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After leaving the lakes and setting our destination to Zagreb the Capital of Croatia we arrived late in the afternoon. After about 2 hours of riding we found no accommodation at all. We thought we will pass Zagreb and head towards Budapest in Hungary… “There must be accommodation somewhere between Zagreb and Budapest… in Croatia”.. well we found out after riding for 6 hours that there was nothing worth talking about or even remotely worth staying at anywhere north of Zagreb towards Budapest.Although it must be said that Zagreb is a nice city and I would highly recommend going through there to anyone…

All the hotels wanted into the hundreds of euro’s per night for “4 star”.. which was more like minus 4 star in towns which would scare even clint eastwood away as dirty harry.. Many of the towns looked seriously like they are from some sort of movie set with all broken down factories and run down roads. I’m sure its not as bad as we are claiming here but at the time in storms and stuff it looked scary. We ended up riding all the way through to one of the termal pool towns close to the boarder in Hungary. The campsite was very nice and the area/town near it was very pretty. The difference between Croatia and Hungary was immediately evident. Only a few kilometers and everything was nice and tidy, the roads improved and the towns became clean. Its not that we didn’t like Croatia it just not really what we expected and the weather made it really terrible for riding. So after 4 days of terrible weather and reports saying it was to last for another 4-5 days we headed north to where the weather looked to improved.

The joys of different countries with different currencies.. It was something that we didn’t plan too well primarily because we didn’t expect to be out of croatia so soon. So we had to get Hungarian Florint.. Unfortunately no bank would take our UK cards to get money out.. and at 10pm at night the currency change places had closed hours ago. We only found this out after Heather had been left at the restraunt and ordered some pizzas and beers only to find out we had no money to pay for them about 20minutes later. I went to 9+ banks and 5 different shops etc to ask people about money. Unfortuantely nobody spoke english.. and none of the abnks took our money. It was a very embarrassing situation that was starting to brew.. No money.. lots of food and beer and no english or hungarian skills.. We ended up having a serious problem tryin to explain to the guy that we could only pay in Croatian or Euro’s.. He didn’t like that idea after intially saying yes he went back on it after we had eaten and drank all the beer… wow.. now we are properly screwed. In the end the bill was less than 8 euro’s including all the beers.. Because he didn’t have enough change and wouldn’t exchange anything we ended up having to pay 20 euro and just leaving him to sort it out himself.. We felt like real dickheads… although being a dickhead comes really naturally 🙂

After some shocking weather in Slovenia and some wild camping in the Forest we stayed in a Hotel for our second night in Slovenia.. The first for our trip so far.. How nice was it to have a real bed to sleep in finally.. We didn’t realise at the time though that our wild camping experience the previous night was actually in a bear area. oops.. maybe wild camping is not such a great idea in the mountains around the Balkans… after all heather thought she heard noises in the night.. maybe it was some bear trying to sniff around the tent.. Maybe it was the central heating system that kept it away after all.. Who will ever know.. one thing we do know for sure is that we are not going to be wild camping so much any more until we know there are no more bears.. ohh.. maybe the odd koala then.. After we camped  near the  Plitvice Lakes National Park. From there we went to see the baracs caves and the lakes. On the way to the National Park we came across a town called Slunj where we got our first glimps of what we should expect in the national park.

Just before the town in the middle of the forest we saw this beautiful little setting.

It was good to have a day off and relax while the really bad weather passed. Unfortunately our plan to let the weather pass was not so  great.. looking at the weather forecast its going to be crap weather for 5-7 days.. depending on who you believe (the bbc or weather.com). The caves looked pretty cool but they have nothing on many of the caves I’ve seen in Australia (Jenolan for example). It was still a nice suprise and the tour guide was excellent. I would recommend anyone going to the lakes to make the small detour (10km) to see the caves.

One of the stark differences between Croatia has been the number of buildings in a terrible state. Many of them pitted with bullet holes, shell’s or with little memorials of families that have died there during the conflict. It was very depressing seeing all these comunities of just ruined buildings all over the area. There are so many ruined buildings they probably out number inhabited buildings 5 to 1.

Its crazy but its a real reminder of how shit war must really be. Now we have seen the lakes and the caves we had planned to go down to the coast and travel for a while. With the shit weather we are going to head north instead to Hungary and then east to Romania missing the Dalmatian Coast. Maybe next time if there is one we will make it down there.. or if the weather improves in the next 30 minutes our route will be back on track…

Well well what can I say, yesterday was very hot at ‘only’ 34 degrees (Celcius), I was sweating by the time we got into Slovenia, after only 2 hours ride from where we camped in Italy. We went to the petrol station and was surprised to see that the Unleaded petrol was less than 1.10 Euro/ litre which when we were paying 1.33 Euro per litre 5 miles away in Italy was a lovely surprise.And even more lovely when you think that in France some places wanted 1.429 Euro/Litre.We had to pay road tax on our bikes which was 17.50 Euro for 6 months (Bugger)..We got to a forest which we had lunch on the side of the road, I threw off my jacket as I was baking hot! My shirt was wet it was so hot though the blow flies and mossies made me pay for it whilst biting my Naive arse. We saw a great camping site so decided to get some water and camp there the night. Went into “town” which was a couple of houses and a few shacks for Slovenia, there was the castle in the rock face/cave which we had planned to see it this afternoon though we put it off until tomorrow because it was late and the “town” resembled a western movie ghost town. The only missing part was the tumbleweed and the tune. We were going to take photos though thought there would be plenty of time… not to mention heather had not charged the battery for the camera since we left the UK and we had no power captain!!!.

Morning sunshine! I think not, I was awoken during the night to some “showers” and what I thought was a bear (heather), though I thought it would pass.. a little morning shower. By 7am it was raining hard and thunder and lighting was seriously above us cracking away, was quite scary at first thinking we may be struck… fried aussies in a tent.. what could be worse… thinking of the bikes. James said we should wait until 10am until it passes, though the only thing he was passing was his so called “central heating” which I could have done without whilst stuck in a tent. We played some cards while hearing the massive cracking of lightning overhead which wasn’t appearing to be moving on like any other storm. I decided that I wanted out… I wanted out now.. ASAP.. I was over James’ so called central heating which frankly I was almost passing out and playing cards was hard whilst you couldn’t actually sit up. James seemed to be Hypo on the electricity storm (and central heating) as he was jumping around like a jelly bean and hiding under the covers (read sleeping bag and liner)!! (I think he was actually sniffing the glue) I finally got him to emerge from the tent. We packed up quickly in the pouring rain, which was the fat hard rain by the way. Everything was packed, though where we were wild camped was down a hill in the forest. It was seriously slippery though we finally without any drops got the bikes out (Thanks to James’ mastery of offroad skills and central heating aka Turbo’s). We decided to forget about the castle in the rock under such seriously shit weather and carry on to Croatia. To give you an idea we had to travel 36km on a clay dirt road down what most people would call a cliff.. However the Slovenians call it a road… however interpretation is what travelling is all about.. or lack there of.

We got out of the “campsitte” and started down the mountain… every kilometre was getting more and more windy… which we did not appear to be affected by in the forest. By the time we got back to the main town it was a serious gale wind with debris all over the roads (whole tree’s and Slovenian Drivers). We decided to move on anyway. We got onto the motorway which just getting on to was a struggle. I almost stopped before merging as I felt I was getting blown off the bike and road. Going 30kms per hour I had my hazards on, seeing all the debris in my path trying to avoid while still not being blown off the bike. At one point I stopped, went to the guard rail while the wind was pushing so hard that my bike was getting banged against it. I stopped to cry for my mummy… it didn’t help. I have never ever felt such gale force winds and we were far away from the 34 degrees C of yesterday. It was 11 degrees and the wind chill factor was freezing fingers. James was literally blue. I literally almost felt like crying a couple of times as I thought I was going to get blown off my bike. Whilst I called for my mummy and prayed to god. It finally calmed down (read there was some wind protection on the road). and we exited the motorway. On the other road the wind decided to push us the other direction into incoming traffic, ok so we have had to deal with guard rail winds, oncoming traffic winds, frontal winds and from my prospective James’ winds! (read turbo) I have had almost enough and am exhausted whilst only riding 2 hours. Taking into account the wind speed indicator said the wind was going 100km/hour..,

p.s… I’m now in a hotel drinking beer very drunk writing post.. oops me drunk who would have guessed… ha ha.. heather inc.

After waking up at 5:30am to get our day started so we could find a mechanic we coasted down the hill into cencenighe agordino after being told that there was a mechanic in Agordo that would be able to fix the BMW F650GS..We initially thought that it would be a good idea to get to town then find someone with something that could transport the bike to the mechanics.. However after successfully going the 1.6km down the hill from our campsite into town we had the bright idea to see if we could make it another 10km down to Agordo….

After spending 4 hours going to various mechanics in town and asking around.. (with a few Latte Macchiato’s in the mix) we got told that we needed to go to tecnomoto in Belluno because all the mechanics in Agordo either had too much work or didn’t do electrical problems. Which was around 30km away.. Could the bike make it another 30km of doing no left hand turns with the engine running.. With James in the lead we cruised the 30km down the hill from Agordo to Belluno to get into town and find round abouts.. f… Of course just to really mix it up a little they required us to do left hand turns !!.. With the electrical problem getting worse.. the bike was now not starting so easily when it went off during a left hand turn.. This of course had to happen on one of the busiest round abouts in Belluno. With heather walking her bike over to the edge of the road so she could straighten up the steering again so she could start on the journey to tecnomoto… After a 30km trip taking around 1hr 20minutes we finally made it to tecnomoto. We waited in line to ask about getting it fixed only to be told there was a bmw dealership 300meters further down the road which would be better suited to fix the problem than them..

So after several false starts getting back onto the road from tecnomoto we found ourselves on route to a bmw dealership… where nobody spoke english.. This was really turning into an interesting day.. The guys at the dealership eventually found someone who spoke some English so we could explain our problem to them.. They agreed that they could have a look at it that day, but it wouldn’t be fixed for a few days due to their current work load.. This lead us to another problem we had.. What do we do with Heather and the Luggage from her bike while I go and find accommodation. The BMW Dealership called us a taxi and we went in loops trying to find a campsite… In the end heather had run out of money and had to sit on the side of the road waiting for me to find the campsite with all her luggage.. At least she had a book to read in the 32c degree temperatures..

After about a further 5km James found the campsite unloaded most of his luggage at the campsite reception and returned taking a further 7 trips back and forwards to get the luggage and Heather to the campsite.

It was not sweltering with humidity more than before and we both sat down for a well earned beer and pasta for lunch at the campsite restaurant… Ahh the saga had finally almost come to an end.. At around 6pm we got a call from the dealership saying that it would take at least until wednesday to resolve the issue… At least we could have a few days off camping on the side of a beautiful lake to relax..

The same scene just before a huge electrical storm.

Just before going to bed last night we went for a walk to watch the Electrical Storms coming in while at the same time working off our pizza’s for dinner. While on the walk we saw the most amazing site where there was hundreds of fire flies glowing.. We thought we may have had some dodgy mushrooms on the pizza but it was real.. Fire Flies.. Unfortunately the photos didn’t turn out well  🙁 maybe next time.

After spending the night at a great campsite very close to Predazzo on route to Lago di paneveggio for yet another mountain pass to cross. The camp site was the first we stayed at which had a proper restaurant serving fantastic Italian cuisine. We drank loads of good wine and ate pizza for dinner. Which is where we found our new mascot. Gnomie the wooden hobo 15.

The following morning we woke and went for a walk into town before starting our journey again. On route over the mountain pass James came around a corner only to find that the corner was actually a foot thick gravel pit.. oops off he goes.. Thankfully a big Itallian Harley rider was there to help lift the bike and get us back on route.. Its amazing how friendly the Itallians have been so far… Its been very good.

The hope was that we would get to Cortina D’ampezzo. Unfortunately we stopped for lunch just outside cencenighe agordino. Where we stopped we did a small offroad section down to the sides of a beautiful river so that we could enjoy some nice scenery while we ate some food. Away from the noise of the road. Well that’s when things started to get interesting…

Heathers bike developed an intermittant electrical problem that only existed when her bike turned left. We took the front display and head stock apart trying to find what was causing the dodgy connection. Unfortunately we couldn’t isolate the problems further than the fact that her ignition block had something wrong with it….

Given any normal area we could have just got back on the motorway and cruised into a normal town to find a mechanic to replace the bits.  Unfortunately this is the alps.. straight roads don’t really exist which makes riding more fun… especially when you can’t turn left. No more mountain passes for us until we get this problem resolved… On the bright side of things we had to wild cam so we could be near the bikes.. Of course this was because we didn’t want to pay the £130 excess for getting recovered on a Sunday from over 100km from the nearest recovery company that BMW would recommend. That’s probably ontop of some crazy other charges based on milage. In the end we camped in an amazing spot where we think the locals may not have been too happy for us to be!… Ooops.. we explained our situation to one friendly local who had the same bike as James and he seemed cool with it.. However I think the other locals had different ideas… At least we got an amazing view..