August 15, 2012
The Wizards of Ooze ride again: Florina - Gianitsa
THE WIZARDS of Ooze are back on the road. Two miracle pills from a doctor in jeans and an office full of religious symbols have done the trick.
"Take these and you'll feel better in the morning," he promised. And he was right.
To be honest, we couldn't have had a better place to recuperate. A week of fighting your insides has, in the end, to be counteracted with withdrawal from society. And here we had a good hotel at a cut price, receptionists who saw their job as tending to everything we needed, a bike shop across the road and a large room on which to work on the bikes. That plus the miracle toubib round the corner. With retrospect, we wish we'd seen him earlier.
Steph still feels under the weather but, as she said, if she didn't know she'd been unwell, she'd have paid little attention. She rode gently for the first hour, then began recovering.
Today is a holiday here. The streets are empty, businesses and offices closed. The local motorbike club was gathering outside a closed café as we left, black-clad lads like crows searching for a telephone wire. They looked up as we hummed by, gave us half nods, then went back to the merits of Hondas over Suzuki and the best way to set up a timing chain.
I don't go much on the noise that motorcyclists make, especially when they make it deliberately, but I see them as cousins. Like cyclists, they are outside the system, dependent on their own resources. It rains on them like it rains on us.
I rode a brevet event once which shared a café with a bunch of bikers. We stood together in line for tea and fruit cake. After a while the guy in front turned and said: "You know, you joke about just the same things as us. Not so different, are we?"
Well, having passed the lads and left them to talk of cam shaft settings, we retraced our route of the other day, along the new but empty highway, alongside the line on which trains no longer run. We passed where, a lifetime ago it seems now, I slept for 15 hours as lightning flashed. And we climbed into countryside waiting for a cowboy to advertise cigarettes.
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The land was North African, rolling and dramatic, except that it was green more than arid. Half-sized trees clung to slopes amid flat but jagged cream rocks. Curious domed bushes the height of your knee spaced themselves out enough that you wonder how they ever germinated. I thought there was no sound except that, when I stopped for a picture, I could hear not only the wind but unseen goatherds and their jangling charges. Countryside that looks deserted rarely is.
We turned into a lonely but busy village celebrating the holiday. It was a place for enjoyment. Around the square with its obligatory bust of someone unknown just half an hour away were five bars and, closed, a taverna. I took a distant picture of drinkers outside one bars. I thought I was discreet. Instead, a jovial and well-oiled man raised his glass to me and beamed and shouted a greeting.
The road went up and it went down. There was no traffic at all now. To our right, we enjoyed the hazy soft blue of a giant lake.
This has been quite the tour for lakes.
We stopped in Edessa, "barely known to tourists" according to Routard but well known to locals. They had collected around its leafy square to enjoy the spectacle of the river, between stone walls, rushing through town and hurtling over the sheer cliff that separates the town from the great agricultural plain of the Thessaloniki basin.
And there it was decreed that we had had enough fun for the day. A cross-country highway leads from there to Thessaloniki itself, a sea port. We had to ride it for 45km before we could turn off and it seemed better to do that on a holiday than when the world returned to work.
You know what it is like to ride 45km in the heat on a straight road across flat countryside and into the wind. I don't have to tell you.
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