East Europe

As I have to start a new blog, this is a wrapup of the last weeks on my way to Turkey. Hopefully the future will bring more but shorter entries. It seems like long gone now but I fınally started rıdıng from Radolfzell at the 21th of October wıth the plan of reaching Istanbul within three weeks in oder to avoid the upcomming winter. The planned route was to ride along the Donau almost all the way to the Black Sea and than facing south through Bulgaria. Till Budapest it was a really nice ride along the constantly growing Donau with quite moderate wheater. At the time the winter caught me, I was riding with Heinz, an elderly man from the Black Forest, who wanted to cycle to Budapest aswell. We shared rooms to get through the nights and the worst was gone after two days.
After Budapest the Donau fınally takes a big turn right going south. With sunshine and beautiful landscapes I enjoyed the way through Serbia into Romania. At this point I must have crossed a certain distance to make it a long distance travel. All people were amazingly friendly and hospitable, cheering along the street and inviting me for beers or food or even staying for the night.
In Russe I met Rostislav, who works as a mechanic on cargo ships. At that point I was already riding breakless for almost a week, because I could not find the needed spare parts. So he made it his job to find me those here and now as he did not have that much to do anyways till the next ship leaves. After five bikesstores he realized aswell we would not find them new. In the end he found a spezialist for car breaks who clued break covering for cars on the old medium for free.

That really saved me in the upcomming mountains that I had to cross on my way through Bulgaria. To avoid the higher mountains and most traffic I chose the more eastern route passing shumen and Burgas and was rewarded with beautiful mountain landscape and a completly new road without cars almost all the way from Shumen to the Turkish border. Despite from one dog biting me in the last ascent in the mountains it was a wonderfull trip without any bad expirience. Only friendly people mostly good weather and astonishingly beautiful landscape.