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.

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