day 9, sunday 8^th august 99

I wake up at around 7:30 and consider dismembering my tent. When it's up, it's spacious & really quite good. Putting it up and taking it down is becoming a real chore though, & I'm growing to hate the 30 minutes or so it takes to do it. Jeremy and marvin are already up. I wander around a bit and then have a lovely (and well needed) 500 Lira hot shower. I also want a dump, but one look at the 'footprints and a hole' toilet convinces me to wait. Within 10 minutes of my return from the shower, it has started pissing it down big-time. Thunder and lightning arrive soon afterwards.

Unbelievable.

The campsite bar-restaurant-thingy is open so we go for breakfast, during which time the rain stops. As soon as we go to finish packing, the rain restarts, only harder. Miserable again, we don waterproofs, pack and set off, ten unhappy bikers in a row.

The rain stops before too long and we go into the first petrol station we see. It's one of the infernal put-money-in-a-slot places and everything goes horribly wrong. It won't take anything but perfectly dry, un-creased, undamaged 10 or 50K Lira notes & almost all our money is damp, creased and/or damaged...

There is a bar right next door (how convenient for your average drunk driver!) and a woman from the staff there helps us out by changing money etc. and eventually we are all filled up. We again lose our waterproofs as marvin declares this day will also now be dry. Jeremy indulges in yet another of his huge and rather blatant lies about distance. Generally, when he says "we've got absolutely miles to go" it means we're about 20 to 30 miles away. On this occasion he says "the border's just a few klicks away, just round the corner" but he means that its bleeding miles.

Off we set, through a really lovely village. It has a pretty church and nice houses on quiet looking streets. It's a real pity about the bloody great big fly-over going smack over the middle of it, that we're now on. Bugger.

Into Slovenia over a high pass, eschewing the more common route that involves momentarily nipping through Austria. The border guard stamps my passport, the first such stamp I've ever had in it - cool! There's no hassle over green cards, but also no way of purchasing insurance at the border. Apparently, you can only do that at the larger border crossings - such as the one with Austria that we didn't use. Arse. This means that several of us are now riding without insurance.

We make a huge cock-up over the route and end up going over a high pass. At the bottom, the first hairpin is numbered '50' and we all promptly shit ourselves. Fortunately, as we find out later, they count them up and down, so its 20-odd up & the same down. On the way down, however, the hairpins are wet and cobbled... Whoever invented this particular perversion of the hairpin should be taken out and shot. Actually, they probably were!

As we pass a river in one of the valleys, it steams. I have never ever seen anything quite like this before. It's not a little wisp or two, it genuinely looks like the river is boiling.

It occurs to me that, looking at the road and the countryside as we go over, its no wonder the Germans had so many problems in Yugoslavia during WWII. On the way down the mountain, the brake fluid in Jim's Sprint ST's rear brake boils and for a while he has no rear brake. He's lucky, though, as we're near the bottom when it happens and so there aren't any more of the cobbled hairpins to negotiate - just a rickety old wooden bridge that looks like it was built before WWII.

In the valley our fears over petrol availability are soothed when we find a rather modern looking petrol station, most assuredly open. We fill up, eat, wander about and I finally get the dump I couldn't face doing that morning. We also find a very new looking open and clear road. We raise the speed and cruise these open roads for some considerable distance, enjoying making decent going after having an average speed somewhere around 20mph in the mountains. Slovenia seems cool and is certainly attractive.

We belt along a motorway towards Croatia, until it turns into a one-lane jobbie. Miles after I assume the motorway has ended, an 'end of motorway' sign appears. Most odd. We cross into Croatia (more passport stamps) with no problems and head for Zagreb. After the errors with the route earlier, we've all agreed that we'll stop there for the night.

As we enter Zagreb there's a big poster that says (in English) "you're on holiday - don't speed". Jeremy gives it a V-sign as we rush past. On one of the wide roads into the city, a hairy-arsed biker from some sort of patch club pulls over next to Jeremy (leading again) and asks where we are heading. He immediately assumes he's going to be attacked & goes into defence mode but the hairy-arsed one turns out to be a she and she speaks good English - and is very helpful.

She escorts us to the Hollister MC clubhouse where we have a beer & a chat. For no reason sanity can explain, the only one of our assortment of bikes that they're interested in is Kevin's VFR.

After an hour or so, they find out where the only campsite in Zagreb is and lead us there. It's an odd place that looks vaguely ex-military. It's also crowded with mosquitoes. Arse. Liam doesn't realise the little buggers can get to you through your clothing and his back ends up looking like a relief map of a small mountain range.

Tents up, we go off to the bar. It's terrible so we head for the restaurant, which is closed for a private function - a wedding, we think. Off we go again to the motorway service station where some of us get fed with something unidentifiable (my sausage in soup looked like a turd floating in effluent) before the woman behind the counter gets pissed off and goes home. We get drunk instead.

Later, marvin and a couple of others attempt to gate-crash the wedding but are sent on their way in no uncertain terms.

Mileage: 250