I am writing this alone, in my sleeping bag, behind a mosque about 100 miles away from Istanbul. Alone. More on that in my special edition Coronavirus blog post.
Bulgaria. I wonder if Bulgarians are as nice a Serbians, I thought as I held on for dear life on a 15 mile off road descent down towards the Bulgarian border. We would be dipping back into the EU for a week before leaving it for good. ‘Have you got any narcotics?’, the official asked, I wish… a deserted border post, no speak of any coronavirus, let alone any kind of testing at all.
About 50 meters down the road, having eaten the only food we had left (some salami), we went into a cafe, where we were bought food, Raki, water, and some coke. Turns out they are as nice. We descended some 15 more miles and camped for the night, and planned our route into Sofia, where we would be spending a day with a lovely host, Yana.
Yana is young and let us sleep on the floor of her shared apartment; she greeted us with immediately with a beer. On her wall were the number plates of every state and country she visited on her 3 year bike tour from Alaska to Patagonia, and in her bedroom stood the bike that she rode;it cost 100€ at a car boot sale, she explained. When she ran out of money, she and a friend would set up what she called a ‘travelling kitchen’, making food and selling it on the street, but no matter how broke she was, to the locals she would always be a ‘crazy, rich gringo!’ What an inspiration, what an adventure. We drank beer and walked around the city at night, then we ate a Bulgarian kebab. Then the next night we went to her friend’s gathering a few tube stops away. Everyone said how great Plovdiv was. Okay! We’ll have two days off there then.
The ride to Plovdiv was spectacularly beautiful. Lots of mountains, lots of snow. Unfortunately, we had been killed into a false sense of security after some balmy days, during one of which I even had to put sun cream on. We were regretting this when the temperature dropped below freezing once more, and we unpacked our down jackets that had been, in my case at least, packed away for good. In Plovdiv, beautiful Plovdiv, we both had a bout of food poisoning-like illness, and spent the two days we were there being sick and worse. Thank-you, Plovdiv.
With a lot of deliberation as to which border post to attempt to enter Turkey, we decided to attempt to cross at Edirne. The migrant situation, only 20km away at the Greek border, was becoming a concern. 120,000 migrants were stuck there, prevented from entering the EU. Since there were only 3 points of entry in total, and the others were days of cycling away, we decided to give it a go.