Sapes, Greece. 6th October 2023.

The border crossing into Bulgaria was smooth and simple. Turkey stamped me out in less than ten minutes. Bulgaria stamped me in just as easily easily but then I had to get insurance for my bike. Customs kept hold of my passport and told me to ride down to the last barrier, park my bike and walk through to the insurance office. The ‘office’ turned out to be a caravan behind a chain link fence. The guy came out, took my registration and passport, then came back with the green card. He then took 65 Euros in cash. Cards not accepted. I smelt a bit of a rat here but I had the essential document. Valid for one month, but it didn’t cover the UK. Had it done, I would have got it for two. Customs gave me back my passport when I showed them the insurance, and off I went. Welcome to Bulgaria and the EU. No need for any kind of visa. My Irish passport gives me freedom to roam.
I stopped for coffee and to swap my SIM to my UK one. I was expecting to get EU roaming but, as I discovered later, my phone company (EE) don’t give it to pay-as-you-go customers any more. That meant I had to keep paying for it, and it’s not cheap!
I very quickly came to the Greek border and was across it in a couple of minutes. I had put a destination into my GPS but took a wrong turning somewhere. I found myself on a lovely road, empty of traffic, that twisted its way through the hills. The Points Of Interest function on my GPS found me a hotel, the only one in the town I’d arrived at. And here I experienced proper EU prices. A shock to the system. But at least I managed to get a good meal in the town.

I was now heading for Thessaloniki, a city on the coast of the Agean sea. Greek roads are mostly OK, but with some rough patches. The drivers are mostly sensible but did have a habit of pulling out in front of me, albeit only at low speeds.
I found a decent hostel to stay at, where the price was reasonable. The rooms and beds were very good but the bathrooms were very much in need of refurbishment. I was very disappointed in that. I hoped they were planning to sort it out during the winter low season.
I wasn’t feeling as well as I ought. I’d visited the toilet four times during the night and I woke up with a back ache and a cough. But I set out to walk down to the seafront and have a look at some of the sights. It was a lovely, sunny Sunday and all the cafés were crammed with people enjoying their day off. It gave the place an air of festivity that was good to see and feel, and it helped me feel better.
This city dates back to 315 BCE. It was the second city of Macedonia, now part of Greece. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire it was taken over by the Ottoman Empire, who rebuilt it. But most of that city was destroyed in a fire in 1917. And more of it was destroyed during an earthquake in 1978.
I went to visit one of the remaining buildings, the White Tower. This six storey, round tower was part of the city defences. Each floor contained displays about the history of the city, with a QR code to scan so I could listen to the commentary on my phone. Each of the rooms mostly contained information boards and photos, particularly tracing the political events in the city, with some artefacts as well. There had been a lot of political upheaval in the Ottoman Empire during the first part of the 20th century, with Thessaloniki in the thick of it.

A bit further into the city was the Archaeology Museum, covering the story of the city from the Bronze Age. Plenty of Roman statues, carvings etc. One thing I liked was that EU citizens got discounted entry, and older people even more. Well done Greece! I celebrated by spending the savings on coffee and cake.

The Rotunda is a building that was a Roman temple to a god or emperor. It had then become the city’s main Christian church during the Byzantine era. The Ottomans had converted it into a mosque but had left most of the Christian era decorative mosaics intact. The building was very high and had a huge floor area. The mosaic figures stared down at me from high up in the dome.

By now I was feeling pretty worn out. On the walk back to the hostel I passed the remains of the Agora from the Roman city. It was at a much lower level than the modern streets, something that’s not unusual. City streets seem to raise themselves up over the centuries. I think it was the only remaining Roman ruin.

That night I was visiting the toilet almost every hour and spent what seemed like hours shivering with cold, even after I’d put on my thermal underwear. I spoke to reception about seeing a doctor and they directed me to a hospital nearby, where walk in treatment was available. After a blood test, a urine sample, a chest and abdomen x-ray and, finally, an ultra sound scan, they decided I had a urinary tract infection that had spread to my kidneys. They put me in a bed and hooked me up to a supply of intravenous antibiotics. It seemed to relate back to when I was unwell in Isparta, three weeks previously.
I was there for eight days! My temperature was up above 39 degrees but slowly came down as the drugs did their work. Having walked in off the street, I had no spare clothes, wash kit or phone charger. After a few days I contacted the hostel and the young guy who’d initially directed me to the hospital did me two favours. He packed up my gear and put it in secure storage, so that I didn’t need to pay for the bed. And he brought some essentials into the hospital for me. At last, I had my wash bag, lap top and a change of clothing. Along with the gradual improvement in my health, I was definitely feeling better.
Does Greece have a free health service, was one thing I wanted to know. Yes, it does, but not for me as a UK citizen. The cost of my treatment was 980 Euros, large enough to consider making an insurance claim. Not a thing to look forward to. But help was at hand in the shape of my UK Global Health Insurance Card, the post Brexit replacement for the European Health Insurance Card. I presented it at the payment window, expecting it to be rejected. To my surprise it was good enough to pay the bill. Excellent.
Once I’d been released from the hospital I had to stick around for another five days. I still needed a daily injection of antibiotics. It was around a twenty minute walk from the hospital to the hostel and I managed it very well, considering I hadn’t done any walking for eight days.
Walking up to the hospital for my daily injection became a pleasure, despite it being mostly uphill. The café at the hospital supplied nice baguettes and coffee. Walking along city streets is always fascinating, especially now that I was in Europe and able to compare them with Britain. The way people live is often revealed by the shops they use. Plenty of small businesses, suggesting a thriving city and a sense of community.

On the first day I noticed a wall alongside the road to the hospital, ancient looking and going a long way up the hill. After my jab and baguette I took a walk up there.
It was a steep climb and what I discovered was the Trigoniou (chain) Tower. This was part of the Ottoman defences of the city. There were walls extending a long way along the sides of the hill and this tower was one of the entrance ways into the hilltop citadel. The reference to chains related to the drawbridge. It had chambers both below and above the entry level, containing displays relating to the historic city.

Another steep walk up to the very top of the hill found me at the Heptapyrgin Fortress, dating from the Byzantine era. It has a shape like a fan, with some other towers around it. Two of them are triangular. In 1890, no longer needed for defence, it had been converted into a prison. Two of the towers had been filled with rubble and additional buildings had been added. One hundred years later it was handed over to the city’s architectural department. They’ve been restoring it ever since.
Not much of the old interior remains in any discernible way. I had a look around the old prison buildings, just because I could. More interesting was the gatehouse, with all sorts of symbols and inscriptions on the outside wall above the gate. I think they reflected the change of rulers and occupants over the ages. The external walls alongside incorporated old bits of marble, from decorations, as filler. Very odd.

On the walk back down the hill I used several steep sets of steps to get down from one street to another. They were lined with pretty little houses, probably from the 19th century, which had lots of window boxes and shrubs in pots. It all gave the area a nicely old fashioned air.
I passed a couple of churches on the way down, and one of the few remaining examples of Byzantine era bath houses. Only the small church was open so I popped in and took a few photos. Considering I’d only gone out for an injection, it was quite a busy day.

The bike was in need of an oil change and I’d located and spoken to a local bike shop a few days before. I rode it down there but had to wait a little while for the mechanic to come back from lunch. He was a very impressive man. He looked neat and tidy; his workshop was neat and tidy too; and he got on with the job in a very efficient manner. I was very impressed.

Once he’d done the work he was keen to show me around his bike collection. He had a penchant for old, small two stoke bikes and had quite a few of them. But best of all were his two special projects.
The first was a water injected Honda bike engine, set up on a bench. It was surrounded by pipes and cylinders to make it work

But better than that was his experimental perpetual motion machine. It worked by using a small electric motor to get a pair of counter-rotating weights swinging which, once they’d gained enough momentum, kept moving backwards and forwards, driving a shaft. The electric motor was powered by a battery which itself was recharged by a generator turned by the machine. Anyone with knowledge of physics will tell you there’s no such thing as perpetual motion, but the machine I was looking at seemed to have got pretty damn close to it.

As I walked along one of the main roads to the hospital I’d noticed policemen hanging around, who were wearing armour on their knees, shins and feet. Expecting trouble in what seemed to be such a peaceful city? Well no. I realised that where they were stood was around the Turkish Embassy. It all made sense now.
I’d noted on Google Maps that there was a museum dedicated to Ataturk there, so I went round the back and found the entrance. The embassy is located in the compound of the house where he was born and the house itself is the museum. It’s where he lived until he went off to military school. His family moved out of there when Greece took over the city from Turkey. Both governments had agreed to compulsorily move each others citizens over to their native lands. Traumatic for all concerned but at least it was peaceful. The whole event reflected the end of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Greece and Turkey as independent nations. If only India and Pakistan had managed to do the same.
There were plenty of info boards describing Ataturk’s early years, along with the ups and downs of his career. But I didn’t really learn much more than I’d seen elsewhere.

That day started with the last of my injections and I asked myself how I was feeling. Pretty much OK, was the conclusion I reached. My legs ached sometimes after my walks but were getting better. My fitness was returning and it was time to hit the road again.
I’d planned to explore some of Greece, possibly Athens too. But my enforced stay in Thessaloniki meant I didn’t have the time. I had a deadline for getting back to England. So I booked a ferry over to Brindisi, in Italy. My planned route home kept me in the south of Europe, partly because it was warmer and partly because it was quicker. The alternative was a long ride north then west, which would have been cold and tedious, with no time to explore. This ferry was the first of three.
It left at 1 a.m. next morning. I got to the terminal at 6 p.m, Nothing to do but hang around, eat food and wait. Once on board I found a section of seating I could stretch out on and settled down. The ferry wasn’t busy and most passengers were truckers. I got some sleep before having to rouse myself and get the continental breakfast included in my ticket.

The ferry chucked me out at 9 a.m. and I took the road heading south. I wanted to get to Sicily. It was a bit chilly at first but warmed up later. Stopping for coffee, I discovered one thing I didn’t like about Italy. Coffee arrives in tiny little cups, is super strong and is served black. Not to my taste at all. Later on I managed to get some with milk in it but still small and strong. Where’s a Costa Coffee when you need one!
Villa San Giovani is the town from where the ferry leaves for Sicily. I located the port and discovered that the fare for me and the bike was 10 euros one way, for a forty minute ride. Pretty good, I thought. The next two and a half hours were spent riding up and down the coast trying to find a place to stay. All the cheap places either didn’t exist or were closed. I was forced to bite the bullet and pay serious money. On the upside, there was a takeaway café nearby, for cheap pizza and beer. Swings and roundabouts.

At the ferry terminal I met a group of riders on an organised tour. Americans, with one Aussie. They were riding BMWs, a Ducati and a Triumph Tiger, on a five day tour from Rome. I decided to visit Mount Etna, where the volcano sits on the peak, puffing smoke and fumes.
Once off the ferry the road took me along a lovely coastal route where I stopped in a village for coffee, and to post a couple of photos of the sun drenched sea, just to make people jealous. By the time I got to the foot of Mount Etna I’d ridden some very pleasant and twisty roads up through the hills. I wanted to go up in the cable car and have the guided 4 x 4 tour. But it was too late in the day for that so I had to leave it until the morning.
Needless to say, the hotel by the cable car wasn’t a cheap one and they wanted me out of the room quite early. So I had to leave my luggage behind reception while I did the trip. The weather had turned sour, with drizzly rain and wind. By the time the cable car had swung its way up to the top I was faced with strong gusts and a wet walk.

The 4 x 4 bus took us across the slope. The wind was too strong to be able to go higher up – the original plan, so we had to look up into the low cloud where it was just possible to make out the volcanic fumes. The volcano is very much active, having last erupted in May 2023 and before that in 2021. But the strong wind and rain kept my mind off any fears of becoming mummified in ash.
The guide walked us across to the edge of one of the slopes and showed where the lava had flowed down the hill previously. Quite boring really. With the disappointment of not going to the top added to the wind and rain, I was quite pleased when we headed back to the bus. It should have dropped us off to catch the cable car but that service had been suspended because of the high wind. I wasn’t surprised.

The bus took us all the way down. It had been a grey day. Both the sky we looked up at and the ground we walked on. Even so, I was still very glad to have made the trip. But I can say that the cup of hot tea back at the hotel had was very welcome.
As I rode the twisties back down to the coast things warmed up nicely. Riding through the Sicilian villages made me feel a bit like I was on a film set, with the brightly painted houses bordering the narrow streets. Flower pots on the balconies, small back streets and not many people around, despite it being a week day. All a little bit other worldly.
My next destination was Agrigento, home to the Valley of Temples. On the way there I had a coffee stop and adjusted my clutch cable, which puzzled me as to why it had gone slack. A short while later, as I rode through a town, the reason became apparent when it snapped! I carry a spare, of course, and thirty minutes later I was under way once more.

Along with the temples, there was a museum to visit as well. Bikes could not park for free, facing an hourly charge that struck me as excessive. I took the ticket at the barrier and parked, not sure how I’d manage to pay as I had no loose change. But once I’d looked around the interesting museum (full of old artefacts from the Roman period and plenty of information), a solution presented itself. I’d parked by the perimeter and I realised there was a gap in the bushes. I rode through it, bumped down the kerb and was back on the road. Nice.
I rode around to the Valley of Temples and was made to go into another car park where I had to take a ticket. This time I parked near the entry gate where there was a useful gap in the fence. It was overlooked by a stall selling booklets, but I planned to deal with that potential issue when I left.

The valley is quite long, with a road going through it, and I decided I wasn’t going to walk all the way along it on this quite warm day and in my heavy riding gear. I went along the road as far as the Temple of Zeus, mostly in ruins. And the Temple of Concordia, which had been restored and was in surprisingly good condition. I also saw a cemetery and a small group of houses. But having seen so many of these places in Turkey the appeal was less than it might have been.

Back at the bike I caught the eye of the old fella sitting at the stall by the entrance and nodded towards the bike and then the gap. He said, “I will see nothing”. Good enough for me and off I went.
I set the GPS for Pompeii and the journey looked doable until I got to the ferry terminal and found it wasn’t the right place. I was directed to one on the other side of town, a twenty minute ride away. Then I had to go back out of the port to a service area in order to buy the ticket. What a palaver!
Once I was back on the mainland I hit the motorway but got stuck in a service area, waiting for the rain to stop. By then it was 4.30 p.m. so I headed for a place off the motorway. When I found it there was no sign of life so I headed for another one in a different town. By the time I’d gone down a dead end road and wandered along the tiny roads that ran through the hills, it took two hours to find it. And the rain had returned too. That hotel was full but they sent me to another one nearby. Warm and dry at last.

After a morning rain shower, the next day’s ride was warmer and dry, and I made Pompeii by lunchtime. I found a good bed and breakfast pace, had lunch, then walked up to see the ruins. I’d been there once before, in 2006 while on a cruise, but had forgotten how big the town was. And yet the town, and others nearby had been buried in ash from the eruption, eight kilometres distant.
Although most of the town’s inhabitants escaped, around 1,100 did not. Ash and extreme heat from the lava killed the remainder before they had a chance to escape. Some victims were found cuddled together for protection. The town was buried under six metres of ash. This link will tell you much more.

There’s lots to see there and it’s amazing how well preserved many of the buildings are, along with the mosaics and painted frescos inside them. It took me three hours to see everything but it was well worth the effort. All parts of the original town are able to be seen, making it the best place to visit to get a proper idea of what a Roman town was like.

I’d booked a ferry from Citavechia, near Rome, across to Barcelona. On the ride up there I was on a long, straight road, lined with very tall trees. They had bare trunks up to about ten metres, and with a large and tidy canopy at the top, looking rather like a hat or a beret. The style of the road made me wonder if I was on the ancient Via Appia, which used to run from Rome into Southern Italy. But whatever road it was, there were LOADS of bikes out and about on this sunny Sunday.
My ferry wasn’t until the evening so once I’d left my B&B I had time to kill. The map showed me a nice road that looped up into the hills, to a town called Tolfa. When I got there I found a fort to explore on the top of the hill, and a nice old church. Unfortunately it was closed, but I’m pleased to report that the café in the pretty town centre plaza was very much open.

I’m both impressed and surprised by Italian cafés. They all sell beer and spirits. A reflection, I suppose, of the relaxed, Italian outdoor culture. I watched people buying a liquor to go with their coffee. I also met a couple of bikers. One on a Yamaha Teneré, the other on an Aprillia. They’d been out enjoying the local trails and we had a nice chat about riding and traveling.
From there I went to the port but I was too early to check in. So I went to the town to kill some time. At the sea front was an old fort, still in use by the military, and a statue of a kissing couple. A sailor and his gal. I ended up in the nearby McDonalds, just killing time.

After a while I went to the port and checked in but as it was still three hours to departure and I ended up back at the McDonalds. I even bought some food there, while I ‘enjoyed’ two children’s parties. Fun!
Once on the ferry I found the 24 hour lounge and settled in for the 24 hour journey. I’d bought some supplies while in the town so managed to save on the expensive boat cafés. The ferry docked at about 7 p.m. and I headed to Sitges, where I’d booked a room. I had planned to meet a friend there but he’d had to leave the day before.
The ferry booking to England was for a few days later. That was simply because the cost of earlier ones was about twice the price. So I spent a few days in Sitges, just hanging around. There wasn’t much to see there really so when the time came to ride to Bilbao I was quite pleased.

That ride was quite something. The wind! I seemed to be riding into the teeth of a gale and at times I was riding in fourth gear up the hills, with the trucks overtaking me. When I filled up my average consumption was down to less than 21kms per litre. It’s normally around 27. Awful. I came off the dual carriageway onto a nice road through the hills. I climbed up to about 850 metres, with the ambient temperature dropping from 22 to 14 degrees. I thought the wind had dropped but the next fill-up revealed the same poor fuel consumption.

In Bilbao I’d booked a hotel for two nights. The main thing I did was to research a source of food for the 32 hour crossing. A nearby supermarket met the needs for not much money. Just right.
The ferry left at lunchtime and I filled the bike with low cost Spanish fuel before I boarded. In the queue I chatted to a guy who was on his way back from Morocco on a Honda CRF300 Rally, the bike I plan to buy next. He’s covered 10,000 miles with no problems, which was good to know.
There were very few people on the ferry so it was easy to find a space to sit, and then sleep.

I chatted to a couple who were in a camper van. They were regular travelers to India, mainly Goa and Rajastan, so we had plenty to talk about. The one downside of the ferry was that it was cold on board. I complained about it but nothing changed. I had to wear all my warm gear to be able to sleep. But I survived, as one does.
I arrived in Portsmouth at 9.30 p.m. on a damp evening. I’d dressed for the cold and all I needed to do was ride the distance. I arrived at my destination at 1 a.m., happy to be warm, the bike tucked away in the garage and with a cup of tea to drink. Journey over – for now.

I won’t be traveling for a while now. I plan to buy a Honda CRF300 Rally, a much lighter bike than the Royal Enfield Himalayan. I aim to go to the Middle East and Africa for the next stage of my journey so that bike should be ideal as it’s 40kgs lighter.
The blog will rest until July, when I’ll set off again, although there will Jprobably be a progress report on buying and setting up the new bike. So thanks for sticking with me and, as ever, watch this space.