full size
I keep hearing banjos. Is that a bad sign?
Since the hotel started breakfast early I was able to get an early start. I had decided to stay on as many twisty back roads as possible.
Yesterday morning the GPS said I had 30 hours driving time to get to the ferry. After driving all day I had reduced that to 26 hours. Not bad for a full day's drive. If I can do that each day it will only take 8 days to get there. That is if I can keep from going backwards.
Just before getting into Bosnia, I found a weird little tourist place. I saw some buildings on a hill, a tourist sign so I stopped at the entrance. There was a pastry shop with coffee. It is very difficult to find a coffee or pastry shop that is not on some diesel polluted city street. It cost $2 to get in, but it was worth it just for the coffee and pastry. The flier for it sold me. But weird it was. After walking around, I am still not really sure what it was all about. Kinda' a weird collection of old buildings (repros or moved and upgraded) and gift shops, and cafe's and hotel rooms. Well, at least there was pastry.
In Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia the landscape was so much like parts of New England, the roads, the foliage, the farm land, tractors and chain saw sounds that I could have been transported there from home and I would have been hard pressed to tell you what New England state I was in, until I started seeing the red tile roofs and signs in crazy letters or an old Lada being driven by the man who proudly picked it up at the Soviet factory when he was allowed to buy one. A man who is still proud to drive it, and should be.
I rode one twisty road that was awesome, then it got smaller, one truck wide. Fewer and fewer people, then eventually no one. Great scenery. Nice ride. Then 6 miles from the next major road it turned gravel. Then logging road. There was some mud due to the logging trucks. It was about 50 kM back to the nearest major road, and much more than that to any place that might have a hotel. It was looking like wild camping in an area that might have brown bears was a possibility. Scary. All in all not a terrible road, but I was traveling alone, with a fully loaded heavy bike, on street tires, tires that don't even pretend to be dirt worthy. There was also the very real possibility that this road would peter out into nothing just short of the next road, possibly after getting so narrow that I could not turn around. Wouldn't be the first time. I passed the hut where the logger was sitting outside by a fire. I was a Pink Unicorn. I was starting to hear banjos.
This is the good part of the road, it just got worse from here.
full size
The road suddenly turned back to pavement a half mile from the main road.
The extra time spent playing in the mud made getting to my next preferred destination before dark unlikely. I checked Air BnB for the areas around me. The closest was back in Serbia. Booking.com did better. There were two in the nearest town, but not much else. It was early, but no other options. Besides, I could still hear the banjos ringing in my head.
I did commit one faux pas. I was asking for butter, but the young guy who apparently was the only one to understand other languages could not understand the word butter. So I pulled out Google Translate. It was still set to Albanian. NOT Serbian. I got the look. But when we figured that out he said Ohhhh, you want Boooter. Uh, yeah.
