jon.bike

Istanbul and the end of this tour

I decided to finish my bike tour when I got to Istanbul on January 10. I feel proud for what I’ve done, but also some shame in not going fully around the world in one tour, as I had projected initially. But I need to be honest about what I want, and right now it’s not to keep going. I’m confident that I’ll come back to Istanbul and head east in a future tour.

When I rolled into Istanbul the traffic was insane and pretty unpleasant to ride through. There were just so many people. I eventually rolled up to what I thought was Hagia Sophia and took a selfie to commemorate the end of the tour.

I didn’t realize that it was actually the Blue Mosque until a few days later haha.

I learned so many things on this tour, many of which I know not even aware of yet, but will show up as I reintegrate into the US.

I have a much longer sense of history. For some reason I thought there wasn’t much going on before the Ancient Greeks, but now I know their chapter of humanity isn’t even in the first half of the book.

Time slowed down for me while I was out here. Every day was full or new shiny things to look at and think about. I saw somewhat predictable patterns along the way, but compared to the Covid lockdown life I was living in before where months flew by like days, now days feel much longer. I love that.

I repeatedly felt grateful for my American citizenship. So many people I met seemed to treat me with awe and curiosity about the US. They said things like, “The US is the best”, “I’ll trade you passports”, “I went there once, so great”, “I wish I could live there”. I feel a new sense of privilege, in addition to the one I have when living in my rich silicon valley bubble. I love the struggles I have.

Everyone has a smartphone. It’s so pervasive; right up there with shoes and jackets. I became more addicted to mine. I’m so dependent on it for everything. It’s how I socialize and navigate and entertain myself and pay for things. It’s disturbing how often I look at my phone. I spent a lot of time people watching and noticed It’s not just me.

I love that you can’t smoke indoors in most of the U.S.

I hate blogging. I was continuously behind on this blog because I never really wanted to update it. So thanks for reading despite the forced tone it might have. I’m mostly doing this as a form of evidence of this tour so that I can look back at it and share it conveniently in the future.

I loved how often I would walk into a restaurant or store and hear awesome music playing streaming from YouTube up on a computer somewhere.

My friend Carole came into Istanbul from Houston a few days after me and she had plans to do some tours of Istanbul.

First took a ferry to Kadikoy, which is across the Bosphorus channel, officially crossing into Asia. We walked around and did an audio tour. The area was full of college students and had a big fish market.

The next day we met up with a local tour guide, Ozgur. It was so helpful to have a guide to answer all the random questions we had. I wish I had done that along the way at other stops on my tour, but now I know for the future. He showed us the Hippodrome and the Hagia Sophia. We were just amazed at the ancient building. There’s really nothing else like it in the world: it was originally built as a church but then was concerted into a mosque when the Ottomans conquered the Eastern Roman Empire. It was the largest building in the world for 1000 years.

Then we went to a hamam in Karikoy and got a Turkish bath. I hadn’t been treated that way since I was a baby. Then to the spice bazaar where we bought all sorts of tea and coffee. The spice bazaar is connected to the larger bazaar where there are 4000 stores.

And then we took a private bought tour on the Bosphorus channel for a few hours. We got to see the bridges that connected Europe and Asia as well as endless vacation homes along the waterfront.

After a week of just bring blown away by Istanbul’s history and very lively streets, it was time to go back t the US. I felt ready for it, but I knew I’ll be back in Istanbul again one day.

Bulgaria

Riding towards Sofia was very cold with a few more mountain passes, but the elevation was indeed getting easier and I knew that after Sofia it would be generally downhill towards Istanbul so I could feel a light at the end of the tunnel. At very the top of the last climb towards Kyustendil I was very cold and stopped in at a restaurant to warm up. The owner approached me and we talked about how there are a lot of cyclists in the area that like to race up the pass I just went up. He gave me free coffee and cookies and then showed off his biceps. He was a very proud 60 year old and I loved to see it.

The next day I made it into Sofia where I planned to stay for a few days over New Years. For some reason I thought I’d find something fun to do there, but I just wound up laying in my hotel room doing nothing. I’m at that age where I remember at some point I used to party on New Years but now all those parties are collapsed into a single memory that I can’t really remember many details of.

Anyway it was cool to ride around Sofia and explore their old buildings and big city parks. They had a classy lightrail system and most memorably, a STARBUCKS with FILTER COFFEE.

After New Years I headed south to Plovdiv. The terrain was flattening out and I was feeling like taking the smoothest route I could so I stayed on the freeway for a long time. It was great while it lasted. After a few hours a police car pulled me over and said, “bicycle, problem.” I told him, “Oh, OK!” and exited. I really feel like a freeway with a 10-15′ shoulder with faster cars is more a lot safer than a bumpy local road with no shoulder and endless cars overtaking me with less than a foot of buffer. It’s definitely more stressful to be off the freeway.

Eventually I did make it into Plovdiv. My expectations were very low, but Rick Steves suggested it on a video I saw so it feels like the right place to stop. And it was. There was a very lively old town that was easy to walk around on. The city felt small in size but lively like a big city would.

I took a walking tour of Plovdiv and really loved it. I wished I had done more tours up to that point but so it was. There were only 3 visitors on the tour, me and a couple from Sofia: Ivan and Malvina. After the tour, we wound up at the same nearby restaurant for lunch where we fed the local cats and became fast travel friends.

They took me out to eat that night as well and showed me some delicious Bulgarian cuisine.

I was sad saying goodbye to them knowing that they would probably be my last new travel friends of this tour.

Slave

Before I met Jason in Dubrovnik, I was planning to ride along the coast into Greece so that I could stay closer to the warmer weather. I was out of days on my Schengen visa but I was thinking maybe I’d take the risk and see if I could get in – maybe the border control agent wouldn’t actually count days on my passport?! That was wishful thinking.. When I. bounced the idea off of Jason, he said something like “you don’t want that living on your permanent record.” That scared me into just going eastward.

I had another YouTube friend that was from Macedonia and he and I had been playing tag on Instagram last summer. So I connected with him wondering if he’d be visiting home for the holidays, and he was, so we got our itineraries aligned and planned to meet up in Skopje on Christmas.

It got colder as I headed inland. The roads improved when I entered Macedonia and the drivers became slightly safer, but still fairly honky and didn’t give much space when overtaking me.

My first stop in Macedonia was Ohrid; an ancient town on the northern side of Lake Ohrid. Lake Ohrid reminded me a lot of Lake Tahoe because it’s an oval shaped lake surrounded by mountains that split between Albania and Macedonia.

I spent a day there and enjoyed visiting the castle and the numerous orthodox churches. There are only a few orthodox churches in SF and I can barely notice them – they also look different than the ones in Europe. The architecture is now distinctive to me. Apparently the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in Ohrid too?

From Ohrid I went north towards Skopje, making a stop in Tetovo. This was the coldest part of the trip so far, thankfully it wasn’t actively snowing but it was below freezing for a while. The layers worked thankfully.

Slave was super helpful with local advice while I was in Macedonia. Our plan to meet on Christmas was coming together, and I rode from Tetovo to Skopje Christmas morning. I didn’t realize that Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas in January, so the 25th didn’t feel like a bad day to ride onto Skopje.

I checked into a hotel in the Old Bazaar part of Skopje. It was a market neighborhood leftover from the Ottoman era and I loved it. There were a ton of dense shops and streets and for some reason jewelry stores?

Slave met me about an hour after I arrived. He had just landed from vacation in the Dominican Republic, but somehow still had enough energy to take me out for an amazing Christmas dinner.

We started out by going to a Turkish Coffee bar that was tiny and full of ornate plates and cups. We had some Turkish Coffee that was cooked in SAND(!) which I’d never seen before. Then we had some Turkish chai tea.

After that we drove about a mile away to what seemed like the hipster neighborhood. Slave found a traditional Macedonian restaurant for us to eat in and we had ourselves a little feast. His longtime friend Aleksander came as well so I got to ask him questions about Slave growing up and stuff.

I loved that we got to hang out. We had been to parties together in SF and we used to work together, but never really spent much time 1:1. I’d always found Slave to be mysterious. Like a super-smart-next-level kind of mysterious. Now that I’ve visited where he’s from and spent some more time with him, I feel like I understand him (just slightly) more.

Finally, I met a lot of dogs in Macedonia!

Albania

The roads in Albania quickly got worse with a lot of potholes and trash all along the road. There were farms with very primitive looking equipment. This was the Albania I had been prepared to see.

Shkodër was the first city I stayed in. As I rolled up I saw a lot of cyclists on old bikes carrying heavy loads. Many of the riders were older men that were not riding for recreational reasons as I was. I started to see more dogs running up and barking at me. Then As I got into downtown Shkodër I saw empty lots full of garbage and little packs of stray dogs eating trash. There were so many dogs eating from dumpsters in the city. I even saw stray horses walking around eating out of dumpsters. It was surreal.

I did manage to get out and explore the well-decorated shopping district had in place for Christmas.

One thing I’d been struggling a lot with on the entire trip is spatial manners. I was frequently surprised and annoyed by how inconsiderate everyone is when it comes to sharing the roads. By everyone I mean everyone: pedestrians of all ages, cyclists, cars, trucks. Nobody will make way for anyone else. Whenever there’s a possibility of crossing paths with another on roads or sidewalks, nobody will move over or slow down for another. There’s no eye contact or an attempt to negotiate who should go first. It’s just: “I’m going now and I don’t see you.” It’s extremely frustrating. Even in the most unfriendly bike cities in the U.S. (I’m looking at you Joliet, IL), there would be some scornful eye contact.

Tirana was a surprise to me. It was a big metropolitan city in the middle of the poorest European county. But this place had all the workings of a big European city. Busy streets and sidewalks. Cafes and restaurants. Universities. People. Lots of smokers too.

My friend Yü described Tirana as “the Paris of the Balkans.” I agree with that. There’s a lot of pedestrians on narrow streets that are lined with cafes, bars and restaurants. There’s a university that brings a lot of young people. I had some of the best food options (ie veggie options) in Tirana.

While I was in Tirana I got my 3rd Covid vaccine. This was something had struggled to do this in while I was in both Split and Dubrovnik, despite claims on the public health website that everyone (including travelers) were eligible for vaccines. In Tirana I walked up to the public health department and asked for a vaccine. After a bit of confusion they took my number and later directed me to the soccer stadium. Once I knew where to go getting a booster was easy. I walked into the stadium, they wrote down my name and passport, didn’t ask me any questions, gave me a vaccine, updated my Digital EU Covid passport, and sent me on my way. Unfortunately I felt some side effects from the vaccine for the following few days, but nothing like the ones I felt on the 2nd dose last June.

Soccer stadium where vaccines were done in Tirana

I had been coordinating with an old YouTube friend from Macedonia this whole bike tour and he was planning to be back there for Christmas. So I decided to meet up with him from Tirana. I headed eastward toward Elsaban for a night and then on to Macedinia the next day. The weather was definitely getting colder as I went inland and gained in elevation.

Delicious traditional Albanian food after a cold day to Elsaban was really wonderful.

Overlooking Lake Ohrid, near the Macedonian border

Montenegro

It didn’t take long to get another country stamp on my passport after Dubrovnik; Montenegro wasn’t far south from there. The Omicron Covid variant was spreading and Montenegro had just imposed a new requirement to enter the country: you must have been vaccinated within the past 6 months. Luckily I was just a few days ahead of that deadline for my second vax.

I was happy that I decided to keep riding even though the weather was in the 40s and rainy still. My first stop was in Kotor and then a short ride ahead of that my second stop was Budva. I decided to stay in Budva for 5 days because of the relentless rain. I stayed in the old town, which had a good coffee shop called North Coffee. Shefak, the barista, was from Turkey and he gave me some tips on where I could stay while in Istanbul.

The cats were still with me along the way south, but dogs became more dominant as well.

Old Town Budva felt a lot like Split – a skeleton of itself during high season. There weren’t many restaurants open and the ones that were open were overpriced.

I told my friend Carole about my plan to ride to Istanbul and she was interested in meeting up with me at the end there because she had always wanted to go to Haggia Sophia and Nicea. So did I. So we agreed to meet up there in January. It was nice to have something like that to look forward to.

Dubrovnik

I rented another AirBnB apartment in Dubrovnik just outside the Old City overlooking the ocean. I looked into shipping options for sending my bicycle back to the U.S., but after about a day in Dubrovnik the sun came out. Dubrovnik was beautiful and inspiring to see.

I did a short 3 mile ride in the rain when I got there from the bus station to my apartment and it wasn’t so bad with the new rain gear I bought. I had no excuses other than feeling uninspired to ride. That feeling was a totally valid reason to stop there, especially since I’d been working on living more authentically with this whole trip. I realized I had proper clothing for the winter weather. I realized that one unconscious requirement I had been making for myself this whole tour was that I always needed to ride “hard.” I felt the need to go multiple long days at a good-fast pace. I needed to prove to people that I was strong.

After meeting fellow travelers on the road and slowing down a bit, I realized that it was pretty pointless to prove how strong I was in comparison to how it felt to connect with people on the road. I’m on a bike TOUR, not a bike RACE. What was I doing? I inherited this habit from the USA trip I did last Spring when there was tremendous pressure to make daily miles in order to complete the trip within the allowed vacation days I had. I suppose another reason I was trying to cover so many miles per day while I in the Schengen zone was so that I could cover more countries and get out before I ran over my 90-day travel visa, which I did only by one day. Anyway, in Dubrovnik I got over my travel depression and decided there wasn’t any shame in going slower and spending more time in the Balkans compared to the pace I was doing in Western Europe. I decided to keep going to Istanbul.

Me looking shameful on the stairs from the “Shame” episode of Game Of Thrones (which had a lot of scenes shot here in Dubrovnik!)

I met up again with Jessica in Dubrovnik and she helped me connect with another expat meetup group she was connected with. I went out with them one night and had a blast. I met some people who were living the digital nomad life. One of them was a fellow programmer named Jason from Canada who had been doing “slow travel” around the Balkans since Covid started. He was friend material to me. Sharp and acerbic with a confident sense of adventure. I hope to come back and meet up with him some time in the future. That also just made me realize one of the significant drawbacks with traveling is that it’s very difficult to make pure friendships. There are fewer constraints and you meet people you wouldn’t normally get to. There’s just so much utility and not enough time in the equation when meeting people on the road that it’s difficult for me not to question the virtue of the friendship. When I travel this long, I feel vulnerable, often lonely. I never really felt lonely when I lived in SF. If anything, I frequently needed to find personal alone time. I’m not used to having this many transient friends collected when traveling. It will be interesting to see what happens once I’m back in a non-travel lifestyle.

Mostar

From Split, my next main stop was initially Dubrovnik, but I got in contact with Jessica and she convinced me to meet up with her in Mostar, Bosnia, which wasn’t too far out of the way for me. She was an elementary school teacher from San Diego that had taken a year sabbatical to travel and had been traveling in the Balkans for a few weeks already.

A few minutes after she arrived at the hostel we were both staying at in Mostar, she got a phone call from her boyfriend. “Hey, how was your interview?!” she said to the phone. I knew immediately I had misread the situation badly. Somehow I had seen what I wanted to see back in Split. Somehow Nicole’s intuition was wrong. I felt so dumb for chasing this chance to hang out with Jessica. It’s not like a bike tourist can have a meaningful relationship with anyone anyway due to the transient nature of touring. I knew this intellectually but I think the loneliness of being on the road that long was really messing with my ability to be rational. I didn’t really want a relationship, but I did want to just take a chance with someone new and see where it went.

After her phone call with her boyfriend, Jessica and I went to find dinner. I admitted to her that I showed up in Mostar on the assumption of mutual attraction, but clearly I was confused. We laughed a bit at that and took it to friendville. I was getting accustomed to making this shift by this point.

We stayed in the first hostel in Mostar, Hostel Miran, which was run my a guy named.. Miran. He had a reputation for being a wild guy that gave a great War Tour of the city. So we took that tour and listened at great length to his first-hand experience of the war. I had never been to such a war-torn place before and this was very interesting to see. There were blown up buildings and bullet holes left over from the was in 90’s. Mostar was recovering but it still had a lot of scar tissue. It made me feel grateful to have the problems the U.S. has.

Miran, Jessica, Me on top of a very windy mountain

It was raining a lot still in the area. The temps were getting into the low 40’s/30’s. The forecasts were showing nothing but rain everywhere for the foreseeable future. I was feeling really discouraged about going on in that weather. It just seemed so miserable to ride in the rain for days. The bad weather combined with my feeling depressed and lonely made me want to quit the bike tour. Maybe I would just switch into “normal traveler” with luggage and bus around the area instead of ride in the rain? Maybe I should just pack it up and go back to the U.S.? I didn’t know what to do.

So after a few nights in Mostar, I took a bus to Dubrovnik thinking that would be a good place to think it over since it has an airport in case I wanted to fly back. Jessica was also planning to go to Dubrovnik so I would at least know someone else there.

Split

I had planned to spend a month in Split. I was feeling ready to have a bit more stability compared to the very nomadic life I had been living for the past few months. So I booked an AirBnB near the Old Town (Diocletian’s Palace) which was quite overpriced for what it was. The apartment was newly remodeled but dark and cold inside, which I think had a negative effect on my mood. It also rained almost every day I was there.

I was surprised by how hard it was to stop riding my bike. I felt depressed almost immediately when I got to Split. I was alone in a dark apartment with cold wet weather outside. I realized that all the riding I had done the past few months were simply distracting me from just being alone with myself and my thoughts. Riding provides enough distraction and shiny/new objects to look at that you don’t actually get as introspective as one may imagine. Riding requires you to focus on the road, drivers, logistics of lodging, routing, cadence, power, heart rate, nutrition and anything else. It all adds up to a diversion from yourself.

Split was a medium sized city that felt like a skeleton of itself because it was offseason. Exploring around town felt like looking at an already harvested farm; you could imagine what it looked like in full blossom, but that wasn’t now. I don’t know what the right word for this is, but it’s some form of FOMO (Possible-FOMO? PFOMO?)

Anyway, Diocletian’s Palace is the place to explore when you’re there. It’s an ancient palace built as a retirement home for the Roman Emperor, Diocletian. I loved the sense of history you could feel when walking around. It was built around 400 AD and here we were, almost a millennium later hanging out in it. I spent a lot of time in an American style coffee house, D16 and another American style bar/restaurant, Daltonist. The ground was made of well-worn stones from all the tourists walking on it over the years. In fact the city hired people to etch lines into the cobblestone to make it grip better/safer.

There were also a TON of stray cats in Croatia, especially in Old Town Split.

A few days after I got there I thought I might try out Tinder, just to see what would happen. I was feeling lonely and was going to be there a while, so it seemed to be an easy way to meet people. A few days later I matched with someone named Nora. We met up for a beer and I thought we had a good conversation. She was from Dana Point, California, but had been living in abroad for years and was currently in Split. She spent five years as a bike tour guide in the area, so we had bike touring and California in common. The next time we met up she took me to friendville and invited me to go to a soccer game: Croatia v Russia.

I was happy to have a new/local friend, and I’d never been to a professional soccer game before (or professional American Football game for that matter!), so this was going to be an experience. Of course it was pouring rain the day of the game, but that couldn’t hold us back. We found some ponchos and bought some Croatian flag apparel to blend in. We drank a lot of beer too, which is probably the only reason we were able to stand in the cold rain for several hours. Croatia beat Russia, 1-0. The crowd sang national anthems very loudly. The energy was incredible, but we bolted out of the stadium before the mass exit and ran down the street in the rain singing “We Are the Champions” (We Are the Champions was the song my classmates and I sang in 5th grade whenever our team won the soccer game at recess; that was the “reward” for winning) on to the best Ćevapi place in Split that Nora knew of. It was a super-fun day.

Another reason I wanted to spend a month in Split was that I needed a shipping address to receive a few bike parts I wanted. It’s really quite logistically challenging to not have a mailing address. I wish there were a good mechanism for travelers to receive deliveries to a network of addresses throughout the world. Anyway, my bike bag setup was in shambles because the zippers on my Apidura framebag broke, so I decided it was time to upgrade to the Tailfin bike bag system. I also wanted to change my gear ratio to make it easier to do ascents, especially with a loaded bike. So I got some gear for converting my bike to the Mullet Drivetrain. I tried very hard to get a replacement SRAM shifter but the COVID supply chain issues hit the bike industry hard and the part was just not available. So I resorted to disassembling my brake lever and super-gluing my busted shifter back together, which was scary but seems to have worked out well so far! Finally I ordered a bunch of cold-weather bike gear in anticipation of all the cold/wet winter riding ahead of me.

While I was working on my bike, I managed to cut my hand with a razor blade. I needed stitches, so I went to the local hospital. That was an experience compared to the American hospitals I’d been to. I walked into the emergency room and talked with a nurse who asked for my passport and wrote my name down on a list and asked me to sit down in a waiting room that was full of cigarette smoke. I waited about 45 minutes and then doctor called me in. They looked at my hand and stitched me up within the hour. The overall cost was $45, which just blew my mind. That may have been the best care I’ve gotten before because it was so fast and cheap.

On one of my last days in Split, Nora invited me to join her to go to a Expat/Co-Working Space Meetup. While we were there, a couple of women from a hostel nearby showed up. One of them, Jessica, I thought was very pretty and sat down across from me and looked right at me long enough to make me uncomfortable. We only barely talked due to the table arrangement and then she went off to another bar. I was bummed I couldn’t get her contact info before she left because she was going to be traveling in same general area as I was soon. I told Nora about this and she was like, “dude she was totally into you, I could tell!” Nora the sleuth got her contact info for me through some mutual friends and relayed it to me as I was riding south from Split.

Into Croatia

It was cold and wet the day I started to ride south from Trieste. It turns out that I had to ride through a small sliver of Slovenia to get to Croatia, so I got to add another country “visited” to my passport.

The road also became unsafe with more bumps/potholes a lot of semi-trucks wizzing by and honking at me. I had no shoulder or parallel road so I don’t really know what they’re expecting from me. It was scary to ride on and was not helping my mood.

That first night I stayed in hostel in Rijeka that began to feel a lot different than Italy. The town was pretty industrial and EVERYONE smoked. The hostel was cheap though, only $15 per night.

The next day I learned about a thing called Bora and boy was is hard to ride in! My bike had a lot of bags on it which basically acted like a sail whenever the wind blew. So it became very difficult to ride in a straight line for a lot of the day. I was very nervous about swerving into the lane when a car could come up behind me and collide. I even had to walk for about a quarter mile through some of it because it was just too strong to ride through. It was definitely the worst wind I’ve been in.

You can see how the wind was hitting the water to get a sense of how strong and choppy it was.

The next few days I stayed in Senj, Starigrad and Šibenik. The days were pretty uneventful, but the scenery was definitely improving as I rode south (and the the Bora wind was dying down too!). It felt like riding along the California coast most of the days, and I could see more and more resort-looking towns on the coast. I also rode through decaying small farm towns that seemed to have been left behind somehow from the fall of Yugoslavia. Half-built houses or destroyed houses were common.

Trieste

The winds turned against me as I rode westward to Trieste, my last stop in Italy. It was a long day, but the fall colors were strong and the sunset was strong. I was getting a glimpse of the Adriatic coast and it was beautiful.

I was also coming down from the high of being in Venice and having a good travel companion. I started to feel lonely and uninspired about riding. I felt saturated and somehow bored. Nothing I saw could come close to Venice.

Along the way I cross-crossed with a French bike tourist, Sylvan who was on his way to Istanbul as well, but he was going at a slower pace, so we parted ways. We exchanged WhatsApp so we could keep in contact along the way. That made me feel less alone because I hadn’t seen cyclists for a long time since the weather was changing.

Trieste was cold, windy and empty. I felt like I was walking around in a skeleton. All I could see were closed doors and trash blowing around on the street and that started to get me down.

The oldest cafe (only 1956 lol) in California is called Cafe Trieste, where the founder was from, so I was interested to see what the coffee scene was like. It turns out that Illy Coffee is based there! I didn’t get to see any factory or headquarters but I was able to check out a few historic coffee houses when I was there though, and that was exciting.

Although the Austro-Hungarian influence was interesting to notice in Trieste, I was ready to move on after a day or so.