“Some things in life are bad They can really make you mad Other things just make you swear and curse When you’re chewing on life’s gristle Don’t grumble, give a whistle And this’ll help things turn out for the best…”
Oh how we could have done with a dose of Python this week. So, retrospectively in some cases, here’s to all the good stuff that happened during our protracted entry into Egypt and our stay so far. We got through the confusing, expensive and sometimes bizarre process and have made it to the desert. This is where we set out to come and we’re here! It began to sink in driving down the Port Said Desert Road towards Cairo that we are indeed looking at the Sahara, and we drove here. This is quite a big deal in a small way for us and there were some wide, slightly disbelieving smiles on our faces.
We drove here!
The last week had been tough, but even whilst in Port Said where having a glass half full was not allowed until after dark due to it being Ramadan, we did manage to enjoy some of the experience. We were able to hang out with some fellow travellers over a beer or two during the saga. We met some really good people who are a credit to Egypt, and got time to relax and adjust to the way things work here. Whilst it was tricky finding any food during the day, let alone particularly good vegan options, there was a huge choice of fresh, cheap fruit. We slept in beds and had proper showers (that said, as nice as it is to have the luxury of hotels, we are both looking forward to getting back in Troopy…you just get used to your own place after this long on the road and we miss it).
The last day in Port Said was actually an interesting experience I think, if a bit in-at-the-deep-end in how things work here in Africa. In the morning I set off down to the port again with Jack from Africality, with the aim of meeting up with our agent and getting the cars through customs and onto the Egyptian roads. More on the roads later, and why I think it was good to spend a few days here before driving myself! But for now, we needed to get into the port which was as easy as being escorted in by an agent the other day, but today we *apparently* needed a pass from the Police. This provided our morning’s entertainment. There is a room in the police station where the saga is played out – on 1 side, the senior officer sits behind an impressively large desk in an office. A boy sits outside the office ready to make photocopies when called, or to lock and unlock the office as the boss goes in and out. The rest of the room consists of a central space surrounded by perspex screens with 8 or so hatches. Behind the hatches sit various women and stacks of files. In 1 corner of the space there is a table where a man sits chatting to friends and hands out sticky stamps in exchange for cash. The game is quite simple – in order to get a pass to enter the port, we need to get enough signatures, rubber stamps and sticky stamps on a piece of paper for the officer to exchange that paper for a slip authorizing the issue of a pass. It is slightly more complicated by the fact that we have to use an agent to do this, and the agent has to disappear upstairs at unpredictable moments (presumably to another such office) to get more stamps/signatures. We don’t have any language in common. There are also no indications as to which hatch you have to go to for which purpose, and the only way to find out seems to be for the agent to push our paper through various hatches and see if he gets a stamp or shouted at to go away. It reminds me very much of a certain genre of computer game. After several rounds of this (interspersed by periods of sitting in a courtyard playing with stray cats), we seem to have collected the correct combination of stamps to win a pass and proceeded to the next level.
Have we collected all the magic stamps?
After that it was pretty straightforward and after some more sitting around the customs house we were able to drive out of the port gates soon after 2pm.
Onto the roads. Now this is where I am particularly glad to have had those days in Port Said, walking and travelling about by taxi to get accustomed to the roads. Things don’t work here like they do back home. It’s a free-for-all and nobody seems to follow rules or signs, but I have embraced it fully. If I were to do a U-turn across a concrete central barrier just short of traffic lights back home, I would expect a ticket. It may have been my worst bit of driving ever, but here it just made sense and actually unblocked some traffic. Honest. We are warned not to drive in Cairo, but I actually quite like it – its just another video game, and so much less tedious than London! The only thing we had a collision with was a horse over at the pyramids – its just so packed with horses, carts and camels that its inevitable that you’ll get a little nudge from something that’s trying to squeeze past you. Just glad it was soft and furry and not a tour bus, so no damage to either! Always look on the bright side of life?
Before it got busy…
And now this most excellent adventure continues – we get to go explore the desert!
“Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is often understood to be about alienation, bureaucracy, the seemingly endless frustrations of man’s attempts to stand against the system, and the futile and hopeless pursuit of an unobtainable goal.” Wikipedia’s description of Kafka’s novel might as well be describing our last few days.
Iskenderun to Port Said. Turkey to Egypt. One ferry, 40 truckers, 4 travellers with 4 passports and 2 vehicles, one purpose: get into Egypt.
We drove to Iskenderun after having called the shipping company, UN Ro-Ro, who said the ferry will sail on Saturday and we have a chance of being on it. On Saturday morning we got ready for the big adventure across the water, left our campsite and drove to Iskenderun. The misadventures began right there: the port is not sign-posted anywhere on the main road. We know the port is down by the sea, but how do we enter it? Which one of these roads leads to the right entrance? We accidentally almost drove into a military port, circled around twice, finally made it into some part of the port, had to get a security guard to help us find the right office. After much faffing around we finally got an escort to drive us to the customs office, who then pointed us in the direction of the office we needed.
“I remember during preparation for the trip that another traveller had posted a map with the entrance marked on it (Liman C). If my feet weren’t busy driving I’d have been kicking myself for forgetting to look that up again.” Jonathan.
As we drove towards the office, we spotted another over-lander vehicle. This must be the place, we thought. Soon after we were introduced to the boys in the Catoni office, and the people of the other over-lander came by: Humperdinck Jackman, travelling around the African continent to stop poaching with the charity Africality, and his travelling companion Cynthia Gibson. At this point it was still morning, everyone was smiling, Jonathan had to clear customs for the vehicle, and so on. We were told that the UN Ro-Ro has suspended its activities, but they have another boat they can put us on, which incidentally was not sailing to Damietta, as we had been told before, but instead to Port Said.
Waiting to Load
What followed was a whole day spent sitting around in the blistering sun, waiting for things to happen. But nothing was happening. We couldn’t even see the 40 promised trucks, or the truck drivers. The ferry was there but nobody else was, just us and some port officials. We spent the day talking, eating snacks, drinking coffee and juice, and waiting. Around 6pm things started happening, some trucks were being loaded onto the ferry, and around 8pm we were told we could drive on as the last vehicles. The ferry was definitely not luxurious: we were first given passenger rooms, which were spacious with a sink and bunk-beds, but the toilets were communal, needless to say, they were squat toilets.
The ferry didn’t leave shore up until about 10pm. That evening we were moved to “crew cabins” which were smaller, also with bunk beds, but they had private toilets. Soon after that we were told that dinner was being served, consisting of sliced tomatoes, olives, bread, cheese, and tea and coffee. Not bad for us, vegans (minus the cheese)! However, we soon discovered that the private toilets reeked badly of old plumbing. We flushed it several times with hot water, and that worked for a bit.
The next 36+ hours were quite miserable. The private toilets started reeking of rotten eggs the next morning, so we had to rescue our things from it and put a towel under the door. The ferry was very hot, outside and inside. The rocking motion soon became a bit much for my stomach, as I got quite nauseous. The food only got progressively worse. We were served various lumps and scoops of stuff, most of it creamy or with meat. Jonathan and I lived on bread, rice and our own tomato packet soup for the rest of the ferry time. I was juggling being nauseous and starving.
Finally Arriving in Port Said
Monday morning we arrived in Port Said. And by “arrived” I mean we spent the day anchored nearby while we waited our turn to be docked. Finally as the sun was setting, we made it to shore. By “shore” I mean all the people were let out from the ferry onto the ferry ramp and the little area around it, to be attacked by people selling sim cards that semi-worked and charging ridiculous amounts of money for them. Everybody needed internet at that point, so we fell into that trap. We still didn’t have our passports by the way – and nobody knew exactly who or which authority had them. We sat around on the hard steel for hours in the dark, waiting for something to happen. Eventually a guy called Sherif showed up and tried to help us by figuring out what was going on and phoning people. We met the immigration people by chance for two seconds, and were told there was no problem. Then we were told to drive off the ferry. The real nightmare began then.
Still Smiling
We drove off and had no idea where to go, we were getting directed by people who had no idea who we were, through the shipping container yard, full of screeching trucks, towing trucks, cars, screaming people, mopeds, all done in semi-darkness and without any signs of anything around, just containers upon containers. We were directed into a gated area full of Turkish trucks (not the ones we were on the ferry with), a very very dark ominous area with no lighting, no shelter, no food or water, no toilets, nothing at all. Forget being spooky, this was a place people get thrown in to be shot in movies. Or refugees get thrown in to rot forever. We still didn’t have our passports and we had no idea what or who had them and when we would get them. We couldn’t leave the port, we had no idea where to go, and nobody spoke any English or any other language that any of us combined could understand. The mood hit ultimate low for me at this point. I am not going to lie, I broke down and cried in the front seat. It was the worst moment of my entire life. Writing about this and reliving the memory is bringing tears to my eyes as I write this.
Eventually somebody came by and told us there was a problem with our visas: we couldn’t get visas upon arrival at this port because it wasn’t a tourist port. This is of course a complete lie, because every port of entry to Egypt must provide visas upon entry. I lost it a bit on this particular guy, and I am sorry to say, on some of our companions also. The guy told us we could go sleep on the ferry and we might be shipped back to Turkey the following day. At this point anything was better than that gated container yard. We drove back to the ferry, but it was being loaded with new trucks and we weren’t allowed on it until they were done. We decided to sleep in our cars just outside the ferry, at least there were more people around and more lights. Still surrounded by containers, homeless looking people, rabid scary dogs, massive trucks… I don’t think anybody really slept that night.
The best place we could find to camp in the Mad Max meets Waterworld nightmare that was the Container port.
The next day nothing improved. We still didn’t have our passports for hours. We had no one to even call or ask what was going on. We had no shelter other than our hot cars, barely any shade, no water or food, again no facilities whatsoever. We could go up to the ferry for toilets but that was about it. The mood was beyond low at this point: it was frustrated, annoyed, angry. Sherif appeared out of nowhere and told us that the Admiral was phoning the shipping company to help us out, or something of that sort. Perhaps Jonathan can explain this all better. We were still lost Westerners with no hope of getting out. Somebody took pity on us and brought us water and some snacks, and then turned out to be an absolute angel helping us out with customs later on.
“I’m not going to go into the details of who played what part here, as some of them went beyond the call of duty and put themselves in vulnerable positions to help us out. There was basically a battle between reason and extortion going on, between friends and enemies, and meanwhile we were left in the dirt and rubbish of the container port to bake in the sun. If it weren’t for a few good people, we might still be there, or be heading home due to deportation or being bankrupted by the vultures.” Jonathan.
Some guy came up to us with passports and our visas were stamped into them. Each visa cost $25. He was asking for $100 for each passport plus $500 for who knows what, and that was even before the agent for customs clearance announced how much he wanted from us. Thankfully the passport guy was kind of dumb, because I managed to trick him into giving us our passports but then we just held on to them and didn’t give him the ridiculous amount he was asking. One small win in the big battle. Eventually we got rid of both of them and our angel friend showed us where we could go to start clearing customs. We drove around the extremely confusing port, stopping and asking and going back and forth. Eventually we found the correct office and Jonathan and Humperdinck went in to try and sort some stuff out.
Some time after (no idea how many hours…. hours have turned into days by then) we finally got out of the port (without our cars, we can’t get them still) and found a hotel. After days of no food, no facilities, all of the human stress imaginable on our shoulders, we collapsed on the beds and I slept for 12 hours. I didn’t even want to get up to get dinner, even though we hadn’t eaten properly in days.
The next day was a holiday so there was nothing we could do to get out of this hellhole, so we just waited. The day was spent walking around, scavenging for some food (Ramadan is still in full effect, and in Egypt it is very strict. You can’t find a single restaurant or cafe open or serving food), playing cards and drinking non-alcoholic beer. In the evening we tried out an Asian restaurant which served real alcohol, and we had our first full real vegan meal in probably a week. It was a strange night: there were two Russian men who worked for some shipping company or some such, basically they spend most of their time at sea. They were offering vodka (of course) and advice. The vodka was vile and probably shouldn’t have been drunk, but the company was pleasant enough.
The next day Jonathan and Humperdinck had to go back to the port, leaving the “women” behind. Probably for the best, because I spent the morning dry heaving over the toilet, and I don’t think the vodka was the only culprit here: eating a large meal after half-starving for a week was probably not the best, plus the stress and the agony.
“Yup, throwing up in the hotel room was luxury – I was similarly afflicted but found myself trying to discreetly chuck in a corner of the ubiquitous decaying rubbish outside the police station we were at on some wild goose chase. For me it was just vodka and the hot sun.” Jonathan.
Passing time with the cats in the Customs House while waiting.
The day spent at the port was not any better, the nightmare did not lift one bit. The problem is that nobody knows what fees we should be paying, they seem to be making up numbers and fees on the spot, and doubling and tripling after confirming the original price. The whole thing is just absolutely ridiculous and there seems to be no end to this. We paid yesterday some crazy fees (not as crazy as we originally were asked), but the cars are still at the port and we are still at the hotel. Today is another holiday so nothing will get done. Tomorrow, hopefully tomorrow, we can clear customs and drive out of here. But as in a Kafka novel, I think there might be no end to our nightmares.
This week has seen us cross Turkey from the West Coast to Iskenderun, probably completing our travels through Asia Minor. I say probably because nothing from here on is going to be as guaranteed as we’re used to back home. We intend to take the ferry to Egypt tomorrow, but (whilst there are lots of them running around on this little campsite) we are not counting our chickens. I’m leaving this week’s blog empty of photos for now as the photo gallery covers that. Actually, its late and we are tired and need sleep – I might add some later and also tag all the photos, but for now – here it is!
Looking back, we haven’t updated you on our travels since we left Athens so I’ll have a go at bring you up to date with the progress you can see on our map.
After Athens, we drove North towards Thessaloniki and camped in the hills South of Alexandria, where we were woken in the middle of the night by 2 uniformed officers of what they described as ‘Police for Hunters’, checking that we weren’t doing any illegal hunting…all very friendly and slightly amusing when they understood the Vegan Without Frontiers logo down the side of Troopy. All I got to shoot was some practice wildlife pics of some giant bugs that came wandering by in the morning! Check out our week 5 pics below.
After that we made good progress across northern Greece, stopping to look at Storks nesting on lamp posts and going for a swim in the sea, and then crossed into Turkey. As night fell we approached Istanbul with very basic maps and a little confusion, but Katana’s navigation once again came up trumps and we rolled up to the target camp site, where we were let through the gates and shown to a plot, shown around the facilities and wished goodnight. They turned on the lights just for us as again we were the only guests, but the contrast between this beautiful little site and the Athens creep-show could not have been greater. This was our base for visiting Istanbul and a happy refuge once we had endured the Ramadan traffic to get ‘home’ at the end of the day. Ramadan on top of a lack of available vegan food options did not make for happy stomachs, but was an interesting time to visit the Blue Mosque and see the city.
The evening’s entertainment was provided by an exuberant, friendly kitten we dubbed Zorro-Cat after his first appearance with a dynamic flourish at the rear window bounding onto the spare wheel.
After another day spent travelling mostly through Istanbul (we crossed out of Europe by ferry across the Bosphorus), we camped off road and off tracks on a hill with some goats. This set the pattern for much of our travels since, as we have tended to alternate a day on a camp site with a couple in the wilds. Katya seems good at finding the right sort of area, and we together have picked out some beautiful places to spend our evenings and wake up to. I am only half suspicious that she picks long winding dirt-tracks so she can get to practice driving, but its all good for me as I get to be a passenger and look at the scenery.
We visited Bursa, Çanakkale, the ruins of Troy and various ancient sites along the coast. We spent a day just vegging in the sun by the sea. We got on each others nerves, we got baked on the long road as we headed inland and stuck to our seats and were invaded by flies the minute we stopped anywhere. We camped by the roadside outside a mountain village and met lots of friendly locals – including Ufuk and Burhan who brought us watermelon and lemonade and joined us for a good conversation and some food, even though we didn’t speak the same language. We met some overfriendly locals, whose written note to Katana after 5 minutes of non-communication (translated by google as ‘you are so good – so beautiful’), blown kisses, and unrefusable wish to show us some remote springs in the mountains had us making excuses and running away to Pammukale. There we walked barefoot in the ‘Cotton Palace’ calcite formations before heading further East, lunching by salt lakes and sunken volcano craters. We camped by mountain streams and took refreshingly freezing morning showers, got stuck in village traffic jams of motorised fully laden cherry carts – and now we are at the end of our Turkish adventure. Subject, of course, to tomorrow going to plan…
Katana here taking over for my additional impressions on the last few days. As far as veganism goes, I think the concept of not eating animals is understood here better than how most Westerners imagine. When we have communicated to various people that we do not consume animals, it was understood without any questions. One person even said “So? We have vegetables!” as if the suggestion that they might not have non-meat things was absurd. The other side of that is, people know exactly what consuming animals entails: it is impossible not to come in contact with animals alive, animal abuse, and animal carcasses and various bits of actual animal bodies lying around in shops. I think in a lot of ways Westernised culture has desensitised people to view meat as just a packaged “food” rather than once alive being. We saw cows and sheep grazing happily in fields, and then we saw a cow being driven to slaughter. I also accidentally saw three or four skinless sheep carcasses being hosed down right on the street.
As for the “female traveller” part that everybody always talks about when Middle East is the destination, I have mixed views. Unfortunately, I am viewed as a rarity, an easy target, I am constantly gawked at on the streets walking or when we are driving, and the incident with the note was also very upsetting. I do feel that a certain part of my freedom is restricted, but after a particularly low point I decided that I just don’t care. In some ways, it is what it is. On the other hand, I have found most Turkish people particularly friendly and welcoming, and also very polite and willing to chat even when there is no common language. The positive aspects of this huge and varied country far outweigh the negatives!
The biggest misconception about vegan travel is that as a vegan you won’t find anything to eat in a foreign country and therefore starve. Vegan Without Frontiers is desperately fighting that misconception by traveling, eating out or in, and not starving. I think it is time we wrote a post about food, seeing as how that is one of the main concepts associated with veganism. We have just left the European continent and it is our third day in Turkey. It is about time to reflect upon our meals that we have been having for the past month.
The luxury of Tibits being in Switzerland is that we had some!
Firstly let me start with eating out because that is usually the biggest “problem”. Having left the comforts of London, we stopped in France for about a week, then we drove through Switzerland into Italy. All of those places had easy access to “comfort” food: pizza sans fromage (without cheese). Many people think of pizza as a gooey cheesy meat platter on thin crust, but go to even the smallest restaurant that serves pizza and politely ask for a vegetarian pizza without cheese and they will serve it to you with tomato sauce and grilled (or sadly canned) vegetables. The same goes for pasta: there are four options, either spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino, spaghetti all’arrabiata, spaghetti carrettiera, or just spaghetti with tomato sauce and no cheese or meat.
Pizza okay, pasta had some meaty flakes for some reason
With pizza we have had more luck, even though sometimes we get the puzzled questions “why no cheese” or the downright dirty look of “you don’t know what you are missing out” from waiters. Spaghetti was a different story, sometimes we got a delicious plate of slightly spicy deliciously saucy pasta, and sometimes we had problems. In a restaurant at one campsite we asked for a plate of oily spicy spaghetti, and we got badly cooked pale plate of pasta with oil and garlic, and a few flecks of meat, probably from another cooked meal or an unwashed pan. Right before crossing into Albania from Montenegro, Jonathan got a plate of spaghetti with bacon pieces on top. He didn’t even touch it, and when the waiter asked why, we explained that we are “vegetarian”. The waiter was confused, because he thought the meal was vegetarian, but then as we pointed out the bacon he just shrugged. Clearly the reaction there was “why wouldn’t you eat this pasta with extra bits” not “I gave them a meal they didn’t want even after being asked if there was anything else in the pasta”. The whole notion that people just don’t eat certain things and rely on menu descriptions for details on listed items simply doesn’t come across once you leave the comforts of London. We tried a different approach as well, by asking the waiters what exactly is in certain foods. Most of the time this has helped a lot and worked in our favor, but one time it didn’t.
Ljubljana camp “salad”
When we camped outside Ljubljana, and went to eat lunch at the camp restaurant, there wasn’t much on the menu that we could have. There was a salad of vegetables from this season, so I asked the waiter whether it had anything else in it. She shook her head, and told us it was only vegetables. I made double-sure: “No cheese?”. She said “No cheese!”. What came out was a bowl of soggy vegetables covered in a creamy sauce. I half-heartedly tried to take out the creamy bits but gave up. When the waiter came to clear the table, I pointed out that I don’t eat “creamy things” and she apologized but again, no other reaction. Maybe I am slightly spoiled by America, where if you barely touch your dish, the waiter will ask if it can be replaced. Here they just shrug and probably put you down as a weirdo. And by “here” I mean outside of London, Chicago or Prague, the three places I know so well.
Random Italian restaurant with a custom meal for us
As we moved further, and travelled through Greece, we discovered there are more menu options for vegans, despite the actual menus being rarely translated into English (or any language comprehensible to us). While we were in Italy, we stopped at a random place for lunch, and speaking no Italian managed to get ourselves a custom meal of potatoes and beans, grilled vegetables and a massive bowl of salad. Similar things started happening recently: a staple for eating out now is a salad, and to go with it some vegetables, either grilled, or stuffed with rice, and once in a while French fries, which are getting less fried and more oven-baked as we move further away from western Europe. Once we had a bizarre meal consisting of an enormous plate of olives and another enormous plate of salad, and even though the olives were good, it put us off olives for a while.
Standard meal out
The main thing is not to forget to eat regularly, so snacks are becoming more and more important. We have in the fridge hazelnuts and chocolate, and in the front seat we have random snacks we buy at gas stations, and sweets. Still, the more you travel into unknown lands, the less important “meals” have become. I am not going to lie, sometimes we skip breakfast, sometimes we skip lunch, and once in a while, if we drive a long way in the evening and camp very late, our “dinner” ends up being beer and conversation. When you are that tired, having driven a long distance on an empty stomach, sweating profusely and feeling really hot, once you camp for the night, all you want is a cold drink and a relaxed chat in the crappy outside chairs we bought and keep carrying around. After that it’s bed time and hopes of a hearty breakfast, which never follows anyway.
One of our many snacks, on a train to Florence
The easiest way to stay vegan and enjoy your food is to cook all of the meals yourself. We have been cooking a lot, and in some countries (where language is more of a barrier than other places, where camping wild is a better option than anything else) we have only eaten “home”-cooked meals.
Fried rice with cabbage, cold leftovers for lunch
We started out nicely in the south of France: barbecued vegetables and local wine! But as we moved along, we seem to be juggling spaghetti days with couscous or rice days and then once in a while something weird like potatoes or packet soup. It is quite easy to cook in the car, we have a fridge, stored food and spices, and a cooker. The problem is, sometimes we really are too tired, or sometimes the vegetables (usually mushrooms) go off too quickly, so if we end up buying mushrooms, we have to eat them within about two days. Cabbage, as we have discovered, lasts forever in the fridge, even when it has been cut. Jonathan makes very good spaghetti of all sorts, mostly olive oil, tomato and chilly related. I make whatever is left in the fridge, or whatever I crave at that particular moment, soup or salad or fried rice.
Lunch after a swim: bread, marmite, ajvar, veggies and fruit
We try and not eat out too much, but sometimes driving all day we end up having to eat out or having to go “raw vegan” just off the main road. Our “raw vegan” usually means cut up vegetables, bread and something to go on the bread, such as Marmite, Ajvar or olive paste. And don’t forget all of the ripe peaches, cherries and watermelon we have been eating at certain times as well.
Ajvar, salad, bread
It is in people’s nature to think that a country’s cuisine is mostly filled with meat, fish and dairy products. Sadly, so far it does seem to be the case. However, that doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy the tasty wonders of certain places, because I have been enjoying olives and massive juicy tomatoes all throughout Europe, so telling vegans that traveling for us is hard because we will certainly starve is just not true in any shape or form. Ask questions and be creative is my advice.
This week I’m going to take you on a tour through the other side of the trip. Yes, we have been swimming in the sea in beautiful places (up to 5 times a day as we rolled down the Adriatic coast through Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Albania). Yes, we have found great vegan food to eat and wine to drink. Yes, we have seen absolutely spectacular scenery and weird and unusual sights. But we have also had our issues, hardships and rough moments.
And then there’s the ‘unusual’ aspects of our journey and our characters which you might get to see develop over future posts and videos. For example, as I drive down rough tracks or open roads I am not only watching the road to be safe, but I am looking out for dead things in the road. Katana has a slightly unusual project on the go at the moment which I am supporting with a mixture of intrigue, admiration and revulsion. You will perhaps see the results in a photo gallery dedicated to ‘Katana’s Dead Nature Studies’, though I guess you won’t experience the full sensory affront of the subject. This has however also led to the rescue of a tortoise (I’m sure Katana wasn’t really disappointed to discover that this particular road-kill was just road-turned-on-its-back-unable-to-move)(actually, I’m not at all sure about that but one can hope…).
Free Tortoise
We spent some time after that discussing how long it had been there, and whether the poo around it was its own and an indicator of its time inverted on the side of the road.
Stranded Tortoise
The tortoise rescue day also had other moments. Once we had packed up from our wild camp in the woods and stowed the shovel (they don’t have loos out there), I had a near miss with some road-kill which turned out to be a very-much-alive snake, and then spent a jolly half hour in 45plus degrees under Troopy by the side of the road greasing the suspension which had gone rather squeaky after our detour into the Albanian mountains. Incidentally, Troopy was given a pretty good workout in Albania – a lot of the mainish roads randomly run out of surfacing and turn into rough tracks or riverbeds, and we had deliberately gone off the map to see the wilderness, making the 4WD a necessity as we climbed into the mountains over eroded tracks inhabited by people on donkeys and mopeds.
Albanian Traffic
Actually that last comment also applies to Albanian motorways where the most alarming incident (apart from having to swerve to avoid a lurching coach) was seeing 4 donkeys being dragged across a busy motorway between trucks, but they did seem more at home in the mountains.
Albanian Motorway Traffic
I think I am also much more at home in the mountains. Put me in a city in traffic trying to find somewhere to park and I am liable to get a bit snappy and take the first excuse to escape I am given. Katana has been an excellent Navigator, of the sort whose good fortune is as much of an asset as her undoubted ability to choose and direct us on our route. But we have had our stressful moments when reality on the ground doesn’t appear to match reality on the maps and we have had to take a few minutes to calm down. That good fortune is awesome though – some of our best adventures have resulted from taking a less-intended route such as that which led us to our first wild camping of the trip.
Even that, however, was not looking good as we were detained by Croatian customs officials at the Bosnian border (where we had arrived by accident), who seemed to take delight in going through Katana’s personal belongings in great and repeated detail. It became clear that the young man’s intent was to cause discomfort enough to get us to ‘pay him a ticket’ right there rather than wait for a sniffer dog to be sent down, and then be dealt with by a judge if they found some hidden illegal items. Katana did a good job of ignoring them, whilst I paid friendly chatty attention to exactly what he was doing until they gave up and sent us on our way – the dog never did arrive. Bad taste left though.
So on the subject of taste – back to our vegan mission. That too has been largely great, but occasionally not so much fun. Driving along the northern part of the Croatian coast was for some time just a succession of whole pigs on spits by the side of the road – which given the sparse traffic must have amounted to 1 per person on the road and was the only food available for some miles. Then there was the restaurant that served the Arrabiata sauce with slices of bacon, though not as stated on the menu.
Attempting to use up Albanian currency
And now we are in Athens, or at least a campsite outside the city. At least, it calls itself a campsite but we are still trying to work out what the true purpose of its existence is. A caravan graveyard? A dog breeding farm? A mosquito super-bug breeding centre? Who knows? We are the only guests. Yesterday there was an Australian couple here who had been here 3 days and seen no other customers. And yet cars come and go, the mosquitoes are watered and the toilets don’t flush. The dogs sit outside Troopy at night and bark at each other or into space. We leave tomorrow and that can’t come soon enough.
Up until now the worst campsite we encountered was a dilapidated site in Montenegro with 1 small toilet block that nobody seemed to use – on getting up early to find them being hosed down, I wandered behind a second (overgrown out of use) wash block and found an area of concrete liberally encumbered with piles of human poo, and a ditch full of toilet paper. At least then I understood. This place is more disturbing than that, and we aim to camp wild more often from now on. Right now we are using beer as an antidote to weirdness…it seems to be working!
Vegan Adventure Travel – Holidays, Expeditions – Overland Africa
