Tuesday    2.9.2025 
13.21km Total: 273.44km 

For the first time in a couple of days I sneak down and eat breakfast.

My stomach has not stabilised to a level that is anywhere near desirable, but shortly after lunch I still feel confident enough to venture out.

I buy combo tickets for the Basilica Cistern and Hagia Sophia, so-called "skip the line" tickets.

They only cost a few Euros extra, which upon arrival felt incredibly affordable considering that the queue to get to the Basilica had probably meant twenty minutes in the scorching sun.
The Basilica Cistern was pretty awe inspiring and would have been under any circumstances, but the fact that it was built by the Romans in the 6th century to supply Constantinople with water definitely makes it even more impressive.
As a film nerd, it is always a little extra fun to visit filming locations and the cistern has been the setting for both the Bond film From Russia with Love and Dan Brown's Inferno.

However, Hagia Sophia was what I absolutely wanted to see in Istanbul (and all of Türkiye for that matter) and it certainly did not disappoint.
Even though it was built in the 500s as the crown jewel of Byzantine architecture, the building is so striking that Byzantine propaganda claimed that the building was in fact created by God through a miracle, and it was probably not a hard sell as a concept for those who had seen it.
I spent a long while in HS taking it all in.

After that I take a seat at an al fresco terrace with a beer and browse my phone to check if there is anything else I can reasonably manage to do on my last night.
I find a Bosporus sunset cruise where you explore the strait at sunset on a "luxury yacht".
I call the company and have reserved a seat, but the departure port is pretty far from my location and time is running out towards the sailing so I swallow the beer in a couple of big gulps and jump into the first taxi available in this, probably the most touristy area in all of Istanbul. Big mistake. Huge.

I should know better by now being a world-weary traveller and all but I stupidly assumed non-Uber taxis ran on a meter. Not so.
When we arrive at the quay, the driver wants €60 for the trip, which was less than ten kilometers.
A completely insane price for that fare but since I still imagined at this point that I would catch the boat, my negotiating position was quite weak.
I could either haggle with him about the price or go on the cruise, not both, so I coughed up and paid only to find out five minutes later that the boat had already left.
So in retrospect I could have spent the rest of the evening arguing with the scammer driver and it wouldn't have made any difference.

I have dinner at ChikiWici again where I am told that my food is ready with: white face, food ready.
Apparently, despite the temperatures throughout the trip so far I'm not quite as tanned as I thought.

Basilica cistern
No one actually knows where the medusa heads originate from.

Hagia Sofia

Halvdan's and Svens runes in the Hagia Sofia
Sven was a man of fewer words. His rune simply read "Sven".

Blue Mosque

A nice enough walk but not quite worth the €60 it cost me.

Wednesday    3.9.2025
572km Total: 7009km  6h 23m Total: 97h 00m
  6.88km Total: 280.32km

A fairly uneventful day on the highway where the miles tick along nicely.
Unlike eastern and southern Türkiye, the toll booths here are classic manned toll booths with barriers.
However, as an "unregistered" vehicle, I must have missed getting a ticket at some point because when I pulled up to a toll booth, the woman at the booth wanted to know where I had come from, which was more than I had an answer to in a reasonable amount of time, let alone prove.
To solve the problem quickly so I could ride on I told her to simply charge the maximum fee which turned out to be 280 Lira (~€6).
At the border to Bulgaria getting out of Türkiye was quite efficient and mostly a mere formality.
There was no physical customs check of the gear at all as it only consisted of checking whether I owed the country any money.
Considering that it cost 25 Lira (~€0.6), I can probably safely assume that none of the speed cameras got me.

At the border control to Bulgaria, it's basically a complete gridlock and it's 35ºC (95ºF).
Although I have no doubt that I'll complain about the cold once there, at this point I'm actually looking forward to more northern latitudes.

Along the way to Sofia, I set a new personal best during the day in how little petrol I have left in the tank before I find a petrol station.
I managed to eco-drive at 80kph on the highway (which I actually think is dangerous, but if you're stupid you suffer the consequences) and turn off to a little village called Chirpan.
When I finally ride into the Shell station, the trip computer shows that I had a remaining range of 14km.

It's evening when I'm finally installed in my room at the Budapest Hotel in Sofia.

I google restaurants and a place called Hadjidraganov's Houses Restaurant has got really good ratings so I head there.
It's unclear if it's intended as a tourist trap or if it's national patriotism gone completely bananas, but someone has found the dial for a rustic environment and turned it up to 11.
I liked it straight away and thought it was cozy as hell.

I order Lamb Pilaf with walnuts, which was absolutely delicious.
With a local lemonade and a draft beer it came to about €25, but I see at as paying for an experience and not just the food, and as such it was well worth it.

Satisfied and content, I head "home" and hit the sack.

Bulgarian border crossing

Hadjidraganov's Houses restaurant

Thursday    4.9.2025 
16.34km Total: 296.66km 

First stop of the day (which again got off to a late start due to my stomach) was the palace.
Not a particularly memorable building exterior but there was a nice park at the back.

Heading on to St. Sofia Church which gave its name to the entire city.

This is actually a bit of a repeat as I have already been to Sofia with Björn and Marika on the Balkan trip in 2015 but then it was quite rushed as we got there in the afternoon and had to move on the very next day.

The Alexander Nevski Cathedral is truly a stately building both outside and inside.
Being an Orthodox church it is unusually bright inside.

Across the street is another stately building, the National Gallery of Foreign Art.
I am hardly an art connoisseur but why not?
There were definitely some beautiful works of art in there but what really stood out was some damn curious sculptures which I really appreciated.

I head to what appears to be the main drag in Sofia when it comes to restaurants and bars, Vitosha Boulevard and have a really late lunch before I head to Sofia City Court and meet up with the guide for the city walk I just booked.
We are a group of about a dozen people from different parts of the world.
The guide Kris is a knowledgeable professional who shares his knowledge with us of Bulgaria's and Sofia's millennia-long history.
It was an evening well spent.

The guide talked about how there is a bit of a family feud going on among the Balkan countries and that they are having a bit of fun with the fact that they have the highest mountain in the Balkans (Rila) by dwarfing Greece's Olympus by a mere six meters.
Apparently, it is therefore a bit of a joke that every Bulgarian has a duty to bring a stone up to the top of Rila to make sure it stays the highest and the other way around, if they climb Olympus they are supposed to bring a stone from there to make sure the Greeks can't pile themselves to the top.

Another macabre but interesting historical gem was the failed bombing of Tsar Boris III in the Sveta Nedelja Church in 1923.
The Bolsheviks had first killed a general because they knew that it would make the Tsar attend the funeral.
They had packed the dome of the church with 25kg of dynamite before the funeral.
They then blew the dome to hell, but the Tsar survived because he simply wasn't there.
He was late for the funeral because he had attended the funeral of another soldier who had taken a bullet for him a few days earlier.
This soldier thus saved the Tsar's life twice, the second time after he was already dead.
However, there was no shortage of casualties.
200 people died and 500 were injured, making this the deadliest terrorist act in Europe until the mid-eighties.

After the guide asked how I got there, an Indian who was on the tour chimed in and asked if it really had taken me a month to travel from Sweden to Bulgaria?
I had to confirm that yes, it actually did, but I had taken a slight detour to get here.
After finishing the tour, I stroll back to Vitosha for some liquid "fika" before heading back to the hotel.

The castle was quite unassuming (for a castle) but there was a pretty cool monument in the castle park.

St. Sofia church

The Cathedral

National Gallery of Foreign Art
There was some pretty weird stuff in there

National Theatre

The courthouse

Sveta Nedelja-church

Remains of one of the ancient city gates into what was then Serdica, a Roman settlement

Presidential Palace