A short email from Bulgaria:
So here I am in Bulgaria.
Forgot your Leva at home, so I will have to use them as wallpaper in Spain.
It has been a varied trip so far. Croatia was a nice discovery, quite a far ahead country to be eastern Europe, with an amazing coast full of dramatic beauty on its rising and falling Magistrala Road, plenty of beautiful islands to be visited at a ferry hop, good food and nice people.
Montenegro is worth a trip for risky bikers, especially if you take the main road from Podgorica towards the inland. If you make it, you are a potential Paris-
Dakar pilot.
The Serbs will let in Bulgarians but not Germans without a visa (despite the Serbian embassy in Madrid claims you do not need one until October). So I had to make it through Kosovo. The bike was guarded at night by soldiers at a KFOR checkpoint (Germans and US-Americans) and the dirty hotel offered Spartan food and a shabby room for 40 EUR. But on the whole, a bikable country... .
Greece as always oozing Filoxenia, the Greek sense of courtesy towards foreingers, and now Bulgaria. I do not know if on your trip through here you ever rode on a secondary road throug the Rodopi (marked on maps in a beautiful shiny yellow) but it is breathtaking for the landscapes and the pot holes, the bends and the crazy
Bulgarian truckers on their Second-World-War-Russian-Eight-Weeled-Pieces-Of-Rubbish. The first night sundown caught me in the middle of nowhere, and behind one of these pot-holed 180 degree bends a trucker had peacefully stopped to take a leak. I could stop the bike two inches from his bumper, stumbled and fell on my right hand with all the 400 and something kilos on it. So now I am conveniently bandaged and taking it very easy. In some two or three days on to Romania and start thinking about my way back through Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Italy and so on.
I hope you are doing fine in Bolivia or wherever you have had the patience to fight with the border police.
Wish you a safe and breakdown-free ride
OLAF FROM SPAIN
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