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.