No Direction Home : Bike-packing in the Balkans

In 2020, we crossed part of the Alps and the Vercors. Last year, we crossed through the Pyrenees and bathed in the Atlantic Ocean 12 days later. Bike-packing adventures have become a summer tradition it seems, and this year Audrey wanted something beyond France.

She dreams of the Balkans that she had glimpsed after too short an incursion in the past. The Balkans for me are a mixture of Tintin in King Ottokar's Sceptre and the first pages of The Use of the World by Nicolas Herdsman. (I need these small touches of symbolism to frame the journey in my head.)

We will leave from Kalamata in Greece, where I’ve made some of my deepest dives and which offered me the world champion title 11 years ago. Looking at our route on the map, which heads northwest into Albania and across to Italy via ferry, I find myself imagining we will ride all the way home to Nice.

But we only have four weeks of this scorching summer with fully loaded bikes to live the itinerant life. Audrey is more realistic: ‘we will go as far as we can.’

The first days are, as always, devoted to finding our rhythm, taming our mounts garlanded with luggage. Audrey relies on the traditional large rear panniers while I venture with a configuration of six different packs spread over the entire frame. We complete the first stages through the hilly Peloponnese peninsula with an average of around 90 km per day, avoiding the main roads.

Our main enemy is the heat, so we adapt our schedule every day. 4:30 am is wake-up call. Then we cycle until 12 pm. We take our positions again for two hours as the sun goes down, if the heart and the legs allow it.

It takes us six days to reach Ioanina, the last Greek city before Albania. After discovering Greece, we will remember our night on the mountainside sleeping against a chapel; the crossing of the Gulf of Corinth on the monumental Rion-Antirion bridge (which was once the largest suspension bridge in the world); the late arrival in the streets of lively Messolonghi; my fall on the coccyx in the suburbs of Arta on Audrey's birthday; the impromptu naps on the tiled floors of village taverns; and the Greek salads on every menu. In Ioanina, we enjoy our first day of rest. We sleep a lot, visit the citadel, Audrey gets her hair cut, and we both ingest litres of water in which we immerse electrolytes to restore vitamins and minerals

We hit the road again and arrive at the border, so we soak up the last Hellenic flavours and shout ‘efcharistó’ and ‘kaliméra’ to one and all. Albania, here we come. Sometimes this border crossing is only an administrative formality and only the suddenly different arrangement of the letters on advertising posters makes it possible to authenticate it.

This time, the landscape does not lie. Entry into Albania is through the heart of a wide and arid valley, bordered by vast mountain slopes with regular crests. It seems to us that everywhere is crushed beneath the summer furnace, and we feel it on our bones too. The greens have been yellowed from the heat. All the cars are taking the direction of the Albanian Riviera, so we decide to head to the mountains for deserted roads and hopefully a little freshness.

The next day we have lunch at a restaurant in Këlcyrë after a morning of riding alongside a wide meandering river. Before leaving, we ask the manager for confirmation on the route to take as the GPS does not want us to follow the SH74 road, which is clearly designated as a main artery on the map, and which promises a spectacular landscape. ‘No good.’ After checking on the internet (it will have been necessary to consult a site specialized in dangerous roads in the world) indeed it’s not good at all.

We are faced with a difficult choice: to either turn back and take the big national route that will allow us to cross Albania in three days and then head to Italy via a ferry (an option that would allow us to survive a little longer the tiny hope of reaching Nice by bike) or choose to branch off towards the SH75 road which sends us to the forgotten corners of the Albanian mountains.

This choice reveals to us the unexpected, the abandonment of a geographical purpose to our journey. It frees us. Our pedal strokes soften, and our luggage becomes lighter. The adventure takes on its purest essence, the unknown. I begin to envision that our roaming might take us into the deepest darkest depths of the Balkans. Audrey is jubilant about this turnaround. It took just 10 days for us to agree on an itinerary.

We meet the soul of the country, and tackle terrain that makes us appreciate all the nuances of riding in the wild and cherish the wide tires of our gravel bikes. We make an incursion into Macedonia, another into Kosovo and each time we return into Albania, the common thread of our journey.

We will approach the border with Montenegro in the Albanian Alps. The chiselled relief exhausts us and when we get closer again to the Mediterranean that we have almost forgotten, three weeks have passed, more than

1400 km are displayed on the clock and the twilight of our journey is announced. We wanted to finish in Nice, then in Rome, then in Montenegro, and finally it will be Durrës.

Durrës is the main port on the Albanian coast from where ferries leave for Italy. It was an obligatory passage, considered for a long time as the link between the two phases of our expedition. When we landed in Albania, we could have been there in three days. We were heartbroken to not ride in Italy, but we would have completely missed this intense, warm, diverse country of ‘Shqipëria’. The heart of Durrës seems rich, but we only stop at a mini market to acquire drinks and other local sweets for the upcoming 17h ferry and 10h train journey home.

We can't wait to see where next summer’s adventure takes us.

No Direction Home : Bike-packing in the Balkans

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