Two bikes. Three weeks. Five countries. 5450 miles.

One of my best friends Jochen (Jockser) and I have been riding together in Ireland and the UK for several years, but strangely enough never further afield, so around Christmas 2013 we decided that we would like to do a loop of the Black Sea starting in Bucharest, Romania and travelling through Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and back into Bucharest.



Unfortunately, the ongoing situation in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea meant that we had to change our plan. Having grown up in South Armagh I initially wasn’t too worried about the Ukrainian situation, but as time went by it became clear that things weren’t going to improve and we would be wise to redraw our route.
Bucharest was fixed as our starting and finishing location as that was where our bikes were being shipped to so we looked at following our original route to ride the Transfagarasan and TransAlpina passes upon leaving Bucharest before turning south through Bulgaria into Turkey stopping at Gallipoli on the way, taking in Cappadocia and Lake Van in central Turkey then riding on into Georgia and Armenia, returning via the Black Sea coast in Turkey to Istanbul then back through Bulgaria to Bucharest.
Another consideration was to leave Bucharest and head for Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia into Greece then into Turkey, but when we worked out the mileages it was leaving us with too much to do in the three weeks that we had. We also looked at going through Iran and Azerbaijan but the cost of a carnet for what would only have been a day or two’s riding was prohibitive. Azerbaijan wanted £76 for a visa and given that we would only be there for two days at most meant that we decided not to visit there either. So this is roughly what our route would end up looking like.



The shipping of the bikes was arranged through Bike-on-Board in Dublin. That was pretty handy for Jochen as he just rode his bike to their depot in the city where it was crated and strapped in ready for transport.



I work for a transport company so had one of our little trucks collect a crate and take it to our depot in Newry where I crated the bike myself ready for transport back to Dublin the next day saving me the inconvenience of riding to Dublin then trying to get a lift back up the road home.
Both bikes were in Dublin on Thursday 15 May and we would next see them in Romania on Friday May 30th all being well.









Eventually departure day rolled around and we met up at Dublin airport for our Ryanair flight to Bucharest. All went smoothly and by 2pm local time we were walking from the terminal the 600m to the cargo terminal to be reunited with the bikes. Little over an hour after touching down in Romania we were on the bikes riding towards the southern Carpathian mountains.

Curtea de Arges was our target for today and we battled on through sometimes heavy rain and very slippery roads via Pitesti getting pretty wet in the process. That also explains the lack of pictures from our day but no doubt we'll make up for that as we go on. On arrival in Curtea we pulled in at the first hotel we saw and secured a twin room for 100Lei which is about €25, quite a reasonable rate and a perfectly functional room. The dinner was smashing. A lovely flavoursome soup followed by mixed grill Romanian style. The wine was really good, a fruity pinot noir that went very well with the dinner.






Our plan for the next day, Saturday was to ride the Transfagarasan and the TransAlpina passes but the forecast was very poor so the plan might well change. We'll see.


95 miles

Hooked already - come on Aiden get on with it!!!!!

This is gonna be great... c'mon, more please

It was a mixed bag that met us this morning when we awoke and we were still undecided on our plan for the day. The weather forecast seemed to be against us which didn't help us much at all.

Jochen had some gps stuff to sort out, so after a late breakfast it was almost 10am by the time we hit the road. We decided that since we had come this far we might as we’ll try to ride the Transfagarasan Pass at the very least, soaking be damned.






From Wikipedia..........The Transfăgărășan or DN7C is the second-highest paved road in Romania.
Also known as Ceaușescu's Folly,it was built as a strategic military route, the 90 km of twists and turns run north to south across the tallest sections of the Southern Carpathians, between the highest peak in the country, Moldoveanu, and the second highest, Negoiu. The road connects the
historic regions of Transylvania and Wallachia, and the cities of Sibiu and Pitesti.












It's often the case that when you wear waterproof clothing you end up not needing it. That was almost the case for us today, just the occaisonal light shower but nothing too bad at all really. With about ten kilometres left to the top of the pass we were riding in really heavy weather, a mixture of fog and rain, very tricky riding conditions.







500 metres from the tunnel atop the pass we came to a dead halt, the road was blocked with snow. We walked on a bit to see if we could get around it but there was no way through. And even if we had managed it there was no knowing what awaited us on the other side. So, with heavy hearts we turned the bikes around and rode the 60 miles back to where we had started this morning.





In the second pic it looks like it would be possible to ride around the snow, but what you can't see is the unhindered fall of several hundred feet doen the mountainside.

All was not lost though. Anyone reading this will know of Jochens need for tea at regular intervals throughout the day, so with that in mind we stopped at the first place we saw. Te al limone as the Italians call it served with two big wedges of warm apple cake came to about £3.50 which isn't bad. Our early steps of the day retraced we headed on south into thankfully drier and warmer climes ending up in a ropey enough hotel in Caracal. Again it is a 100 lei (€25) job, but nowhere near as good as last nights find. Still, the grub was good, £18 getting us beers, wine and two fine courses each.



Romania is a place of great contrasts, extreme poverty sits right alongside obscene new wealth. Stray dogs are everywhere in great numbers, some chase motorcycles too, but you'll see old folk with a cow on a lead??? Out in villages in the countryside everyone seems to want to live alongside the road with many of them using the location to sell their produce. Jochen bought a kilo and a quarter of fresh juicy cherries for only £1.85. We saw strawberries and cabbages for sale too.



Parts of the country are very beautiful, but the Romanians don't seem to have cottoned on to international tourism yet. Indeed, big motorcycles must be a very uncommon sight given some of the looks we have been getting from the locals, especially in the more remote regions.



The place is generally pretty unkempt to say the least, get rid of the dogs lads and tidy the place up a bit and there's money to be made. Or maybe they just want to keep the place to themselves. Still, aside from all the downsides, of which there are a few, it is an interesting country to visit and the warmth and friendliness of the Romanians has been very nice.

Tomorrow sees us into Bulgaria and also maybe on into Turkey. We'll see how it works out.


229 miles

We were breakfasted and on the road by 8.30am this morning. Yes. I know. I couldn't believe it myself to be honest. Such silliness is not in the general working (or leisure) practices of my companion. Still, it was good to be on the road early, if not a little cold.



Pretty basic, hand operated level crossing.



Through the very shabby and run-down town of Corabia and on to Tunur Magurele where we just arrived in time for a ferry across the River Danube to Bulgaria. €4 passage for the two bikes and riders.

Whilst waiting for the ferry we met a young Dutch lad who was heading for Australia on his bicycle. We had great craic with him but were happy in the end to be pressing a start button to start our next leg. We wished him well and may well see him on our way back from Georgia.









Upon landing on the Bulgarian side passport and customs formalities were dispensed with very quickly and all that was left was to pay the port tax of €0.50c each.

I have always been struck by the differences in countries in Europe when you cross a border, they just seem, well, different. And it seems that this is the case too in Eastern Europe. Only a mile or two down the road and Bulgaria looked and felt very different to Romania. Cleaner, no stray dogs and better roads were immediately apparent and had me in great form as we made our way to Pleven for a petrol stop.



As we crossed a mountain range on route 35 between Pleven and Karlovo we saw a huge arch on top of a mountain and wondered how close we could get to it. As we crested the mountain we saw a little road up to the arch and rode up for a look.



It is huge and very reminiscent of Soviet memorials. It commemorates 1878 when according to Wikipedia after the Russo-Turkish War, an autonomous Bulgarian state was created within the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. On the other side 1944 is remembered, the Bulgarian coup d'état of 1944, also known as the 9 September coup d'état was a change in the Kingdom of Bulgaria's administration and government carried out on the eve of 9 September 1944.













€3 buys a lunch of two warm sandwich rolls with two glasses of Coke in Karlovo and we decide to see if we can get across the border to Edirne in Turkey this evening.



Again the border formalities are easily dealt with helped by the fact that I had my visa bought online and also because I had bought my insurance at the duty free area before going forward to the Turkish checkpoint. The insurance was reasonable enough at €27.

Chai at the border crossing







So it has been quite a busy day for us today spanning three countries in just a couple of hundred miles. Our hotel, whilst basic enough is good value at just under £12 each. Dinner in a nice café in the town centre was only £8 or so. We are living well, and living cheaply. Happy days.











All being well tomorrow will see us visit Galipoli and the sites of the slaughter that happened there almost one hundred years ago in 1915.


310 miles

Nice one Aidan.

David Nimrod said:

This is gonna be great... c'mon, more please

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Echoed................can't wait

Fascinating....and looking forward to the next installment..

WTF? No, I mean, really, WTF?

I have been up since 7.30am drinking chai and looking outside on a virtual monsoon and the water is running down the streets. Shite.



This past half an hour I have been checking various weather websites, some telling me that it's sunny and warm and others telling me this is going to last for two days. I think we're going to head off anyway at about 9 or half past. Sure we can't stay here.



At about half ten I went out of the hotel and loaded the bike, but then it rained heavier again. By 11-15 I was going a bit stir-crazy so cajoled Jochen into heading out into the easing rain. It came on even heavier, but a few miles out of town it stopped raining altogether.



We enjoyed an hour or so of 19C temperatures and dry roads before riding under a very ominous black cloud. You could smell the rain and feel the energy of the oncoming storm in the air. And then it hit us. Hard. Very hard.



I remember six or seven years ago riding from Grantown-On-Spey to Inverness with Mandy in a dreadful storm. High winds and driving rain, a horrible evening, the sort of evening that you wouldn't put a fox out of a henhouse and I swore that that was the worst weather that I had ever rode a motorbike in. Well, today we ran that one close. Very close. I settled into a 105kph rhythm and kept her pinned but at times I could feel her aquaplaning and at times I couldn't even see where I was going. It was pretty bad alright.



We pulled in at a service station on the outskirts of Galipoli for some chai. By now it has more or less stopped raining but we spent an hour planning what we would do next. Plan formulated we saddled up again, thankfully in the dry, and headed off to see some of the memorials in the region. Like the Somme, the numbers involved are huge and the whole thing is both humbling and sobering.





The poor lads that were here one hundred years ago suffered more than just wet feet.









Visitor centre





Anzac Cove














All the historical stuff done we enjoyed a "spirited" ride round the coast of the Galipoli peninsula to Killitbahir where we boarded a ferry to Canakkale.











It's not every day that you get a ferry from Europe to Asia for £2.25 but after a quick cup of chai on board we arrived onto the Asian continent in lovely warm evening sunshine. Just in time to sort a hotel and have dinner by the sea.







Room with a view.
















144 miles

Lucky you didn't camp in Edirne, the woman that runs the only campsite there is completely bonkers (and not in a good way)

Enjoying this. Very inspirational.

Great read Aidan

Hooked!
Mark

Really enjoyable this.

No idea where you are heading tomorrow but can highly recommend this small pension on the coast - it is a "local" holiday town with good eating and overnight bike security

A quick question regarding logistics: how much did it cost to ship your bikes out to Bucharest?

Hmmm ... I had the same q in mind. Certainly beats battering down English and Continental motorways.

Kritou said:

No idea where you are heading tomorrow but can highly recommend this small pension on the coast - it is a "local" holiday town with good eating and overnight bike security

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The trip was undertaken over a month ago Kritou and I'm only just getting around to writing it up now. Thank you nonetheless.

MilkMaid said:

A quick question regarding logistics: how much did it cost to ship your bikes out to Bucharest?

Click to expand...

scotboxer said:

Hmmm ... I had the same q in mind. Certainly beats battering down English and Continental motorways.

Click to expand...

If you don't mind gents I will come back to you with all that info at the end of the report. Thanks.

Today was really only ever going to be about covering miles. The next big must do for us is to see the rock formations at Cappadoccia which is over 600 miles from Canakkale. The distances maybe don't look much on a small computer screen but this is a huge country.



Heading south we were often looking out over the Aegean Sea until we got to Egremit where we turned inland. It will be some time until we see or smell the sea again. Still, there will be plenty of lakes I'm sure.



1964 Chevrolet



Me



The roads are pretty good with many of the ones on our route being dual carraigeway. Jochen was bemoaning this today at a fuel stop but things were about to change. Just outside Bigadic road 555 changed to route 240 and what a change it was. The next 100 miles were a rollercoaster ride of a road, reasonably surfaced in places and badly broken up and potholed in others. There were tight twisties and fast open corners, pretty much everything in fact and we had a ball.









We stopped in the tiny little village of Karamanca along route 240 for some chai. The tea shop owner was very welcoming and got us sorted with the chai and a plate of fresh cherries. No English was spoken nor understood, but we got by with some German. Our host had worked in Dortmund and was telling all the old fellas in the teashop about us and our trip. Then the camera came out and the exotic visitors (us dear reader) were recorded for village posterity. 30 pence was all that our charming interlude cost us. But it was worth so much more.

Here Mehmet, do you remember the day the two Irishmen turned up on two big motorbikes...................?

Pretty good value here tonight at our hotel. A triple room with balcony, dinner and breakfast all for just under £20 or €24, whatever you're having yourself. At this rate the budget will last an extra week. Now there's a thought.

From where we are now in Afyonkarahisar it is still about 275 miles to Cappadoccia which we'll most likely wipe out tomorrow. Thursday morning should see us visit the rock formations most likely without the optional, and no doubt costly, hot air balloon ride.


345 miles

Great report so far matey, I've been looking forward to this one