Tour de (Western) Balkans 2023

We get off the ferry in Pula at night and cycle along the harbour with the port cranes all illuminated in multi colours (it’s super cool and it’s an artist what did it) and head for a friendly hostel, then immediately out for FOOD. Only a kebab will hit the spot, so kebab it is, us queueing with all the teenagers. Then an ice cream chaser, and Jon who has started auto-dissolving had pizza in between.

By day Pula is lovely. It’s a big old working port but it’s also full of interesting things to see – a big old Roman oblong amphitheater, a big old Greek temple, many fine buildings, some old mosaics. It isn’t overrun with tourists and we both love it. By midday it’s back on the bikes and off we head into what seems to be a constant headwind.

Both of us really wanted to see Istria. It doesn’t quite turn out to be what either of us expected but does turn out to be cracking cycling territory. The first day sees us taking a massive loop South East to avoid the airport, doing a long stretch of off piste down to a cove and back up again, then through rolling agricultural land through dotted villages, hedges abound, with lots and lots of new build houses, and lots of Slovenian registered cars.

On a tiny dirt path between two thick hedgerows we meet Pauline and Ambre, two feisty French lasses in their twenties off on a great adventure on their bikes from Marseille to Athens – first bike trip for one of them and second for the other. They are having a total ball and make me wish I’d headed off on my bike without a care in the world in my twenties as well (I was brought up to see Disaster and Domestic Accidents – a broad category that involves Coming A’cropper in many a life situation – around every corner and it’s taken 4 decades for that to start to wear off) (the main person who warns about Domestic Accidents is my dad and in life’s many great ironies he’s managed to bash his head in not once but TWICE coming off a bike and landing himself in hospital and yet is still riding his bike aged 89). The French lasses are delighted at knocking on doors everywhere to ask to camp in people’s gardens and can’t get over how amazing and cheap cycletouring is for seeing the world. We generally have a group-love of cycling and part in great spirits.

Gradually the houses thin out and it all feels very rural and lovely. The wild flowers are in full explosion. Vines appear. We stop for field picnics x2 and up close in meadowland the wild flowers are staggering. Orchids again everywhere (difficult to pee without hitting one) and millions of smaller flowers. I could just lie there for hours in the field taking it all in. Obv not in my peepatch.

We end up at a lovely small campsite run by a very friendly young guy and his dad who has a most excellent taste in music in their bar area where we sit and have a beer after our pastatea. The campsite is really lovely and well thought out for families and there’s lots of laughter from a sweet Polish family having a ball playing volleyball.

The heavens open as predicted and the tent turns up trumps yet again in the soggy weather with our two antechambers. For the first time the next morning we try the trick of taking down the inner tent with the outer still in place (new tent) and it’s ace.

Then it’s off to pretty Motovun via some Greek standard very steep gradients up and down and my back tyre finally punctures properly on a descent. Thankfully for some unknown reason I wasn’t going at my usual swift downhill pace and so averted a Domestic Accident.

Motovun is touristy and pretty and perched on a hill top, an old fortified village. We have our second breakfast in an elegant cloistered area with a greedy cat and fine views.

The landscape has really changed over the two days and we leave behind sun-beaten polje scrub oak land and it all suddenly feels very middle European. We join the Parenzana cycle trail, an old railway line that goes from Porec to Trieste and it’s totally ace. We join just at the section that takes you up a steady climb out of the deep valley through tunnels and over viaducts and past villages. It’s all dripping greenery and so lush and verdant. It’s mainly gravel and well maintained and just a joy to ride.

We end up at a second Istrian campsite, also small, also lovely, just a field really with a nice lean-to covered area but in contrast to the previous night’s that was cheap as chips, there is no doubt that we are being milked for all our euros here, and end up paying a pisstake whack for it – you could stay in a nice hotel for this. Definitely not a campsite for Ambre and Pauline. Being crap at haggling we don’t argue.

But it does allow us to dry everything out under cover as it’s still chucking it down, and wash, and walk 3km to the next village where we have the Full Istrian Amazing food at an unprepossessing looking but very very friendly and very delicious trattoria. I’m in food ultra-heaven. This is part of Rosemary and Clive’s Christmas treat and it’s very special. It involves a lot of seafood and wild asparagus which we finally managed to find by the road side earlier as well. On a pee theme, wild asparagus doesn’t make your pee smell like farmed asparagus.

We wake early the next morning and pack up our slightly less soggy things and head back to the Parenzana. This takes us down to the coast for a country-hopping day as we leave Croatia, pop briefly into Slovenia, then on to Italy.

We hit the coast at old saltpans mostly abandoned and then it’s into Slovenia. Suddenly tarmac is smooth and cyclists abound. Not the smileyest and definitely on a fitness mission as the Lycra count shoots up. We almost lose track of our cycle tourist count there are so many, they come in twos and threes and solostyle and we have to invent a chant to remember what order we see them in for our Total Cycle Tourist Count. This is Euro Velo 8 in all its glory.

Great views down on the sea and along a lovely coastal cycle route with only joggers and bikes and all headwind bora and ships out at sea, we stop in Koper for the tourism – old 15th C Venetian palazzos, big church, winding streets, but still a workaday feel about it with a busy port. Great ice cream. A bit of a footle leaving town and suddenly boom we are in Italy, tarmac quality goes down, cycle route joins the dual carriageway (gulp) but cars are respectful and it’s not remotely scary just a long drag into Trieste through industrial suburbs on dual carriageway. Both v excited at reaching Trieste so it gets its own section. We reach Trieste at last, after roughly 10 years of talking about a Greece to Trieste trip, we have made it at last with No Domestic Accidents!