Hey people!
So right now I’m in France around Lyon area. I just finished one grape picking job and soon I’m gonna be off to find some more, but right now I just wanna share this video that me and Ugne made in between getting grape juice all over our clothes. Enjoy!
Howdy!
So now I wanna tell you about the trip I have done in Balkans and in Italy this year. After statying in Thessaloniki for around 4 months I felt its time to move. Also in the summer this great city gets completely deserted as everyone leaves to the islands or anywhere where theres no 45 degree heat. I decided to make the trip with the bike again, because it has been a long time since I did any long distance with it. The original plan was to hitchike to Denmark and try to recycle a bike there. From the stories I heard people throw away everything there, so you can easily put a lets say 300 euros bike together and also get clothes for cycling, tools and such for free. But in the end my friends abandoned tallbike caught my attention and I thought to myself that it would be really awesome to do the trip on that. So after serious repairs, buying new wheel, repainting the whole thing and doing other small stuff the bike was ready to hit the road. Now the name of the trip is Say my name because recently I became a big fan of Breaking Bad series. If youre a fan you will know what I mean 🙂 So I named the bike Heisenberg and hit the road in the beggining of July.
My first objective was to get to Dubrovnik in Croatia, as this place was supposed to be very touristy and therefore good for busking. So I set off in this direction. Now the tallbike has an amazing ability to draw attention so the hinking of the cars was following me everywhere I would go. But also has a positive side, even before leaving the city on the first day I was stopped by some guys sitting in a cantine and was offered sandwich and a coffee — sweet 🙂
So first stop was still in Greece in Edessa, I managed to get there in the night, did some busking hang out with some young greek guys but then having no place to stay I had to leave the city and after like half an hour of going in the dark decided to sleep behind the barrier next to the motorway – not the best solution but worked for me. Next day I arrived in Macedonia, now there are some serious uphills you have to go trough (like anywhere in Balkans when I think about it). At some point I arrived to what seemed like the biggest uphill in the universe and there was no way to ride anymore so I spent around 1,5 hour pushing the bike up. At some point I ran out of water, then I was saved by some cyclist who gave me one bottle. But then it happened again and the hill seemed like it would never end! So I started to try to stop some cars passing me by to ask them if they have any. After few minutes I started to think again and took my empty water bottle and waved it at the cars- it finally worked. Then an old man told me that just 100 meters up theres a place where I can get water. Being energized by that news I almost ran there and found myself on the top of the hill- finally! It was a rest area with a spring and an abandoned restaurant! Perfect place to stop for the night! Inside there was a bed so I made myself at home. Later the owner arrived to take some furniture from it but he was perfectly fine with me staying there. In the night I had a surprise – there was a bag haniging from the ceiling, being curious I decided to check whats in it. So I touched it and it started to move and a squirrel ran out of it – it made its house inside this bag 🙂
Then after some cycling I managed to get to Ochrid lake – now this is a nice place to be. Im not usually a big fan of touristic places but Ochrid manages to keep the balance between touristy and normal. The only annoying thing was people asking me all the time if I want to rent their room. One guy couldnt understand no as an answer and kept following me all day. By the end of the day when I was getting ready to leave the town to camp somwhere I was approached by a young guy who asked me if I needed accomodation. I was ready to tell him to get lost but it turned out he got messaged by my friend who told him I was coming to Ochrid and he just found me on the street! So he took me to his hostel, now this is gonna be an advertisment, but if you are in Ochrid you totally want to go to this place. Its called Sunny Lake Hostel and its absolutely amazing, great atmosphere and full of travelers from everywhere. I chilled out there for two days before deciding to continue.
After this I continued on my way to Albania which greeted me with amazingly long owesome downhill – it was really a nice change. Getting there you can see that the country is really different than the rest of Balkans. To me it looked a lot like turkey, with all the bazars, markets and tons of people hangin out together. The pity for me is that I had to stick to the main roads – the small ones were all going up the mountain and I just woudlnt be able to ride on them. So apart from the little piece of mountains in the south where I entered the landscape was pretty boring – fields, shops and lots of cars passing me by. Now Albanians are generally disliked by all of their neigbours, especially people in Greece people seem to even hate/fear them. But when you meet them they are one of the nicest people ever! I was passing some building being under constraction and stopped to ask some guys if I could sleep in it. Their grandfather heard the story and didnt even want to hear about me sleeping in there and took me to his house where we spend the night having conversations in broken english/italian/bulgarian/greek, my head was exploding in the end with all the languages. Also they gave me crazy amount of homemade raki and delicious albanian food – that was awesome to experience that kind of hospitality.
Soon after that I entered Montenegro. The first day of the trip was beautiful, I ended up on the mountain, passing all the little houses, cows and such, riding on a small path watching the sunset. Then the next day I got to the main road and man I do not reccomend to do it on a bike. First of all its pretty tough cause it goes up and down all the time. Its just fuuuuuul of cars all the time, and then on the sides you have cliffs, shops and rooms to rent, nothing more because theres little space and people use all of it. So I had to ride 1,5 hour in the dark before I found an empty and pretty disgusting building to sleep in, I was so tired though I didnt care anymore and just crashed there. The next day I managed to get to Dubrovnik. Now that city gave me some mixed feelings – I think out of the touristic season it mus be really nice, and the old town is just beautiful. But in the season its just too full! There were crowds everywhere, it was really hard to pass trough with the bike. Everyone working there seemed to be really tired and bored with people – which I can totally understand. And its just ridiculously expensive. Anyway after doing all this way I decided to stay a bit and try how the busking goes. I managed to find a spot under a bridge , just in the center which was perfect for sleeping! Noone would ever go there cause of the bushes around so I could have all the peace I wanted there. Busking worked out pretty good so I decided to stay for 5 days there before continuing. Now the good thing about busking is that you can meet all kinds of cool people, so I made firends with a french guy, a dutch couple and two spanish girls – was awesome to have some people to hang out with and talk to after all day of answering the questions ” Where are you from and how do you get on that bike”.
Dubrovniks old town from above and inside.
Having my objective of saving up some cash completed I set off towards Serbia to meet Ecotopia Bike tour in Nis. – here you can read more about it. I wanted to join also because it was organized in Thessaloniki this year and I made friends with the people running it when I was still living there.
I was really relieved when I could finally leave the bigass road and go on smaller one inside Bosnia. Now the mountains and generally the landscape there was beautiful!
When after all day of cycling I finally got to the highest point on my road it was all so green and open, with beautiful meadows and sheep on them, toatally worth all this cycling! Crossing Bosnia took me around two days in the end, then I entered Serbia. Now heres where the spoke-nightmare started. Basically the spokes in my rear wheel reached their limit and every day from now on I had at least one spoke broken. The first one was the worst, because I didnt have the tool to fix it proporly at this point (I acquired it soon after that) and there was no bike workshop anywhere near. So I spent over 1 hour bending the spoke over and over again to push it trough the hole near the gears. To my suprise it held and never broke again (well other spokes did though 🙂 ). Now about Bosnian and Serbian people – they are just lovely and really helpful. Everywhere I would ask if I could sleep in some empty spaces the answer was always yes and normally included at least a coffee 🙂 The best experience was in a really small village in Serbia – I was passing a bar and I saw another biker hanging out there. So I decided to stop for a coffee also. But the people running it wouldnt let me go with just that 🙂 In the end I spent there like 3 hours chatting about my trip, the other bikers trip, their village and all other topics you can imagine. All that drinking nice Serbian beers of course. I was seriously considering staying there for the night (because they offered to host me) but because it was still early I decided to continue on.
Few days and million of broken spokes later I found myself in Nis, Serbia. I tried to go and do some busking but the weather decided not to cooporate with me and it started raining so after few songs I decided its not worth it. Also I met two ecotopians there who decided to hang out in the city that day. So after grabbing a dinner I set of to the lake where the rest of the group was camping. I must say getting there was like getting to some kind of finish, like I was thinking “woo I made it”. When I think about it I had the same feeling when I got to Dubrovnik. Well just before the lake I met Barry, an Irish guy who was also joining the group. So few beers and one wrong road later we found the spot where the biketour was camping. It was quite a shock to find myself with almost 20 people (plus one puppy, now they also have a kitten I heard) after all this time of solo cycling, but luckily the next they had planned to just rest by the lake so there was time to adapt 🙂 The whole situation, I mean being with so many people who cycle, all those tents and communal cooking hobo style on rocket-stoves they carried with them reminded me a lot of the times when I was with the 2wheels4change circus. Oh also if you are intersted in hobo style cooking you might want to take a closer look at rocket stoves on the net. I dont think I have any picture of it, but bassicaly its a barrel with a bent pipe going trough it, directing all the fire and heat up. Ok, its not really handy when you are on the road but if you are stationary its a pretty sweet thing, allows you to cook without the need of having a lot of firewood.
Well the next stop on the trip was Prishtina – the capital of Kosovo, we got there within two days. Also during this days I found out about one big disadvantage of a tallbike – its soooo slow compared to a normal bike! When I was alone I didnt really realize it 🙂
Well about Kosovo – as 95% or more of the population is Albanian it feels a lot like being in, well Albania. You can see and feel a lot of tension between them and Serbian people (because of the recent war they had). We had one Serbian guy with us and he really insisted we dont tell anyone his Serbian. Also you could see a lot of sings with the names of places – they have Albanian and Serbian names written on them. But on most of them the Serbian names were sprayed over. Also talking with people you could see their general dislike of Serbs. I got ask what I think about them few times and people grimaced when I told them I like them. Well its not the best place to be Serbian definitely, but for other nations the people are as hospitable and nice as in Albania. Oh also busking was amazingly good there, because its not something that happens there every day I suppose. I even got intervied for the local newspaper, unfortunatly I never saw the article but Ive been told by some kosovans that it came out. The city itself was interesting to see, first when you enter you see a lot of buildings that are just falling apart and then suddenly in the center you have this new shiny promenade full of people. It was quite a big contrast.
We set our camp in a big park 5km from the city, the guards at the entrance were totally cool with us staying there – I cant imagine this happening in the western Europe. That night was the big party night, it was Pixies birthday, so well we drunk way too much, played some music and some people decided to wrestle on the ground. Also I got punched lots by my friend From Uk, Christabel (malaka!). So the next day was the hungover day, which meant staying in the tent for like forever before going to our next destination – Prizren. We heard that the route is quite difficult (which was a big lie in the end) so me and Christabel decided to take the bus to go there (ok, also because of hangover, lets be honest here).
Prizren had a much nicer feeling (at least for me) than Prishtina, its smaller and has a lovely river running trough it with lots of bridges, stone buildings and a castle overlooking the town. There was a music festival going on there at that time so the place was full of people, many of them from another countries. When we got there it was raining cats and dogs – seriously, we hid under a cafe roof and it was still raining on us! Pitching a tent wasnt really a good idea in this weather so we decided to find a hostel for this night. We asked some people for directions and got there quite fast, but then the guy working there told me they are completely full. Being desperate I asked if we can sleep on the couches in the reception and he said that if we want we can sleep on the terrace maybe, but I should check it out if its good for us. I did, and it was the most awesome terrace ever, better than any room they could offer, with a beautiful view over the town (the mornings there were awesome ). Well then I asked how much is it to stay there and the guy just said “whatever”, in the end it was 2 euros per night – best deal ever! We decided to stay there for our whole stay in Prizren.
The music festival turned out not to be so interesting in the end (at least for me, just not my type of music being played) but we saw a cool theather play on stilts done by young kids from Prizren. It was too bad it was all in Albanian, but the costumes they had were pretty cool and some scenes gave me the nice fairy-tellish feeling.
Oh also in Prizren our friend Sebastian managed to outhobo me, he walked with us to the hostel, sneaked into the bathroom to have a shower and then he liked the terrace so much he just went into an open room, grabbed some blankents and stayed with us for the night. In the morning he just dissapeared – I have still a lot to learn in terms of getting free stuff apparently 🙂 Also before when we stopped in some town to take a rest people from the nearby market just approached him and gave him lots of fruit – he claimed it was because he was topless that day 🙂 All in all Prizren was a fun place to stay.
Sebastian being the hobo king.
The next stop (and the last with the ecotopia for me) was in Skopje in Macedonia. Now Skopje is a place to see, Ive been there 3 times I think and every time I find something new in the main square. Now if you have never been to Macedonia you have to know that theres tension between it and Greece. Its about the origin of the nation, both nations claim to be the descendets of ancient macedonians (the axis of all this is Alexander the great). Some greek people wont call Macedonia by its name, they just would call the whole country Skopje. Anyway the Macedonian gouverment decided to show everybody where they come from and turned the city center into what I call Ancient greece disneyland/las vegas. Everywhere you look is full of statues of horses, lions, people, the main one being the way to big statue of Alexander the Great on a big column with a fountain below. Well as it was really hot that day me and Christabel decided to take a swim in there, I totally reccomend it 🙂 We were just a bit worried that the police would come and cause us trouble but in the end nothing happened. Lino and Manu (other biketourers) deicded to follow in our steps and they enjoyed it a lot.
Anyway back to the statues and bridges and so on. All of this is new, its only like 3 years old and most of it is still being built. So it basically a big construction site also. The statues themselves are really not bad but its just waaaaay to many of them in one place. To add to that most of them have colorful lights under htem in the night, this makes the las vegas feeling even stronger. Then there is classical music being played from the speakers most of the time and a little train for kids going around – I hope you are getting the picture. I just cant understand this giantic waste of money in a country which is obciously not rich and cant really afford this. Also I dont even want to think about the amount of money that was stolen in all the contracts and so on for all of this. But definitely its something worth seeing.
And the old town part is quite nice with its small streets, market, teashops – it has a nice arabic feeling.
We stayed in AKSC social center (which I knew from my previous visits ). Its run by awesome and very hospitable people, if you are into alternative stuff or need any info or help when you are in Skopje you can always turn to this guys – Im sure they will help as much as they can. During my stay there I was torn – I ahd to decide if I want to continue with the ecotopia or should I turn west towards Italy and then France. In the end I decided to do the latter – because the tour was finishing in the end of September in Athens and I wanted to be in France for the grapepicking again-so that was just to late for me. So after some sad goodbyes I was on my own again. I stayed in the AKSC few days more haning out with Isabell who was going to catch up with ecotopia after finishing her work ( shes also a blogger, you can read it here: ) . I was pretty broke at that time so I decided to go back to Prishtina to busk up some cash for the ferry to Italy as well as some pocket money. Worked just good! I managed to get the ferry ticket, saved up some cash and I could afford a stay in the hostel every night. Now another advertisment: in Prishtina you go to Buffalo Backpackers Hostel, no other option! The first night I stayed in the City Hostel and it was empty and super boring, then when I was busking I met a girl who was staying in the Buffalo one. It was much more alive than the other one and much more fun to stay in so I totally reccomend it. The next five days I spent busking busking and more busking and in between I would just nap in a hammock in the hostel – good times. I also got offered to work in a call center (oh the horror!) by some guy in the street. I would have to try and sell life insurances to the Swiss people (wtf). Well form my experience the people who call you and try to sell you useless shit are the most annoying thing in the world so I turned that one down. After 5 days I had busking overdose and went to Prizren yet again. That place seems to be the festival place – this time there was a movie festival there and it was even more full. I wanted to go back to the terrace hostel but even there there wass no space, so I ended up in the camping field. During my stay there I run into almost everybody I met in Prizren – Troy from UK, Marta and Elena from Spain, the cool German dude whose name I could never remember and half of the people from the hostel 🙂 Also I got a 15 second part in a short movie (ok it was more about Heisenberg than me 🙂 ) and got intervied twice, felt quite wierd, Im not used to that.
After two days I set off to Durres in Albania to get my ferry to Bari in Italy. I got quite tired of cycling at this point and the road to there was quite tough once again because of staying on motorways, the heat, cars, uphills and all that. So I stared considering where could I live the tallbike in Italy and continue to France by hitchhiking. After this the story is quite short, I got to Bari where I stayed in Excaserna liberata – its an old military complex which was squated early this year, quite nice and big place with a lot of events going on. Then I cycled up to Termoli and there I decided its enough of cycling – now I had a timetable, I had to get to France fast to find the picking job so the cycling wasnt an adventure anymore – it turned into transportation. And a slow one to add to that. So from Tremoli I just got on a train and got to a small beautiful town of Sirolo. My friend Alessia with whom I lived four months in Thessaloniki lives here, and once again she is allowing me to experience the Italian hospitality (me I love you Ale!). And the Italian food, my god, Im gonna get fat again here.
Well this is it, the Say my name trip basically ended in Termoli, now Im just relaxing before hitting the road to France and reuniting with some old friends there to try to find work together.
Pictures are here:
http://s1352.photobucket.com/user/hobosonwheels/library/Say%20my%20name
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Wojtek
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I’m back!
Well hello there!
Yup, I’m still alive and kickin’
So once again I’m back in Thessaloniki, this city is a trap you cannot escape 🙂
Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff that happened since last post. After being in Turkey I went back for some time to Thessaloniki, played a lot of music with my friends from Canada, Ireland and Greece, explored Bulgaria a bit and finally got home together with a lot of my friends.Also there was my cousins wedding coming and I wanted to be there for that.
Now I just want to do a little bit of backblogging about my search for work in France after the wedding. So me and Ugne left directly after the wedding, being hangovered and so and arrived  in France after like 3 days (oh it was October 2013), hitchhiking. Our plan was to just go around in the south of France and ask in villages for work. Man, hitchhikng in France was really awesome, fast and easy. And I learned to really like french ppl (ok, apart from those who speak english but refuse to use it and talk to you in french 🙂 ). I was really surprised how nice everyone was, even if they didn’t want to give us a ride they would be still very friendly and would smile a lot. So all in all we arrived to Montpellier pretty fast to visit Ugne’s friend. Now, if you are anywhere near Montpelliere (which is also a super nice and a very alive city), be sure to go to Ganges and the small villages around it. It was the first time I saw such small places being so alive. Apparently the living costs of Montpelliere are way to high so a lot of students just go to live in those villages. The first time I saw those places I was sure they would be completely dead. They reminded me (in the terms of desing and such, all those small curvy streets) of all the small pueblos in Spain where you go to walk on the streets and see absolutely noone, maybe one or two cats. So I was expecting the same thing, but no! Those place are full of ife and cultural events, theather place, musicians, people restoring old mountain houses and so on. Definetely a place worth seeing. But back to the grapes – we asked around there and got our spirits a bit down – it seemed we arrived to late. Also it was October and most of the places had a complete of workers since may! So if you will try to do that be sure you arrive earlier that we did 🙂
So we spent some time in the house of Ugnes friend – he was developing photos he took on big canvas and then he would paint over them. He was preparing for an exhibition and needed help. So Ugne decided to stay aroud there to help him with that.We arrived together in Bordeaux and than she went back there. So I ended up staying in one of the squats of Bordeaux, still hoping I would find some work. Now the squat gave me realy mixed feelings. On one hand it was amazing, beautiful location, very nice buildings, garden with animals and many nice people. On the other hand some people that would arrive there would do many drugs, which I really don’t like to see. But in the end it was a good base to continue my search for grapes. After endless calls to all the farmers whos numbers I found in the local employement office I almost gave up, but then some people from Czech republic and Slovakia arrived saying they know a good place around 40 km from Bordeaux. The next morning we arrived there just to found out it’s another employemnt office, not having any work for us really. Also they wanted us to prove that we rent a flat or whatever in France, obviously we couldn’t provide them that. Being dissapointed we went back to take the train to Bordeaux. As we had only 15 minutes to catched it we started to run. Run like hell. My heart was going crazy but I still hoped we can make it, we arrived just in time to see the train slowly take off without us on board 🙂 We had to wait for the next one, and being super tired from all the running we desperatly needed water. And there was a Chateu nearby. We went to their office and asked if they could give us water. And then if they could give us some work – well they said yes to both. That’s what I call being lucky 🙂 The only issue was that they wouldnt give us a place to stay, but we quickly solved this problem by squatting a very big old farm building that was like 100 meters away from it. Now the work itself – I was expecting it to be much harder than it was, again I was lucky to have a really good boss-after passing each row of the grapes he would allow us to get some rest before the next one. And the weather was perfect – it was cloudy all the time. We had sun one day and the heat was really hard to take, I really preffered when it rained 🙂 All in all we finished the work in 8 days for which I got paid over 600 euros. Easy money to keep you on the road 🙂 After that I returned to Bordeaux trying to look for some more work but this time it looked like the harvest is over everywhere in the south. There was some more in the north but it was getting to cold already. So I took off and started to slowly go home. I arrived to Marseille to visit a good friend of mine and after few days I went hitchhiking again, towards Italy, where I had one of the worst hitchhikings ever 🙂 It was the weekend so the trucks can’t ride so I switched to normal cars. I walked like 7 km to the nearest service station on the highway and started to ask people if they would give me a ride. After like 2 hours I only got one ride of 50 km from a chinese guy. Seriously, everybody else I would ask looked at me as if I would want to kill their family and burn their house, one guy closed himself in his car when he saw me approaching him saying good morning 🙂 Maybe I have a killer face, judge for yourselves 🙂 Being discouraged by it I decided to just stand with a sing near the station exit. After 5 minutes I got a police patrol telling me that hitchhiking is illegal here and asking me to go away. Being totally pissed at this point I went to the town nearby and took a train to Bologna and then all the way north to the Austrian border. Exiting the train I got really surprised – no more than a week before I was sitting in Marseille in a balcony just with a thin jacket, and also all the past winters I spent somewhere in the south of Europe. So getting bitchslapped by the crazy amount of snow in the alpes brouht me back to the winter-reality 🙂 Luckily I knew there is a heated waiting room for passengers on this crossing, cause I sleeped there 2 years ago when I started traveling. After spending night there I jumped on a train to Vienna to visit another good friend of mine (hola Yasimine!). After this point I just felt like I want to get home fast to spend some time with my family, and to finally be there for Christmas after 4 years of absence. I managed to find a super cheap bus to Poland and few days later I was on it, looking forward to enjoy polish winter once again.
I don’t have many pics from this trip but I will to find and upload some later.
Wojtek.
Hey everyone! Yea ,I know I got super lazy with blogging, I’m in south of France right now trying to find some work picking the grapes and enjoying the amazing atmosphere and people here, but I will write some more about it later. Now this post is about a short movie my friend Vanessa made and which I wanted to share with you. So enjoy!
Oook so now I will kinda try to summarise over one month of time in this post…time went so fast, I’m not even sure how long exactly I was in Turkey.
Anyway, if you have opportunity to visit Turkey – don’t hesitate a second! I was really amazed by the kindness and hospitality of Turkish people, stretching from just having a chat trough offering you all the tea in the world until inviting you to stay at their places.
So we left Thessaloniki, me, Pavi, Nico, Jonas and Angelo – we took a try to Alexandropolis just to skip hitchiking in Greece which can be pretty tricky. Our goal was to get to Cesme – there was a trance music festival going on there and also Ugne was there and we wanted to pick her up. The way went suprisingly fast, we needed just to days to get there, and we got a ride in a butchers truck, with blood and meat hooks inside – felt like we are starring in a horror movie 😉
Hitchiking in Turkey works amazingly good – example, I went from Ankara to Gaziantep, which is around 800 km. I managed to cover this distance in one day, scoring a dinner from the driver as well. And then to get from the very south of Turkey to the northen coast took me just two days, and half of that distance I hitchiked in public buses 😉 So if you plan moving around Turkey by hitchiking and have any worries about it – don’t, it works better than public transportation sometimes 🙂
So after we reunited with Ugne and danced our asses off in the party we started to roam the country, pretty randomly, just looking at the map and choosing destinations as we go. First we ended up in Izmir which I highly recommend visiting – theres certain atmosphere there thats really awesome, and people are somehow more relaxed then elsewhere. Also there we made our most amazing performance ever, getting a huge crowd of people and making them dance…in the end I was playing my guitar so hard that my fingers started to bleed, but I noticed it maybe one hour later after we finished, good times 🙂
Me and Pavi in Izmir after playing the show
After Izmir we went to Mudanya to visit famous donkey man. His name is Sama (at least at the moment) and he is around 60 years old and is walking around the world with a donkey (Gina) for around 12 years now…Amazing and inspiring example of how you are never too old to start traveling. We spent few days there, just relaxing and then we hit Istambul. Now I know that Istambul is a very popular touristic destination but for me it was just too much of everything: too many people, too many cars, too many bulidings, too much noise, too much smoke…playing music was good, but a whole day in a crowded street really gets you tired, and then we had to go to our small room we shared with 4 more people…was like being in the street again. The best thing about Istambul was that we met Elliot, Greg, Ubert, Nemo and Olga again, which was a pleaseant surprise 🙂 But we were really happy to leave for Ankara after a week, to meet up with Jonas who was visiting his Turkish family there for the first time in his life.
In Ankara the things in group got a bit tense and I decided to go all the way south to Gaziantep to see my sister who was there taking part in some kind of school exchange project. So it was my first time hitchiking alone for such a long distance which was pretty challenging 🙂 Nonetheless I managed to do it and spent 3 days there, meeting my sister, sightseeing the city, making friends with some highschoolers, jewelery shop owner and a guy selling flowers in the streets.
After that I went all the way back north to meet up with others who were somewhere in the mountains in an empty house. After that we hit the east and got to Batumi, where some things kinda fell apart for me and I decided to go all the way back to Thessaloniki to rest a bit and regain my strenght. It took my 5 days to get back here, would probably take more if not for the kind man who picked me up and then being worried about me hitchiking in the dark bought me a bus ticket to Istambul so I can get here faster. Well here I am now thinking what to do next, there are few options I’m considering, but I will probably take some time to relax and meet my friends here.
Sooo I’m thinking now how to summarize my whole trip there…certainly it was worth to do it, I mean I met so many amazing and kind people…this kind of experience can really bring back your faith in the mankind, when you see people actually caring about each other and being kind to others for no reason or no expectations of profit for themselves. Also being completly alone on the road in a country I don’t know and using a language I don’t speak was a very challenging experience, but I managed to get by quite good and I feel so much stronger after all this! As for the broken heart part, I hope you didn’t expect any juicy details! Anyway if you did I’m sorry but all you will get from me will be this song, which has to be enough for you:
I update the pictures in Turkey gallery on photobucket, they are HERE
Cya soon!
Wojtek
Yo!
So all this time since the last post I was here in Thessaloniki just enjoying the city, having fun with friends and playing some music…I played to stay here longer but the wind started to blow in different direction again. Tomorrow me, Jonas, Nico, Pavi and Angelo are taking a train to the Turkish border and then we gonna hitchhike southwest to get to a trance festival. And Ugne is there already, so we gonna meet there and after that the plan is to explore Turkey a bit and then hit Armenia and Georgia! boooyah!
I uploaded some new pics from Thessaloniki, they are HERE , enjoy!
So if you come to Greece – beware of Thessaloniki, it will suck you in for good! What was supposed to be one-maximum two weeks visit turned into a month and a half filled with hanging out, watching shitloads of movies and devouring crazy amounts of food. Oh, and playing in the streets a bit, but mostly with eating 😉 
 I’ve never been in a place like Thessaloniki before, I mean the city isn’t especially beautiful, to tell the truth there’s nothing special about it if we talk views etc. What is so awesome about it is the super strong alternative scene that you can see everywhere. There are squats everywhere, and what squats they are, the most impressive one for me was Yfanet – a squated ex-factory, around 20.000 square meters. Inside there was everything: a bar, skate park, library, space for all the workshops in the world and the most awesome – the part where people used to live – it was as if someone had separated an entire street from the rest of the city, imagine living there! Sadly nobody lives there anymore, the police in Greece is getting pretty crazy lately and they evict a lot of squats. Back to the squats in the city – the ones worth seeing apart from Yfanet are Scolia, which is a free school where you can learn languages, dances, playing instruments and many other things. And best thing – it’s for free! Another place you should see is the squatted University – another enormous space that is being used for different events like concerts and so.
So we entered the city on our bikeys an started to look for a place to stay. We tried different places, stayed one night in Yfanet, managed to spend around 5 nights in Scolia and finally we ended up in Kostas apartament. Now, there are many guys named Kostas in Greece, but this one is THE Kostas. He shares his space with everyone, when we arrived there the place was full with the Rainbow Bicycle Caravan, so with us it was around 20 something people, and still Kostas kept on inviting more. And it’s not such a big space 😉 Let’s just say that the I spent my first night there under the kitchen table 😉 In the place there was a big projector, so we watched like a million of movies including the entire Star Wars trilogy.
As for getting free food there – the city is recycling friendly, many bakeries will give you stuff they would throw away if you just come there around 21-22 and ask for it. We also got awesome chocolate brownies from Starbucks thrash. But if we’re talking food there’s just one word: Cantina. It serves food for students twice a day, you cna just walk in and get as much food as you can eat and more. And if by chance someone is checking students id by the door you just say the magic word: Erasmus, it opens all the doors there 😉
So after doing nothing but hanging out and eating tons of food, we decided to go away before we will disturb the planet’s orbit with our fat asses! So that’s how me and Ugne ended up in a night train to Athens and then on the ferry (The subtle magic of erasmus worked again and we got there for half the normal price 😉 ) Oh and also we left our bikes in Thessaloniki spread all over the city…so that’s how the hobos on wheels became the hitchhiking hobos! Soooo Crete…Crete is pretty ekhem empty in the wintertime (yea, everyone told us that before, but still we expected a bit more people there ) So we arrived in Heraklion and found out that the rest of our hobos is on the other end of the island (planning for the win 😉 ) Nonetheless we decided to hang out in the city for a while, thanks to our awesome CS host we stayed a bit longer (Antonio if you read this don’t get too pumped up, we liked your royal bed the most! 😉 ) But after few days we found out that again we are in a kind of city-lazy-comfort-zone that makes us do nothing all day, so we decided to hitchhike somewhere else and got to Chania where we met the rest of the team 😉 From interesting things from this time I can surely mention finding our own abandoned building that we named the “pink monkey squat” 😉 Some of our guys slept in there, we used is as a safekeep for some of our stuff when we left Chania. Oh also in that time the mayan end of the world came, and me and Ugne decided to go out of the city to a random beach to watch the fireworks but got dissapointed, nothing happened (except for us walking around the nearest village dressed in blankets and playing guitar and a tamburine).
After that we decided to check out Matala, which is located on the southern side of Crete. Matala is pretty famous on Crete for it’s caves.
From what I know some ancient tribes used to live in them, then the ancient greeks used them to bury their dead and after that they got squatted by hippies in the 70 shocking the local population. The hippies stayed for a while before they got kicked out by the police, and they left their mark on the place. Every year there’s a hippie reunion festival and the place is swarming with them. But when we got there it was completely dead, out of the touristic season it turns into a ghost village. The guy who brought us there called some local hippies who still live there and we got our own cave with a better view than any 5star hotel would give you! Also (which makes me lol) it had wifi reaching it from the town, so I could feed my internet addiction without problems. So we turned into modern cavemen, using our computer’s light from the screen to find the lighter in the dark so we could start fire 😉 Life there went slowly and peacefully, at first we faced lack of food, as there were no places to recycle and the prices in supermarket were ridiculous. But one day we decided to go to the nearby city to play some music and recycle in the market and the problem solved itselfed, we could get back to getting fat again. On new year’s eve Paul, Vanessa, Patrick,Ines and Savita came to join us and we had an awesome party in local bar, getting lots of drinks on the house, good times 😉
You should definitely come to Matala if you are in Crete, the caves and cliffs are really amazing, and be sure to check out the awesome red beach (I;ll upload a pic if I will find one) Also if you will go there out of tourist season you will know everyone who lives there in no time and will feel like a part of the Matala team 😉 After 3 weeks of sleeping in the dust and doing cavemen stuff me and Ugne felt the need to move again. So we packed, went to Chania to pick up our stuff, went on the boat again and arrived back in Piraeus in the morning. After that we had the worst hitchhiking experience so far: we went on the highway to catch a long distance raid. The only thing we caught were 8 policeman searching my pockets and my stuff, asking for illegal stuff I have, getting my data and telling us to go off the highway. So we went to where they told us to go, and after that traffic control guys came and told us to go away. Also almost nobody stops for thumb here apparently so after 5 hours we made maybe 45 km ;)Also Ugne twisted her ankle and can’t really walk now, so hurray! After than our luck turned a bit and we go a long distance ride and now we are in a fast food in a service station around 150km from Thessaloniki. We hope to get there tomorrow, and after that we’re off to Turkey to work in an eco-project for some time.
PICTURES FROM THESSALONIKI ARE HERE
AND FROM KRITI HERE! 🙂
Wojtek
So I realized I never wrote anything about my stay in the hippie community in Spain, and as I’ve lived there for almost half a year I think it’s worth writing few words about it.
After finishing my volunteer job in Spain in summer of 2011 I went back to Poland, just to discover I can’t find a place for myself there. Don’t get me wrong, it was really nice to see all of my friends again and then to work some time in my old job. But the feeling of being in the wrong place and wrong moment was with me all the time. So in October I decided to go to Spain again, this time by hitchhiking. My goal was to reach a hippie community in the Andalucia region and stay there for around month and a half (that’s the amount of time I
got when I calculated all my money, still can’t believe how wrong I was about that 😉 ). So I picked up my backpack, my guitar and a piece of cardboard to use as a sign and hit the road.
The start wasn’t very promising, I spent around two hours before I got my first small ride, and after that piece by piece I managed to get from PoznaÅ„ to WrocÅ‚aw in one day, which isn’t very impressing 🙂 There for the first time in my life I faced a problem that has become everyday’s routine for me now: where the hell will I sleep? As I saw the sun is going down I started to look for a nice bridge to spent the night under, but in the end I was saved by a couchsurfing couple who answered to my emergency request.The next day I managed to get out of Poland and into Czech Republic. There I decided to take a bus to Hradec Kralove, as the roads were under construction and I had no idea where I should hitchike. Later that night the weather decided to kick my ass and it started to rain like crazy, me being outside a bus station of course. Seeing how bad it is I decided to hide under a roof and take the night bus to Prague, where I had a couchsurfing host waiting for me. I spent some days there, admiring this beautiful city, hanging out with my host and meeting up with my friend with Poland. Also at this point it turned out I don’t like hitchhiking too much. So when I found a bus to Vienna for just 13 euros I decided to take it.
Prague
I wanted to go trough Vienna anyway to visit Yasmin – my friend with whom I worked in an environmental education center in Spain. So I got stuck in Vienna for a week, not being able to leave the comforts of living in a flat in a really cool city 😉 I also discovered the free shops at this point of my travel, to put simply you just go to them and if you find something you like you can take it. You can also bring stuff you don’t need. They have clothes, books, cutlery, plates etc. I also managed to get into a spanish conversation group and I went to a class about ecology in Yasmine’s university. It was kinda boring,
cause I understood maybe 1/10 of it 😉 Good times, but what’s good has come to an end and after this week I left the city and caught a ride to Innsbruck. The driver dropped me out at the train station in the night. As there were a lot of hobos checking out my backpack and phone all the time, I decided to take a train to Italy just not to sleep there.
So next morning I woke up in the land of pizza, spagethi and super mario. At this point I stopped to hitchhike and I was using trains to move around. I spent around two weeks in Italy in total, just fooling around, sleeping hobo style under a tree in Bologna, visiting my friend in Parma, going to a living room concert in Bergamo, living 3 days in an airport to shelter myself from the rain and so on 😉 All in all I decided to speed things up, and I found a reasonably priced flight to Malaga. And so I reached my favourite country once again!
I needed to reach a small town called Orgiva but it was Sunday and there were no buses. So I took a bus to a town called Nerja which was on the way, just to get out of Malaga. After sleeping in a very small cave on the beach I continued my travel and got to the hippie village on Tuesday.
Now about the village, it was created 20-something years ago by some travelling hippie couple, after that some people chipped in and bought the land and left it for anyone who wants to take care of it. It’s located up in the mountains, in a beautiful valley. When I entered the place I had mixed feelings- to get there you have to pass trough the parking area, filled with wrecked cars. Generally it looks like a junkyard in which people decided to live. Luckily after that it got better, I passed trough a nice eucaliptus forest and than entered an open space, filled with a garden , a big tipi and some structures that were
resembling houses a bit ;)No but, seriously, the placed is filled with awesome self made buildings – straw shelters, wooden huts, strawbale houses, stone houses – you can find it all here. If you’re lucky you can help to build them and learn how to do it.
I set up my tent in the field, but being annoyed by the people passing all the time next to it I moved it into the forest to get some peace there. In the next days I slowly got to know the place better, took my first shower in the waterfall, walked around, talked to people. It’s not a part of Spain, there are people from all over the world.It’s also a very strange mix there – you can meet tourists, travellers, cool people, annoying hippie people, hard workers, masters of laziness, crazy people (like literally crazy) and slightly less crazy people (like myself)…in a short you can be sure you’ll find some good company here 😉
The first 3 weeks I was spending a lot of time in the big tipi, just siting around the fire, singing and chilling out with the people. After some time I made friends with a bulgarian couple that was traveling on bikes trough all Europe with no money at all. Being inspired by this I asked about all the details, and together we found my first bike. It was standing next to one of the houses, and after a short chat the owner just gave it to me! We also went recycling together many times, and hanged out a lot.
Mah first bikeyyy!
As it started to get colder and people left the forest I decided to move into a place called Casa Maya – it is an old building, probably belonged to some farmers looooong time ago. Every half a year there’s something different going on there, this time it was kind of a squat and an open house for everyone. I went there, asked for a piece of floor to sleep on and that’s how I got sucked in for the next 4 months. Soon I made friends with some people who lived there a bit longer than usual and we decided to organize place a bit more. Also we thought about a way to make some money for ourselves – which resulted in starting
out small cake buisiness. Me and my italian friend really got into it, in the end we were making cakes almost everyday (and as we were eating what we couldn’t sell we were getting fatter and fatter 😉 )
OMNOMNOMNOM
Those were really good times, cooking together, recycling, making music, having lots and lots of guests and lots of fun… I pretty sure that when I’m gonna settle down in some place in the future it’s gonna be something like this one, a place where you can live a really simple life, far from the absurds of the modern world. I’m far from saying that this place was a paradise, there were many things that got me annoyed. A big problem there is the amount of marihuana that some people are smoking, and the fact that it’s easier to get than tabacco. But still I managed to find amazing happy people – like my friend form Ireland who built two awesome houses there and is raising her newborn child there. She also started her shoe making buisiness there. Places like this can really make you think about the way you choose to live your life, and show you an alternative way of doing things. But I know that for some people washing in a cold river and using shitpits with no toilet paper is a border they will never cross 😉
Anyway, after the winter was over I decided to move on and go to Morocco with my friend Simon and in March we entered the bus which was the first step on our travel towards Africa. But that story is for another time 😉
Wojtek
Here are some pictures from our travel trough Serbia, Macedonia and 2 or 3 pictures from Greece where we are at the moment, I will do an entry about that soon enough 😉 enjoy
Sooo for many different reasons I ended up in Serbia with a bunch of musicians and clowns!
Me and Alice were cycling from Poland to England, but when we got to Berlin we spotted a guy on a veeery long bike waving to us from the other side of the street. That’s how we met Tyle and his truckcycle ;> After chatting for a while it turned out that he is involved in a project called 2wheels4change – basically it’s a circus travelling on bikes, playing music and giving street shows and organizing workshops on the way. We went to Berlin’s bike kitchen and watched Tyle and rest of the crew building some crazy bikes for the trip.
After brainstorming whole day I decided to join their trip to Turkey to spend winter there and Alice decided to continue to England. So I turned my bike around and went back to Poland as it was there that the trip was starting. The very next day I almost completly destroyed my deraileur and chain, but thanks to some bike travelers form china I managed to put it back together so I could get to my home in Grodziec. Â So I faced the terrible feeling of not having a bike, but my guardian hobo angel saved me once more and got a very nice frame for me and shipped it to me from England (thanksss soo much alooooce! )
And so having a new faithful stead I took a train to Warsaw and joined the rest of the crew, among them my friend Daniela that I met in Gibraltar just before I went to Morocco last year. What was supposed to be a bicycle trip quickly changed into a train trip, as the group wanted to get to an anti-facist festival being held in Zrenjanin in Serbia. To tell the truth it didn’t sound very interesting or atractive to me, but not wanting to be separated from the group I joined the crazy train race which took us to Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria (where we spent a very nice week in Vienna, and I reunited myself with my boots that I left there last year 😉 )Hungary and finally to Novi Sad in Serbia.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Serbia, I just had no idea what it is like. The cities turned out to look like polish cities 20 years ago, also the clothes people are wearing look like from they are from the same period – in short it was like travelling back in time. The best thing about Serbia was it’s people – I never experienced such hospitality and kindness, expect for Morocco maybe. Camping in people’s gardens was never a problem, they would come to us and share their food with us, also once we found ourselves in the middle of a town in a rainy night – and after talking to some folks we got a whole house to sleep in! And one other thing I have to mention – Rakija, the Balkans finest alcohol – it
seems that everyone has at least 4 bottles of it in a fridge here – we were offered rakija everywhere, in houses, shops and parks, finally we had to start refusing it from time to time to keep ourselves sober 😉
We spent some time in a squat in Novi sad and then biked to Zrenjanin to participate in the festival, which turned out to be a rather small event, much smaller that I would imagine. Anyway the very cool thing happened there – this whole time we were waiting for some Paul and Vanessa that were supposed to join us. It turned out that they are the same people that lived with me in a hippie village in Spain for some time, so by complete coincidence we met
again.
When the festival was over we decided to go back to Novi Sad where we got kinda stuck for two weeks, just hanging around and playing some shows and eating a loooot of Burek’s – kind of fried pastry with cheese,meet or mushrooms inside.
Also we spent lots of time building a new tallbike for Daniela and modifying our bikes to be more comfortable to ride.
As we left Novi Sad and started to follow the river to get to Greece the weather decided that it has been enough sun for now and it got really cold, rainy and not fun to ride a bike at all.
Also a crazy thing happened – we were in a small village having a rest and we
got approached by an elderly man asking us who are we and so on. After a short chat he invited us to sleep this night in his restaurant. So we got there and set up everything to go to sleep and cook and than we heard some screaming from outside – the man that invited us got a heart attack and died few moments later, leaving all of us shocked and really not knowing what’s going on.
Soon after that me, Paul, Vanessa, Daniela and Max (our Brazilian-Mexican-Spanish amigo) decided that we don’t really like what’s going on in the group, and the way they handle stuff,making decisions and so on. Also we were really tired of cycling in cold and rain, so we decided to take a train to Macedonia, hoping that it will be warmer there.
Officially the Serbian trains don’t take bicycles in, especially not crazy ones like we have, so we were really worried if we can get on a train or not. But once again hospitality overcame everything else, while we were waiting for the train the conductor invited us to wait in his office, asked many questions about our travel and in the end helped us to get the bikes in the train 😉 And so after 9 hours in train we got out of Serbia and arrived in Macedonia.
– Wojtek
hobos on wheels 