Travellers’ tales: An Aegean-to-Adriatic C2C

My solo tour took 18 days,13 of them riding. It was a wonderful trip, including coastal cities, pretty farmland, remote mountain passes, spectacular valleys, jagged fjords and medieval mosques and monasteries. It encompassed a huge variety of cultures, histories and languages.

I travelled from ancient monuments and resolutely anarchist backstreets in Thessaloniki to an up-and-coming North Macedonia; from crumbling Communist-era statues and factories in Albania to Kosovo’s melting-pot of East and West; from Montenegro’s tiny Alpine-style villages and glitzy coastal resorts to the stone towns of Kotor and Dubrovnik.

The multiple languages and four different alphabets used increased the challenge. Few people spoke English outside of the tourist towns. My basic Russian helped… plus sign language when needed!

I travelled light, with just a single pannier. I was grateful of this when sweating over some of the highest passes, which were not far off 2,000m, and when I once inadvertently ended up riding for hours on steep, forested dirt tracks on my 28mm touring tyres.

The people I met were all kind and generous. An Albanian mountain guesthouse owner invited me to eat with his family. A friendly restaurant owner gave me a discount after I spoke to him in broken Serbian about Newcastle United. And a farm-stay owner offered me home-distilled raki moonshine for my birthday.

I bumped into some interesting fellow travellers, ranging from a bedraggled and lost Israeli hiker to a lovely American nutritionist. I met a handful of cycle tourists, including a couple who’d towed their young kids from Holland.

Unlike me, all were heading south towards the sun. Having said that, the weather was mostly good, and although chilly in the mountains (snowing over one pass!), it was warm on the coast. I got a decent cycling tan.

When, finally, after 1,150km of riding and over 16,000m of climbing, I rolled across the medieval bridge of Dubrovnik at the end of my own C2C, I was a tired but happy man.