2024: A Cycling Odyssey

It’s impossible to over state our emotions as we pedalled that last kilometre towards the mouth of the Golden Horn, finally arriving in Istanbul on an overcast Sunday in the middle of October.

Gateway to the East, the junction between Europe and Asia. Through the centuries Istanbul has seen a huge number of mystics, merchants, nomads and conquerors pass through its walls … and now it was welcoming two emotional touring cyclists from Bath.

But why not feel the enormity of the moment?

Since leaving our car at Frank’s shop in Nuremberg in late August we’ve cycled 3003 kilometres (1866 miles). 39 days in the saddle.

And if we look at the whole trip since we left Bath last summer it’s 4332 kilometres (2692 miles). 56 days of cycling across 9 countries.

It was nine years since Clare first came up with the idea of cycling to Istanbul during a chat around our kitchen table.

And it was fourteen months since we were forced to stop our journey in Nuremberg because of Andy’s racing heartbeat from Atrial Fibrillation. Almost exactly a year since his catheter ablation gave us the chance to go back and try again.

During those nine years we’ve been on many bicycle tours to many amazing places. But Istanbul was always the dream destination, the big one, the journey of a lifetime … our personal cycling odyssey!

Yet the junction between Europe and Asia seemed so far away, much further than we’d ever cycled before. It just felt too big a challenge.

Those kitchen table chats went round and round in circles … can we really cycle that far? … can we be away for so long? … what’s the best way to go? … when’s the right time? … will we be limited by the post-Brexit Schengen visa restrictions?

The more we talked about it, the more we decided that no, we couldn’t do it. We weren’t getting any younger and various bits of our bodies were starting to complain in a way that they hadn’t before. Istanbul was just going to be too much!

But then we switched to e-bikes and realised we could travel much further each day for the same number of hours in the saddle. We discovered that whilst e-biking is still good exercise, we don’t suffer from the same level of exhaustion from hill climbing as we did on our old steel touring bikes.

Suddenly the cycling odyssey was back on!

Any bicycle tour of this length is not just about the pedalling …

It’s a lot of staring at maps and planning the best route for the next day.

It’s many hours spent researching the most appropriate places to stay.

It’s endless packing and unpacking of our panniers, trying to remember to put things back in the same place.

It’s taking the batteries off the e-bikes and recharging them every night.

It’s plastering on enough chamois cream or vaseline to keep the saddle sores at bay.

It’s washing out smelly cycling shorts in a hotel sink.

But best of all it’s about being in a bicycle touring bubble together, riding behind each other or side by side, sharing a lot of date nights, both equally consumed by the whole experience.

“A journey of a lifetime is measured by memories, not by time.” Debasish Mridha.

The final leg of this journey-of-a-lifetime got off to a rather bleak start.

Leaving Bucharest on a cold damp morning we cycled back towards the Danube across the featureless farmland of the Danubian Plain. Now widening out as it heads towards its delta, the river has always been a formidable barrier in this part of the world, protecting Romania from many an invading army.

And so it proved for us.

Amazingly until 2013, there was only one bridge over the Danube from Romania to Bulgaria, the ‘Friendship Bridge’ between Giurgiu and Ruse which opened in 1954. Even now there are still only two, the second being the ‘New Europe Bridge’ which is much further west near the Serbian border.

There are several ferries we could have aimed for but the best crossing point for our route was easily the Friendship Bridge. Now old and tired, it’s in need of substantial repairs which means lane closures and lengthy queues.

That gave us plenty of time to gaze across at the forbidding industrial landscape that greeted us as our first view of Bulgaria.

And to pick our way through the questionable cycle path that led to the border controls.

Before arriving in Bulgaria we knew even less about the country than we did Romania. So we decided to pedal first to the historic city of Veliko Tarnovo in order to learn a bit more.

Tucked into some dramatic bends of the Yantra river and surrounded by an amphitheatre of forested hills, Veliko Tarnovo is a gem. Capital of the second Bulgarian Empire (a two hundred year respite from Ottoman occupation between the 12th and 14th centuries) Tarnovo was also the site of the declaration of independence for the modern Bulgarian state in 1908.

To mark its status as the country’s historic and cultural capital, Veliko meaning ‘Great’ was added to the city’s name in 1965.

Clare scored us a great last-minute-midweek-hotel deal there, a 5-star boutique hotel with only four beautifully curated rooms, a significant upgrade on our normal digs which we have to admit added to our enjoyment of the city.

The worst room of the trip also came in Bulgaria, the bed so uncomfortable that Andy pulled the mattress onto the floor in the middle of the night. In the morning he realised the discomfort was caused by some spare wooden bed slats left under the mattress. What a delicate princess-with-a-pea he is!

After leaving Veliko Tarnovo we pedalled onto Elena, gateway to the Balkan Mountains that split Bulgaria in two, north and south and give their name to the whole Balkan region.

Here we stayed in a small workman’s cottage with a charming owner who re-assured us that the quiet pass we’d planned for the next day was indeed the perfect way to cycle over the mountains.  

Then he went on to tell us that there are only three border crossings between Bulgaria and Turkey. Only three!

“Don’t go main road way to Edirne” he said, “Many big trucks from Istanbul. Many people coming in car from Holland or Germany.”

“Better you go Black Sea. Very beautiful. Especially Sozopol, much beautiful place.”

“Then you go through nature park to other border. Third border. Not many people go there. But oak trees, oak trees far as you see. Much better for bicycle. You go that way.” 

So we did. And he was not wrong.

Those two days of climbing, first over the Balkan Mountains and then up through Strandja Nature Park to the Turkish border, were one of the highlights of the whole trip. The Balkan Mountains are covered in a carpet of ancient beech, hornbeam and spruce forests, Strandja Nature Park in ancient oak trees many of them well over 500 hundred years old.

With barely any cars passing by, the sun shining in a clear blue sky overhead and with every ridge and fold of the hills covered in a thick carpet of trees, it felt as if we had been plunged into a sparkling pool filled with fresh forest air.

Ever keen to preserve her battery, Clare once again stayed in blue (level 2 support) for the whole of both climbs. Andy gambled on purple (level 3) simply to try and keep up with her. It was cutting it fine … on both days he rolled up to our accommodation with just 3% of his battery left!

Once we got over the top of the Balkan Mountains and into Southern Bulgaria the landscape changed considerably. Gone were the lush forests, replaced instead by an open, arid, Mediterranean outlook.

The south also seemed poorer to us, more neglected. For example, we rode past several piles of fly tipping, something we hadn’t noticed before.

This got us to thinking about the pre-conceptions touring cyclists and other slow travellers bring to the countries they pass through.

We hadn’t expected to like Bulgaria very much and found ourselves noticing things that continually reinforced that view … the litter, the abandoned dilapidated buildings, our difficulty understanding the Slavic language and Cyrillic alphabet, the food always smothered in cheese (which Clare hates), the apparent brusqueness of the people.

We felt we were in a kind of negative reinforcement loop that was hard to get out of. 

Many of the same things were also present in Romania but that was a country we expected to like. There we only found positive reinforcement … the rustic charm, the smiles from friendly people, the easier Latin based language. 

This didn’t seem fair to Bulgaria somehow.  But you can’t help what you think as a traveller passing through.

We decided we’d need a spectacular experience to shock us out of the negative spiral and see the country afresh through more positive eyes. The two days of riding up through the forests almost did it … they were amazing, inspiring, incredibly beautiful, almost enough to change the spiral. But not quite.

The Black Sea coast didn’t reverse the spiral either.

Much of the cycling was challenging, along busy roads or along some of the worst maintained cycle paths we’ve ever pedalled on.

One Sunday we were bumping down such a cycle path when the heavens opened into an almighty thunderstorm that forced us to shelter under the trees for an hour. 

Eventually we took refuge in a pop-up fish restaurant full of people enjoying a family lunch.

Our host in Elena was right, Sozopol is a charming old town … full of meandering cobbled streets and pretty wooden houses, all huddled together on a narrow peninsula.

And Tsarevo, further down the coast, is a pleasant family resort.  Both are notable for being unusually clean, swept and scrubbed each morning by an army of street sweepers armed only with straw brooms.

On the way up from Tsarevo to the Turkish border, we paused in the tiny village of Kondolovo, delighted to find a coffee vending machine with real Italian coffee!

These coffee machines are extremely popular in Bulgaria. They’re everywhere … on street corners, in bus stops, even in remote villages … and they offer a shot of surprisingly good coffee for a very low price.

At the border we were surprised to come across a number of coaches which must have driven up the main road from Burgas, each one taking 20 minutes or so to process. No matter … Clare cleverly sliced her way through the queue of traffic like a knife through butter with Andy following sheepishly in her wake.

Within minutes we had left the EU and the Schengen zone behind.

From the border it was a three day ride across Eastern Thrace (European Turkey) to reach Istanbul. Turkey already felt very different … mosque minarets signalling the next village in place of church towers, women dressed in burkas, groups of old men languishing outside every tea shop.

But they all gave us a notably more cheery welcome as we pedalled through, waving and calling out encouragement.

The ride into Istanbul itself is notorious in the bicycle touring community for being especially difficult, highways full of impatient mad drivers, narrow side roads completely blocked by traffic, roadworks everywhere.

We followed the advice of a couple of young bloggers and hugged the Sea of Marmaris as closely as we could. It turned out to be a mix of the serene and the scary.

Serene as we cruised gently along coastal cycle paths, weaving our way between families enjoying their weekend stroll. Scary when we were cast out into the traffic, winding through suburbs in a desperate attempt to avoid any main roads.

But it wasn’t as bad as the warnings suggested so after reaching the Golden Horn we decided to carry on cycling through this crazy city taking in its sights and sounds. We even caught a ferry across the Bosphorus to Anatolia (Asian Turkey) … just to make sure we’d properly completed our journey from West to East.

By the end of the day we were weaving through the traffic like a local Deliveroo rider!

We’ve been lucky enough to visit Istanbul a few times before and it’s one of our favourite cities. An enchanting blend of Eastern and Western culture, it’s a vibrant modern city but with many layers of history to peel away … from Byzantium to Constantinople to the Ottoman era to the Turkish War of Independence.

Jam packed with people, Istanbul is chaotic, colourful and confusing with extraordinary experiences lurking around every corner.

A fitting destination for our cycling odyssey.

Now it’s time to turn around and travel west in order to get home. We have 23 Schengen days left to get back to Bath. Our rough plan uses 20 of them so there’s not much time for things to go wrong.

We can’t go on planes (as they won’t carry our e-bike batteries) but trains and automobiles are part of the plan. As are buses and ferries, lots of ferries … and a bit of cycling.

Not much cycling though, that part of the odyssey is done.

Clare and Andy

Bath to Istanbul

4,332km pedalled (2,692miles)

27,209m climbed

224 hours in the saddle