the men tells me he’s an investigative journalist. He used to work for one of the private TV channels, he says, but lost his job after producing a series exposing corruption in government. ‘This place is a disaster zone,’ he slurs tipsily. ‘Everyone leaves if they can.’
What a shame to be forced out of such a place, I think to myself. The country is tiny, with a population similar to Glasgow (620,000). Yet packed inside is a greedy abundance of natural treasures, including lakes, mountains, gorges, forests and a coastline described by Lord Byron (with just a hint of hyperbole) as the earth’s ‘most beautiful encounter between the land and the sea’.
P is equally enraptured, it seems. ‘Bloody hell,’ he says as we work our way through the vigorous greenery en route to the coast. ‘Blood-dee hell.’
The problem with having such riches at your disposal, however, is the temptation to dispose of them. And the government’s intentions are clear: turn the country into a luxury mecca for the super-rich. Porto Montenegro, an extravagant marina development part-owned by Oleg Deripaska and the Rothschilds, benefits from generous tax breaks, while the country’s show-piece hunk of real estate, Sveti Stefan, is now a five-star resort boasting rooms that would set the average Montenegrin back several months’ salary.
P and I consider staying at Sveti Stefan, but empty our pockets and realise we only have £15, some Halls mint Soothers and a puncture repair kit between us. So we go instead to Perast in the Bay of Kotor – an achingly charming town deeply influenced by its 380 years under Venetian rule – and from there move onto Tara Canyon, in Durmitor National Park.
On our way to the canyon, we are flagged down by police for speeding and hit with a €50 fine. They clocked us doing 78km/h in a 60-zone, the officer says. No arguments. To pay we have to go to the nearest big town, 20km back the way we came.
It’s clear the guy’s a maverick. There’s no way we were doing 78km/h, for a start; we were doing at least 100. But what to do? Before starting my trip, I’d made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t contribute to the crooked dealings of any country I passed through. I’m a moral person, after all, and much of my journalism has focused on corruption and fraud. I know the terrible impact it can have.
‘Can we just pay here?’ I say, handing over two €10 notes. ‘We’re in a bit of a rush.’
Minutes later we’re zooming along the road again, back on track. I watch the policemen recede in the rear-view mirror, along with the tattered remains of my integrity. Hypothetical ethics are so much easier than real ones, I mull to myself. What strength it must require to keep your hands clean. Or at least a degree of tolerance for moderate inconvenience.
At Tara Canyon – the deepest gorge in Europe (1,300m), running for 82km along the Tara River – P and I hit the canyoning trail and spend a fantastic day scrabbling our way through a magical, craggy underworld of cerulean pools, rivulets and rocks. Our guide is a PE teacher, but tells us he’s trying to get a visa for Australia. He’s desperate to leave, he says. ‘Everyone hates the government, but there’s nothing you can do. They control the jobs. You speak out, you lose everything.’
After P returns to the UK, I rekindle my strained relationship with Maud, who was cruelly abandoned in the boot of the hire car for the duration of the break (P is not an enthusiastic cyclist). Then I hit the road again towards Albania. As I leave Podgorica, I pass protesters calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic – curiously one of the richest leaders in the world, despite his £1,000 monthly salary. I then follow the Civjevna river through the mountains, beside moss, spruce and fir, while the sky burns electric blue overhead. It’s a beautiful ride and I feel the lethargy seeping slowly out of my pores.
Then, after about 28km, the road suddenly stops (see pic). I look around in panic. Where the hell has it gone? Has a mountain been built on top of it? Has Donald Trump taken over border control? I storm into a nearby house to demand answers. ‘Ah,’ a woman says, looking apologetic. ‘It hasn’t been finished yet. The only crossing is down south, by Lake Skadar.’
Oh crap, I think. Lake Skadar? That involves going almost all the way back the way I came. I look around frantically for some hapless soul I can bribe or cajole to take me through. It’s not like I have any awkward scruples left to worry about, after all. But it’s futile. The route is completely, irredeemably blocked. And I’m completely, irredeemably buggered.
So, with a heavy heart, I turn around and go back. I should probably have checked first, I think to myself. That probably would have been the sensible thing to do. Hoping I’ve learnt my lesson but knowing I almost certainly haven’t, I finally make it to Tuzi, near Lake Skadar, where I get chatting to a man in a cafe. I shouldn’t attempt to cross today, he tells me, because there’s nowhere to stay on the other side and it’s inadvisable to camp. ‘The place is full of thieves,’ he says. ‘Even locals don’t go out after 10pm.’
I’m sceptical – few prejudices are more overblown than those between neighbouring countries – but he offers to buy me lunch and I’m starving. It’s clear his motives are not entirely pure, but that’s one of the great advantages of being a woman: the exploitation of randy men. If they want to throw in their chips on the faint off-chance there’ll be a payout, that’s their gamble. They should really examine the odds more carefully.
‘The protests in Podgorica won’t come to anything,’ the man, L, says over lunch. ‘It’s just a few thousand people with nothing to lose. But most people have everything to lose. If you don’t vote for the government, you’re spent.’
It’s a strategy that seems to be working; the Democratic Party of Socialists has won every vote since the first multi-party elections of 1990. They control the politics and the courts. They control the money. ‘It’s better not to have kids at all then bring them up here,’ L says, a little fiercely.
After declining L’s selfless offer to find me a motel, I book a cheap room in town and bed down early. The next day, I leave at 8am and finally make it across the border without a hitch. In Albania, everything suddenly seems poorer; the goats scrawnier, the grass scrubbier. I meet a eight-year-old boy with bare feet who is clutching a packet of Malboro, and a leathery old crone on a bicycle who gives me a toothless grin and a carrot.
And then I see it: my biggest adversary to date. A gruelling humdinger of a hill that marks the beginning of the Prokletije mountains. The road zigzags steeply up the side of the valley for about 5km, before disappearing ominously over the top. I feel apprehensive, and stall for 20 minutes to eat my carrot and listen to a man talk unintelligibly about his chickens. Then, finally, I succumb.
For the next two hours, the hill and I do battle. It’s a true bun-burning thigh-cruncher of a climb and my body is on fire from the start. Every half-mile I stop for a short(ish) rest, but I am determined not to dismount and push. It feels somehow significant, this hill; if I can manage it, I think to myself, I can finally call myself a bummler. I can finally grow some balls and a dram of self-respect. So on I go, slogging, sweating, steaming, swearing, up and up for about 18km. And slowly, very slowly, sometimes almost moving backwards, I manage it.
At the top it feels good. Very good. And the reward is magnificent. Opening out before me is a broad, verdant gorge, and the most fiendish set of hairpins I’ve ever seen. After a well-earned breather, Maud and I rocket down with joyful abandon, only narrowly avoiding coming to a calamitous end at the bottom among a flock of errant goats. We did it, I crow jubilantly to myself! We bloody well did it!
About an hour later, however, I’m struggling again. The tarmac has run out, along with my food and water, and my wheels keep spinning hopelessly on the gravelly track. Suddenly I decide I’ve had enough, and barge into a nearby fish farm to bribe someone into taking me the final 25km to Vermosh, on the northern Albanian/Montenegrin border. They don’t understand me at first, but a simple yet sophisticated annotation seems to do the trick (see below), and eventually the man agrees.
At the next village, after firmly refusing all payment, my kindly saviour hands me over to another man who is going all the way to Vermosh. He already has three hitch-hikers in the back — an Albanian man and Israeli couple — but happily adds me to the clan. And thank god he does. It’s raining hard now and the road is just rubble, hemmed in tightly by cliffs and plunging ravines. Progress is slow, and we stop regularly to wait for bulldozers to clear the way.
After a nail-biting, two-hour drive, we finally arrive at a remote limestone farmhouse in Vermosh, where our lovely driver bids us goodbye. It’s now pitch-black and pouring, and the owners greet us warmly with a wonderful meal of homemade beef stew, goats cheese, bread and shopska salad. Then they bring out the obligatory bootleg rakija, which briefly gives me the ability to speak fluent Albanian before knocking me out for the best part of eight hours.
The next morning, after a hearty breakfast and a tour of the century-old farmhouse’s charming ‘ethnography museum’, I hit the road again towards Berane, in Montenegro. Or would if I could find one. The grounds seem to comprise one vast, lumpy, crevasse-laden mud-pit and I am forced to half-push, half-carry Maud for most of the way. Eventually we reach a small stream with no way across, and I feel myself perilously close to a tantrum. Sighing deeply and self-pityingly, I bend down and remove my socks and sandals (stop that sniggering, please — fashion is a social construct) and wade miserably across.
I’ve just dried myself off on the other side when it starts to rain, first lightly, then like a sheet. It soaks me so thoroughly that my padded underwear (I said stop that) eventually takes two whole days to dry. In the meantime, I manage to cross into Montenegro and take refuge in a small, grotty cafe in a village called Murino. As I wait by the wood-burning stove for the deluge to abate, a man approaches me with his phone. ‘Rain three days continue,’ he says, via Google Translate. ‘I take you home, protect you?’
A few hours later, I finally slosh my way to Berane. The town seems to have nothing at all to recommend it, so I set off the next morning for a very hilly ride to Rozaje, which seems slightly worse than Berane. In Rozaje, I check into Motel Milenium (sic) for a highly reasonable £10, for which I get a dynamic fuchsia pink colour scheme, dirty carpet, no curtains and a broken toilet, plus a smattering of blood and hair on the wall for no extra cost.
The next day, I tear myself away from this idyll for the final schlepp to Kosovo. It’s a lovely, soul-rejuvenating cycle, punctuated by the occasional pitch-black tunnel of doom, and I reach the Serbian border quickly. Here, for the first time, the police stop me and take me aside for questioning. They go through my passport three times, saying the name of each country slowly and quizzically. ‘Uzbekistan?’ (I nod). ‘Japan?’ (I nod again).
Then one of them taps his knees invitingly and I freeze. Oh my god, I think. He wants me to sit on his lap! I am weighing up my options — slap him? scream? oblige, then crush him with my leviathan thighs? — when he reaches over and drapes a coat across my legs. ‘Brrrrr, no?’ he says, mimicking the cold. Yes, I nod eagerly, desperately relieved. So not a sexual deviant at all, it turns out, but a considerate young man. Sometimes it’s so hard to tell them apart.
And my legs are chilly, now he comes to mention it. It’s now 14th October and winter is snapping at my heels. My plan is to keep abreast of it until I hit sunnier climes in the south, like those protagonists in films who successfully outrun tsunami waves or giant fissures in the earth before being whisked off to safety, but I clearly need to up the pace.
With this in mind, I hot-tail it the final few miles across Serbia to the Kosovo border, where I encounter the cheeriest border guard I’ve met so far. ‘Very good!’ he says approvingly, looking at my bike. ‘You will love our beautiful country!’ And seeing his big, beamish grin, I suddenly have the feeling I will.
Next post: Serbia & Kosovo. Follow my journey on Twitter or Facebook.
]]>Kostajnica, Bosnia to Podgorica, Montenegro (20 – 28 Sep)
Total miles cycled: 1,118 (1,800km)
Thigh status: Mini-Zeppalin
The best thing about camping is the joy you feel when you don’t have to do it. My first night in Bosnia is spent in a cheap motel, under a firm roof and some powerful leopard skin linen, and I awake fully refreshed. By 9am, I am en route to Prijedor, 65km away along the river.
I feel the country become gradually poorer as I ride. Houses often comprise just half-finished jumbles of brick, their windows a cluster of black, sunken eye-sockets. Farmers in flat caps pass me on horse and cart, while decrepit Ford Fiestas hoot greetings as they thunder by and veer cheerily into oncoming traffic.
It’s lunchtime by the time I pull up in Prijedor, the third largest municipality in the Republika Srpska (Serb Republic). This covers the northern and eastern regions of Bosnia and is predominantly Serb Orthodox, I learn, with a minority of Bosniak Muslims and Croat Catholics. The rest of the country falls under the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, comprising a majority of Bosniaks with a minority of Croats and Serbs.
Prijedor seems fairly nondescript as I nose briefly through the centre. However, the city reflects some of the country’s most troubling hangovers from the past. Around 5,200 Bosniaks and Croats were killed or went missing here in a mass genocide perpetrated by the Bosnian Serb army in 1992, while thousands more suffered in hellish concentration camps.
Today the city is sunny and peaceful, but I’m told that ethnic clashes have been on the rise since the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in July. I don’t hang around long to investigate, however, as I need to find a camping spot and it’s already growing dark. I berate myself for again leaving my search so late. It would take an adolescent chimp less time to learn from its mistakes than me, I muse as I frantically scan the roadside in the dimming light. And it could probably cycle faster too.
Eventually I spot what seems to be a derelict church set back from the road, and I wheel in for a look. Despite a prowling rabid mutt clearly on its third line of coke, it’s not bad at all. So just half an hour later, I’m snuggled deep inside my sleeping bag supping a nightcap of Kutjevo Grasevina 2013, a highly drinkable Croatian white (and then another — an abandoned churchyard at night is no place for abstinence).
For the second time in three days, I awake what seems like minutes later to the deafening roar of a tractor. It’s 6.15am and I stumble bleary-eyed into the daylight to find a couple of builders staring at my tent in bewilderment. I brace myself for an unpleasant exchange. What happens to trespassers in Bosnia, I wonder? Should I make a mad dash for it across the fields? Before I have time to collect myself, however, they have administered their punishment, harsher and more potent than I could have possibly imagined: a large mug of home-brewed rakija that dissolves the oesophagus and pickles the innards like a shot of sulphuric acid.
By 8am I am on the road, feeling indomitable. The sun is shining and the tight knot of anxiety curdling in my gut that I’ve become accustomed to each morning has evaporated. Early morning alcoholism, I think – where have you been all my life? I vow only to be completely sober from now on if the situation truly demands it.
It’s a short, pleasant ride to Banja Luka and I arrive by late morning. The city is the de facto capital of Republica Srpska, with large green spaces, wide boulevards and a bloody history etched deep into its masonry. Dominating the central square is the impressive Serbian Orthodox Church of Christ the Saviour (pictured), recently rebuilt after being destroyed by Croatian fascist forces in 1941. Over 2,300 Serbs were subsequently massacred and the rest sent to concentration camps.
During the Bosnian War – the conflict resulting from the country’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in 1992 – the tables were turned. Serbs expelled nearly all Bosniaks and Croats, and razed all 16 mosques to the ground. Viewing such conflicts objectively, which repeat and repeat and repeat, can we ever truly claim to be anything more than tribal beasts?
In a park beside the citadel, I stumble across a Bosnian army recruitment drive. I try out a few of their machine guns and feel a frightening surge of bloodthirsty zeal course through my veins. Humans, in all our hubris and godly aspirations, should never hold the trigger between life and death, I think to myself as I eye up a couple of howling infants in my sight-lines. It’s far too tempting to act on it.
On my way home, I bump into one of the officers, who voices his view of his country. ‘We have lots of problems,’ he tells me. ‘But your democracy is 1,000 years old. Ours is 20 years old. We just need time.’
Following a night at the ambitiously titled ‘Smile Hostel’, I set off for Zelenkovac Ecological Movement, an ecolodge-meets-art-gallery-meets-jazz-festival recommended by friends and bummel mentors Max and Emily. The ride is stunningly beautiful from start to finish, first along a river – where I take a brief detour to see the lovely Krupa Falls (pictured) – then up up up into the lush, forested hills where the air is electric and permeates the soul.
Zelenkovac proves every bit as odd and enchanting as I’d hoped. The main log cabin is a Brothers Grimm masterpiece, lovingly built up over the past 30 years by owner Borislav Jankovic. Inside is a cosy bar/gallery containing an eclectic range of Jankovic’s paintings, and surrounding the lodge are a handful of charming wooden huts for guests. As I warm myself by the fire, I am chatted up by S, a Serb who manages the place with a French couple. They all arrived several years ago and never left, he tells me over a rakija. It’s run as an NGO with grants mainly from the US, while the Bosnian government gives just enough for an occasional opportunistic photo op.
Serbs are very warm-hearted people who feel, says S. They talk to each other in bars and buy rounds for strangers. Here, when a bell is rung, everyone in the room gets a drink. What are relations like between Serbs and Bosniaks these days, I ask? ‘We are brothers,’ he says. ‘We have shared so much.’ But you were at war so recently, I say. ‘Everyone is at war sometimes,’ he replies. ‘Even the English and Scottish.’ Yes, I think. And look how that’s going.
The most important thing to him is family, S says. Next comes his country. But not the politicians, he stresses, or the policemen who have regularly beaten and arrested him since the 1990s. In his view, Serbia killed its last good president in 2003: Zoran Đinđić, the man responsible for extraditing Slobodan Milošević to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 2001.
We get onto women’s rights. He is not a feminist, he says, grimacing. He’s a ‘modern Serb’. He cooks, but refuses to wash up. ‘You think a woman can cut wood? That’s man’s work. The woman is better at other things [mimics cleaning and decorating].’
I obviously disagree, but I do partially understand the logic. In a world where manual labour dominates, it makes some sense for the man to toil outdoors while the woman pulls her weight at home. Though how hard can chopping wood be? I’m fairly sure I’d choose it over a life of domestic drudgery, given the choice. And there’s the rub, of course. Women are rarely given the choice.
Like everyone else in the Balkans, S is a smoker. As we talk, he puffs his way through an enormous box of dirt-cheap bootleg cigarettes. The warning on the packet seems to encapsulate the precarious, petty fault lines of the country perfectly: to maintain ethnic neutrality, it is written in all three national languages, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian — despite the fact the first two are identical to the letter (see pic).
In the morning, while the men are out banging their chests and wafting their testosterone around the woodpiles, I leave for Jajce. It’s another dazzling, delicious ride and I feel thoroughly revitalised by the time I arrive. It’s just as well, as I discover that the town has an intimidating 24 ‘historic monuments’ on the tourist trail. This seems a little greedy to me. Why not focus your attentions on one or two good meaty monuments, leaving scope for a restorative snifter at the end?
Usefully, however, the merit of several attractions has already been quantified for me by experts, saving me the bother. The 22m Pliva Waterfall (pictured) is ‘one of the 12 most beautiful in the world’, I am informed, whereas the medieval fortress (also pictured) displays some of the ‘most impressive views in Bosnia’. The catacombs and underground church are rather good too, but by this time I’m exhausted and decide to leave the final 19 sights for another occasion.
After a fitful night in the freezing cold campsite, listening to stray dogs howling and mauling each other to death outside my tent, I hit the road for a hefty 110km marathon to Visoko. The ride is spectacular, but involves a tough climb up a truly gargantuan hill and takes me the best part of seven hours. I am enjoying a brief rest face down on the roadside to celebrate my arrival when, as if by magic, a couple in a van pull up and ask whether I’d like a ride to Sarajevo. Why yes I would, I say! And we churn up the final 20km in minutes.
In Sarajevo, I stay with a German woman, F, who is investigating how women in the region reconcile being Muslim with being European for her PhD. ‘The interesting thing,’ she tells me, ‘is that there really isn’t any tension at all.’ A brief tour around the city, where the vast majority are Muslim, seems living proof of this hypothesis. Here, hijabs and high heels live in easy harmony, with most women dressed in modern Western attire.
Severe problems lurk beneath the surface, however. Homeless people beg on every street corner, symptomatic of the deep dysfunction at the heart of government. Corruption is rife, unemployment disastrous (27%, according to the IMF) and the economy on the verge of collapse. Everything comes at a price. ‘Bribery is completely normalised,’ says Z, a local academic. ‘People pay for university degrees and surgical procedures. To get off parking fines. To have babies.’ She adds: ‘The big malls you see here are not a sign of prosperity, they’re a sign of political deals. Nobody wants them.’
What about the looming Avaz Twist Tower, a glistening 176m phallus built in 2008 to house Dveni Avaz, Bosnia’s largest newspaper? Do people want that? Some, depending on which side of the political and ethnic divide they’re on, says B, a former editor-turned-translator. Avaz is owned by Fahrudin Radončić, who leads the second largest party in the Federation. According to an indictment by prosecutors in Kosovo, Radončić and drug trafficker Naser Kelmendi were responsible for commissioning the murder of mafia don Ramiz ‘Ćelo’ Delalić to prevent him undermining their business interests. Radončić has stressed that he himself was not indicted, but only named in the indictment as a member of a criminal organisation, which he firmly denies.
‘Politics and the media are both drawn along ethnic lines, and almost all of it is dirty,’ says B. Boundaries were far more fluid before the war, he believes. ‘People were more tolerant then. Now the country has no identity, so people search for it in their ethnicity and religion.’
The Bosnian political system was created by the 1995 Dayton Agreement that brought an end to the war. It’s a viciously complex arrangement, involving multiple layers of bureaucracy and autonomy, which nobody I meet seems entirely to understand. What people do agree on, however, is that it’s in desperate need of reform — starting with the abolition of the three separate presidencies for each ethnic group, which only serves to institutionalise sectarian divides.
According to E, a British investigative journalist, the threat of Bosnian Serb secession is very real. ‘And that would be a disaster. It would imply that the land you win through war crimes can be rightfully yours.’
I leave the next day for Podgorica, Montenegro. I have agreed to cut short my Bosnian trip to meet my boyfriend there for a holiday, so cycle 11km out of town to catch the bus. Only minibuses are making the winding, treacherous journey, it transpires, but after some persuasion the driver agrees to squeeze a dismembered Maud into the tiny boot. To celebrate, I spend my final Bosnian marks on a bar of Milka and packet of chocolate hobnobs.
Ten minutes later, the driver comes to ask for another four marks for the bike. Ah, I say apologetically. I’m afraid I’ve eaten it. I try to offer him my remaining three hobnobs, but confectionery clearly isn’t accepted as official currency on Bosnian buses. Just as I’m debating the horror of having to disembark, an old woman reaches into her purse and pays on my behalf. It’s not a small amount for her, I know, and I feel deeply touched. I give her a hug and thank her profusely. She smiles, touches her hand to her heart and says ‘Muslim’.
The next few hours are spent on an exhilarating romp through the magnificent Tara River Canyon, the deepest canyon in Europe. Jam-packed inside the sweaty bus, we recklessly rattle and swoop beside stomach-churning drops with no security barrier and often no proper road. To my surprise, however, I reach Podgorica intact and on time, and manage to cycle the final 10km to the airport before my boyfriend arrives. Success, I think exultantly! And due in no small part to my kind Muslim friend. So thank you again, lovely lady, wherever you may be. I hope life brings you all that you deserve.
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