About The Adrien and Martin Joly Blog

Brothers Adrien and Martin follow in the footsteps of many travelers who crossed the Balkans from antiquity to modern times. But they do it by bicycle! Starting on October 6, they have given themselves one month to cycle the nearly 2,100-kilometre distance between Venice and Istanbul. In their blog, they reflect on and document their journey as they travel through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey.
Their blog in French is at http://balkansavelo.unblog.fr/

From Bari to Gravina

November 05, 2008 • Comments Montenegro

On the other side of the Adriatic sea is another world. A few minutes is enough to feel that we are no longer in the Balkans, the smell, the noise, the activity  seems all more familiar.

It takes us a  few m iles to leave the port and to find the old city of Bari.

The atmosphere is amazing. It corresponds to what one would imagine of Italy, Vespas cr os sing t he city full speed, old Widows in Black, linen drying on their balcony.. We are seduced by this atmosphere.

We are looking for a map of Italy, we have 6 days to reach Napoli to get our planes. That is long enough, as we only have 300 kms to cross. So after the experience of Montenegro, we decide that we will only use little and quiet roads accross the mountains.

And that's what we do.

On the road, we can see plenty of abandonned stone houses, sometimes an entire village is desolated. We get attacked by some dogs, fortunately not fast enough to reach us.

When night falls, we look for somewhere to stay… And in an a ghost village near the road, we ask the only inhabited house if we can use one of these empty houses.

Aziz, a marocan opened the door to Martin, he is not the owner and must wait for his boss to give us the permission to stay.

As we are waiting, he offers us food and bread that we accept a bit shamefully as Aziz doesn't seem to have much for himself.

An ugly Italian farmer arrives an hour later, and simply asks us to leave as he doesn't want to have any problems with the Police. But as he is too scared to tell us that in front of us, he asked his employee to do it.  Poor Aziz feels terrible, this attitude goes against his principles of life.

Fortunately, we ask one house further, and a nice retired tennisman is happy to open his garden for us.