No rest for the cyclists: we rise at 0645 for breakfast, take a short walk along the beach to pass time until the sun begins to warm the still-frigid coastline, snap the requisite campsite photos, pack everything, hoist our bikes up onto our shoulders for the mighty walk back up to road level, and head off. Today's itinerary: down the coast through Ploče, on past the agricultural lowlands, up and across to the border crossing into Bosnia, 10 km of Bosnia, cross back into Hrvatska, and bike some 30 km more to a wild camping site recommended to us by Aleksander and Azra - about 120 km in all, not inconsiderable along this rolling coastline...
...and we start off with the morning coffee in a small town some 5 km after starting out, making sure to wash dishes, brush teeth, and perform other, er, washroom-related duties during our stop. The first two are best done at fountains, as that way both of us can split the washing duties and brush simultaneously; sadly, those seem to be in short supply since we left Venezia a week and a half ago. We leave the café, heading up around the back of the town to meet the main road in a manner that seems most circuitous - we wind around, switchbacking slightly up the mountain slopes behind the town before dropping again slightly - but we make it there nonetheless, and are again on our way...
...whereupon, not a couple of kilometres further on, we meet up with an Australian cyclist on an even more ambitious journey than our own: starting from Barcelona, he plans to cross the whole of Eurasia via Istanbul, the Middle East, and China before hopping along the island chain to Australia and thence home to Melbourne - a year-long trip that promises to be quite the adventure! We swap stories of our travels, trading observations about respective choices in gear; this is standard protocol for travelling cyclists, among whom the only truism is that no two groups are exactly alike. Unlike our panniers with their increasingly tattered rain covers, his sport an integrated waterproof exterior; he remarks upon how much lighter our load seems, since we don't even have front panniers; we note the dual handlebars - a common sight among serious touring cyclists, as they permit easy attachment of additional gadgets such as cycling computers or handlebar bags - which remind us of the Swiss bike mechanic we met back in Barcelona. Of additional note: he is a chemical engineer by trade. This may seem unusual - after all, why should a highly educated person give up career prospects to bum around on two wheels? - until you hit the road and find that most touring cyclists fall into one of two categories. The first consists of career travellers, people who take odd jobs wherever they find work to save up for the next big trip. Bored professionals make up much of the other category - recent graduates, programmers, engineers, financial advisors, anyone with enough book learning behind them both to land a decent-paying job and to realize that they would much rather be doing just about anything else...
...and we bike alongside him for a while to the road overlooking a few lakes just above Ploče, where he decides to leave us and wait for two Canadians behind him; he has been travelling with them for a few days, but they keep a slightly slower pace. Touring cyclists, it seems, form highly ad-hoc groups. They will join up for a short stretch, perhaps even for a few days - and yet everyone involved knows that they are still on their own trip, that they are free to stop without the others or continue on past them, that the group may be broken without malice or hurt feelings at any point. And so it is that we leave him above the lakes by Ploče, continuing on down into the town for a spot of lunch...
...which we eat with gusto, attempting to warm ourselves in the cold October weather. The sky is more and more threatening, its uniform grey giving way to ominously raincloud-shaped formations, and we hope the cold will not be compounded by wet. As we finish our lunch over on the far side of the parking lot, we notice in our peripheral vision two odd characters checking out our bikes. Those being our only form of transport and, next to our cash and passports, most prized possessions, this understandably makes us a bit nervous. Some paranoia can be a good thing...
...but in this case it is unfounded, for no sooner do we approach our bikes than we see two heavily-laden mountain rigs perched against the far end of the shopping cart rack - yet more touring cyclists! We wait patiently for them to finish lunchtime shopping - she is from Denmark, he from the southwest of England; they are on a yet more ambitious trip even than the Australian, an around-the-world adventure that after nearly two years is finally drawing to a close with the last jaunt up through Europe to England; they are solidly in the odd jobs set of touring cyclists, and have already planned the next great adventure; they do indeed take advantage of the larger mountain tires to go off-road whenever possible; their bikes are adorned with stickers from China and Turkey and somewhere in the former Soviet Union...
...and, unfortunately, they are travelling the opposite way - so we ride on towards Bosnia, up past the orange groves in the swampland near the border, past countless stands that sell oil and fruit and nuts and all manner of tasty things. As with most borders, this one is up and over a mountain range - nothing onerous by our standards, but definitely noticeable. We are soon at the border crossing post, where they take a cursory look at our passports before returning them and waving us on through; there is none of the pointed questioning and overt suspicion that awaits travellers foolish enough to enter the US - a reminder that for most of the world borders are merely arbitrary, and that these borders mean little in a region that with Schengen has largely left the bureaucratic overhead of crossing them behind...
...we stop in a café for drinks and a plate of fries - though really we do this to warm up a bit, shake the cold and wet out of our bones, dry our soggy cyclist clothing out. Anything to get refuge from the rain, for few things make riding more generally unpleasant than the knowledge that there is no dry place at the end of the day, that if your clothing and tent and sleeping bag soak through there is nothing left to turn to. Fortunately for us, our tent and sleeping bag are very much secure in dry bags whose thick yellow rubber exteriors protect them from all manner of inclement weather. As we prepare to leave, we are surprised to find our Australian friend again - he saw our bikes from the road and decided to drop in on us! We show him the location of the place we plan to camp tonight, and he agrees to join us...
...so we bike on - and are glad that we stopped when we did, for it is the last food joint for some time - up to the crossing back into Croatia. There is a short segment of no-man's-land before we hit the border post; we unclip one foot each, but the customs agents laugh and wave us on through. From there, it is 30 rainy kilometres to our site, most of it uphill. We find a market along the way, stock up on food and wine for supper, and make our way around the bay to the site: as we near the end of the bay, there is a dirt and rock path leading up around the back of this rock. We follow it, dragging the bikes up with us - space enough for several tents with a splendid view across to the bay and surrounding islands...
...but no other cyclists join us; perhaps they misunderstood when we pointed to the map and headed instead for the nearby campground. It is possible that we were not quite clear enough - for we wild camp whenever we can, pausing in beds and official campgrounds only when necessary or when the cumulative jankth of neglected hygiene wears on us. We cook in solitude atop the rock, warming ourselves by the feeble warmth of our one-burner stove as the light fades and the rain mercifully stops, giving way to a night that seems uncommonly warm by the standard of the past few days. Further south now. The days get minutely longer as we head south, the climate warmer, the mountain faces turning slowly from barren to brush-punctuated gravel to relatively lush greenery here at the bottom of Croatia.
So, no joiners for the site - but our spirits are high, and we are but 30 km out of the medieval port empire of Dubrovnik where we will rest for a day before continuing on to Crna Gora, Albania, and eventually into Greece. So close! We hope to reach Athens by Halloween, albeit without any expectation that the pagan festival will be taken seriously there; this will leave us with plenty of time to cycle the final leg into Istanbul. 2500 km to go: the same distance we cycled from the cold pallor of Denmark to the frightening heat over the Pyrenees, and a mere fraction of our distance covered to date. What will real life bring to those who have spent so long away from it? Only time will tell...