Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Greece! (With a Squidgeon of Bosnia Herzegovina) 26th July till 7th August

Well as you can see by the dates we are still keeping up our blog pace of staying well behind!

After saying farewell to Croatia we cross into Montenegro and stop by a bustling coastal town Herceg Novi.
At various info center's we stop and ask for information about local attractions and the ferry cost.

Each place has a different cost for the ferry and we begin to hear about the "blue cave" which they claim is only accessible by boat...

Turns out that with the busyness of the day and some selective hearing that the ferry is free!





After crossing over we decide to try and find this cave with a bit of guesstimation navigation. We head inland, past Zigi Beach and up an unexpected mountain.
"It's more than just a beach"

We thought we'd be at the cave in time to swim that day but the night sneaks up on us and we setup camp on the top of a hill










After half a day of hunting round exploring World War 2 bunkers and bush bashing I'm ready to give up when Ziggy pushes hard for one last try.

Second Valley style cliff climbing and scrub bashing rewards Ziggy (and me when I catch him;) with a great cave with glowing blue water. So cool that we forgot to take any photo's :( We think there may be some video footage though, so something to look forward to when Ziggy makes his trip video!

See Ziggy's not homeless

We ride past Ziggy's place and get back to the job of riding toward Oz.















Some nights we have epic campsites and others, well... involve sleeping inside construction sites or dumps. We definitely spend less time looking for a spot now than we used too.

Drying out our gear after we got slammed overnight by the heaviest rain yet. The saucepan we left out was full in the morning

We are really enjoying watching the countryside change as we roll along.

Now into Albania we enjoy meeting locals from the small villages, eating cheap delicious Doners









and spend some time hiding from hustlers in the big cities.

Before leaving Albania we stock up on Doners and ingredients to last us for the 2 days we are in Macedonia.

It's a pretty cool place and is once again fairly touristy at the coast near Ohrid.

After going to a tourist info place we ride on another detour into Ulza Regional Nature Park.

It seems whenever we go to a info center we then need to ride over another mountain! But it is totally worth it.

We get rained on for a while and start to get fairly cold, an abandoned building that smells like urine, gets us out the rain for a late lunch and hot drink which nicely defrosts our fingers!

Their seems to be a pattern that after copping the rain our fate changes.

The sun comes out!

Yes, my tune has changed, I'm totally on board with the Selfie!

We dry out and then fortune favors us.

We cross into Greece are given delicious doners, drinks, water and directions by a very friendly family. We pull up for the night, Ziggy again miraculously finds firewood from nowhere and we stew all the roadside fruit we found.

My Greek's not that good but I think it says something about a teddy bear shop coming up.

We decided that we are going to make a push to get to Thessaloniki so that we can go to church the following day. We work out it will be our biggest yet 140km.

That is, until we get booted off the freeway and have to ride over another mountain range.

But somehow we don't mind so much at the top.

Graffiti Art in a Kebab Shop (yep we go to these places a lot)

Some friendly cafe owners give us delicious iced coffees and biscuits

After the very timely coffee break we do our final kilometer's in the dark and camp in a cornfield. We feel pretty happy to have made our target spot, especially after having to ride 176km to get there.

The next day we were pretty disappointed to find out that the church we rode to wasn't on that Sunday!

But meeting our host for the night Alexandos, his Wife Susan and another cycle tourist Guillam made up for it.

The next day the four of us took to the road together. it was pretty sweet riding in a group and the Km's flew by!

At the end of the day our paths split and we say a fond farewell to our riding friends. (And a Polish guy we met just before the photo)

One of our occasional lunchtime desserts is the 2L challenge. Which we are now getting pretty good at!

 We roll to a beautiful beach, chill for the afternoon and then take the obligatory sunset photo's.

(And Sunrise Photo's)

 The second puncture for the trip (both times mine)

Our highway "shortcut" leads us along a slow but interesting path.

3333km and counting.

 Touring through Europe has been so good! Such friendly people, fun times and interesting places.
We're pretty excited to be slowly getting closer to home and look forward to the next stage of our trip. Love ya's! Ziggy and Joel :)