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Velico to Instanbul
A long but fun day. Where to start as we left Velico we discovered the main road out of the country was closed and none of us had maps..brilliant. So after much umming and arring we found our way round to another route that took us through a small town called Simonograd which, I discovered, has the flashest speed camera equipment I've ever seen. It's mounted in the police car and automatically tracked me round a bend registering my speed the whole time. After a bit of a chit chat chef Michel and myself agreed that a photo of 2 international adventurers and a 10 Euro contribution to the Siminograd police (Michel) benevolent fund would assuage the need to fill in these boring forms and save the Simonograd county council the cost of processing complex paperwork - see pics for details. He gave us a few tips about where to expect to see speed cameras and we all went on our way feeling we'd had value for money. However further down the road we discovered that this route was also closed (I think in hindsight Michel did tell me but my Bulgarian isn't up to much) so we ended up in the middle of this small village with the only road a six-foot deep trench where the road used to be. Eventually the boys persuaded me that we could ride thru it so off we set unfortunately someone had cut a 3 foot deep trench right across the road right at the end. As one of the guys is a builder he decided the best approach was to build a bridge over it ... sound familiar? "Stick with me....." which eventually we did unfortunately one of the locals took offence at our filling in his ditch and started shouting something at us in Bulgarian I suspect he was the guy who dug the ditch in the first place. We finally calmed him down and solicited his help, which he very kindly gave. Luckily none of us came off crossing the bridge although, as usual, I nearly did .. at least I didn't paddle it over.
Then came Istanbul the place is a typical asian city no body gives ground everyone tries to take your space a madhouse but once you understand the rules it becomes quite fun. What wasn't fun was finding the hotel we all got split up in the traffic in the end I solicited help from a local riding an Africa Twin who kindly led me all the way to the hotel. If the philosopher who said, "the journey is the interruptions" then today was a great journey.
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