Very quick update, before I actually post what I've written earlier: I have safely arrived in Greece by now and am about to finally arrive in Turkey. I will write about this later. I just wanted to say that - even if you may not notice from the length of my blog entries, all of the last posts have been written in a hurry as I was either busy enjoying time with friends or in nature or trying not to use up all the battery of my laptop as I had no idea when I could charge it again - or all of the above. I will write some more, once I am settled down in my new home!

So I find that, moving south in Europe, things do change. For example there is no free internet on ferries any more, even when the ferry takes 33 hours to arrive at your destination. So I am writing this while sitting on the ferry but I will only post it when I have internet access next time, who knows when. Also, I need to warn you that, as I mentioned before, my camera has died and I have not tried to fix it yet (which is sad for you, because there are some great pictures that you could have seen!). The blog website, however, forces me to post a picture with every blog entry, so be aware that I will just use random pictures for now that have nothing to do with the the content of the blog, nor the geographical area that it is about.

I mentioned before that my path has deviated from the originally planned one. However, now that I am on my new way, I also find that my initial goal of seeing as much of Europe as I could, mainly parts that I had not known before, was not only not practicable but also not smart. Rather my tour has become a tour of visiting old friends and countries I had known somewhat before but I now got the chance to get to know better. And in this way I could really enjoy the last few weeks. I met several friends, many of whom I had not seen for years and most of them at very short notice. Still, all of them were happy to meet me and also host me at their various new homes. This way I could not only get to know some new places but I could also see how my friends lived after all this time. I was very happy to see that basically all of them had found their respective ways in life and that they were all happy with what they had achieved and where they lived and how. This was very nice to see, but nicer so even, as I found that no matter which way they had chosen in life, each of them still had respect and appreciation for other life styles (including mine). It is clearly not easy to be really happy yourself but acknowledge the fact that other people with very different life styles will be happy in their own way but then, obviously, my friends are my friends for a reason. I decided that, having so many friends spread out all over the planet, maybe it was the right time not to get to know more people and more places but to go back and visit the ones that I had left too long ago and had barely spoken since. Clearly Facebook chat is a nice tool to stay in touch but meeting people in real life and getting to know first hand their respective living situation increases mutual understanding so much. It also quickly became clear that, in some ways, my life and theirs fit perfectly well, as I travel around to see places and people and most of them have their homes and are bound by various situations to stay there and are happy to have visitors instead. It needs both, of course, but it was very nice to see how it all fit! I also really enjoyed how I could just speak with friends I haven't spoken to in years, chatting like we had only parted a few weeks before. I learned, once again, to appreciate what I have rather than always wanting more, and in this way it was the right decision to not try and see so many other countries that I have not been to before.

Instead, as I entered Italy, I quickly found that I had made a big mistake all the while looking at it like the country that was always there and that I kind of knew anyways and that was not worth visiting again. It was completely unexpected that Italy - especially in the north - provided me with some of the best cycling routes that I had cycled during the past months. I took the train to get up to the mountain pass but after that I had expected that I would have to follow the main road with a lot of traffic. Instead I got a perfect cycling path (even with its own tunnel a couple times!) with the most scenic views imaginable, as I slowly left the alps to move south, and it was one of the best days of cycling all the way downhill from the Brenner pass to Bozen. I stayed with another friend over night on the way and then made a spontaneous decision to meet yet another friend on the other side of Italy, which lead me to cycle past Lago di Garda for the next two days. Again, I was surprised that a perfect cycling route took me there, and the signage was - allegedly - better than what road signs in Italy normally are. I made the same observation later, by the way. So from the alps I cycled through the amazinginly different landscape of the dolomite mountains, including a nature reserve on the way. Lago di Garda was a very nice home for one night and one morning. The water perfectly clean and still warm enough to wash myself and my hair and swim for a little bit. It was low season but still the place was swarming with people mostly speaking German and some speaking a whole range of other languages. On the side of the lake, mostly I had to follow the main road for real this time - there simply was not enough space for a cycling path. But after I passed the lake, again a cycling route appeared to lead me to my next stop. It was quite miraculous how they always seemed to know where I wanted to go, and, what's more, due to the signage even in the surrounding villages you managed to find them even when you didn't know they were there.
As I arrived at the Po river, I left my bike there for a few days to take the train to go into the Apennine mountains to see yet a different type of mountain in Italy and to visit a friend who - with some other friends - was starting an eco-village type of living there. I could stay with them and help in their garden and get to know life in the middle of nowhere in a medieval castle. And eat some delicious self-grown food! After that I took the train back to recover my bike and continued cycling along the Po to go to the ferry terminal in Venice. The cycling routes continued along the Po river, all the way to the delta, but the signage did get worse. I found that cycling routes are the responsibility of the provinces, and clearly the northern provinces do a better job. So I was following the Po all the way to the delta and then from there I went north to Venice to get the ferry. The water of the Po clearly isn't the cleanest of all, so instead of swimming there, I started to use the bathrooms of railway stations or McDonald restaurants to wash myself. It was not until I arrived at the Adige river, that enters the Mediterranean Sea just north of the Po and south of Venice, that I felt completely clean again - for about five minutes, because then I had to cycle on to get to Venice in time for the ferry.
The flats of the Po valley are quite disappointing as such, but I had expected worse, to be honest. The evenings and mornings there were beautiful in a morbid kind of way. The sun turned blood red as it started to sink lower on the horizon to disappear, not behind that but behind the layer of smog that, closer to the surface of the planet, got so dense it completely blocked out the view of the image of the sun, before it could disappear behind what was supposed to be riverine forests. The same thing happened in the mornings in opposite direction, only there it was even more scary, considering that in the east there was supposed to be only open sea, so you were wondering just how the smog would get there. Only about 1 or 2 hours after the official sunrise the red image of the disc of the sun turned yellow or white and the rays actually brought some warmth down to Po valley and started to help producing electric energy in one of the large photovoltaic-plantations which even there start to replace agricultural fields. And we are talking here about one of the most productive soils in the country! It is dry, yes - they even built fancy pipelines to get water from the river to water the fields - and quite clearly, where they had these they did not have any money left over for fixing the bad asphalt cover of their roads. But even so it seems a big shame to use these soils to set up photovoltaic-plantations. Something clearly is wrong with the priorities we have in this world!
The riverine forests were another category of disillusionment. In fact, when I was cycling down the Danube in Austria, I was appalled to see that, clearly, the lessons learned from the last floods some years ago, were that you better build walls around your city if you want to be safe. Only in the region close to Vienna the strategy was to give the river more room and re-build at least part of its original natural bed. Further upstream, literal walls have been built around each village or city that should block the water in case of a new flood. The river bed there looks just like a channel - and that's also what it is, of course.
Floods do not seem to be a problem in the Po valley, but riverine forests are very rare. There was a park on an island somewhere, where I had breakfast. It was a protected natural area. I was not interested in the forest on the island so much, which was just a random forest, but more in the shores where some few shorebirds were keeping me company while I ate. A random man came, suddenly and asked me if I had been to the forest. He said it was "bellisimo", while I had found it just nice, but from his perspective it was clearly one of the most beautiful places in the surroundings. The Po has ended up in a channel, just like the Danube has, although some trees were left in place along the sides of the channel in Italy. Probably the fact that the Po is not navigable made this easier. More disturbingly, however, next to the river there were large mono-cultures of a tree species I wasn't sure what it was, but these plantations covered hundreds of hectares along the river sides. I can't really complain all that much because two of these plantations provided me with a bed for a night each, but as I finally approached the delta of the Po, the original riverine forests were more intact and here it was that even I found that they are of a beauty that you barely every witness in other places. I did not go all the way down to the sea, as my road took me north. The pools that I passed did not look very natural but they did provide me with the best bird watching opportunities and largest numbers of shorebirds throughout all of my trip. I did not make it to the delta of the Danube but the delta of the Po provided me with some substitute for it, and Greece is still to come.
The last morning on Italian soil I had to bike to the port of Venice. It was so foggy I barely saw where I was going and the ferry was even delayed because of the fog. I got a glimpse of Italian inability of placing road signs as signs directing you to the port had left and right arrows seemingly at random. I even saw the left turn to the port when I passed it (part of the reason why I saw it so late was the fog, of course), but by then they had exchanged the English term "ferry" to "boat to". I had never found out, what the name of the port was, I had just assumed it should be easy to find. And it would have been but when I saw the turn indicating "Venezia centro" and "boat to" I assumed it was probably a boat to Venice. Stupid me. I asked a guy at a gas station later and followed the "boat to" directions in nowhere land, until suddenly a building appeared out of the fog and I had arrived at the port of Anek Lines. The fog had made it quite an adventure to get there, and honestly, if you asked me now how to get to the port in Venice I would not be able to tell you.

Sleeping out on the deck of the ferry was an interesting experience as I had gotten so used to just rolling out my sleeping bag where ever I felt like spending a night and sleeping there, brushing my teeth at any time of the day that was convenient for water supply and wearing the same smelly clothes for days and nights, changing only my underwear and washing it immediately again, any time I had convenient water supply. From this point of view I looked at all the other people who were camping on deck with their air mattresses and pumps they had brought to pump them up, looking and smelling clean, folding up their clean clothes on their pillows, even among the "cheap" passengers I felt as uncivilized as possible - not in a bad way, rather in a funny way (Mind you, I was glad it didn't rain that night, because otherwise I would have been very jealous of the air mattresses). Like I was the only one who had experience in sleeping rough and smiling mildly at the other people who seemed to need their old world orders to be intact in order to feel like they were still worthy of being human even in rough sleeping situations. During the low season the ferries are very cheap so the cabins wouldn't have cost that much so I could not really understand why these people didn't just book a cabin. But then, it was also nice to see that even people who had money ventured into these rough sleeping situations at times like these, still strictly avoiding exchange with their fellow passengers, as if the "civilized" world had just created a bulge to accommodate for these people as they were exiting the civilized spaces of their homes but showing the same behaviours.

I now have four days and 220 kilometres left in Greece. While in Italy, I was struggling hard to recover the Italian I once knew and stop the words from coming out of my mouth in Spanish. My Greek is barely existent, which is sad, but I hope that people speak some basic English, Italian or Turkish or we can communicate with gestures and pointing but not trying to speak the local language will help me to get back into learning Turkish again, I hope. Because on Thursday I will take the ferry from Athens to Chios, which is on the island closest to Izmir and on Friday I will finally arrive at the last stage of my journey. I will write again when I arrived. For now, I hope I can enjoy a little holiday in Greece and then I am excited to see what Turkey has in store for me.