If 'Milan' is a verb, and I'm pretty sure it is an action, then that's what we do for the rest of the weekend - zip to exhibitions and long lunches and late drinks with buzzy arty people in her pet cinquecento.
In Montenegro I am zipping along the beautiful Bay of Kotor. Maybe a litle too zippy as a policeman jumps out from behind a tree with a big red stop sign. I leave him in the dust - good practice for the third world cops I expect to encounter further down the road. The universe has its way of making its point though and not 10 minutes later I am stuck in a gigantic traffic jam for 2 hours waiting for a fatal traffic accident to be dealt with. By then it's dark and my iPhone has become petulant so the best thing I can do is follow a fellow biker called Kurt to the hostel he is staying at. It's called "High Hostel" and it lives up to its name with an insanely steep and crumbling track to get to it. So much so that I fall over. Again the universe waves its magic wand and delivers me a big strong bloke from Yorkshire to help pick everything up. We build a fire from shipping pallets and while I gaze into the flames, Kurt, a big Tinder-jockey sets him self up dates with a Russian girl, a Swiss girl and a French girl.
The Albanian border is my kind of Border. The two countries guards actually sit across a table for each other and having passed my passport in one window the Montenegrin guy passes it across the table to his Albanian counterpart and then he hands it back to me out of another window. The state of logistical bliss is only enhanced by the old lady in a shawl shooing her cows out of my path. I contentedly breathe in the woodsmoke of a country I feel great affection for and deftly dodge vintage Mercedes (Albania was the European clearing house for stolen Mercedes in the 80s and 90s under Hoxha) as they careen around horses pulling carts carrying whole families sitting on their crops. Around Skodër there are at least 30 petrol stations, most of them sporting huge "Mastercard" and "Visa" signs, so I figure it might be possible to get across the country without getting any Leks but when I ask if I can pay with a card, they all look at me as if I were insane. "Cash Only!"
The road up into the mountains is gorgeous but the Macedonians lever 50 euros out of me for one day's insurance.. It does buy me some beautiful scenery as I head through Mavrovo National Park to reach Skopje for the night. At a junction outside of Skopje, left is Bulgaria and right is Greece. I choose Greece to avoid a second border insurance robbery.
Turkey is unavoidable however and they gouge a whopping 190 euros. I try to wheedle but he just grins.
I hit Istanbul rush hour with a vengeance. I don't think I've ever seen so many stationary cars but I take a cue from a local biker and weave and chase an ambulance and then I am really enjoying myself, starting to reignite a very particular euphoric feeling that motorbikes and life outside the first world give me.
My friend Tara, a US filmmaker, welcomes me to her hip little apartment down the hill from the Galata Tower in Karaköy. We have a lovely evening catching-up but at 6am the week of long riding days catches up with me and I wake, literally screaming, to an excruciating leg cramp. Sorry Tara!
Istanbul is having its Biennale so I can get into a bunch of museums for free, so once the ritual of SIM cards and laundry is done I check out some very cool exhibitions at the Arter and the Modern.
Tara's apartment is ruled by her cat, Pasha, she rescued. I spend a long time trying to entice her from behind the washing machine. The catnip I bought doesn't help and she just stares at me with big angry eyes. Some horrible person really did a number on her. Next morning we can't shower because she is glowering in there.
We go to Qnuysho, the shelter for Asyrian kids that Tara volunteers at, with her friend Jaman, a musician from Aleppo who is living a limbo life here, very restricted by the Syrian ID he has been issued with. He tells me how he was smuggled into Lebanon in a compartment under the passenger seat of a car. After the kids clamber all over us, we sip Arabic coffee, heavy on the Cardamom - I get quite partial to this as somehow it does not give me the jitters in the same way that normal coffee does. Then Jaman plays guitar for the kids in a chaotic sort of show with the kids overflowing in all directions.
Around midnight I head up to a lookout on the Asian side with Jaman and 3 of his friends. One of them shows me a scar on his stomach. He was at a demonstration in his hometown Daraa, which is where the revolution started and the soldiers opened fire with no warning. Hospital would mean prison so he underwent surgery on the street - they used a coke can with a straw to pressure-flush the wound.
Sali takes me for a boat ride and I see a submerged village, just the minaret poking above the water.
Back on the bike side of the water one of the guys is still there, Halukfuat is his name, and he plies me with Raki and tries to persuade me to stay, indicating an impossibly broken armchair on a rickety pontoon. I friend him on facebook and Sherife! (cheers!) I am off in the sunset.
Back in Antep, Özge has had the horrible news that her Syrian boyfriend's father has been locked up in one of Asaad's most notorious prisons. When I drop off the welcome therapy of the Raki to her bf's place, she tells me that they have just learned that his sister has visited his father and that he has been tortured for the last week and has sort-of lost his mind. I am of course lost for words.In a daze I walk the hour into the old part of town and find a restaurant called İmam Çağdaş which turns out to be one of the best meals of my life - a yogurty meaty dish with aubergine called Ali Nazik followed by sublime baklava - Antep is rightly famous for its cusine.
I see Özge briefly for breakfast and she says that her bf's father now has a court date and may surprisingly get bail, in which case she is going to try to pull some strings with the British Council and get him to the UK.
On my way out town I visit the sumptuous Zeugma mozaic museum.
Despite the amazing natural beauty that surrounds it, Ölüdeniz is one of the worst white trash tourist hellholes I have ever found. Everyone looks so ugly! Or maybe it's just the neon lighting. I find my friend Owen who is visiting from London and he borrows a tandem paraglider and takes me for the word-defying experience of a flight from the mountain Babadağ that towers over the bay. It's an unforgetable experience and also at times one of the more terrifying especially when Owen decides to do some aerobatics. I am shaking for a good 20 minutes after we land. Then we drink. Oh how we drink.
A night in a seat with blaring basketball on the TV and every part of my body taking it in turns to go to sleep apart from my brain and then I am catapulted into the Athens predawn with a thousand fellow banshees and shoal through a primordial soup of rutted roads bearing Cyrillic signs without any real sense of being awake or asleep, barely existing in fact. I find a boutique hotel and Anna, the Polish attendant, shows me to the breakfast buffet which is so good it pulls me most of the way back up the well from the Bardo. I offer her the pillion seat on the condition she brings the entire buffet along. Thus fortified I drop my luggage and go get the bike reshod with more Africa-friendly tyres and stock up with some other spares as I know my next chance to be able to do this relatively easily will be Nairobi.
My hotel, the Lozzani, is a hilariously oldschool flophouse with junkies and prostitutes wandering around like Night of the Living Dead outside. At first the shower is amazing but then it abruptly takes its icy place in the great pantheon of evil-plumber-revenge-apparatus. I head out and spend a nice hour in hip Trigono with filmmaker Christos, best friend of Kostas who edited "Papagajka". The sunrise ride down to Lavrio port leads me into an impossible bluff that the cloud silhouettes make. A mountain with a hole in it.
The shipping office is an anonymous portacabin with an illegible sign. I realise I need to use my other passport on the paperwork and he makes the correction with a flourish of tippex. Then to customs - "you see that ruin over there? next to it there is a field and at the end of that field is a building and at the bottom of that building you can ask a man to stamp this piece of paper". All done by 9am. I take a bus to the airport and try to stay awake - signs say no sleeping - ironic in that my lasting memory of Athens airport is our whole family sleeping on its roof in 1974 when our flight was delayed.
On the flight, the guy siting on the aisle of my row is so immense that the flight attendant has to bring a seatbelt extension for him. I am in the window seat thankfully. A French guy comes to claim the middle seat. The big guy goes to stand but the French guy says with glazed eyes no hurry I will wait a few minutes - clearly needing a moment to steel himself. We pass over Lavrio and I can see the boat, Alexo, that my motorbike is shipping on - Bon Voyage bike!
I arrive on the train to the port city of Haifa at 9am and commence 6 straight hours of bureaucracy. At Rosenfeld shipping they have to go back to the boat to get the paperwork so I sit around waiting and chatting to Eyal, an Israeli fruit farmer who has just returned from motorbiking in Europe. I pay my 500 euros and lug my heavy bags down the road to the Pool insurance office. Just as well Eyal can show me where it is as the place is very anonymous and only signed in Hebrew. The woman there is very grumpy, probably because her two colleagues spend the 2 hours I am there constantly berating her, for what reason I cannot ascertain, she needs lots of photocopies, lots of signatures and even my International Driving Permit - the first time I have ever actually used this. In the end it costs 360 shekhels for two weeks which is actually a bit cheaper than they originally told me so that's a relief. Customs is fairly straight forward - he writes something down in Hebrew and says I need to ask the gate guard where it is - and I struggle on in the heat under my vertebrae-crushing load to "Customs Gate 5" which turns out to be right next to Rosenfeld shipping - I could have just left my bag here... D'oh! This is particuarly on my mind when the security guards there subject me to the most thorough search I have ever experienced - every little bag and object is scrutinised down to squeezing my toothpaste - takes almost an hour. And they have no idea where the thing on the note is that the customs guy gave me. Miraculously I find a rusty old luggage trolley and wheel my way around the building asking random people and showing them the note. Eventually I show a teenage boy and he disappears into a toilet and comes back with an older man who looks at my note and asks me "what do you want to do?" This is the 5th time someone here has asked me this and they seem mystified when I say I want to collect a shipment. IT'S A PORT!! But anyway, he takes me in a lift to a nice air-conditioned office where a nice lady called Adi tells me their computers are down and can I please use this terminal here - she comes over to help me with the Hebrew and I ask her about the button in the corner that says "English" She looks genuinely shocked and says "Well I never saw that!" So I do the form myself and pay the port fee of 300 shekhels. Then after another hour of waiting I get a form, comically laden with stamps and she gives me directions as to where to claim my bike. Oh just keep walking that way and if you get to a second roundabout you've gone too far. So off I trudge. It's about a twenty minute walk and my trolley has disappeared. Row upon row of shiney new trucks and tractors and cars. Past "Alexo" sitting sated at its dock. and there suddenly is my bike incarcerated behind a chain link fence. I bargain for its release with a cheery guy who claims all my documents and hands me my key. Then of course I go out the wrong exit and some very unimpressed guards send me back through the truck channel. Of course the window is about 3 metres above me at the gate and the guard here has to go through a pantomime of running up and down to and from his office about 8 times with the truck drivers behind me getting stonily irate but finally I am free. I have arrived in the Middle East!
The Baha'i gardens in Haifa are OK if you like OCD horticulture on a large scale but it is interesting to hear about the Baha'i religion. Akko, just the other side of the bay, is more my cup of tea with its worn old Arabic port streets and souq teeming with feral cats.
Next day, he lets me stay in his workshop and fix my sprocket bearing and number plate. Such a godsend to have the opportunity at this point. He even helps me look up what size bearing I need and takes me to the nearby town of Karmiel to a hardware store to buy it. It's more a cathedral of hardware and the owner is like the pope of all hardware store clerks. He is 93 and finds the exact thing we need from his vast array of shelves in about 30 seconds. Ronen drops me back at the house and then goes to his work at its secret location and I message him periodically when I can't find a tool etc. The job involves using a heat gun which is a first for me but I take my time and am proud of myself when I manage to do it successfully. I also cut a piece of aluminium to back my numberplate.
After a Nutella-heavy breakfast scrum at the hostel, I wander the Machane Yehudah Market and the surrounding streets of Nahla'ot.
Then I take a tour of the old city. Jerusalem means "city of peace" and yet it has been conquered more times than any other city on earth, 33 times in fact.
We visit the Armenian quarter - they have their own quarter because they were the first nation to convert to Christianity. Their flag shows the mountain they hold sacred - Ararat. Turkey apparently complained to the UN that the mountain is in their territory and the UN responded that the Turkish flag also depicts objects not in Turkish territory - a crescent moon and a star.
The Jewish quarter was completely destroyed by Jordan and remained empty for 18 years - so archaeologists got a chance to explore and found a wealth of Roman streets below.
Then there is the view of the Dome of the Rock - where Mohammed ascended to Heaven - or if you're Christian or Jewish, what God made the earth from. The wailing wall is the nearest they can get to the first temple - built by Solomon.
The Muslim quarter is bustling with traders
In the Christian Quarter there is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I love the fact that a ladder is propped against a first floor window. This is because the church is shared between several branches of Christianity and they could never agree on anything. So at one point they decided to freeze the way everything was organised. When this was done there happened to be this ladder left there by a workman and so it also had to stay in perpetuity.They could never agree who should hold the keys so they ended up giving them to a Muslim family whose descendants to this day still open the church every morning.
Inside the church is anything but a place of calm contemplation. It's more like being on a Channel Ferry when everyone is told to return to their cars.
I settle into a Shawarma place called Jericho Cafe and after a while I get talking to a guy called Hassan. When I say talking, what we actually do is converse entirely with google translate on own respective phones. It is kind of amazing that I can type in English and then have it spit out some beautiful Arabic script. That, along with lots of gestures and expressions, keeps us chatting for the next couple of hours. It's pretty odd some of the translations that I get in English from Hassan mind you and it leads to some odd moments. At one point I think he has told me that he lives with an unmarried pregnant woman and when I ask when the little darling is expected, he looks positively freaked-out and waves his hands - "under Islam this is... merciful!" No "...butchering" no "...Haram!" the translator finally says. I try to imagine myself in my alcohol-free, sex-free, tobacco-free coca cola free teens and somewhere deep in my brain a fuse blows. I'm not entirely sure if his work as a tax accountant grants him a chauffeur or if he is a lorry driver but the niceties of language notwithstanding we have a fun evening and arrange to meet tomorrow afternoon. We talk about money and he explains how expensive things are here because of the occupation and the import duties imposed by the Israelis.
On the way home people still call out welcome every 15 yards. It's late and one guy steps out of his car to indicate his house and offer me food and a bed.
I sleep pretty well considering the insane cockerel. Well they're all insane aren't they, or at least they look like they're having a fit when they crow. This one however starts crowing before midnight and doesn't let up even at dawn. He's still going at 9am. It must be some sort of record. Or deathwish. Basel at the Auberg Inn where I'm staying, serves up a delicious breakfast of hummus, labneh, cucumber, bell peppers, tomatoes, fried egg, pitta, halva and marmalade with coffee and watermelon for after.
I have to fix the throttle on the bike which is sticking - upon closer inspection I can see that the handguard is bent and that is pushing against the throttle - must be from one of the falls. On the one hand it means I can ride no-handed, other other it is potentially very dangerous if I weren't able to shut it off. I go find a workshop in a crumbling backyard and he quickly bends it back into shape with the addition of a washer it's as good as new. I go to the ruins of Hisham's Palace which has a lovely mosaic. The guard, About, gets my phone number and invites me to dinner at his house and then I head on to the Monastery of Temptation where Christ was tempted by the devil while he fasted for 40 days and nights. It's a dramatic setting, high in a rock face and the journey there up some very steep gravel switchbacks nearly topples me a couple of times especially since I am carrying my full luggage but it makes the view, when I attain it, all the more epic.
I meet Hassan back at the Jericho Cafe and we head off to the Dead Sea. "Salty" he tells me helpfully. "Don't get it in your eyes" he says, somewhat more helpfully. It really is an odd experience - as you get deep enough, up to your armpits, your legs suddenly refuse to stay on the sand and pop up either in front or behind you. I slather myself with mud - it's supposed to be good for your skin. The effect is has on me is that my iPhone won't recognise my fingerprint for 2 days.
In the morning Kseniya talks about the benefits of fasting and the focus it produces in the mind. I suddenly feel very hungry and go across the street and get falafels. I have a nice chat with the falafel master Mustafa and his friend Hamse the baker from next door. Mustafa shows me photos of the camp from before 1948 with beautiful old traditional buildings. Over time it has become a place for non-refugees to find cheap land and so the building is pretty chaotic and gives rise to the ramshackle jungle I see today. I take Kseniya to Old Jericho (Tel el-Sultan) which is just a few mounds of earth really. But there are a few tantalising glimpses of parts of a huge tower and the place pulsates with all the layers of history - right back to Neolithic and pre-pottery times - it's the oldest town on earth after all. We stop at the "Russian Museum" which we have been joking about - what possible connection could there be between Jericho and Russia?! It must be a KGB front. Turns out it is a piece of land bought by the Russian state to build a church on but on which was then discovered Byzantine remains. We take pictures of the unlikely combo of a Russian girl in Indian clothes with no hair sitting on a British motorbike outside a Russian museum in Palestine.
I head off in search of "Nabi Musa" - a mosque built on the burial site of Moses. This takes me out into real desert and past abandoned Israeli tanks and cars used for target practice.
I also find Qasr al Yahub - the place where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. It's on the River Jordan which is of course the border between the two countries so you have to go through a maze of minefields and razor wire to get there but when you do you find gaggles of white-smocked Russian ladies being dunked by chanting orthodox priests with both country's soldiers eyeing each other uneasily across the narrow stream.
In the morning, after picking some tomatoes, we breakfast on fried cauliflower, scrambled egg, falafels, labneh, tomatoes and Za'atar. Murad and Judy, a 65 year-old Australian who has been coming here twice a year for 10 years bicker like an old married couple. Then we go to the olive farm and pick all day. It's a very Zen task and involves me climbing the hospitable trees that Murad's grandmother planted and the time passes quickly. We manage to denude 3 trees between the three of us and have two sacks for a total of about 75kg of olives. That's about 15 litres of Olive oil.
A lady that Judy knows well comes by with gifts for her daughter that Judy will take to the US for her. They include wrist covers, a herbal stick to clean teeth with and a box of sweets that also say 'hair removal' on them. I talk about going to Hebron and Murad warns me not to go alone as he says they will think I am a settler and attack me. Better to go with an organised tour he says.
As I wander the drop-dead gorgeous crumbling old biblical town I get a mixture of dirty looks and some friendly welcomes. Although it feels edgy, I am also loving the sense of immersion. The walls are peppered with pictures of martyrs and machine-gun wielding youths. A Coffee grinder, Sami, welcomes me and plies me with delicious coffee and chocolate. He talks about Islam and how Christ talked of Mohammed and how we are all one. The guy sitting next to me helps me with some Arabic phrases and I find out that he lost his son in a Police cell 'accident' I get some of the cheesey sweet local delicacy Kunafeh which is very more-ish and the vendor won't take money for it. I talk to Naser Alniadi who ran a fashion and beauty shop in New Orleans for a while. I become facebook friends with all and sundry.
I find myself listening a lot in this country. On the whole trip actually. Certainly the people of the Middle East need some listening to and Israel/The West Bank/The Occupied Territories/Sector 48/The Holy Land more than most. Maybe it untwists things. In the circular way of things, it is also somehow part of my own therapy - I survived open heart surgery just 6 months ago and a broken heart of a more allegorical kind the year before. It leaves me wanting to just breathe the world in.
It's late, I am slightly tipsy but I head back into the West Bank with no address for my lodging and my petrol tank perilously low. I have to ask about 5 different people for directions but they are all amazingly smiley and I wash up at my airbnb no problem. Next day I visit Shepherds fields - where the angels came down to tell the shepherds about the wise men and then the Church of the Nativity. The whole interior is a mass of scaffolding and the queue to see the spot where Jesus was born is absurdly long so I don't tarry. Then the Church of the Milk Grotto - not very interesting either. Then to the separation wall. The art and stories on the wall are very touching - I am always moved by art as a reaction to the artless. And Banksy's "Walled-Off" Hotel has a special potency with his new inscription for the Balfour Declaration centenary.
After I look around the Jewish part of the Cave of Abraham - where all the Jewish forefathers are buried - I am approached by Mohammed who offers me a tour that is a joint Israeli-Palestinian project. Turns out to be entirely from the Palestinian perspective but it fascinating nonetheless. He shows me the deserted streets around the Cave of Abraham with their shutters welded shut and tells me how Israelis throw stones at Palestinian homes so they had to put grilles on the windows. He shows me the school he went to and tells me how the kids have to get there an hour early just to get through all the security. It looks like a prison. There is a Palestinian house that an Israeli flag is draped over. He says the family took down the flag but the soldiers threatened to arrest them if they didn't put it back. He shows me an alley that the soldiers walled off. Some people took a shortcut through a nearby window and when they were caught were put in prison for 2 weeks. There is a mass of steel welded over the window now. When I go to pay him the 50 shekhels we agreed he conveniently has no change for my 100 note and says don't I want to make a donation to Palestine? Well OK... A cardinal rule of travel - small denominations!
I find the Jewish Visitors Centre and the lady there gives me the settlers perspective. First she sits me down in a state of the art cinema with the surround audio going through a test intoning "rear left, front right, centre..." Then I am shown the most appallingly vomitous film about the history of the Jewish people complete with comically bad dubbing, cringe-inducing acting and zoom-whoosh video effects. At one point a machine actually blows soap bubbles in my face. It's laughable but the point, as reinforced by the lady on her tour after, is that at various points the Jews bought parts of Palestine - Abraham paid 400 pieces of silver to own his tomb etc. - and also were subjected to massacres and persecution over the millennia. She says the Jews were here before the Arabs. My guess would be that the truth is a lot more cloudy. Yes the area was called Judea before Caesar started calling it Palestine around the time of Christ. Yes they have emotive and ancient claims on the land, but so do the Palestinians and they both need to accept at least to some extent the status quo and find compromise. People are not responsible for the sins or successes of their antecedents. But I'm saying that from my position of lofty privilege of course... Settlements are certainly not helping - neither is any form of violence.
At Shivta, after several army camps packed with rows of tanks, I find a camping spot in a grove of trees. It's beautifully desolate but I do find one companion for the evening, Danny, who is Israeli and has been travelling around Israel for seven years having 'lost his confidence'. He has a big bushy grey beard. We build a fire and he tells me stories of his family - fled Cossack Pogroms of the early 20th century to Alexandria. There they spoke Yiddish with their parents, French between the children and Arabic around town. I explain how English is partly related to old Gothic German and he says maybe that's why he finds he knows some English words but doesn't know how - Yiddish is also related to old German.
In the background the whooshes, pops and thumps of the Israeli army shooting and zipping around in F16s and the high-pitched cries of Jackals out in the sandy wastes.
I ride to Avdat where the ruins are ruined by yelling schoolkids and then on to Mitzpe Ramon, on the edge of a vast crater or Makhtesh created as the ocean waters receded, several miles across. I ride the dramatic twisty route down into it and then the harsh gravel roads to Wadi Ramon admiring the layered colourful sand formations. I hike around a horseshoe-shaped canyon called Ein Saharanini and have the place entirely to my self, feeling most serene as I wander past the natural abstract art installations.
At the Jordanian border I have a nice friendly Israeli soldier at the first gate. She smiles and wishes me luck. Then to balance things out, I have the most miserable and hostile passport officer I have ever encountered - she all but spits on my passport. Then I switch passports and head to the Jordanian side. There a crowd of soldiers huddle around the bike and ask me all the usual questions and generally treat me like I have just scored a winning goal. After everything is meticulously X-rayed, I enter the world of the numbered doors. First I am sent to door number 8 with strict instructions to then go on to number 10 but number 8 sends me to number 4 and says I should follow that with number 9. However number 9 is closed so number 10 leans out and says I need to go to number 1. Number 1 is chain-smoking with a deathwish but ironically sends me to get insurance. In the insurance room, he has a worried expression. The network is down which means he spends the next 2 hours slowly typing I know not what while making a string of phonecalls. A random bloke comes from nowhere to change my shekhels into Dinars and translates with the worried man for me until my 27 Dinars is paid. Then back to the Advent Calendar doors. Number 4 has a big queue but eventually and dejectedly prints me out a fabulous-looking embossed document. I pay him 20 Dinars for this with a 1 Dinar afterthought gouge. A soldier takes me to a secret un-numbered cabin behind the numbered ones where they produce a credit card machine with a flourish. All the cabins have three large portraits of the king, his father and his son all beaming down on their officials. This soldier proudly poses for a photo with me in front of the portraits. Back to number 1 who sends me to number 8. Now number 8, is the chief and he knows it. He looks like an Arabic Harrison Ford as he brushes the ash of my embossings and grunts in satisfaction - he has found a mistake! Number 1 has missed off a digit from my numberplate. So I stroll back to number 1. Number 1 looks mournfully at the space where the "9" should be and issues a new corrected document. Then just back to number 8 and I am done. Numbers 10, 9 and 4 all come out of their doors to congratulate me on cracking the code. I am free! Just two more checkpoints and I finally enter Jordan. Almost immediately, a land cruiser tries to run me off the road but I am ready for him. Not my first crazy-driver country Bucko!
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