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Published: March 12th 2007
Thursday March 8.
Last night I accessed my e-mails. I had e-mails from Alison, Peter and Tony. I replied and Peter replied again almost immediately. It is still amazing for me this internet.
As so usual it is difficult to get out of these cities on a bike with the roads built for cars and of motorway standard. At the start of the E80 I asked a police officer for route 8 which runs next to the motorway but he insisted that it was better to use the hard shoulder of the motorway so with some trepidation I did. Not surprisingly I made good progress but at Novi Sad I decided to go on to route 8 - a mistake. For 20 kms I tried to ride on this potholed road which made riding all but impossibe. It took 2 hours just to cover 20 kms. I rejoined the motorway and averaged 22 - 26 kms/hr and sometimes downhil I was doing 35 - 40 kms/hr.
With this progress I decided to go for Plovdiv rather than Pazardzik and I covered 164 kms.
I checked into an expensive hotel in the centre with bedroom, reception room and bathroom. The receptionist had
Potholed roads.
This is the section when I left the motorway at Novi Sad for 20 kms. Two hours I spent on this section.asked for 60 Euros but I knocked the price down as so often before and paid 25 Euros.
Friday March 9.
A somewhat boring day. The road was fairly flat so I quickly covere 150 kms to Svilengrad which is close to the border. I checked into a nice family run hotel and jumped into the shower and as often before washed my clothes. The whole room is tiled and the water goes down a hole in the floor. The clothes restricted the drainage and unknown to me the water overflowed the shelf into the bedroom and flooded the bedroom and out into the corridor! I frantically mopped up using towels and then turned up the heating to dry out the room.
My right thumb is still spit.
Saturday March 9.
I set off for the border which takes about an hour. There were lots of passport checks but everyone was courteous and helpful, especially the man who takes the money for the visa. He gave me a cup of tea and two pieces of cake. By early afternoon the trafic was getting heavy and I had long ago decided to take the train or bus to Istanbul.
On the hard shoulder of the motorway.
It is getting late on Friday so the roads to Turkey are nearly empty underlined of course by the death of Dave Cook some 15 years ago on Turkish roads. Intending to find a hotel I passed a bus station so I decided to enquire about buses to Istanbul for the next day.
One was leaving in a few minutes and it was almost empty. On went the bike and my bagage and I was in Istabul main bus station within 2 hours.
It is about 8 kms from the station to Sutanhamet for the Antique Hotel so I stupidly decided to cycle there. After 1 km I gave up, it was simply suicidal. The traffic is as bad as Cairo so I took the Metro humping my bike up and down stairs with the help of others.
I will be taking the bus out to Gerede before cycling again. I am not going to do battle with this traffic in these urban areas.
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Lindsay
non-member comment
Looks like fairly quick progress
Hi Neil, been watching this leg of your trip, since I'm due to get to Vienna in 3 days, and push on to Istanbul from there. Looks like the weather hasn't been too good though - I haven't come across any snow further west in Europe, hopefully it has all cleared by the time I get there. Looks like you had some fairly good days too, I'm tending to ride more around the 100km mark, rather than 150km. Maybe time to push myself a bit more...