Bolivia

Hi everyone,

we're in La Paz now... just did a week's mountaineering course and that was cool; now we're off for another 4 days of glacier training and we'll hopefully summit Huayana Potosi (>6000m) on the last day.

Will add photos and stuff after that if we've got time. We'll see how we go, political instability in Bolivia and all...

Later,
m+j

Colorado, USA

12-28th August, 2008

Colorado! What a beautiful part of the world. I could write about this place, and in particular, some of its very friendly residents, for pages and pages. But I won't, not because it's boring, but because I don't have the hours and hours and hours I'd need to do it justice.

So let's start at the beginning. The year was 2001, and the Tas Uni Climbing Club was cruising along. That was until this little upstart from Colorado named Dayna Hochevar came along, and started traditions like massage conga-lines and dessert pizza that changed the face of the club.

Dayna and I have kept in touch for the last 7 years, would you believe, and man it was good to see her again. She picked us up from Denver International Airport, which is 2 hours drive from her house in Pueblo. And that was straight after she sat an exam to get into Physician's Assistant School. So she was all tired and stuff, but still she drove all that way for us. That's how cool she is.

We stayed with her in her share house, living with her sister Tracey and their landlord (and friend) Daneya. Both were super-cool and almost as untidy as us, which made all of us feel completely at home.

So what did we get up to? Well, lots of hiking, driving around, and even some climbing. It was super cool.

The first place Dayna took us was to the Garden of the Gods, which is an amazing place with an alien sandstone and conglomerate landscape. Here's a photo.

The Garden of the Gods

Reygan, Dayna's niece, top, and Dayna at the Garden of the Gods.

We did some cool bouldering in the Garden of the Gods, and also found a little garden snake which Reygan promptly picked up and started stuffing down the backs of our shirts. What fun!

Dayna's parents, John and Dianne, lived about 10 minutes drive from Dayna's. They were really nice to us and we spent many evenings there eating delicious food, playing pool, using their internet, watching the Olympics, and planning hikes. They were our adopted parents for the time we were in Colorado, and we'll love them forever. Thanks guys!

We visited this place called Bishop's Castle, which was built single-handedly by this slightly bizarre old fella, Mr Bishop. He's been working on the castle for over 40 years. It's a litigator's nightmare, with rickety steel stairwells, a dragon's head, teetering towers, and anything you could imagine that would make parents' wills crumble as they watch their 8 year-old kids tear around the place. Entry is by donation, and you also have to sign a legal waiver before you go in. What made it more dramatic was the fact that it was misty, raining, and we were 30-40m up in the air surrounded by steel, with a thunderstorm approaching.

Atop the tower of Bishop's Castle. Scary stuff.
Clockwise from left: John (Dayna's brother), Dayna, Jen, Reygan (under stairs), my feet.

Em Willcox, a fellow medlet from Utas joined us a week after we got to Colorado. Together, the three of us went for a hike up Greenhorn Peak whilst our poor hosts were all at work. It was a 2 hour drive to the start of the hike, and when we got there, we realised we'd left all the food for the day on the bench at Dayna's place. Oops. At least we had water, and I happened to have a single muesli bar in my pocket. So it was a third of a muesli bar each for lunch in our 5 hour hike. Good work team!

Me and Em on top of Greenhorn Peak. Hungry.

One morning Dayna's father John got us out of bed at 3am so we could drive 3 hours to the foot of La Plata, one of Colorado's "Fourteeners" (i.e. peaks greater than 14,000ft). This turned out to be a fantastic hike; it took us about 5 hours to get up to the top, and 3 hours back down. Here are some photos:

Contemplating my navel on a very square boulder, on the way up to La Plata.

Jen took this great photo of these two marmots. They're cute. Very cute.

John, Dayna, Em, and Jen very happy to be at the top of La Plata.

We also did other cool things like hike up Pike's Peak (another Fourteener, and then caught the cog railway down), went to Water World (how cool!), the Colorado State Fair where we saw our first Rodeo, spent many many days lost in REI (Recreational Equipment Inc - a huge outdoor store where we spent many thousands of dollars on mountaineering and climbing gear for our mountaineering course we were about to embark upon in Bolivia), oh, and we musn't forget Walmart where you can buy everything from your groceries to potting mix, drugs, bikes, and fridges.

Thanks so much to the Dayna and the Hochevar family for letting us use and abuse you, and to Daneya and Tracey for putting up with our slobishness. It was definitely one of the highlights of our trip!

London

8-12 of August, 2008

A nice easy, non-stressful plane flight (i.e. without bikes) back to London saw us breaking into Vince and Fel's house and hanging out there while they were on holidays in Paris! Well, we saw them the day we got in, and the night before we were about to leave.

I think we did nothing but watch the Olympics all day, for the whole time pretty much. Vince and Fel have a very very large TV screen, with Sky satellite TV which meant there were about 6 different Olympic channels and you could switch between each depending on which sport you liked. It was so cool.


We did manage to catch up with a few friends; here's a pic of a Hutchins Boys reunion at some pub somewhere in London...

Will Lamprill, Me, and Adam Commane at the pub.

I don't think I'd seen Adam since I left school. What a blast from the past. It was cool to catch up with the boys anyway.

Nothing much else to report in London, apart from going for a couple of runs to keep our fitness up, and just resting up.

Turkey

1-8th August, 2008

3965km, Lisbon to Istanbul... Let's call it 4000km. The ride is over!!! Our bums are thanking us already.

Turkey is an amazing country, and we had a great time there. The bus ride was alright; coming into Istanbul we realised how bloody huge the city is, and how many mosques there were!

The bus station was a monstrosity of a creation. It was just ridiculously humongous. And traffic was unbelievable; bumper to bumper for ks and ks, 5 cars 4WDing over a traffic island in an attempt to do a U-turn; all typical third world traffic. We were knackered, and over it, so we shoved our bikes in the back of a dual cab ute-taxi (we didn't even need to take our pannier bags off) and got a rip-off ride into Sultanahmet (10km away but the trip took over an hour), the touristy old-town district of Istanbul.

The blue mosque, Istanbul.

Our first task once we got to Istanbul was to get rid of our bikes. Took us a day and a half to organise, find bike boxes, clean and pack the bastards up (an epic, especially with Australian Customs to deal with), but luckily for us the lovely lady in the window above us gave us copious quantities of tea and even lunch! She was so cool.

For the princely sum of $840 USD we got both bikes, our pannier bags, and all our riding gear sent back to Oz. Phew.

After that we could relax and see the place!

Sultanahmet at night.

We spent a couple of days checking out the city of Istanbul. We visited the Blue Mosque, which was fantastic (see our FB album "Turkey" link on the right), and also the Grand Bazaar which was huge and crazy (we didn't buy much from there, just a couple of paintings of whirling dervishes i.e. dudes dancing wearing white robes). We also checked out the Spice Market which was tres cool and bought some apple tea to give to Sam, Aarti, and Arjun, and to Simon and Rosie back in England. We didn't think we'd get it through Australian Customs :( . Apple tea is sooooo good! We drank lots of it while we were in Turkey.

One evening we went for a stroll to a big tower, but the line was massive so we didn't bother going in. It would've given us great views over Sultanahmet, but instead we went to a rooftop restaurant and had a cuppa and some biscuits up there and got a view almost as good we reckon. That's where we took that photo above. We also checked out the big mall there, which was a couple of kms long, and totally crowded with mostly locals and had the usual city mally shops there.

On the Monday we took off for a 2 day tour down to Gallipoli and Troy. This was one of the best things we did. As it was the first organised tour we'd ever been on, we were a little nervous. But when the bus picked us up in the morning, it filled up with young Aussies. There was also a lovely old Kiwi couple. We hadn't heard so many Australian accents in one place at one time for ages.

Gallipoli was amazing. You know how you learn about it at school, it seems pretty bad but it's so far away. Our guide Murat was great; he was a Turk, but had a real interest in Gallipoli and knew a lot about the place. So after watching a doco about Gallipoli on the bus on the way there, Murat took us to some of the memorials and important battle sites on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

The whole experience was quite moving. Just hearing about how many people were killed for no good reason, the countless tactical blunders made by the commanding officers there, and the unusual camaraderie and respect soldiers from both sides had for their enemies, really had an effect on both of us. At every site we were taken to, the tour group was very quiet and respectful. Seeing the trenches and how close some of them were together was spooky - some of them were only 8m apart. Apparently some grenades would change hands 4-5 times before they blew up. Insane.

Lone Pine Memorial, Gallipoli.

After our tour of Gallipoli, we stayed in a hostel in Cannakale and watched the old classic movie "Gallipoli" starring Mel Gibson. I'd seen it a few times, the last time probably in Mr Cripp's Australian Studies class in grade 9. I forgot how cool it was!

The next day we were off to Troy, scene of many epic battles and home to the Trojan Horse myth. Our tour guide, Mustafa, was awesome. He was the guru of Troy, having written two books about it and is up to date with all the current theories, excavations, and news about the area. So apparently the whole Trojan Horse story may not have happened at all; it could have been a big siege tower or something, or a battering ram... who knows? There's no evidence for there actually being a horse at all. But it makes for a good story. Mustafa showed us around the walls and the excavation areas, and was entertaining and knowledgeable.

The Trojan Horse used in the Brad Pitt movie "Troy", Cannakale, near Gallipoli and Troy.

The model of the Trojan Horse at the historic site of Troy was a bit lame though... it had been rebuilt recently and looked all shiny and crappy. You can see a photo of it in our FB album. The cooler-looking Trojan Horse was the one in the town of Cannakale; this was the actual horse used in the movie "Troy" starring Brad Pitt etc.

After the tour we were bussed back to Istanbul where we got ourselves sorted out for our flight back to London the next day.

Bulgaria

18-31st of July, 2008

Bulgaria was a place of fun and relaxation for us (not that the rest of the trip wasn't...).

After slipping down the side of the massive queue of cars at the border, much to the disgust of many hot, sweaty, frustrated motorists, we cruised down the highway towards the capital, Sofia. We thought we'd give Sofia a miss and stay in a small village on the outskirts, and then head south-east to Velingrad where there was cool mountainbiking. This small village did have a hotel, but unfortunately it had closed long ago. And the directions we got to the next town were hopeless and we ended up riding around in circles during the 40 degree heat of the day.

So that being the frustrating case, we thought we'd just ride the 30km to Sofia and stay there. Luckily it was a Sunday afternoon, so traffic wasn't too heavy. We stayed there for a couple of nights and ate at a really cool vego restaurant. Twice. Such was the lack of vegetable material in the rest of Eastern Europe.

It took us 2 days to ride to Velingrad, much of that in spectacular lightning storms. The lightning was a little too close for comfort at one point, striking the ground about 20m away from us and scaring the crap out of us with a loud crack.

We stayed in a sweet 4 star hotel in Velingrad, and watched the last few days of the Tour de France... poor Cadel, bridesmaid again.

We spent a week in Velingrad and spent the first few days resting, and then we met this cool guy called Vasil who runs a mountain biking cooperative and makes trails all around the area. Got some good track notes from him and then went off exploring!

This lovely guy gave us some local brew on one of our rides. It was potent, ouzo-esque.

Sweet singletrack, on a day ride out of Velingrad.

One of the big days we did involved 100km of fun asphalt and dirt road mix, of which we spent about 50km hopelessly lost. But we eventually found the track (the tracks were generally well marked, except for some key spots that meant we were kinda stuffed if we missed them and ended up lost for hours at a time). The finish of the ride was 20km of descent down a good asphalt road (we didn't have time for the dirt road descent, because we'd spent too long lost and it was getting close to dark).

River crossing on the 100km epic day. We weren't lost at this stage, but about 300m later we took a wrong turn and added 15km to the day. Oops.

After Velingrad, we rode 100km to Plovdiv which was a nice fast ride; we managed to average 30km/h! It started as a nice fast descent down a horrendously scary windy road filled with suicidal drivers, and then a flat as a pancake plain with a slight tailwind, and baby-bum smooth asphalt.

Carpet snakes were on the menu in Plovdiv.

Bulgarian drivers are probably the worst and scariest in the world. Forget India and South America (though we haven't seen Iran or Iraq yet...), but think about this: the road toll is typically over 1000 people per year, and with a population of 7 million people, this is just ridiculous. They try and mark the "black spot" areas on the roads, and you'll see one around a blind corner and think, "ok, fair enough," but then we saw one on the highway to Plovdiv, on a dead straight section of highway with no intersections and excellent visibility. Only in Bulgaria could they have made this a black spot area. Only in Bulgaria.

From Plovdiv we thought very hard about our lives, and very hard about the drivers in Bulgaria being incompatible with our lives, and our conclusion was to preserve our lives and catch a bus to Istanbul!

Serbia

Serbia is cool. And mostly cool for one reason: our mate Denis. If we hadn´t met him, we may not have enjoyed it as much as we did.

So we caught a train across the border from Montengro to a town called Prijepolje, where we intended to ride across from here to Bulgaria. So I meet this boy on the street and he helps us with some directions, and he speaks really good english, and he takes us to this map shop where we buy a map, and then he says goodbye.

The next day we planned to buy tickets for an overnight train to Nis, after finding out that riding East would be a bit dodgy with shite roads and politically unstable countryside. So we were hanging out that day and bumped into this kid again. And got chatting, and chatting, until eventually he invited us back to his mum´s pharmacy to meet his mum and to have lunch, and then he showed us all around town, and took us to a really old monastery on bike. It was so cool.

Our mate Denis.

Denis is a very politically aware 17 year-old. He´ll probably end up being president of Serbia some day. He´s a leader of a youth group there and they do lots to help young people in Prijepolje. At present he and his friends are organising a big concert with bands, rapping, poetry readings, and other cool stuff.

So that evening we hung out in town with his friends, and they convinced us to stay another night so we could go riding the next day... we couldn´t really say no, and crashed at Denis´s folks house. His family were also super friendly and fed us loads of good traditional Serbian food. His grandma was particularly awesome.

So the next day we went for a mountain bike ride with Denis, his best mate Wildhem, Denis´ little brother Peter, and Denis´ old history professor Faruk. It was a long day´s ride, as Denis and Peter´s bikes were in very bad condition with failing drivetrains requiring Peter to walk up all the hills, and dodgy brakes which meant Denis had to walk down all the hills!

Faruk took us to some great places, I can´t remember what they´re called now. But there was an old trading route between Dubrovnik and Istanbul that ran near here and the fort pictured below was one of the outposts protecting the trade route.

Wildhem, Denis, Peter, Faruk, and me.

Below the fort was a really, really old mosque. Maybe 600 or 700 years old? Maybe older. Anyway, we went inside and had a look at a hand-written copy of the Qu´ran that was perhaps 500 years old or something. Crazy.

Faruk shows us the ancient Qu´ran.

Denis, Peter, Jen and Faruk outside the fort and the mosque.

We took the overnight train to Nis, where we were both knackered and ended up treating ourselves to a 95 euro 4-star hotel, and spent the day escaping the 38 degree heat and watching the Tour de France in blissful air-conditioning. Ahhhh...

The next day we rode for a bit, and then stayed at a small town near the border of Bulgaria. I can´t quite remember what it was called, but I do recall that we stayed in a very communist style hotel. The only word to describe this huge concrete monstrosity is ¨grim.¨ Added to that the nightclub that started pumping out music at about 1am, we were pretty happy to get out of that place.

The next day we rode through a beautiful, but very busy, gorge to the Bulgarian border.

A rare break in the traffic allowed us to take a photo of this beautiful gorge, on the way to the Bulgarian border.

Montenegro

Montenegro! One of our favourite places. We want to buy a house there one day :)


So after leaving Dubrovnik, we rode for a day and ended up in a town called Herceg Novi. This was a typical beach town with lots of tourists and crowded beaches. We stayed a night here and then headed north inland, into the highlands.

Fat Pizzas are available in Herceg Novi.

So we bought a map of Montenegro and decided we´d ride north through the mountains. There was a yellow line on the map that was supposed to represent a ¨primary¨road. It started off well, being a nice sealed bitumen windy road with little traffic, except for big garbage trucks. The road then turned to bitumen interrupted by intermittent gravel patches, and eventually after about 4 hours of climbing we got to what must have been the top - a massive rubbish dump complete with fire and burning rubber smoke. Yum.


After we pushed our bikes through the home of the rubbish men we found the road became gravel, and then the gravel stones became bigger and bigger until each rock was the size of a fist. Not good for touring bikes with 30kg of gear on the back with no suspension and slicks. So push we did.

This was some of the stuff we had to push for, for 3 hours.

It was depressing pushing our bikes downhill. Really depressing. And we really weren´t sure where the hell we were. Where was the primary road that was marked on the map? It seemed this was it. We followed it for a few hours, not sure whether we should turn back or not, but eventually we hit bitumen and were relieved to finally get back on our saddles.

We were still lost however, and what made it even spookier was that there was absolutely no-one around. It was deserted. There were loads of old farm houses that looked like they´d been bombed. It was eerie.

Eventually we found a couple of boys who couldn´t speak much english, but rang their parents who could and we talked to them on their mobile phones and got some vague directions.

We ended up camping near a small village called Grahovo, where the lovely lady at the grocery store gave us directions to a lake we could camp at for free! We were stoked. It was a perfect end to an epic day... We´d been riding since 6am and set up camp at around 6pm.

The beautiful lake we camped at, near Grahovo.

The next day we rode to the town of Niksic, which was pretty dusty and boring, so no need to say anymore except that we didn´t get lost this time!

Then we headed north towards the town of Zabljak, which apparently had loads of outdoor stuff to do like mountain biking, rafting, hiking, skiing (when in winter) etc, and was also home to the Tara Gorge. This was a spectacular part of the ride, with quiet roads (some unfortunately riddled with potholes) and magnificent views.

On the road to Zabljak.

The road to Zabljak was uphill. And lots of it. It nearly broke us, as we thought we´d be riding up to a plateau and then it´d be mostly flat, but it certainly wasn´t the case. I don´t know how high we climbed, but we spent a good part of 10 hours riding uphill of our 12 hour day. Beautiful, but buggering.

We spent 3 nights in Zabljak, I think, just resting and chilling out. We did some exploring of the area too and managed to get ourselves lost a couple of times. We hiked to a lookout of the Tara Gorge, which was beautiful, and met a couple of local Montenegran fellas who were visiting Zabljak for the weekend. They gave us some good insights into the political situation there.

We also took our bikes around the Black Lake, which ended up being a fun easy mountain bike plus a bit of hike-a-bike up the stairs, but it was certainly a lot of fun.

Leaving Zabljak was for once mostly downhill, and we really enjoyed it! Here´s a picture of the Tara Gorge from the bottom of the descent. The colour of the water was just unbelievably beautiful. We´ll have to come back one day to paddle it.

The beautiful Tara Gorge.

That was the most exciting part of Montenegro over. I think we rode along for another day or so and then caught a train into Serbia.