An Ignominious End to the Blitz

Tripoli, Libya, December 23

Please forgive the long gap between posts, but a lot has happened since I last wrote from Mostar, and I haven't had much Internet access to update my trip. Not that there is much to update, as you will see!

I rolled out of Mostar on December 2nd, headed back to the Croatian coast along a rather busy direct road, not nearly as pleasant as my meandering route in across the Republika Srspska. It was grey and cold but not actually raining, and as the day wore on the sun came out. I finally popped back out to the coast and rode along the Adriatic until it got dark and I took refuge in a small hotel beside the road, in a little tourist town below a beautiful old monastery perched high on the limestone mountain slopes above.

I slept well that night and was off fairly early the next day. The weather was sunny and I rolled along steadily all day, along a pleasant, if not spectacular, coastline. I enjoyed the small bays that lined the road, although they were not as breathtaking as what I had seen a few days earlier in Montenegro. My destination for the day was the city of Split, the major city of southern Croatia, and I rolled into town around three o'clock, through extensive suburbs. I found my way to the heart of the old town, the remarkable Palace of Diocletian. In the third century AD, the Roman Empire was falling apart, and was only saved from total collapse by a series of remarkable emperors who came from what are now Croatia and Serbia. One of the most important was the emperor Diocletian (284-305) who radically reformed the structure of the empire, splitting it into eastern and western halves. He eventually retired from the position of emperor and settled outside his old hometown of Salona, in a huge, fortified seaside palace, from where he kept a close eye on how his successors ran the empire. The palace, or at least its massive outer walls, still stand today; in the seventh century, the inhabitants of Salona abandoned their city in the face of barbarian attacks and took shelter within the walls of the palace, where they founded the new city of Split. To this day, the old town of Split huddles inside the palace walls, using and re-using Roman structures as modern churches, houses and shops. It is a strangely intoxicating place to wander, far more chaotically laid out than Dubrovnik, and with a wonderful energy to it. I walked around for several hours, even venturing into the spooky underground rooms that lay under the palace itself; an art exhibition was going on there, and the huge, dark rooms made a perfect setting for art installations. I thought that Dubrovnik was a fabulous city, but somehow old Split managed to capture my heart even more.

I set off the next morning, via the old Roman ruins of Salona, which were huge but strangely lacking in life. I usually adore ruins, and these had a lot to offer, but they failed to kindle any spark of the ancient life in me; maybe they suffered from the comparison with Split. I made another detour into another old Dalmatian town a couple of hours later, stopping in at Trogir. Its old town had a wonderful cathedral square at its heart, but the cathedral itself, a UNESCO-listed monument, was out of bounds that day, taken over by a rather obnoxious BBC camera crew who were busy filming an episode of Dr. Who. I found my visit to the cathedral sacrificed on the altar of television and left town in a grumpy mood, not helped by the spitting rain and cold wind. The rest of the day's ride was uneventful, but the sky darkened and began to threaten some serious precipitation and I stopped just outside Sibenik, where I stayed in perhaps the finest commercial accommodations since I started biking in July. I followed the signs for "Sobe-Zimmer-Rooms" and ended up in a spotless, luxuriously fitted apartment with a full kitchen. I cooked up a huge meal, let the last of my wet luggage dry (from the downpour three days before), played some guitar and slept the sleep of the dead for 10 hours after watching the soccer World Cup draw on TV.

The next day, December 5th, was, unknown to me at the time, going to be the last day of cycling for the year. I rode fairly hard all day, along a gentle, quiet coastline, full of bays and inlets in which sailboats bobbed at winter anchorage. I loved the scent of pine forests that filled my nose all day, and with the low-lying offshore islands and the much lower coastal hills, I could almost have been riding along Lake Superior's northern shore. I passed through some pretty little towns, but with time running short and some distance to make that day, I decided not to make the long detour into the old city of Zadar. I bypassed the town and rode a further twenty kilometres until darkness forced me to camp in a roadside field. It was actually a pleasant place to spend the night, although a bit chilly at night.

I awoke to frost the next morning and snow on the distant mountain tops. I also awoke to a flat rear tire, and after fixing it, I was puzzled about a strange rubbing noise I heard coming from the wheel. I fiddled with the brakes, but the noise persisted. Only when I went to the other side of the bike did I see that the problem was a bit more serious than I had at first thought. The rim of my rear wheel had cracked nearly a quarter of the way around the perimeter of the wheel; it must have happened near the end of the previous day, since the wheel was close to collapsing under me, and I was lucky that I didn't have a nasty crash. I had heard of this happening to other cyclists, but it had never happened to me before. Once this happens, the only solution is to rebuild the wheel, a job for a professional bike mechanic. I knew that it would take several days, and that it would not be possible for me to make it to my rendezvous in Trieste on time if I waited for the repairs to be done, so with a heavy heart I packed up my gear, walked out to the road and spent three hours waiting for a Rijeka-bound bus to appear. I loaded the bike and gear into the bus, paid an extortionate amount of extra fare for the mountain of luggage, and rode to Rijeka.

The next day I caught another bus to Trieste (paying an even more ludicrous amount for the luggage) and rendezvoused with Joanne, who drove me and the bike to San Vito, where her aunt lives. We dropped off the wheel at a bike shop, spent a day looking around Friuli, and then drove into Venice to spend four glorious days staying at the vacant apartment of a friend's cousin. It was a wonderful way to unwind after five months in the saddle, but it was hardly the way I had hoped to end the bike trip. Once the bike is fixed, I feel I should at least ride from San Vito to Venice to bring closure to the bike trip!

I hope that you have enjoyed following my month's cycling adventures and misadventures! I hope that the holiday season finds you all enjoying life to the fullest.

Cheers

Graydon

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance From Start of Trip

Daily Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical Metres

Cycling Time

Average Speed

Maximum Speed

Daily Destination

22	12/2	1774.9	89.1	28	524	5:08	17.4	42.8	Podaca, Croatia
23	12/3	1872.4	97.5	10	1144	6:00	16.3	42.6	Split
24	12/4	1964.7	92.3	5	c. 1000	5:26	16.8	52.3	Sibenik
25	12/5	2064.1	99.4	52	998	6:19	15.6	39.4	20 km past Zadar

Dawdling in Dubrovnik, Moseying to Mostar

Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, December 1

I am sitting in a wonderful and completely deserted hostel here in Mostar, trying to bring my blog up to date after a few days of eventful riding and thought-provoking scenery and conversations.

I blasted all the way from Kotor to Dubrovnik in a day on Nov. 27th; I didn't think that I would make it, but it was far less hilly than I had been led to believe (as well as about 20 km shorter)--my map is pretty deficient in some important respects. The brilliant sunshine that had made my ride into Kotor so photogenic had disappeared, but even under leaden skies, the rest of the spin around the Bay of Kotor was very pretty, interrupted by a quick visit to some second-century Roman mosaics in Risan. I finally emerged from the sheltered waters and quiet roads and continued on to a lunch stop in Herceg Novi, another pleasant old town projecting into the Adriatic. The hilliest bit of the day was, strangely, the two kilometres between the Montenegrin and Croatian border posts; after that I rode mostly along a flat inland valley full of vineyards. Another steep climb led to a dramatic plummet into the city of Dubrovnik from a clifftop viewpoint. I found my way to a little backpacker guesthouse, checked in and then wandered into the old city to have a nocturnal look around.

Way back in the prehistoric days of 1988, I was told that the three great old cities of eastern Europe were Prague, Krakow and Dubrovnik. I first saw Prague that year, and two years later I found my way to Krakow, but this was my first opportunity to set eyes on the third city of the trinity. It was well worth the wait. Dubrovnik is a spectacular place, with a broad, imposing main street, the Stradun, lined with white limestone Baroque and Gothic buildings that catch the nighttime lighting in precisely the right way. In some ways, the warmth of the stone is captured even better at night than in sunlight. I wandered open-mouthed through the narrow alleyways of the city, peering up the steep, darkened side streets. I found my way out the other side of the old town and ate mussels in a little restaurant beside the harbour.

I liked Dubrovnik so much that I took two days off there to rest my tired legs. The first day was so unremittingly rainy that I barely left the hostel until the evening, sallying forth for another seafood feast when the rain finally stopped. The second day was cloudy but dry, and I spent a happy hour strolling the old city's walls, getting wonderful views both of the dramatic light over the sea and the back yards, nooks and crannies of the medieval town. Dubrovnik was badly damaged by shelling by Montenegrin militias and the Yugoslav army in 1991-92, and although most damage has been repaired, there are still a few derelict ruins that you can spot from the walls. The destruction was decried at the time as pure vandalism, as the old town of Dubrovnik had zero military significance; this sort of pointless destruction was all too common in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Happily, once the fighting was over, the Croatians determinedly rebuilt the city and it still oozes historic charm.

Dubrovnik was a major port on the Adriatic for centuries, first under Venetian control but then as an independent commercial rival to the Venetians. It certainly has an Italian feel to it, perhaps because of the Baroque churches and classic Renaissance architecture along the Stradun. Talking to some Croatians (the entire population of Dubrovnik seems to speak excellent English), I heard tell that Marco Polo, whose trail I followed along the Silk Road, was in fact born on nearby Korcula Island, which was a possession of the Venetian Republic. I looked it up, and in fact the historical evidence is non-existent, but apparently there is a Marco Polo museum on the island. Since it seems pretty dubious, I decided not to take a detour to check it out.

I finally tore myself away from Dubrovnik yesterday and rode up into the limestone hills that line the coast, reaching the Bosnian border only 12 km from town. I spent the day riding through a wild, desolate limestone plateau with a thin scattering of towns and villages, blown by gale-force winds up over the numerous climbs along the route. All day I was in the Republika Srpska, the territory of the Bosnian Serbs, as shown by the Cyrillic alphabet on signs and the Orthodox churches along the road. I spent the evening in the village of Ljubinje, staying in a house that rents out rooms to the very occasional travellers who spend the night there. One of their relatives is a policeman who speaks pretty good English, and I had a long, illuminating conversation with him about the war, the political and economic situation of the country (fairly dire) and the future (dim). He and his family were gracious, well-spoken counter-examples to the Western media image of

Bosnian Serbs as fire-breathing war-mongering monsters, and I was glad both for the conversation and for the roof on a night of wild gale-force winds and rain.

Today's riding was truly dismal, with the winds continuing, accompanied by non-stop torrential rain, occasional hail and lightning. I was soaked and cold when I got to Mostar, and spent a couple of hours warming up and waiting for the rain to stop before going down to investigate the old town. Mostar lived up to my expectations, and even exceeded them. Mostar was almost completely destroyed, first by the Yugoslav army, then by fratricidal fighting between the supposedly allied Bosnian Croats and Muslims in 1993. Its iconic Ottoman stone bridge was deliberately destroyed by Croat shelling, and the old town did not have a single intact roof left when fighting stopped. As in Dubrovnik, there has been extensive reconstruction, and the bridge was re-opened in 2004. Outside the old town, there are still lots of destroyed, bullet-pocked buildings, but the old town once again boasts cobbled streets and overhanging Ottoman houses and graceful Turkish mosques, all painstakingly rebuilt from the ashes of war.

The reconstructed bridge is tremendously picturesque, and I spent a long time wandering around, trying to find the perfect angle for pictures. For years I had a poster on my wall of a painting of Mostar's bridge done by the 19th-century Hungarian painter Csontvary, and I had always wanted to see it for real. It lived up to the painting, particularly when the sun had set and the bridge was bathed in warm, yellow spotlights. It seems a symbol of the co-operation which this war-ravaged nation will require between the political leaders of the three ethnic/religious communities if this country is to prosper in the future.

From here, I will head quickly and fairly directly up the Croatian coast towards Trieste and journey's end in Venice. I hope the weather improves! I can't take too many more days like today.

Peace and Tailwinds

Riding Day No.	Date	Distance From Start of Trip	Daily Distance	Final Elevation	Vertical Metres	Cycling Time	Average Speed	Maximum Speed	Daily Destination

19	11/27	1531.8	94.1	40	1259	6:00	15.7	51.1	Dubrovnik, Croatia
20	11/30	1630.2	98.4	414	1675	7:03	14.0	43.1	Ljubinje, Bosnia-Herzegovina
21	12/1	1685.8	55.6	70	1148	3:44	14.9	58.7	Mostar