The dispatches are presented in chronological order.

ITALY

June 1-3, 2005
Travel Time
San Francisco to Milan to Mandello del Lario in Lake Como, Italy

June 4, 2005
Birthday Bash in the Hills
Mandello del Lario, Italy

June 5, 2005
Not Motorcycling Venice
Mandello to Venice, Italy

June 6, 2005
Venice Proper
Venice, Italy

June 7, 2005
I Am Not a Duck
Venice to Lido delle Nazioni (Italy) in the Rain

June 8, 2005
Bright, Sunshiny Day
Lido delle Nazioni to Pescara, Italy

June 9, 2005
Promontorio del Garganano

June 10, 2005
Trulli Yours
Alberobello, Italy

June 11, 2005
Puglia: The Scenic Route
From Alberobello to the Brindisi Ferry (and from there, Greece - see below for dispatches from Greece)

GREECE

There aren't many dispatches from Greece because it was a true "retreat" with the Wild Writing Women, to decompress and take a break from our writer's duties, laze by the pool and the sea, take leisurely boat rides to pretty Greek Islands and, in general, find out what it's like to "not" be travel writers for a while. Also, this area is a bit outside of my theme "The Adriatic" because it's on the Ionian Sea. That's my story and I'm sticking to it! I would like to share some photos from the area, however:

June 12, 2005
Brindisi to Patras Ferry and the ride to Kostos
The ferry to ancient Corinth, down the east coast of the Pelopennese Penninsula to the villa.

Photos: Greek Ferry

June 17, 18 2005

Photos: Spetzes | Hydra, Kostos, & Porto Heli

ALBANIA

Albania was definitely the "find" of the journey. It was the place everyone warned me against. Dangerous, bad roads, mean people, guns, robberies, pickpockeds, blah blah blah. Did I find anything like that? No! Kind and generous people who are anxious to develop tourism in their country in order to enjoy a better economy. Passable roads and construction to repair the worst of them. The lovliest, most stunning landscapes, unspoiled mountain villages, tiny crecents of beach, fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, and succulent lamb dishes, good coffee, and smiles of welcome - yes, maybe after an initial jolt of surprise. (What is a solo woman motorcycle tourist doing in Albania!!!) But terrible Internet connections. General poverty and illiteracy with pockets of educated and well-to-do people. An attention to ecological and historial site preservation. Get this - nodding your head up and down means NO and back and forth means YES. Yikes!

June 19-23, 2005
Albania - here they have satellite connections only and I haven't been able to upload dispatches and photos. "The entire country is on satellite," said the guy at an Internet cafe in Vlore. "It's no good...we need DSL." He's right. I was barely able to get onto my my browser-based weblog for a short communique about the most stunning motorcycle travel experiences I've had in my life. I thought I'd zip through Albania quickly - in two days - so many people had warned me against being here I was leary of traveling alone, yets it's my favorite place in the world so far. If I had another week or two I'd go explore the interior, too. Which just proves once again, you can't believe everything you hear so you've got to go see for yourself.

Sun, June 19, 2005
Patras to Corfu Ferry
Not much to report - just an overnighter, a floating hotel, and then on to the Kaliope and across to Albania.

Mon, June 20
Corfu to Saranda and the Butrint Ruins
Wowee Zowie! The little ferry Kaliope from Corfu to Saranda was so cool. I met a couple from Slovenia in an old VW bug convertable to comiserate with about the lack of information on the Albania ferry in Greece. The Greeks claim to not know about it. Then, if you ask the police AND the navy, someone whips out a clipboard, and between bites of donut (yes, here too), lets us know it arrives at 8:00. Does it take vehibles? Who knows. When the Kaliope arrives we are all relieved to see that it does, indeed. It might squeeze four small cars in, if pressed, but it's just me and the VW and about 10 passengers for the hour-long ride to Saranda. This is a real border. We had to register with the police, get visas, show papers for the vehicles, get stamped and receipted, and go through all those formalities you used to have to go through before the EU came about. Guys are selling Leke (Albanian currency) in the street, so I didn't change my Euros, figuring that hotels would take them. I arrived in Saranda just in time for the destruction of illegal buildings constructed atop an archeological site in the town square so had the impression that there were more cops than population in Saranda. Found a hotel, then off to Butrint and then it's just me (the only tourist) and the ruins, mosquitos, snakes, and archaeologists, one of whom actually discovered a coin during my visit. This place is vast, eye-popping, and took me 4 hours to explore and I think I missed quite a bit. For sure they're uncovering more every day, so each year the site will become more impressive. I posted notes to my weblog in the absence of the ability to upload a dispatch and photos.

Photos: Saranda (Corfu to Albania ferry connection)
Photos: Butrint Ruins

Dispatch, June 21, Saranda: The Albanian Postal System

Tues, June 21, 2005
Saranda to Vlore
Geographic drama and the widest variety of road types ever. The Breva came through on some rock and gravel and wet and steep and twisty roads. Whew! I'm exhausted but this stretch of coast is spectacular and a must see and truly the best and possibly the most challenging motorcycle travel day of my life.

Photos: The Road to Vlore

Wed, June 22, 2005
Vlore, the Apollonia Ruins near Feir where I spent three nice hours lunching and wandering the grounds- the only tourist except for an American painter who ran in, photographed everything, and left in 20 minutes. The grounds are barren - the prominent feature is the face of a building with corinthian columns intact, but objects found have been collected inside the walls of the church grounds. The taverna there served me a truly gourmet meal of salad (with real lettuce, for a change, not cucumbers and tomatoes) and a small chicken grilled and spiced that I enjoyed thoroughly in its large, airy lodge in the field. As I was leaving the ticket taker tried to sell me a Roman coin for 100 Euro. It was spectacular. He had other, smaller stuff for less money, but I didn't want to be part of that economy - that was my kneejerk reaction. I rode to Durres thinking about it - he lives there, he found it, yes it belongs in a museum, but he and everyone there is pretty darn poor. Why shouldn't he sell it? Try to make a living? Actually, the museum should offer to pay locals decently for the stuff, which lies about like Indian heads in my native North Carolina. I could have bought it and donated it to the museum. A museum - probably not that one as it looks like it's been cleaned out of the small stuff. I hit Durres before sunset and got a hotel room on the seafront with miles of beach umbrellas, and joined the throngs who came out to promenade at sunset. I wanted to swim but the nearby harbor made me wary, and dead sea grass collected at the shoreline.

Photos: Apollonia

Thur, June 23, 2005
After a short morning visit to the archeological museum in the former capital city of Durres in Northern Albania I make my way north to Lac, Milot, Lezha, to the last decent-sized town of Shkoder to the lonely mountain pass at Hani Hotit and the Montenegro border. I could have gone a different road following the coast but people told me the road was absolutely terrible. I'm glad I took their advice because the "good" road was sometimes pretty terrible, but nothing was as steep and treacherous as in Southern Albania - just irritatingly rutted and dusty. Outside of Shkoder I put all my remaining Leke in the hands of a gas station owner and it exactly fills up the tank. Then I hit that familiar territory of no-man's land - the 10 or 20 miles on each side of a border that few people settle. On the Albanian side there are a few houses, some fields, and abandoned gas stations rusting to nothing, and around a corner a dozen guys shoveling a ditch who stand up and shout and giving me the thumbs up as I ride past. It's the first time this has happened to me and at first I'm startled but then I wave and return the thumbs up, smiling all the way to the border. Since Shkoder I've been getting squeezed by mountains and I wonder where I'll cross. Have I made a mistake? There's no other traffic. None. I'm alone. There's a big lake on the left that separates me from the Adriatic. The mountains come straight down to its shores and there seems to be no recreation on it, no villages. Is it that inaccessible? I ride and ride toward an ever more impenetrable wall of mountains and the road rises and falls and finally I get squeezed into a pass where there's a lonely border filled with men in uniforms, wooden barriers, and small buildings with officious looking people looking through official papers. There's some back-up and they're not letting cars through into Albania, but a couple of people stack up behind me as I pay 1 Euro for each day I spent in Albania to an incredibly nice Albanian who speaks fluent English, get my passport inspected by a robotic Montenegran, and then ride through to present the collected stamps and receipts to the border guards at the other side, officially entering the non-town of Bozen. In that short time I've met an Albanian man with his family driving a yellow Mercedes - we've passed each other for miles, and he introduces himself and gives me his telephone number in case I need any help in the next couple of days. He's lived in Norway and now lives in Podogorica, and crosses the border a couple of times monthly. He shakes hands with all the cops and as we ride north we are stopped once more by a few police, whose hand he shakes and we are let through and I follow him, figuring any other police barriers will be a breeze, and beep a bye at Podgorica as I turn west to the Adratic Sea to land in the beach town of Petrovac an hour later.

SERBIA-MONTENEGRO

Thur, June 23, 2005
Montenegro is breathtaking with its high, jagged mountains, forests, lakes, and - best of all - good roads. Riding to the sea brings views of the island-dotted Adriatic sparkling blue but before that I'm gawking at the huge steep mountains (as I try not to fall over the side), a couple of national parks with forests and lakes, and am impressed by the capabilities of humans who engineer roads through this kind of territory. My stop for the day is in Petrovac, the first town on the sea, exhausted from a long, hot day of riding through the Albanian mountains - the Macedonian mountains behind them - the Montenegran mountains ahead - mountains everywhere you look.

I wind down into town from the main road - like Saranda in Albania it's built between the switchback roads - and find a touristic center. A couple walks by and comments on the bike. He speaks Italian, she's fluent in English. After some chit-chat - their cousin lives in Fresno and will visit in two weeks - they ask "what do you need?" I say "a bank and a hotel." They tell me that there's no bank but if I have a MasterCard ATM there's one at the big market, and the big Hotel Palas I passed probably has rooms for one night. It's easy - 27 Euros later and I'm installed in a huge family hotel, a basic tile-floored airy room with twin beds, put on my bathing suit and run out to join the throngs on a shockingly crowded beach. I manage to find two square feet to put my towel and flip-flops down on the smooth rocks and dive into the sea - my first swim in the Adriatic. (In Italy it was raining, and in Albania I didn't want to risk it - whenever I had the opportunity I was too close to a harbor with its associated flith.)

The water here is cool and clear - so clear that when I put my feet down to touch the bottom it wasn't there - it was a couple of feet lower than what I gauged with my eyes. I spent about a half hour swimming, floating, tasting the sea, rinsing off the hot dusty day and hours of travel. I found my towel, dressed, and went to the market. The ATM worked, I got Euros (wow, travel is getting so easy) and then was faced with the delights of a foreign grocery store, one of my favorite pastimes.

It's incredibly neat and clean and I count no less than 10 young employees (in green uniforms) whose jobs seem to be to straighten up after the customers look at things on the shelves. I choose a liter of juice, and a girl quickly fills the space I left by pushing the back ones up to the front. I look at some wine and the labels are quickly faced front foward after me. (Bad girl! I skewed the bottle!) There's Montenegran wine, red and white, tins of things like squid in ink and oysters in olive oil and peppers. There's decent chocolate, packages of instant soups, a large selection of herbal teas, many flavors and textures of yogurt, and a neat isle of non-grocery items like suntan lotion and razors and travel-sized packets of tissue.

A section of breads and cheeses and salamis is attended by four specialists, but there is no produce here - too messy, probably - that's out front and sold separately. At least here, unlike in Italy, they let you choose your own fruit. (In Italy you point and they get it for you.)

This is an adjustment from Albania, where I saw zero grocery stores, only neighborhood markets where you just grab from a jumble from the crates and refrigerator and pay an approximate amount, rounded out to the nearest convenient coin. I'm trying to remember if I saw one cash register, and I don't think I did - only calculators.

HERZEGOVINA

Fri, June 24, 2005
Herzegovina
In and out - 50 km of lovely road and then I was in Croatia. Not much else to say.

CROATIA

Fri June 24, 2005
Dubrovnik
Arrived 1:30 pm. From Montenegro to here is a beautifullly paved coast road like Highway 1 in California. Coming around the side of a mountain you suddenly see Dubrovnik, its red roofs and huge city walls. There's nowhere to park and take photos, unfortunately, so I ride on in to the city gates - no cars inside - and park on the sidewalk in front of an Internet cafe. Finally I uploaded all my dispatches and photos (above) from Albania.

The Internet cafe people assurred me that despite all the busloads of tourists there were rooms to be had here. I'd seen "apartment-zimmer-rooms" signs on the road into town and they said yes, just ask, so here I am, having rung the doorbell of one and I have a room with a view of part of the city walls and the sea beyond.

Dispatch from Dubrovnik
Photos of Dubrovnik

Sat, June 25, 2005
Peljesac Peninsula

Dispatch: Gourmet lunch and afternoon snorkle
Photo Gallery

Sun, June 26, 2005
Korcula Island and Hvar Island
Dispatch
Photos: Korcula (Where Marco Polo was born)
Photos: Hvar

Mon, June 27, 2005
Pokrvenik on Hvar Island
Dispatch: Pokrvenik on Hvar Island
Photo Gallery

Monday, June 27, 2005
Split and Trogi

June 27: Hvar Island, Split, and Trogir
June 27, 28: Hvar Guesthouse
June 29: Drage to Pag Island
June 30: Rab Island
July 1: Rab to Istrian Peninsula

SLOVENIA

July 1, 2005

FULL CIRCLE: BACK TO ITALY

July 2-5, 2005

July 2: Venice Beach
July 3-5: Mandello del Lario
July 6: Flying Time

DISTANCES | PETROL