The Balkans

Time to go on another bike tour

Last year I opened this blog to write about my interesting summer vacation that involved a day trip in London, 2 weeks of working in my Berlin office, taking local trains to fun villages in Germany, traveling by train and bike to France, and biking with a group of anarchists from encampment to encampment. While last year’s trip was fun, I decide to go on a much more “normal” trip this summer. So I started planning a bike trip with a friend of mine from home. We are both in a group of commuters who live in Jerusalem and work in the Tel Aviv area. The group would bike from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv at least once a week.

Goals for this trip

Last year the bike trip was very low budget. We slept in tents, ate food that we found in the dumpster, and didn’t pay for any activities. The biking distance was also very short. During my week and a half with Ecotopia (the anarchists), we only biked from Lyon to a bit past Valence, or 150km.

This year, my biking partner and I decided to spend a bit more and sleep in motels, eat food that we bought from grocery stores, and even buy some souvenirs. However, this trip was definitely a low budget trip, and we tried to save money wherever reasonable.

Where to fly

Both my biking partner and I have not been to a wide variety of places. So we looked at places that would be close and cheap, but not too dangerous (eg. Russia and Turkey). We considered buying a ticket to one location, and returning from a different one. The issues with that are that it would involve buying two one-way tickets, which is more than a round trip. And we would not have a place to store our bike suitcase. So we chose to go to and from the same airport. Using the website https://secretflights.co.il/ we found a cheap ticket to Sofia, Bulgaria. In fact, the price was so low, that the cost to bring the bike as check-in luggage was double the cost of the price to bring a person. Since we looked for the cheapest flight, we got the worst hours. It would arrive around midnight and return early in the morning. However, a few weeks after we bought the ticket, wizz air decided to cancel our flight. As compensation, they offered to refund our ticket or let us rebook to the same location and within a few months for no extra fee. We took the second option and got flights with better hours for no additional cost.

What route to bike

After picking the location of where we will be flying to, we had to design a route. The first thing I looked at, was where there was a Jewish community or Chabad house for Shabbat. Unfortunately, there aren’t many Jewish communities in the Balkans. I guess a mixture of the Holocaust, communism, the Bosnian War, and the fact that Jews have automatic citizenship in Israel, emptied out most of those areas of their Jews. The only options we saw were the Chabad at Sofia, Belgrad, and Thessaloniki. If we picked Sofia, that would mean that our trip would have to be two circles around Sofia, and we wanted to go to farther paces. Belgrad was a bit too far away, so it would require taking some form of public transportation back. However, it looked like public transportation was very sparse in Serbia (outside of the big cities), and it was hard to figure out how to purchase a ticket and if bikes would be allowed. So we chose to plan a route that went through Thessaloniki for Shabbat.

As for exactly where to go, my bike partner had a coworker in North Macedonia who gave a lot of recommendations of places to go. Since we have been biking together for quite a long time, it was easy for my biking partner to estimate how many kilometers we could bike a day. His guess was between 100km and 120km. I suggested we plan for something a bit less aggressive, but we tried to get about 100km a day. So using my constraints, and the coworker’s recommendations, we created our route.

Preparing for the trip

The next step was to decide exactly where to stay. The main sites we checked for lodging were https://www.booking.com/ and https://www.airbnb.com/ . I have heard bad reviews regarding hidden fees with booking, but they must have fixed it since. Airbnb on the other hand was difficult. You can’t really filter by price, because the cleaning fee can be anything. The two rules that we had were that there had to be two beds, and a private bathroom. Other than that, we simply sorted by price.

We knew that we wanted to stay at Sofia for the last night, so that we could store our bike suitcase there. Skopje was important, since it was the capital, and my bike partner’s coworker lived there. We were told that Vevčani and Edessa were nice resort cities with waterfalls and similar good views. Thessaloniki was a must for Shabbat, because they had a Jewish community and Chabad. That left us with one arbitrary place to stay. So we looked on the maps from booking and airbnb, and found a cheap place in Kyustendil, Bulgaria, which was on the way.