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.