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.