The penultimate day!
It’s hard to believe we’ve reached this point, we both don’t want it to finish, but want to see our families and spend some time off the bikes. We’re fatigued but still brimming with energy. And we have to make a decisive plan as we have to be in Graz by tomorrow night so Amand can get on the plane the following day and head home to New Zealand. All in all it feels a bit strange!
While out getting breakfast Sam decides he’s going to race home to Graz today, one day early, to surprise his family. It’s a bit sad we won’t finish this journey together but we’ve also encouraged each other to do what we want during the journey. Amand and Steve respect Sam’s decision and decide they’ll try to find a camp somewhere on the coast and make the most of the very last moments of this adventure.
We leave Split and hit the Croatian autobahn, and spend the next hour at 140-150km/hr to knock out some kms. Can you believe we decide that we’ve got a bit bored of beautiful coastline and need a break from it? And thus, at a petrol station on the autobahn near Zadar our shared adventure ends. We have a cuppa to mark the moment. Sam later reports that he smashed out 594km on the highways and got home in time for dinner. Nice one!
Steve and Amand are in no particular rush so have time to look around Zadar, another seaside town with an old fortification and a beautiful promenade. Yawn! They sit on the wharf and eat some lunch while watching the world go by.
It’s here in Zadar that Nadia starts making rather loud groaning and rattling noises, oh bugger! This is our first bike issue since Amand’s flat tyre in Azerbaijan (21 days ago!) which we are super glad for, but today is a Sunday so there’s nothing much we can do anyway.
We decide to travel up through the island of Pag, apparently known for UFO sightings, and hope that the ferry is operating at the north end to take us back to the mainland so that we don’t get stuck on an island full of loopy UFO seekers. As we near the Paški most (southern bridge onto Pag) we come over a rise and the landscape changes instantly and very dramatically from fields to a barren moonscape. We stop to share in our awe and snap some pics.
The ride along Pag is beautiful, if a bit other-worldly. We reach the north end and there’s no ferry, or UFOs, anywhere… apparently there’ll be one at 5pm (a ferry, that is). That gives us an hour to find some food for dinner since we’re planning to camp somewhere random later.
We race back across the island to the village of Novalja, passing by sign after sign about the massive supermarket. We find it and it’s closed, dammit all to Sunday’s in Europe. We go searching for the town centre, get lost, try again, get lost, give it one more go and eventually find a small bakery. Perfect. We then have to race back to the ferry, and wind through the confusing village streets, somehow find our way out onto the main road and make it back to the ferry terminal just as it docks. Phew!
We dock back on the mainland, in a place called Prizna – fortunately they let us leave – and we track north, cruising along beautiful coastline and curvy roads. We had some great fun clearing all of the ferry traffic, Nadia rattling at full noise all the way!! We keep our eyes peeled for a campsite, but instead have a random encounter with a car full of locals who are entering a bird sanctuary while we are stopped on the side of the road. We run into them three more times over the next 30 minutes, and we all enjoy the humour of the moment!
Just south of Senj we stop to watch our last stunning sunset (well we think it is at the time!) over the islands of Krk and Otok Prvić. We share a moment about the sun going down on our adventure (remembering our friends in Ohrid); it is heavily tinged with sadness.
From here we spot an actual campground and go to investigate, it’s pretty nice but we decide we can do better, it’s not actually on the water and who wants to pay for camping anyway. So we head on and just down the road spy a sawmill on a small peninsula, we investigate and amongst the jagged karst landscape is a patch of grass just big enough for two tents (and we mean just big enough!) We also find an old fire site, obviously not the first people to find this stunning spot to pitch a tent.
We hide the bikes behind a wood pile and watch the day disappear. This is our last night on the road together and we’re out of whisky, poor planning for sure! We chat around a roaring fire, which gets a bit too roaring given the over supply of wood (we’re right next to a sawmill!). We spend some time damping down a few embers that have jumped into the surrounding grass and finally hit the sack near midnight.
THE LAST DAY!
We awake to the sounds of the sawmill getting underway on a Monday morning. This is the last time Steve will see the sea for many months, so we take a swim in the Adriatic which is kinda warm and surprisingly salty. A great way to kick off our last day together! We’ve got a big day ahead of us, about 460km to cover up the coastline of Croatia, through the foothills of Slovenia and mountains of southern Austria to reach Graz, and our plan is to avoid highways as much as possible. We pack our tents and hit the road, stopping just 10km north in Senj for breakfast
We discover that the rattle in Amand’s bike (so loud that Steve can hear it even when he’s in front!) is because the right exhaust pipe is loose – Nadia has blown an exhaust gasket! While Steve writes a postcard to his kids (better late than never right!!), Amand tries to find a mechanic in Senj to see if they have a rear header graphite seal for a KTM950 Adventure. Surprisingly no such luck! We try again up the road in Rijeka where there is a KTM mechanic, but they don’t have any either. They suggest we ride to Italy which we quickly dismiss, even though Trieste is only 80km away. We just don’t have the time.
Figuring that the exhaust is unlikely to fall off in the 300km to Graz we press on into Slovenia to our last manned border crossing. We wind our way through stunning countryside and while the plan was to visit Ljubljana for a late lunch, with all the searching for bike parts, sadly, there’s not enough time for that either. Instead we grab a quick bite at a service stop.
For one final time we have to be wary of the weather, we’ve got one eye on the blackening clouds outside and the other on the weather app and our food. We chow the food down and get back on the bikes; as we’re getting ready some other bikers stop, they are saturated! We race off, just as it starts dribbling, ride in some light showers for a few minutes which then clears, never to see it again. Another grand moment of missing some terrible weather, we marvel one final time at our luck with the weather!
We make our final border crossing back into Austria near Dravograd via an unmanned border post. We plan to head over the Soboth, a well known ride in the south of Austria but Steve tries his hardest to miss the turn-off, luckily Amand still has his eyes open. As we near the top of the mountain pass we’re greeted by the setting sun once more, a stunning combination of black rain clouds and sun breaking through. We stop to watch the curtains go down, not only on this day, but our entire adventure.
Three years of discussions, research, planning, team changes, saving money, getting fit, getting family onboard, lining up work obligations, getting visas, buying gear and bike parts, and bike maintenance. Then six weeks of riding around the Black Sea, amazing people, incredible scenery, stunning (and not so stunning) roads, bike issues, team issues, sunrises and sunsets, eating way too much salami and cheese, border crossings, the heat, six too many police encounters, bribes, forging documents to enter Russia, troubles getting through the conflict zone in Eastern Ukraine, keeping up with our social media pages, missing our families… These thoughts and more flash through our minds as we ride north to Graz, then Thal, then into Sam’s garage where it all started.
We high five, hug, celebrate (and maybe commiserate) it’s emotional. We look at our bikes – Lyubov’, Nadia, Vera (Love, Hope, Faith – in Russian: люблю, надежда, вера) – and see them in a whole new light. They look eager for more, but to be quite honest, we’re done! For now at least
Thank you for reading, we hope you’ve enjoyed following our motorbike adventure around the Black Sea!
The end….but not the end (hopefully)!!!