I've been in Turkey now for three memorable and event filled weeks. Here is a little background and a few of the highlights.

Neither Felix (The DR650) nor I are going anywhere at present. Felix is in the hands of a mechanic in nearby Ortaca getting its 8,000 mile service. The guy’s workshop is in a local sanayi (pronounced San-eye-ee). In the UK it would be described as an industrial estate. Almost every Turkish town has one. But a sanayi's resemblance to a British industrial estate is superficial. The units are small. And their business is fixing things. If you want something fixed, there will be someone in the sanayi who can do the job. And if they can't, they will have a cousin in the next town who can. No problem!

Whether people have a dodgy modem or a thirty-year-old washing machine, they don't throw things away here; they take them to the sanayi and the sanayi fixes them, fabricating or modifying parts, as necessary. For the most part businesses here don't need to carry much stock, because there is usually someone in a nearby unit who can supply what is needed or can make it. The person you approach to do the work will take responsibility for it, but will contract out parts of the job to others as required. I'm told the system works very well, but as I discovered, it can take time if you need something unusual, and a DR650SE is pretty unusual in Turkey (in the UK, too, for that matter). Erhan, the mechanic who did the work for me, had never seen one before and appeared to be smitten. ('Lovely engine' he kept saying.) Before taking Felix to him, I had to give him three days to order an oil filter from Istanbul. And when he did start the service and found that the brake pads were badly worn and the front disc was slightly warped, I had to wait another five days (because of the week-end) while he got them, too. That's the way it works here, and I'm not complaining.

Like Felix, I've been getting about a little less than I would like because this part of Turkey is experiencing intermittent and unseasonal rainstorms. They don't last long, but they can be heavy. (And mucky too: after the last one everything was streaked with mud from the Saharan dust that sometimes blows over from Africa. I am, though, getting plenty of opportunity to relax and recharge my batteries which is what I need. I wasn't aware just how exhausted I had become. I'm eating a lot of wholesome Turkish food and seeing some of the immediate neighbourhood which is mountainous and spectacular.

Not far from the village where I'm staying is Dalayan, a tourist town with a beach where turtles come to lay their eggs. Until last year, the demands of commerce and conservation were held in a delicate balance by the municipal authorities. Coachloads of tourists came to the beach by day to sunbathe: female turtles came by night to lay their eggs. Night volunteers identified the nests and erected fences to keep the daytime tourists at bay. More recently, political shenanigans and local protests have resulted in the administration of the beach being taken out of the hands of the municipality and given to nearby Mugla university which (as is the nature of universities) doesn’t appear to know what to do with it. Service outlets and tourist numbers have declined and the fragile local economy has been affected. A drop in visitors to the beach is having a knock on effect for family restaurants, local taxi and minibus firms and their small-scale suppliers, while there have been few gains for the turtles. The babies can now incubate in a little more security, but adults are still being maimed by propellers and fishing nets. On the beach is a turtle rescue centre, which cares for sick and injured animals. It became famous recently when it successfully repaired an injury to one animal using a 3D-printed titanium jawbone.

I've been in Turkey for three weeks now. I arrived here on 11 May from northern Greece, full of dizzying excitement at the thought of exploring Istanbul. Constantinople-Byzantium-Istanbul - the threefold city. Can there be another like it? Is there anywhere on earth with such a spectacular location, or such a dazzling history? For decades, I have had an imaginative engagement with the city's exorbitant and catastrophic story.

My first night in Turkey, though, I camped just outside the city at the beach town of Silivri on the banks of the Sea of Marmara. The Sea of Marmara! I couldn't believe it; here it was, lapping placidly at my feet, the great waterway, a sea lane to Phoenician traders; Greek settlers; Roman legionaries; Persian armies; Ottoman sultans and slaves in their thousands. the Sea of Marmara has been a gateway for Russian sailors, Anatolian princes, Mongolian hordes, Byzantine patriarchs and Crusader knights. The whole of the ancient Western world tumbles together in this spot. That night I sat on the sandy beach for hour on hour watching the lights out at sea and letting my thoughts wander far and wide. Memories and feelings, hopes and dreams, facts and fantasies flowed through my thoughts. Traces of events from my past I had long since forgotten or buried surfaced here againagain. I didn't know it but I was on the point of exhaustion, and not just with all the travelling of the last two months. I was full of emotion. Tears and moments of elation came and went for reasons I could hardly explain. Watching the lights far out on the tideless waters brought back intimate memories of my grandfather and gathered his memory closer to me. Not far to the south lay the Dardanelles, where, as a Tommy in the British army he had fought, reluctantly in the first world war, a conscript in an imperial conflict he had no sympathy for. It was there he had received an 'enemy' bullet under his heart. He survived, but the wound proved to be inoperable under the conditions of the day, and he carried the bullet to the end of his life.

It may have been naïve of me to enter Istanbul, the monstrous and miraculous city, the second largest on earth, without a detailed map or a GPS, but... there it is. My plan had been to buy a map as soon as I hit the outskirts and use it to try to find my pre-booked hostel. Little did I understand at that time, that in Istanbul there are no maps, signage is incomprehensible to outsiders, traffic jams are a way of life, and homicidal driving is a permanent part of the experience. It took me eight hours, several litres of bodily fluids, and a year’s supply of adrenalin to find my way through the city's maze of streets. These are often cobbled and canted at impossible angles, with gradients never intended for motorised traffic.

It was a tedious and terrifying time (if you have ever been caught in a blitz of Turkish drivers you will understand), but once I had located the general area, I was able, by a gradual process of elimination, to use dubious or near-incomprehensible directions from a string of passers-by, to home in on my destination. I should perhaps here acknowledge a particular debt to Olaf who recognised the ‘Horizons Unlimited’ sticker on Felix and bounded up to me with great good humour to offer his help; his wife who persuaded the clerk of their hotel to provide me with detailed directions; and to Onur and Meltem, two Turkish students who early on in my quest took me under their wing and came up with a brilliant - if life-threatening - plan to get me to the right quarter of the city (It sounds easy enough, but Odysseus never had a wilder or more hair-raising time of it): follow the 86C bus.

The hostels I had booked and where I was to stay for the next four days were close to Taksim Square and the adjacent Gezi Park which, in that short space of time, I got to know extremely well. Both square and park are of huge political and emotional significance to Turks as symbols of their fight for national independence and, more recently, for their personal and collective freedom. Only two years ago the square became the focus of huge political protests that spread rapidly across the country, gathering a great deal of international media coverage as it went. Because of those events, many of the buildings surrounding the square and park, now have iconic status.

Eventually, I tore myself away from Istanbul, crossed the Bosporus bridge, and rode into Asia. That trek out of the city was one of the most miserable of my life. To avoid getting sucked back, once again, into the monstrous labyrinth, I stuck to the motorways. But motorway traffic in Istanbul crawls along at the speed of a tortoise, while motorway drivers exhibit all the manners and temperament of wild boar. Water and fruit vendors festooned with their wares made their sweaty way down between the rows of honking and jabbing cars. Pedestrians climbed over the dusty barriers and made their way listlessly across the road to god knows where, faces set, their eyes fixed and impassive. In the intolerable heat, my motorcycle gear rapidly became a personal sauna. Sweat ran down my body and dried. On either side of the carriageway, for mile after mile, tall cranes in bright, primary colours were busy raising what must be the most insolent and soulless modern high-rise development that I have ever seen. Built, it seems, for androids and not for human beings, this nightmare cityscape was a place for people to go mad in.

And beyond the city itself, there was no relief. The ugly urban sprawl continued. Clinging to the long northern shores of the Sea of Marmara, a huge industrial development scattered across the landscape all the filth and detritus of modern commercial life: dirt, dust, chunks of concrete, rusting metalwork, broken crates, half-finished and abandoned buildings, scattered panelling, patches of wasteland covered in dusty weeds and rotting brickwork: it just went on and on. Hours later, as I began to think it would never end, the world turned green and orderly once again, and the relief I experienced was like a long-wished-for release from physical pain.

Izmir, where I arrived two days later, proved to be a much kinder and comprehensible community, gentler in every way than Istanbul, its crazy, exuberant and unsleeping sister-city to the north. Navigating through it was relatively straightforward. A cheap hotel turned out to be hard to find on my first night, though, and when I did find one, proved to be little unexpected. The first indication that it was a love hotel came with the sight of the massive 'emperor'-sized bed with its tiger-skin rug. The second indication was the mirror strategically placed on the wall beside it. The clincher though was the toilet roll which was not located in the bathroom but over the bedside cabinet. I slept that night in my sleeping bag. It did the job, and for the remaining four days of my stay I found a super-friendly hostel inhabited by a lovely and fascinating group of international travellers, each with an extraordinary tale to tell. I spent my time there exploring the harbour and bazaar and taking a trip to Selcuk and the evocative remains of the Greek/Roman/Byzantine city of Ephesus.

After Izmir, I travelled slowly down the coast to Ortaca where I was to stay for a few days with friends. There were a number of possible ways to get there. I had initially chosen the fastest. A friendly and enthusiastic waiter in Izmir, though, had insisted that I should abandon this plan and take the tiny coast road that runs through Oren. I orginally determined to ignore this advice, when I got the same tip from a guy I met chilling out to rock music in a lay-by near Kusadasi. (While still talking to me, he rang his girlfriend, and with a great deal of shouting and gesticulating, told her that he had just met a madman who was planning to ride a motorcycle to Kazakhstan). Two unforced and enthusiastic recommendations cannot be ignored, so I went with the advice.,/p>

Minor roads, though, can be hard to find and as a result, this part of the trip turned out to be somewhat adventuresome. (Having no detailed map and no GPS are always good preconditions for an adventure.) Before finding the right road, I turned down several wrong ones, the last of which gradually broke up till it became a non-road, and then hardly more than a pile of rubble. And it was there on a hairpin bend that I took my second tumble on Felix. Neither the bike nor I were injured, so the only damage was to my ego. Once on the right road, though, the advice I received proved to be excellent. I think it would be hard to find a more beautiful and spectacular mountain road anywhere on earth than the wild little single-track road from Oren to Mugla, or one that was so much fun to ride on a motorcycle.

And once I had reached the road's end and turned onto major roads near Mugla the surprises continued. This stretch of the D500 must rank as one of the world's most dramatic motorway experiences as it careers down the almost sheer face of the mountainside in tight sweeping arcs giving dizzying views of the coast and coastal peninsulas below.

It was after dark that I arrived at the home of friends near Ortaca, in a state of manic excitement over everything that I had seen and had happened that day and in the days preceding it. I babbled on late into the night. Now, though, I’m now appreciating the opportunity to recover from what has been a sometimes traumatic but always exhilarating couple of weeks.

Unlimited Horizons

I'm writing this from a hotel room in Macedonia, a vast and rambling edifice tucked away in a fold in the hills, designed partly in the grand manner, and partly put together by string and sticky tape. How its endless corridors and crazy staircases connect with one another, I'm still to find out. It's the sort of place where, with a little imagination, you might hear the swish of evening gowns in the corridors, and catch a fleeting glimpse of the Princess Dragomirov in the restaurant. The hotel is my latest overnight stop on a motorcycle journey which has already taken me through much of South-Eastern Europe (the Balkans), and if all goes to plan, will take me through Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, Western Russia, the Ukraine and then some of northern and central Europe on my way back home. The plan, though, changes every day. As do my encounters with places and people. This afternoon, in eastern Macedonia, I met Niko, a young rice farmer. Niko was waiting at a bus stop to collect his father, home from Slovenia where he had been working (over the winter period, I presumed, when there is little labour needed here in the Macedonian rice fields). 'It's a good living, here,' Niko said. I could believe it. It also seemed a good way to live. As the light declined, a solitary figure was casting seed by hand into his flooded field. Tractors rumbled up and down the roads and into nearby villages. People shouted greetings to one another. On such a quiet evening, this corner of Macedonia seems a peaceful place. 'Do you like Macedonia?' Niko asked. 'People are friendly here. And the mountains; they are beautiful.' He pointed across the wide open plain to the line of low peaks and gentle slopes beyond. He was right; they are beautiful, and gentle, too. A bus pulled up at the side of the road and its door puffed open. And older man, strongly built with a face full of experience, stepped down, and Niko introduced me to his father. After a brief exchange, Niko invited me for schnapps, an offer which, with great regret, I declined. I cracked a rib while riding through Italy and have been forbidden to mix the medication with alcohol. And the truth is I have extremely poor brains for alcohol. Riding and drinking do not go together with me very well. I liked these people and would have appreciated a chance to get to know them better. But they have my contact details. I've had many memorable encounters since I began this journey in April. A few weeks ago I met Boro high in the mountains of Montenegro. Boro had just purchased a small piece of land, squeezed between the road and the lower mountain slopes. He was finding his excitement and pleasure hard to contain. Though I was tired and would have been happy to camp on the lower terrace, he insisted on taking me and my camping gear up to the highest one so that I would have the best view. He swept his hand across the scene, a full 180 degrees. 'Panorama' he said. He pointed out his haystack, which had hay stacked around a pole set in the ground, a traditional construction in these parts. He explained that it wasn't really a haystack, but a rumpy pumpy pole. Montenegrans like 'natural' sex apparently or, at least, Boro does. His arms windmilled. It set me wondering whether the horizontal racks that Slovenian farmers build to make their haystacks have had an influence in that country's sexual practices, too. Two days ago in Albania I met Klinton, a twenty-something who is studying at the University of Tirana. Klinton had been summoned by two friends who worked in a cafe in the town of Lac where I had stopped to ask the way. Klinton spoke English and was needed to come and sort out a crazy British motorcyclist bent on getting to Russia, but who had ended up in a cul-de-sac in Albania. He arrived at the cafe in his car where I was drinking tea and refused to leave me until he had guided me out of the town for several kilometers, put me on the right road and made sure I was going in the right direction. He dismissed my thanks, describing his actions as a simple matter of 'respect'. It was in Albania, too, that I met the Dutch family Wesselingh - mother father and three children (and until her recent death, a grandmother too) - not so much a family, more a social project or a way of life. For 20 years the family has devoted itself to helping members of the local community establish some sort of life for themselves as they and the country emerged from a period of intense poverty. They baked loves in their kitchens for the hungry and destitute, rebuilt a maternity unit and restored people's houses after a disastrous flood. They now run an extensive recycling project, as well as a campsite and an organic restaurant to help attract tourism to the area and create employment. They still feed old people with no family to support them. Meeting them was a chance encounter as was my meeting with Aco, way up in the mountain town of Cetinje. I'd knocked on the door of Aco's soba (B&B) looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Aco was an engineer and had been a keen motorcyclist in his youth. His father, too, had been a motorcylist, a professional sports rider. Huge pipes were being installed under the road where Aco lived and the whole area had been dug up. To get my DR650 into his garage, I had to negotiate an open drain and do a little off-roading across a pile of builders' rubble. In Croatia I met Ana who told me about her family who had lived through the siege of Dubrovnik and how it had affected their lives. People are rebuilding their lives, but there is still a lack of trust especially among the older generation. She thought, though, that younger people like herself have a more nuanced understanding of events. And that was good. In Italy, I ran into Alfredo who ran a hostel occupied in the main by young men from Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for a new life. These are encounters and experiences that could only have occurred on this journey. They are all different, but each one, in its own way, has challenged my preconceptions of people and cultures. Everywhere I have travelled so far, I have had my expectations altered, and my journey has only just begun. Friends sometimes say of me, in a kindly way, that I'm not really connected with the 'real' world. But I'm not sure which 'real world' they are talking about. I've dreamed about doing a trip like this since I was in my teens, which is now a fair few decades ago. Even now, it would probably never have happened without the encouragement and example of other overland motorcyclists, many of whom I met through Horizons Unlimited. So, this blog entry is in part a big thank you to all those Horizons riders wherever they now are who made me believe that doing something like this was actually possible, and that I didn't need to be a Commando or street-fighter to survive it. Since going to the Horizons annual meet in the UK, I've discovered a big friendly open family. So, thanks everyone for all the inspiration, the help, advice and information. And if anyone reading this has ever dreamed of riding a motorcycle to distant parts or even to Western Europe, these are the people to speak to. Check them out.

Go to Horizons Unlimited, the website that's all about motorcycle travel. Travellers Community, Bike Travel information on the Bulletin Board, free Monthly Motorcycle Travel E-zine, Travellers' Stories, and plenty of tips and info!

This little guy was standing at a motorway junction trying to sell baby rabbits to passing motorists. He tried to sell me one. He didn't appear to see the problem. I gave him a Euro for letting me take his photo. He accepted it, but reluctantly. He seemed offended.

This is a Ukranian guy on holiday with his wife in Montenegro. He stopped me to ask me for directions, which I was actually able to give him. He asked where I was going. His wife insisted on taking a photo of the 'heroic' motorcyclist. At last, I'm somebody's hero.

This is Klinton. I'd stopped at a cafe in Albania to ask directions. Neither of the youngsters spoke English, so they summoned Klinton by phone to come and sort out the crazy English motorcyclist. He arrived a few minutes later in his car. We chatted at the cafe table for fifteen minutes while I drank my tea. He then drove several kilometers to show me the way to the right road. He wouldn't leave me until he was sure I was on my way and going in the right direction.

This is Aco and his wife who put me up, and encouraged me to do some off roading down some roadworks near his home. His father was a professional motorcyclist in the Montenegran team, which, if I recall, was quite famous in its day.

I'm not sure if you can see the fireflies in this. You may need to expand it. I tried to capture them, but the photo doesn't do justice to how magical they actually were.

This is my first view of Albania taken from a mountainside in Montenegro

It's a blisteringly hot day. You are an elderly Montenegran couple. You take the car out into the country and leave it by the side of the road, put on your walking gear and go for a walk. What must you remember to do? Clearly you must leave all the doors and windows open to make sure the car doesn't overheat. Different world!

If I were ever to win one of those TV quizzes where you get to select a prize, I think I would probably not choose a motorcycling weekend in Prishtine, at least, not if there were any chance of rain. When I crossed over into Kosovo from Albania this morning, the weather was cooler than yesterday, but still warm and fair. It looked like it was going to be a fine day. My plan of travel was straightforward: I would take the motorway directly to the Kosovan capital of Prishtine which is located in the dead centre of the country, find a bank, get some Euros, the official currency of Kosovo, and use some of those Euros to pay for a meal. I'd then head due south to the border crossing over into Macedonia that evening, changing my remaining Euros into Dinar when I got there. It was a simple plan. But not one which had considered the possibility of a major downpour, nor had any realistic concept of what riding a motorcycle in Prishtine might mean. Within minutes of my crossing into Kosovo, the skies darkened, and the rain came down in great grey sheets, so by the time I hit Prishtine's six-lane traffic jams and experienced its inch-of-your-life driving, I was already tired, hungry, soaked and chilled. It was not a good start. A principle or point of honour that seems to be applied by all motorists in South-East Europe is that rules belong to the authorities and are there to be broken by everyone else, and this principle is nowhere more ruthlessly observed than in Prishtine. The number of near escapes I had in this city has left me with enough motorcycling stories to last me the rest of my life (and for a traumatising ninety minutes this afternoon my life seemed likely to be a short one). But it wasn't just the crazy drivers that tested my nerve to breaking point; it was the downpour that made lakes and rivers of what had once been roads, and the great, drenching arcs of spray thrown up by traffic in neighbouring lanes. It was the mud washed down into the streets by the flood waters, and the rubble from the building sites washed down with the mud. It was the hundreds of sunken manhole covers, and the giant potholes laying in wait under the dirty waters. It was the metal cats' eyes, lethal proturusions, which stood a full inch proud of the road at crossings. And above all it was the steep, steep hills where the slippery roads offered no grip whatever, every time I was forced to put my boots to the ground by the creeping traffic. Within minutes of entering the city I had lost track of where I was, and had no idea where I was going. I needed desperately to stop and take stock, but there was little opportunity to park a motorcycle here, even briefly, and especially a fussy motorcycle like Felix that will fall sideways where the camber drops to the right, or will roll forward when parked facing down hill, even if left in gear. When I did manage to find and pull into a bus stop to gather my wits (the bus stop was already packed with parked cars, forcing the buses to stop in the middle of the road) the lining in one soaking-wet glove decided to pull loose, stranding me for an additional half-hour in the pouring rain while I tried to get it back onto my hand. After that, I gave up looking for banks, since none of the banks had parking spaces. And I gave up looking for parking spaces because they were all inaccessible or already crammed full. I even gave up looking for signs to Skopje. I had just one thought in my head - to get out of this town and I didn't care how I did it or what direction I did it in. And despite everything I could do, it still took another half-hour of defensive riding in this stop-go, horn-honking chaos before I extricated myself from the city centre, the traffic started to thin and my adrenalin levels began to fall. I pulled in to the forecourt of the first out-of-town service station, and headed for the cafe/restaurant. I've rarely felt more relived to squelch into a seat and order a cup of tea. That was enough. Just to be out of that mayhem was enough. It meant, at least life (mine) would continue for one more day. As the stress and numbness drained from me, it became clear, though, that I also needed to eat, and soon. But that meant, I needed Euros. I had Croatian Kuna sitting uselessly in my wallet, and I had Albanian Leks, but I had no Euros. I fished around in my pockets for evidence of loose change and, as luck would have it, found six one-Euro coins. That, too, was enough. In Kosovo, six Euros will buy you a lot. It will certainly buy you a meal. (I still feel as though I'm cheating people, paying them so little for things.) Before ordering, though, I had to go through my life-saving ritual of showing the waiter a Google translation of 'I am allergic to milk, butter, cheese, cream, yoghurt, nuts and seeds' on my smartphone. This usually works well, but on this occasion the waiter was puzzled. He called over a colleague, and then another. Within the minute, I had a committee of four debating my message. Eventually, one of them pointed to the smart phone and said: 'Serbo-Croat!' I nodded. 'You have Albanian?' he said. How stupid and disrespectful to visit a country and not know what language people spoke. When the job was done and I was satisfied no-one was going to poison me, I ordered a huge plate hot chicken salad, and an even bigger plate of spiced rice, and then washed it all down with two cups of tea. The bill came to four Euros (about £2.80) As the laws of chance would have it, when I'd made my emergency exit of Prishtine, I'd come out on the wrong side of the city. Access to my route meant I'd have to brave the centre once again. But I'd now re-energised myself and restored my wits, the rain had stopped, the roads had cleared and I had a feasible plan. I'd eaten, so I could forget about getting Euros, at least, for now. I could forget about everything apart from finding my road. Riding back across the city wasn't a fun experience, and I had my closest call of all during that ride on a crazy roundabout right in the centre, but my nerves survived intact. The A2, when I did find it, was a scruffy little road, looking like a line of crazy paving with unfinished borders and an occasional trench scooped out of it. But it ran directly from Prishtine down to Skopje in Macedonia, and that's where I needed to go. On leaving the city, it headed out across a wide plain towards a distant line of fearsome-looking mountains, their sharp peaks still zebra striped with snow. Before it could reach those mountains, though, it was forced to run the gauntlet of an uninterrupted 40-kilometer ribbon development of new and half-built stores, hotels, restaurants and commercial enterprises of all kinds. Here was the soulless and probably unsustainable outcome of Kosovo's new, unregulated capitalist economy, a human and ecological catastrophe. For me, the absurdity and ugliness of it all was symbolised by the petrol stations. Three or four massive stations with huge canopies, sometimes standing side by side, were touting for your business on every single kilometer of that desperate little road - hundreds of them, all in competition with one another. There was no relief from this commercial overdrive anywhere along the road's entire 40 km length. The only indication, in fact, that you were in a town with a recognised identity and name, was that the density of new-build alongside the road increased slightly. For the first time since passing through parts of Northern Italy, I began to feel weary and depressed. So, it was with some relief when I eventually reached the mountains, and the road turned east to ascend a pass. Here the scenery changed from commercial post-modern chaos to forested hillsides and steep river gorges. This was a very beautiful part of the country. I stopped off in a small town close to the Macedonian border because I'd seen an ATM, and didn't realise until I got off the bike how tired I feltI. Asking at a local supermarket if there were any rooms to be had in town, I was directed to a local hotel. I'm now sitting on the carpet of a room in that hotel which I've taken for the night. The floor space of the room is somewhat larger than the floor space of my entire house back home in Hertfordshire. To occupy it fior one night has cost me £14. There don't seem to be any other guests. Down on the first floor there is a huge and very empty dining room. The only other person in the building as far as I can tell, is a young man who sits in a corner of the king-sized bar in a padded jacket watching football on television. If I need anything, I'm told, he is the person I must ask. He speaks no English and gets easily flustered. The entrance hall, the dining room, my room and the corridors that lead to it are all painted brilliant white. The bedspread, too, is white, as is the tiling in the bathroom. I feel like I'm living a scene from 'The Shining'.

I’m blogging this Sunday evening from the home of Aco and Nevenka. Aco is in his early 70s perhaps: it's hard to tell. He's wiry, strong as an ox, and has an easy laugh. He was an engineer (though ‘was’ is probably a little premature: the contents of his garage - tools and machinery - would make any practical man weep). Nevenka restores furniture and paints, and is as lively and as much fun as her old man. Aco speaks little English, but makes up for it with an engineer's ingenuity. We communicate fine. Aco runs his house as a Soba, which here in Montenegro is equivalent to a B&B except that for £11 a night I get a very comfortable bedroom, an en suite shower, and small separate kitchen with all facilities including as much Chai as an Englishman can drink. I also get entertained by this amazing pair. It was very easy decision to install myself in this comfortable little flat for the night; getting Felix, my 2014 DR650, into Aco's garage proved a little more complicated. Aco’s house is just off the main drag in Cetinje, and his street is currently being dug up. The first problem, then, was that the footpath, the only remaining access to his garage was now an obstacle course of rubble mounds. The second problem was that running alongside the main road and therefore across the entrance to the footpath was a large open drain. When I pointed out the drain to him, Aco's response was ‘No problem'. ‘No way’, I thought. I learned later that Aco had been a enthusiastic motorcylist, and his father had been a professional sports rider for the Montenegran team. I, on the other hand am not a confident off-road rider. And although I've ridden on a fair bit of gravel, I've never got used to it. While I was debating how I was going to talk my way out of this, Aco picked up a portable Stop sign in front of the road works, and started examining it. You know the sign: it’s the universal, red, eight-sided sign that tells you to stop and think before you act. It was a second before I realised what he was intending. Carefully, he laid it across the drain in front of the footpath, jumped up and down on it a couple of times and repeated: ‘no problem’. I was still debating with myself whether this was a good idea as I crossed over the road to Felix. Could I trust Aco's judgement on this and more to the point, could I could trust my own nerve? How available was my inner teenager? Very available, as it turned out. I knew that even if the DR's rider sometimes let it down, it would have no problem with this. I fired him up, disengaged my brain, and headed for the drain. No problem. Job done, the sign was returned, now somewhat kinked, to its former use. With sufficient adrenalin in my system, the rubble mounds proved very little problem and I arrived at the garage upright and in one piece. Aco mumbled something in his broken English which took me a moment to decipher. I then realised: ‘Paris-Dakar’. I arrived in Montenegro last night, stayed at a campsite and then headed for the Bay of Kotor. The air in the bay is damp and the land is green. The entire bay is surrounded by high mountains, which plunge down into permanently calm waters, leaving just enough room for the road to skirt the bay. Here and there, where a river has gouged out a little valley for itself in the mountainside, small towns have sprung up. Some, in ancient times were Greek colonies, and the Romans were here too. All the towns I passed looked a little run down, and dismal. Many tourists come here in the summer, but there has been no commercialisation. The one modern-looking hotel complex, when looked at closely, appeared dirty and neglected. This is a poor country with little capital to build infrastructure. Arriving in the town of Kotor, then, gave me something of a surprise. Kotor is a prosperous port with deep harbour, pavement café’s and a booming tourist trade. It has ancient walls that surround the old city at sea level and climb high up the mountain beyond, presumably to prevent an attack from above. I’m already way behind the schedule I set for myself, but I couldn’t help stopping here and having a meal in a pavement café overlooking the bay. Eating at pavement café’s in a hot sun is a temptation I can rarely resist. Beyond Kotor the road charges uphill for fourteen kilometres to one of the highest passes I’ve crossed so far. I was told in advance that it had a total of 27 hairpin bends. It wasn’t told however, that these are only the hairpin bends on the final ascent. None of the other hairpin bends and near hairpin bends in the lower part of the road were mentioned. (And by 'the lower part', I mean the part I managed to ride before my ears popped). The right-handers were nerve racking. I wasn’t concerned so much about getting round, - that was easy enough - it was getting round when there was a car coming the other way. Here as elsewhere in South-East Europe, drivers don’t always stick to their own side of the road. And I sometimes rode wide, too. At the top of the pass I stopped at a restaurant with terraces giving spectacular views of the valleys, the lower mountains, and the entire bay. After the ascent, I decided it was necessary to have another meal. And while eating, I got into a conversation with a group of Italian bikers who were travelling around visiting war memorials in the region. Beyond the pass, the road dips down again into the village of Njegusi which sits in a hollow in the top of the mountain. It’s an idyllic-looking place at this time of the year, but hell in the winter, I imagine. The houses all have very thick walls. After Njegusi, the road continues to twist and turn for another 10 kilometres down into Cetinje. The landscape on this side of the mountain is entirely different. Peaks extend beyond peaks into the distance. The rocks and small trees make this road exquisitely beautiful. There is nothing I know in the Alps that can even begin to compare with it. Cetinje is a big town, located high up in the hills. It once the royal capital of a mountain kingdom. Set away from the lowland areas, no one speaks English here. I picked up a few groceries as I passed through, and carried on, intending to camp wild in the valley beyond. A couple of miles along the main highway to Podgoricia, the capital, I turned down the steep hillsides on a windy, single-track roadsides that drove ever deeper into the mountain forests. After 8 kilometres, though, it became very clear that I would find nowhere to camp here tonight. The road clung to the hillside and nowhere was there any flat land. The only village I saw was a tiny community cut into the slope. I turned back to Cetinje hoping to get back before dark – which is how I met Ato and his daughter, two of the most genial and funny people I have met on the whole trip – and that is saying a great deal.

Slovenia - or possibly Narnia. I'm not sure.

Postojna caves, Slovenia

Udine in Northern Italy, featuring 'hoppy' (my name), the golden angel - the biggest weather vane I've ever seen,

I’m holed up in a cheap, family-run hotel in Zadar, Croatia listening to the drunken singing of a wedding party down in the restaurant. For the last half hour, the guests have been lurching their way through a string of pop favourites. Out in the car park they are making short work of a hog roast. How exotic is that? So unlike customs in England that we Brits all know and love (!) On entering Slovenia I imagined I had accidentally stepped out of the world and into Narnia (an impression that lasted as long as I stayed up in the mountains). Crossing the border into Croatia, however, I felt more like I was on a trip to Stevenage. Croatia is as different to Slovenia as E M Forster is to Jeremy Clarkson. In Rijeka, Croatia, I saw women so brassy-looking that I had to blink. Some had such stony faces you could whet a knife on them. The place was full of plain or punky teenagers and men in tank tops and skinny jeans, and all the usual displays of urban masculinity. The loo walls of the restaurant where I had lunch were adorned with a giant mural of Andy Capp worshiping a pint of beer. Not far outside the town I passed the Garfield restaurant and was shortly afterwards almost taken out by a car with My Little Pony shades in the windows. That all said, the coastline of Croatia is spectacular, and the motorways that span its gorges and tunnel under its mountains are magnificent pieces of engineering. One thing is sure here, Croatian bikers are unlikely to square off their tyres even on the motorways. The twisty coast and mountain roads are a joy to ride. Roads like this make even top-heavy Felix feel like it is flying. Felix is the DR650, by the way. (It revealed its name to me last week.) And on these roads there are hundreds of bikers: super-cool riders on custom bikes, ‘committed’ superbike riders with arses in the air and loads of couples riding two-up on BMWs The speed limits are very restrictive here, but that hardly matters since there are no speed cameras and no police, so no-one takes the slightest notice of them. Unless you ride at least 15km an hour faster than the posted limits you will be overtaken by a local driver – no question. And you would be unwise to assume than when said driver does overtake he will recognise that you have a physical need to occupy space. I’ve had some very close shaves here already. I suspect swapping paintwork is a common experience in Croatia. I stopped off for a cup of tea at Senj, a coastal town which seems to be a popular spot with bikers, and fell immediately into conversation with Wojciech. Wojciech was lounging in a local bar when I met him, chilling out for all of one day, having ridden down from Poland in two days on his Varadero – and planning to ride back in two more. I’m taking nine months to do this journey; at his rate I would do it a little over two weeks. We chatted in broken English and managed to communicate for a couple of hours with lots of hand signals, and generally hit it off. He wanted to ride down to Split with me. I wasn’t sure about that. I think there might be a few issues about pace and compatible riding styles. On another bike and without a cracked rib, it might have been fun. We swapped addresses though, and promised to think about a joint European trip next year. After that, fate lent a helping hand. I took the wrong road out of Senj, and instead of continuing along the coast as planned, found myself riding up into the mountains. According to the map, the two roads met up some seventy kilometres to the south. So I decided to carry on and make a detour. The mountain road climbed steeply, twisting continuously around the contours of the hills. The air grew cool and fresh, helping my contracted lungs, and the mountain forests that lay everywhere about were beautiful. At the top of the climb, the forests retreated and the road levelled out onto a high mountain plateau dotted with farming communities and small towns, a very different world from that of the coast with its souvenir shops, restaurants and bars. As time went by, though, the towns grew fewer and smaller, becoming little more than tiny hamlets: a string of isolated buildings strung out along the road. In one lonely area of rocky pasture, I rode past a vaguely military vehicle in camouflage colours, permanently set up by the side of the road and accompanied with crosses and signboards. I was getting too cold and hungry so I didn't stop to investigate, but I wondered if it was a memorial to the Balkan conflicts of recent years. That thought was reinforced a few kilometres down the road when I began to see ruined and deserted houses, just a few at first, and then dozens of them. Some had mature trees growing out of them and were clearly abandoned long ago, but others looked as though they had been recently occupied. I couldn’t tell whether this was the result of rural depopulation, or military conflict. [On arriving later in Zadar I looked up Gospic, the main town in the region and, sure enough, up came the 'Battle of Gospic'. There was a battle here between the 'Yugoslav People's Army and the 'Croatian National Guard, and there were massacres in villages all along the road I was travelling.] It reminded me that despite the sunny, Mediterranean climate and the tourist traps on the coast, the Balkans are one of the especially tragic parts of the world - like Wojciech’s Poland. The old people up here will have seen a great deal of violence in their life-times and been affected by it. The youngsters will know nothing of it, but they will hear the stories, and carry those stories into adult life. Their lives and identities will be defined by them. In circumstances like this, it takes a lot of courage and a widening of experience, to throw off the constraints of our early ideologies. By six o'clock my ribs and chest had started to spasm again (that seems to be a pattern), and it was becoming painful to pilot the bike. I needed to find a campsite or cheap hotel quickly for the night, and it was clear that wasn't going to happen in this remote region. Fortunately the motorway down to Zadar on the coast runs along this part of the plateau, too. I didn’t want to leave these little roads, but had little practical choice! I made for the coast at top speed and then enquired at the first cheap looking stop-over place I could find. Here in the hotel, the ‘singing’ continues, each enthusiastic number, now concluding with loud, self-congratulatory cheers. How long this will go on for is anyone’s guess. I don’t think I’m going to get much sleep tonight. (No wonder the receptionist was willing to bargain for the price of the room.) But what the hell: a happy life to the bride and groom, whoever they may be. They're the ones taking the big risk, I think.

Half an hour ago at a campsite near Bovec in Slovenia a couple walking their dog gave me an enquiring look as I was putting up my tent. I smiled a hello. “You are a long way from home,” they said in English, pointing to the GB sticker on the back of my motorcycle. And it was true, I was feeling a long way from home in more ways than one. I crossed the border from Slovenia just five hours ago and I already feel overwhelmed by this place: by the sheer beauty of it, by the slow and easy pace of life here and by the unaffected kindness of the people. After the interminable commercial landscapes of Northern Italy, I was completely unprepared for this. I've spend the last three days in Udine, in the Italian province of Friuli. This was unexpected, an enforced break following a minor accident on the bike in which I cracked a rib. I don't think it's a serious injury, but it was painful, and while the muscles around the bone were spasming it was dangerous to ride. The spasms haven't entirely stopped, but they are a lot better and this morning I decided to carry one with the journey. I headed east, across the valley floor towards the distant mountains on the Slovenian border. I had no idea until now that mountains could be so varied. These borderlands are a world of near vertical crags and steep-sided valleys, so quiet, it was like entering a fable. All the stresses of the last few days began to dissolve, as the peace and silence of these mountains sank deeply into me. At some point on this journey, I crossed the Italian-Slovenian border. The border here is an entirely social entity, existing somewhere into the law books of various government bodies and in the minds of the modern robber barons they represent. It is marked in physical reality only by a sign that welcomed me, in various languages, to Slovenia. There were no guards, no border post, nothing - just a sign. At first, the slow pace of life here was not apparent as there was no one to be seen. The grassy meadows and sunny hillsides, the towns and roads were entirely deserted for kilometer after kilometer. The only cars I saw had Italian registration plates. And I saw only one old man on a motor mower. And yet the effects of human ordering of the land are everywhere. When at last I did at last arrive at a town, a mountain-sport centre with a heady buzz to it, full of outdoor types, brimming with health and fitness, it came as an almost physical shock. It was here, that I realised that in crossing over an unmarked border, I had taken a further step outside my comfort zone. Leaving England for France required only minor adjustments. I can get buy quite nicely in French. Italian poses few problems for someone who knows English and French and learned Latin as a schoolboy. But with the change from a romance to a slavic vocabulary, a change I had anticipated but not prepared for, I was lost. Nothing was familiar, and my few words of Russian were of little use. For someone like me with serious allergies who has to know in detail what he is ordering or buying, that makes life complex and potentially fraught with difficulties. My new smartphone with its translation ap, was a useful though tedious tool, helping me to understand ingredients labels on processed foods, but I got through this first social problem thanks, rather, to the natural friendliness of the people. On explaining my dietary needs to the owner of a bar serving food, she told me that unfortunately they could not be met. All her sandwiches came pre-made with cheese. (The Italian influence in this border town is still strong.) But then, to my surprise, she then suggested that I take a trip over to the supermarket opposite, buy something to make some sandwiches. I could then bring everything back to the bar and assemble and eat it at her tables – an offer I duly accepted. Without being asked, she then produced a pair of scissors, so that I could open a packet of smoked salmon, I’d bought. Such eager and unforced kindness is something I’m frankly not used to. I was moved to mention it to her when I left and offered her my appreciation. I'm beginning to understand just how dependent on the kindness of strangers a solo traveller actually is. ‘Oh it’s just my job,’ she said with as laugh, which is true, of course, but the same is also true of bar owners the world over who might learn a thing or two about regaining the human values the commerical motive has crushed out of them. She added though, “And I like to talk and be kind’ which I suspect came closer to the underlying reality. And it was a truth I found to be repeated several times more in my short time here. As the mountains grew higher and more elegant by the minute, and the beautiful and empty twisting roads of Slovenia drew me further into this unexpected land, I had several other encounters of this kind, from the shopkeeper who offered me a naïve kind of temporary friendship for ten minutes when I went to buy a bottle of water in his shop, to the camp-site attendant, who returned to me unbidden several times with bits of useful information because he wanted to make sure I had a good night. There is a kind of grace to people here that I have not met elsewhere. I'm looking forward to tomorrow. The cracked rib has had unexpected consequences. It made me slow down. I've always understood that all journeys really take place inside, but I now know that to make a journey it is not the same as to travel. Staying put can be part of the experience too. 'No hurry; in your own time' seems to be a common phrase here.' I've always been slow to do things. I need to recognise that is my pace and be true to it.

It seems hard to believe that it was only two days ago that I rode through the Mont Blanc tunnel and found myself in Italy. A dozen or so miles of burrowing through a mountain and I find myself in another country, grappling with another language and another culture, another people with another set of historical identities. The road on the Italian side wanted to take me me to Aosta, so that’s where I went. Taking the autostrada rather than the old road was a mistake though. For most of its length it tunnelled its way with ruthless efficiency through the mountain spurs one after the other, giving only brief glimpses in between, of the daylight and the valley. I began to feel a bit like Gollum, hiding away from all this sunshine. I decided at that moment that I’d had enough of autoroutes. After days and evenings spent among the seemingly quiet and orderly way of life of French provincial towns, with their easygoing politesse, Aosta came as a shock. Aosta was busy, anarchic, scruffy, excitable, and above all, I told myself, Italian. How much of all this was expectation and projection, I‘m not sure. There was no mistaking that this was an Italian town, though, as every tenth person I passed was licking ice cream and every twentieth shop I passed was a gelateria. Even some of the bars were selling multi-coloured ices. The narrow streets echoed to people’s voices and footfalls in the way that ancient Italian cities often do. In half an hour the impression of scruffiness and disorder diminished. The city centre is full of tall plain buildings intersected by tiny alleyways. It is all obviously old but well-kept and painted in Mediterranean colours. These ancient shells, I quickly discovered housed modern boutiques and businesses, and life here is lively and modern. I walked the length of the city centre enjoying the buzz of it all. At its mid-point, the long main street was casually bisected by a double line of Roman archways, linked by towers at either side, and at its far end it opened out into a small square. On one side of the square stood a half-hearted water feature (I later decided it was a drinking fountain with a very leaky washer) and on the other was a 2100 year old triumphal arch set in the middle of a roundabout. Between them, was a small outdoor café – just a wooden kiosk, surrounded by tables and chairs and an adjacent car park. This appeared to be Aosta’s happening place for students, twenty somethings and bikers – or one of them at least. I settled down for a tea and asked a group of bikers if they spoke English or French. For a moment there were blank looks and then, with a great deal of hesitation and stumbling over unfamiliar words, a shaven- headed bloke in Kawasaki leathers offered me friendly directions to a hotel near the station. In England I speak English. In France I can get by in French. Here in Italy I am the tourist, dependent on the goodwill of others. On this trip, this was my first experience of being the Englishman abroad. The air is mountain fresh here in the Aosta valley. Whenever you raise your eyes above the level of the buildings, giant snowy peaks rise up before you. They dominate the town without louring over it or diminishing its sense of energy or good humour. The hotel turned out to be more expensive than I wanted, but it was in the centre of town, and a good base to explore from. I was also very tired and very hot after a long day’s riding in the southern heat, still in my northern clothing. Evening stroll around Aosta-> Pleasant, solitary couples, tea at the bar, thinking about the barriers of language. The artisanal chooclate shop, and the drunk. The next morning I had breakfast in the square. (love their Italians for liking vegetables) and took photographs. Chatted with the woman in the Tourist information office in one of the towers at the double roman wall. She gave me advice on best routes. Now sick of motorways, I took the old road south-east down the Aosta valley to Ivrea and then on up to Arona on the southern shores of lake Maggiore. Here, the mountains captured and constrained everything. The old road and the new, the railway, the river and the overflowing abundance of human life and activity threaded themselves along the line of the valley, a blend of physical geography and human ingenuity. One town followed another in quick succession, one hardly finishing before the next began. The old road was constantly interrupted by small roundabouts (no use in wasting space here), each decorated with an artwork or something that said something about a particular town’s history or activities. The towns, themselves, were small, their buildings tightly packed together, but all light and energetic, unplanned but not chaotic. The chalet-style houses crowding up the hillside glowed in the southern sun, splashing the valley sides with a multitude of colours and forms. Everywhere, too, small industrial units appeared too, equally colourful, equally energetic, and neatly integrated into their communities, not separate and overwhelming like the massive industrial complexes on the outskirts of larger towns. Among the chocolate box houses there were concrete mixers and cranes, piles of timber, commercial units - modern life lived at a different tempo and in a different key. A chalet style cinema passed me by and an elaborately designed garage. And everywhere between the buildings, there were domestic-looking terraced gardens faced with stone . High above the towns and between them, small fields were cultivated on the shoulders of hills or on the tops of great bastions of rock, crops sprayed by gallons of water. And then way up above the fields the mountain sides were covered in a soft pelt of fir, finally to be crowned with jagged brilliantly white peaks. But always, down below, the lazy river, wound its way along the valley floor in its rocky bed. I was in an excellent mood and the Aosta valley danced and sparkled in my eyes. Beyond Ivrea I took the road eastwards. Here the land changed dramatically. Gone were the rocky gorges and pretty towns. The land now opened out to an open plain, as flat as anything in Norfolk and with as little shade. I stopped in one town to consult the map opposite a bar. The locals eyed me thoughtfully. Mad dogs and Englishmen... Wherever there were populations, there were masts stuck on top on tall pylons which opened up at the top into a funnel shape. All were marked with red and white chequerboard squares reminiscent of Tintin’s rocket. Unlike the towns in the Aosta valley which followed one another in an almost unbroken sequenece, here they were isolated one from another by the huge plain. Road signs pointed off in all directions to other towns in other places. At first, the towns were neat, dusty and self-contained. Eventually though, they became older though, scruffier, more traditional-looking peasant communities, with crumbling walls and bad roads. Later still they changed again, dominated by huge commercial and retail parks. I wonder if Staples sells the same kind of paperclips here as it does back home in Stevenage? By the time I got to Arona I was tired, very sweaty, dehydrated and anxious, and my mind was racing like the engine of my bike. My nervous system and its engine were vibrating together and at the same frequency. The last twenty kilometres became just a dizzy blur of incongruous impressions: roundabouts that suddenly appeared without signs to guide me, mazelike towns that seemed to go on for ever, incomprehensible junctions that panicked me, important looking signs that meant nothing or suggested something not very good. I was getting very tired. I was beginning to get tired and hot, and stressed. Following signs for towns or road numbers I recognised was difficult. Getting anxious when they stopped appearing at roundabouts or crossings became easy. When the distance to Arona displayed on the street signs began to increase rather than diminish, frustration set in. In this hot and exposed country, progress was slow enough. Was I being sent on a wild goose chase? Finally, coming down a steep incline into Arona on the shores of lake Maggiore, the bike began to jerk. At first I thought it must be the road surface, but I wasn't convinced. I needed to stop now and this would have to wait for another day. I found a campsite, and bedded in for the night. It is 6.30 am and I’m sitting on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Northern Italy. A church clock from across the water has just struck the half hour. A tuneful polyphony of birdsong is drifting down from the surrounding trees. Sweet to hear – apart, that is, from the cawing of a solitary old crow in the distance. On the opposite shore I can make out the colours and horizontal lines of a small village with a cluster of white boats on the shore line. The wooded hills rise gently behind the village. Further to the south are the white capped peaks of the Alps. Tiny, hypnotic ripples are breaking on the lake shore lake like breathing in and out. There is an occasional plop of a water bird landing on the water. I’m in no hurry to do anything. The campsite behind me where I have spent the night is very quiet. It is still the very beginnings of the season and the noisy energetic families of high summer have not yet arrived. The few people that are here are mostly older couples in camper vans. Mine is the only tent. The tent is new and is very comfortable. It has two awnings and two entrances, one at either end. The zipped entrances to the inner tent are perfectly circular so that when I wake up in the morning I have the impression of living in a hobbit hole. It is also extremely easy and quick to put up, as I found out on my first night of camping in France when I arrived in the dark. As for the rest of the day to follow, who knows. I'm heading round the lake for Como.

It was the big day today, and I woke to it feeling like I wanted to cover my head with a pillow like a small child, in the hope that the big, complicated and demanding world would go away. This was not the romantic and faintly heroic beginning of a grand adventure that I had imagined to myself. It didn't help that I'd set the alarm for six o'clock (I'm not a morning person), and I spent my first supposedly waking hour wandering around like a zombie and needing a good grouch. The rest of the morning was devoted to dealing with various last-minute panics before I finally set out at quarter to eleven to ride down to Dover for the ferry to France. At the ferry port I was pulled over for a customs check which somehow didn't happen. The custom's officer's look when she saw the amount of gear all piled up on the bike spoke volumes. She settled for asking me a couple of brief questions, to which she got even briefer answers, and then waved me through. Dover was misty and unremarkable. Even the castle looked drab and unromantic - despite the mist. The crossing, too, passed off without notable incident. All the excitable bits of me were still refusing to come out. Instead of standing on the deck feeling the salt air and the sense of freedom blowing all about me, I went into the bar and used the onboard wi-fi to sort out a route down to Reims. I am still having problems with modern technology. I even managed to confuse the guy in the information office. The crossing passed in a flurry of frustration and bad temper. I rolled off the ferry and headed straight down the A26 to Epernay, just outside Reims, arriving just after dark. Here I experienced my first act of kindness directed towards me as a stranger. Having spent half an hour wandering round this warren of a town looking for the municipal campsite, a cheerful guy in a (white) van shouted across to me and offered his help. When I explained what I was looking for, he just said 'follow me,' and hit the pedal. He led me miles around town to the campsite, which turned out to be closed! I felt almost bad for him, after his good deed, but he went off cheerfully enough. I'm now holed up in a nearby cheap but comfortable hotel, still trying to get my head around all this technology. I had to ask the receptionist to help with the hotel wi-fi. Maybe my circuits are just incompatible with modernity. The ride down to Epernay, though, was a pleasure. I like the simplicity and sweep of French motorways - so much more civilised than English ones - and much less busy. They never stress me. The landscape of Northern France, though, is alien to my English eyes: mile upon mile of broad, rolling hills, all pale greens, and browns and off whites, and all given over to agribusiness, with nothing to interrupt your view, often to the horizon, not a single tree or hedge or house or wall. Yet for all its bareness, it is extremely well groomed. What trees there are run in neat, measured rows, the fields are always tidy, farm building suggest an sense of order - a million miles from the pocket-sized and joyously scruffy landscapes of my English lowland home. It all felt very alien - at least until I caught sight of the graffiti on the side of a motorway bridge. That started to make me feel that I was still travelling through the same world that I had left this morning. In fact, I'm already beginning to relax into the journey, and that is very good going for me. Normally, it takes a week before I stop worrying about what could go wrong and trying to calculate in advance the number of ways I could possibly make an idiot of myself in a foreign land. Good omens. France is easy, as I've done it so many times before and can get by comfortably in the language. But I won't be in France for long. I'm heading directly south to Macon. There, I turn east into Italy. I don't know northern Italy at all and I can't speak of a word of the lingo. But somehow I don't care any more. Ciao.

The Scottish bit

The Scottish part of the trip is now complete. For most of the time I was accompanied by Tim, an old university friend and roommate from the 1970s. My DR650SE is no match for Tim’s newly acquired Pan European (1993 reg, in immaculate condition.) but it is still be a nippy beast when needed. It does have some quirks and peculiarities, though. The side-stand is ridiculously long for the bike. I’ve had an inch and a quarter taken off it and it still makes the bike unstable if it is leaning into even a very moderate up-slope. The problem is even more acute now that the rear shock is weighted down with full panniers. I'm also told that the screws on the neutral sensing unit under the clutch casing apparently have a habit of working their way loose and disappearing into the engine, and the upper chain roller is known to break off after a time, taking part of the frame with it. More personal to my own bike is its disinclination to change once it has been running in one gear for a while. It has to be forcibly persuaded.

17 March: A fast and chilly motorway ride (M5/M6/M74/M8/A82) from Malvern up to Tyndrum, north of Loch Lomond. The A82 from Glasgow to Tyndrum is always a lot of fun, especially the twisty northern section, where it becomes jammed in between vertical cliffs on one side and the shores of Loch Lomond on the other. I discovered today that I eat about three times as much food as Tim and need more frequent food breaks. Tim is discovering that I also take about three times as long as anyone else to do anything. (I’ve never understood why this is. I'm really quite impatient and don't dawdle over things.) He is handling this realisation with patience and good grace. Apart from Tim and me, there was only one other person staying at the hostel in Tyndrum this evening. Her name is Tasmin, and she has driven over from Aberdeen for a day’s climbing. Both Tim and Tasmin are musicians and just happened to have woodwind instruments tucked away in their packs, so an short Celtic-flavoured jam session enlivened the hostel dining room this evening.

18 March. Another day of riding. From Tyndrun we headed north for Rannoch Moor and Glen Coe. We’d made such good progress yesterday that beyond Glen Coe we had time to take a scenic detour round the Moidart peninsular via the ferry. The road round Moidart soon turns into a bumpy, twisty single-track affair that had it not been for the glorious scenery would have felt like a fairground ride. I’m sure there are some ugly places in Scotland, but if so I have yet to find them. We had lunch in Fort William before heading up the Great Glen to Inverness and then on to a campsite at Dornoch. By mid-afternoon it became clear that my expensive brand new camera had stopped working – so no pics then. Similarly it became clear that the fan on Tim’s Pan was kaput when the bike overheated in rush hour traffic in Inverness. Tim worried discretely about it for a while and then got on with the ride. I fumed all the way up to Dornoch about my camera. We got separated in Inverness, with me doing most of the fretting on this occasion, but managing to give the impression that I was taking it all in my stride. We met up again on the outskirts of Dornoch where we hoped to find a campsite. Dornoch, which looks on the map like a small and not very significant town, surprised us with the remains of a medieval city centre, complete with castle and tiny cathedral. More immediately practical were a welcoming pub and a Chinese chippy.

19 March. We packed up the tents early and set off up the A9/A99 coastal route to Gilles and the ferry to the Orkneys. We breakfasted comfortably in a chintzy café in Wick. On the way to Gilles we passed through John o’Groats which has always seemed less like a town to me than a large field with a few houses half-heartedly scatted about within it. The ferry pulled into St Margaret Hope in South Ronalsay. The island guards the southern entrance to Scappa Flow home of the British naval fleet in times of conflict, and its southern shoes are spattered with gun emplacements and other wartime constructions. South Ronalsay is connected to the main Orkney island of Mainland via three ‘Churchill Barriers’, causeways which serve to block seaborne access to Scappa Flow from the east but which also carry the road between a string of islets. On either side of the barriers, the remains of rusting hulks poked out from, the water. We rode to the capital, Kirkwall, found a supermarket, an information bureau and a hostel on the edge of town.

20 March. We got up early and rode to the Ring of Brognar to watch the eclipse. The ring is a dramatic Neolithic stone circle on a narrow spit of land between two lochs, one fresh, one saline. About seventy people had already gathered there waiting for the big moment, and were sharing eclipse-watching tinted glasses and home-made biscuits. Tim was expecting to find a bunch of ‘hippies’ and travellers, but for the most part they turned out to be Orkney folk, who were making a morning of it with dogs, hampers, cameras and a lot of bustle. Half the people there seemed to be civil servants. (If you aren’t a farmer, a craft worker or a shop keeper in the Orkneys, then it’s likely that you will work for the government.)

Far from obscuring the eclipse, the thin layer of cloud scudding across Orkney skies (and they are vast), eliminated some of the harshness of the sun’s light and made the event easier to watch. By wearing my lid and watching through my tinted visor any remaining glare was removed and gave me a ringside view. As the moon ate away at the sun, the air became colder and the day darkened, though not as much as I had expected. I was astonished that the sun’s penumbral energy is so great that even a 98% eclipse can do no more than dim the daylight. My one disappointment was that in an island full of sheep there were none nearby. I’d been told during an eclipse they lie down and go to sleep. The small child in me really, really wanted to see that.

Later that morning we rode up to the west coast of Mainland on a road that was almost lost among the island’s pale green rolling hillsides. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant ride. On an island with no trees, the Orkney blustery winds can do some interesting things to a motorcycle’s line of travel. We’d come to see the Neolithic village of Scarra Bray, which is billed in the tourist brochures as the best preserved site of its kind in Europe. And it was seriously impressive. As the wind continued to thrash around us, one of the wardens, wrapped up from head to toe in an enormous black windcheater so that only her eyes peeped out, gave us an extended history and explanation of the site. Like other native Orcadians we met, her speech was slow and soft but with an attractive lightness. I can see why so many people fall in love with these islands.

A new brewery miles from anywhere and keen to attract the tourists provided us with a restaurant lunch – one of the best meals I’ve had in a long time. The bread was wonderful, light, fluffy and melt in the mouth. Orcadians certainly know how to keep you happy and sell you stuff. From there we continued our Neolithic ramble, stopping off at the Stenness stones and getting an eccentric guided tour of Maeshowe, one of the best preserved neolithic burial chambers in the area.

The guide books are keen to point out that the Orkneys have a mild climate. Most of the Atlantic depressions that affect Scotland and the rest of the UK miss the islands, so the summers are warm for their latitudes and the winters are brief. If snow does fall, it doesn’t linger. The two most noticeable features are the winds and the skies. The winds are inescapable and the skies appear to have been stretched out in all directions. They are vast. From an Orcadian’s perspective the world must look very horizontal. We rode back into Kirkwall and spent a while in the city’s Norse cathedral, getting an impromptu guided tour who was clearly in love with the place and wanted to show us its carvings of Green Men and its Sheila na gig. After dark we rode out to Deerness, a peninsular on the eastern side of Mainland, where we were told we would find the only campsite open at this time of year. It turned out not to be a campsite but a big lawn behind the Deerness Community Centre, which welcomed campers. After parents had picked up their children from an evening event, the cheery warden showed us round the centre and gave us the keys – just in case we wanted to let ourselves in to make a cup of tea. ‘Just hang the keys behind the door and close it when you leave in the morning’, she said. How often do you find such trust!

21 March: We rode back from Deerness to the ferry, along country roads, stopping off to look at the ‘Italian Chapel’ on Lambs Holm, one of the small islands between the Churchill barriers. The Italian Chapel was originally a Nissan Hut, converted into a place of worship, and decorated by Italian prisoners of war held here in the 1940s. It was a bizarre place: very Catholic; very Italian, (very kitsch - somewhat between a strawberry flan and the Sistine Chapel) and completely out of place among the islands’ bare and washed-out, protestant hillsides. After the ferry crossing we rode down the A9 to Inverness and then on to Fort William where we stayed the night at The Wild Geese, yet another hostel, which offered the most luxurious and comfortable bath of the trip.

22 March: From Fort William, We rode down to Glasgow and then on to Edinburgh. I’ve never been to either city before. Glasgow impressed, but Edinburgh grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. We didn’t have time that afternoon for anything other than a quick look round. We wandered up Princes Street in the New Town and down the Royal Mile in the old one, and then spent the rest of our time in the Scottish Art Gallery. On the way out of the city we parted company. Tim was on his way to stay with some friends and I was heading for a campsite at Musselborough. The parting was an unceremonious affair. I caught sight of my turning and veered off while Time rode straight ahead. I’m not sure he even sore my going. ('Sore'?! I think I must have been thinking of my bum when I wrote that.) I don’t like staying at holiday parks as a rule but the site at Musselborough was an exception. There were a few occupied campervans or mobile homes, but I was the only camper there with a tent. The warden conducted me into a small walled enclosure, full of daffodils and inhabited by birds and rabbits. The wall was tall and ancient, looking, built from deep red sandstone. I woke up the next morning to the sound of a woodpecker in a nearby tree.

23 March: I wasn’t yet ready to say goodbye to Edinburgh, so caught a bus back into the city from a bus stop just outside the campssite – and then did all the tourist things: I admired the castle on its basalt plug; walked up and down the Royal Mile; visited Charlotte Square; got a certificate for climbing to the top of the Scott Memorial; did a walking tour of the old city; looked in St Giles cathedral; went to Greyfriars cemetery and rubbed the nose of Greyfriars bobby; visited statues of David Hume and Adam Smith; pored over exhibits in the spectacularly interesting museum of Scotland; and yes, I even had a cup of tea in the café where JK Rowling wrote the first volume of Harry Potter. What a city! It’s as monumental as Vienna, but with a happy, human face – there is little that is pompous and overbearing about it. I was told that Glaswegians say it’s all fur and no knickers. And that may be so, or maybe not, but I loved it. It’s the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited.

24 March:I woke up early, intending to ride back down to Hertfordshire in one go. I didn’t get going though till after 11.00, partly because I woke up feeling groggy and not really ready for the day and partly because the café in Musselborough where I had breakfast took nearly forty minutes to cook my scrambled eggs. I didn’t mind though, I was happy just to sit at the table and watch the world go by, or read the joke book that they left on each of the tables. (Maybe waiting 40 minutes for scrambled eggs is a common occurrence.) I couldn’t help thinking that Musselborough sounds like something out of James Joyce or JK Rowling, but I couldn’t make my mind up which.)

The ride home was cold and wet and occasionally miserable. Throughout the morning and early afternoon, it rained or hailed and the wind blew and blew. On this occasion the wild and beautiful hillsides of the Scottish Lowlands failed to work their magic for me. On reaching the border, the weather changed dramatically and almost instantly: rain and grey cloud yielded to bright skies and skimpy sunshine. But it didn’t make much difference. I was still cold, and the traffic volume rapidly quadrupled, demanding my full attention. I had my only real panic of the trip at a service station on the M6 in Cumbria. It was miles from anywhere. I’d stopped to get fuel and something to eat only to discover that my debit card had stopped working. I tried to ring my bank from the public phone. (I had, of course, forgotten to take my new mobile.) The phone, however, failed to put me through and ate up the last of my spare cash. Eventually, one of the staff in the restaurant leant me his mobile so that I could ring the bank and get it the problem sorted.

The rest of the ride home remained cold and windy, growing chillier as the day wore on and the sun went down. I lost count of the number of times I had to stop off, and the number of cups of tea I drank at service stations to try to keep warm. I got home just after 11.00 pm, feeling a bedraggled and exhausted but far to wired to go to bed, and ready for more. Much, much more.