Blog

I haven't spoken yet about the hotel chain PEPA, hotels I've been using since the beginning of November and the room which I'm sharing with Peter since the beginning of January. Hotels are excellent, very cheap and fantastically located! Can you imagine sleeping in İstanbul half a minute from Aya Sofya, five minutes from the Topkapi Palace and mere two minutes from the Blue Mosque? For only two and a half million Turkish Lira per day? Or, for example, overnight on no man's land between Albania and Kosovo (where I was looking directly into the barrel of a pissed-off American police-officer's charged gun), a morning view over white pools at Pamukkale or the citadel of Haleb (Aleppo), first waterfront line (in front of all the other hotels) in Lebanon or Egypt, sleeping a few metres off the Dead Sea shore, morning view over the Giza Pyramids, Nile feluccas, sunrise in the middle of the sand… ¡Almost like Paradores in Spain!

Now we're all together in Tunisia which is the most complicated country as far as internet access on this expedition (not counting Albania, of course). With Peter we feel somehow lost and empty. Tour buses and last models of off-road vehicles on every step, everybody is staring at us, distances are ridiculously short: Gabes – Matmata 30 kilometres, Matmata – Douz 99 kilometres… here you don't even gain the best position on your seat and you've already reached your destination! Today we went for a holiday to the coast and only a couple of meters from the shore Peter is looking for Greece. In Tunisia we were planning only to be, to exist and to relax. On a sandy beach, under warm Sun, besides a pine forest. We haven't tracked the spot down yet, but we will find it!

Tunisia is already completely European. Peugeot Partners I haven't seen since Turkey are plentiful here, roads are in perfect shape (yesterday we finally found some potholes which made us fell more familiar), all the effeminate speed-breakers are well signposted by a gaudy yellow signs 200 metres before (how boring), it looks like continuous-line overtaking isn't socially to well accepted behaviour, head-light communication without any to me understood reason is completely absent here… I was actually afraid that driving conduct, adopted in the Wild East (Cairo and the surroundings), would lead me directly to jail in Italy but it was already Libya that started putting me back into European traffic system. I was strangely observed while driving wrong way into one-way street, and already in Tripoli I got a feeling that driving on the wrong side of a four-lane street wouldn't end happily (a common practice in Cairo). Here in Tunisia we don't even honk anymore, we keep our safety-distance, and I even started using indicators again (it was hard, though), we drive with lights on at night.

Light engraving room (Photographic camera) is more or less resting at the moment, but we'll be using it again on Malta where we'll call on our way from Maribor to Ljubljana. This stopover hasn't been planned since ever, but if Peter and I have a chance, we take it. This news might be looking as if the journey was over already, but don't let yourself be misled – the road is still long and tough and we are still many sunrises away from our final destination, Ljubljana.

All the way from Egypt we weren't able of getting a single ice-cream so the first thing upon crossing Slovenian border will be to enter a Mercator Supermarket to get some local ice-cream. More and more often we imagine snowy Slovenian valleys, Sečovlje salt pans mud, a nice sun-bathing at a cappuccino on the Ljubljanica river bank in Ljubljana…

And, of course, Spain, one and only, our second homeland. Spain, wide Castilian lowlands, horizon-filling olive groves, El Rocío, Consuegra, Ronda, Gharnata, Ishbiliyya, Balansiyya, Barshaloona… Yalla, ya-safirayn, yalla ila l-bayt!