Helle everybody!
I have taken on the slow gear and have been taking it easy lately. My odometer has passed the 3500km mark (on tenth!). Tomorrow I will be entering Turkey, and while I am writing this report I am situated in a beautiful meddow with a view into Bulgaria (I guess the border should be about 10 kilometers away as the bird flies).
Once more a lot has been happening lately. From Dubrovnik I rode together with Micheal and Daniel, two German cyclists that are also heading for China, but will use a couple of plane tickets in the process of getting there; first from Athens to Nairobi, and later on from South Africa to India. Unfortunately they don't have a website on which they tell about their adventures, so I won't be able to link them here. They feel like seeing a couple of sights in Monte Negro that don't really interest me, but after a short split up I meet once more upon arrival to Tirana.
After surprisingly beautiful Monte Negro, I arrive to an even more surprising Albania. Not a rich country, but a multitude of sights, extremely kind people (several spontaneous invitations for over-night stays), and a history than seems to get more interesting and complicated every day you learn more about it. To me a place where I had a lot of fun and I would definately visit once more in the near future, and definately recommended for those that love Eastern Europe and don't mind basic (and I mean really basic) conditions. Beware though that an Albania tha nods and says 'jo', will mean the opposite of what you would instinctively think; 'po' and shaking indicates agreement.
In Tirana Laura of Outdoor Albania (http://www.outdooralbania.com/) invited me for a weekend of rafting, which turned out to be more of a river-hike due to low water level of late summer, but had an extremely good time, both with her and her boyfriend as well as with the Albanian students that had booked the tour.
Once I decided to head off from Tirana again, I found out one of the attachments of my handle-bar bag had been broken off. Fortunately Arkel (http://www.arkel-od.com/) was extremely quick in replying to my request for help, promissing to send me a spare pair of attachments the same night, however, my plan to pick them up somewhere while making my way to Thessaloniki turned out to be a little more complicated. Eventually Thessaloniki University offered to recieve the parts for me, but before finally getting that worked out several days had passed. This (as well as a couple of other things) caused me to let go of my plan to meet up with Yvette (http://www.bikeforchildren.com/) in Istanbul and ride to Damascus together with her.
After some more days in Albania and expensive, but easy to camp-out Greece, I finally arrived to Thessaloniki. Coincidently on exactly the same day the European day against the use of cars, something I had never heard of before. Wether I felt like joining some meeting in the city centre, they asked me.
Once there, the city's mayor, assisted by two camera teams and a number of journalists and a couple of photographers where waiting for me. They all welcomed my like their lost hero, and I had to come over for a chat with the mayor. What the... ?? The dear sir officially welcomed me to his town and wishes me the best of luck during the rest of my trip. I on my turn thank him for this, and don't have a clue on what to say next.. A photographer of the local student's magazine manages to fill a complete memory disk of his luxurious digital camera with my face, and promises to send me a couple of pictures.
The next morning I find images of both me and my bike in the newspaper. The article (http://www.weijmans.net/images/artikel-krant-thessaloniki.jpg) contains loads and loads of errors, but nonetheless it is still a crazy thing to find a story on yourself in the papers, especially since I didn't do anything to special yet.
Vassilios Papacharisis, one of the maintainers of the university sport's center, and also the person that invited me in the first place, treats me like a prince. I am allowed to use all facilities for free, spend the night on a yudo mattress, and get recieve my own keys to grant me access to the building. In the mean time he tries to arrange all sorts of things to make me feel at home. Great! Once I decided to leave after a couple of days, he surprises me by offering me a complete set of university cloaths (t-shirt, polo, cap and button), making me a special team member of the university squad.
I continue my road through Greece along mostly beautiful but busy roads, and am now heading for Turkey, where I hope to find a nice package at the poste restante section of the local post office. I also promise to update my website, once I get to Edirne (or otherwise Istanbul) I will make sure there will be some more information on it, so it will be easier to look up what my excat plans will be and what the mail schedule will look like, so you can all start sending me fan-mail and stuff.. ;)
So long.
Lots of love from Eelco, who is having a killer time, but feels it's quite difficult to be missed by so many people.
