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A happy hunter, her Oregon white truffles and the dog that made the day. Photo by Andrea Johnson.

Some underground objects in Croatia will detonate at the slightest touch: landmines.

Other underground objects just smell. When journalist Lucy Burningham went to Croatia in 2007, she went looking for truffles. The Portland-based beer, food and travel writer was doing research for a book she’s writing about truffles of the world. She spent two weeks in northwest Croatia’s Istria peninsula, where she explored the local oak forests with pen and pad, fringed the secretive clan of local truffle hunters and, as she now concedes, poked her nose where not everyone wanted it.

“As a journalist working on a story about truffles, it felt like risky business,” Burningham said. “There’s a lot of cash flowing around, there’s a black market, and I felt like I was entering a world where I wasn’t wanted.”

Most truffle hunters aren’t lawbreakers. They are simply protective of their patches, which may be family-owned and passed along from generation to generation—the foundation of a wholesome industry across Europe. But lookalike truffles are sometimes falsely advertised and illegally sold, and in the dark woods of Europe and in the high-stakes marketplaces, strangers and foreigners are not always to be trusted. Burningham didn’t speak the language in Croatia, and she had just one local contact in the truffle-hunting underworld. The man, hardly a Luddite of the woods, carried four cell phones and seemed to be always negotiating a sale through one of his market connections. He served as her guide, and on one occasion as he drove into a remote truffle patch in the woods, he asked Burningham, seated shotgun in the Fiat, to cover herself with a blanket and hunker down and pose as a sack of potatoes.

“No one wanted to see an international journalist poking around in the forest,” Burningham explained.

Burningham observed the white truffle’s prominent place in Croatia’s culture and cuisine. She saw, too, that Croatian people object to the white truffle’s reputation as the “Alba truffle,” which suggests that this aromatic mushroom, Tuber magnatum, is an Italian specialty. In fact, though France and Italy have gained reputations for having the world’s best truffles, Burningham’s book project was conceived in Oregon, in the woods surrounding Portland, in the heart of North America’s very own truffle country.

Throughout the Pacific Northwest, three species of highly valued, highly aromatic, native truffles grow naturally in the soil among Douglas fir trees, though relatively few people know it. Burningham caught wind of Oregon truffles in 2006. Today an increasing number of chefs, gatherers, retailers and entrepreneurs of many makes are catching on. Though the industry struggled for several decades, demand is now growing, and prices have shot up from about $50 per pound wholesale five years ago to about $250 per pound today.

Truffle season is now in full swing, and those interested in unearthing their own truffles should contact the North American Truffling Society, a group of enthusiasts who meet in Corvallis, Oregon to discuss, study, hunt and eat truffles. The Cascade Mycological Society may also be able to help. The upcoming Oregon Truffle Festival, scheduled for January 27 to 29 in and around Eugene, will offer another opportunity to experience Oregon’s best-smelling mushrooms, both on the plate and in the woods.

Truffle hunting, whether in Europe or America, is usually conducted with truffle dogs, the best of which can smell underground truffles from 150 feet or more away. Only four such dogs, trained and certified through local truffle dog training programs, exist in Oregon, according to Leslie Scott, a managing partner of the truffle festival, where at least one of these dogs will be meeting and greeting guests. (Though truffle pigs still dwell in the lore of old European truffle hunting, the keen-nosed animals posed a problem for truffle hunters as they often attempted to eat the prize. Dogs will merely sniff out the fungus and gladly take a pat on the head in reward.)

Meanwhile, the Perigord black truffle is now under cultivation worldwide in orchards of hazelnut and oak trees “infected” at their roots with the mycelium of T. melanosporum. These orchards lie in furtive locations in California, Tennessee, North Carolina, Oregon, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Argentina and other places. Most are young and still maturing into production, and tourist hunting opportunities for the black truffle will likely grow more common in the near future. The Italian-Croatian truffle has not been successfully cultivated, but some landlords lucky enough to own a white truffle patch among their hardwood trees do host visitors to dig up this most expensive of fungi.

America's most prized fungus, the white winter truffle of Oregon. Photo courtesy of Charles Lefevre.

What’s a truffle good for? T. magnatum is favored for shaving over pasta or poached eggs. It is almost never cooked, and the raw aroma of this critter is so powerful, so intoxicating, so mesmerizing that it is said to drive some people—and female pigs—mad with lust. I’ve only smelled it once, in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. The chef emerged from the kitchen with a freshly imported truffle on a silver platter, and the smell seemed to hit me like a gust from 25 feet away. If I’d been wearing a tie I think it would have blown up in my face, so powerful was that aroma. T. melanosporum, the black Perigord truffle, is considered almost as good as T. magnatum but is quite different and is often cooked into sauces and meats. Among the New World truffles, the Oregon black (Leucangium carthusianum) may smell like pineapple, wine and chocolate—a truffle that does well in creamy desserts. The autumn Oregon white (T. oregonese) bears similarities to its European counterpart, as does the spring Oregon white truffle (T. gibbosum). Each is piney, musky and garlicky. A favored trick with white truffles, from the Old World or the New, is to place one in a Tupperware along with an egg. The aroma will creep through the egg’s shell and flavor the yolk and the whites.

Almost wherever one goes, truffles can be found. Thousands of species grow worldwide. Most have no culinary worth. Some carry a respectable price tag, like the prized Saudi desert truffle—and just a few are valued like gold. Still others have no aroma or flavor at all but look enough like the coveted species of Europe that fraudsters slip them into the market and draw illicit incomes. T. indicum, for instance, is a worthless lump of a mushroom native to eastern Asia and which looks almost identical to the Perigord black truffle (T. melanosporum). The presence of imitation Chinese truffles in France and Italy has recently become an ecological problem: the species has found its way into the soil and established itself, posing a new threat to the already declining populations of native black truffles. Mixed deviously into a batch of the real thing, fakes add precious weight to a sale that can draw almost $1000 per pound from buyers who assume the product is legit. (T. magnatum draws even more money, often several thousand dollars per pound.) 

All of which should make for some good adventure reading, and we hope that Burningham will have a book chapter in which our heroine visits China and follow her nose into the black market for false truffles. She notes that doing so “will probably be even sketchier” than snooping around Croatia.

Safer, surely, to stay home—but sometimes there’s no resisting the truffle.

Facing the Void: Ellee Thalheimer stands before a high pass near Sampeyre, Italy after an ascent of several thousand feet.

Four months ago, upon arriving in Sofia, Bulgaria to begin a two-month bicycle tour, I met a Ukrainian man named “Slav” at my hostel. Like me, he was an avid cyclist and chronic adventurer and had toured alone through much of Europe. He knew the regions, roads and mountains of Bulgaria like corners of his own backyard. He had pedaled, as well, the entire rim of the Mediterranean Sea, even requiring a tank escort as he skirted the shore of Algeria. Slav’s favorite thing to say about this North African nation was, “Algeria is not touristic. It’s terroristic.” He said so about once per hour.

Slav lived at the hostel. An environmental and social activist, he worked daily to promote bicycle travel in and around Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. He helped lead a critical mass bike ride every Thursday night through the streets of downtown, and each afternoon he led tourists on guided bike rides to the city’s chief attractions. In doing so, Slav pulled in a slight income and managed to sustain one of the most inspiring, freewheeling lifestyles I’ve encountered.

Funny thing was, this man happened to be a vehement opponent of, as he put it, “the emancipated woman.”

“Why must a woman pursue a career?” said Slav, who was 35 and had already been divorced twice. “A man is the hunter, and he provides for his family. A woman takes care of the house, cooks, cleans, watches children. It was that way for thousands of years. Why change now?”

“You ride a bike,” I pointed out. “Ancient hunters didn’t. Do you hunt?”

He admitted he did not. I posed him another question: “What if a woman wanted to go bike touring with you?” He frowned.

Long ago in America, biking did help bring about emancipation (sorry Slav). Civil rights leader Susan B. Anthony observed this in 1896 when she said that “(bicycling) has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” And this year, two books came out in which the authors discuss the bicycle’s historical role in the empowerment of women: It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels by Robert Penn and Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way) by Sue Macy. (Since the cold, wet and wintry season of armchair adventuring is upon us, I’ll soon review these books in some detail.)

Today, more pedal-empowered women than ever are avid bikers. In Amsterdam, New York City, San Francisco, Rome and beyond, women zip soundlessly and nimbly through the streets. They take the lane, merge left to turn, assert their rights as commuters, flip on flashing lights for night riding and blissfully bypass one of society’s nastiest illnesses: the traffic jam. The most intrepid of these women sometimes pack luggage onto their bikes and tour the world. As they pedal, the bicycle charges them with strength, spirit and independence.

In Portland, the thriving bicycle culture teems with thousands of women—31 percent of the cycling populace by one recent count. Among them are two prominent writers and cyclists who are further pushing the bicycle revolution: Elly Blue, a journalist with Grist who has authored a remarkable online series exploring the social and economic value of bicycles, and Ellee Thalheimer, a yoga instructor and writer who has been laboring by pedal and pen to promote the thrilling and rewarding experience of bicycle touring.

Zen and the art of bicycle maintenance: Thalheimer fixes a flat with the composure of a yogi.

This, I decided, I had to hear more about, so recently I spoke by phone with Thalheimer, whose personal website even states, “Bike touring is one of my favorite things ever.”

I asked her why.

“There’s just something about putting all your bags on a bike and riding off and being open to experiencing whatever the road brings you that day,” she said. “It teaches you to be open to the world in a new kind of way.”

Thalheimer’s first bicycle tour was a north-to-south Pacific Coast run with her dad about a decade ago, immediately after college. She fell in love with the lifestyle, kicked into high gear and has since toured extensively—in South America, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States. One of her most rewarding journeys of all was her three-month solo ride throughout Italy in 2008, the research end of a book project for Lonely Planet. She loved the nation north to south, credits Italy as being the place “where I learned to really love food,” and remembers Sampeyre in the Alps as one of the most beautiful places she’s ever seen.

“I don’t usually cry when I see pretty things, but when I got to the top of that pass in Sampeyre, the view was just insane,” she said. “It was so beautiful I almost couldn’t believe it.”

She had to come down, though, and eventually go home, but Thalheimer is almost as thrilled by parts of Oregon. She especially loves Crater Lake and the surrounding country, she says, “but eastern Oregon has really captured my heart. The people are as friendly as they get, the land is beautiful, with mountains and some really hard climbs.” (Thalheimer is marked by a personality trait common to many cyclists: In her words, “I love feeling exhausted.”)

To extol the virtues of her home state as seen from a bicycle and to encourage others (“who might be on the fence about bike touring,” she says) to get on their own bikes and go, Thalheimer is now wrapping up a guidebook about cycle touring in Oregon, a project she’s been researching for years. The book is due out this spring. Asked whether she’s at all reluctant to tell the world about her favorite places, she said, “I love seeing other cyclists when I’m traveling. When two cycle tourists meet somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you immediately have something in common with that person, and you connect in a way that you never could in an urban area.  Anyway, if we ever had a glut of cycle tourists in remote areas, I think the world would be a better place.”

Millions of us agree. I do, and probably so does Slav, who sings the gospel of bicycle touring and building a bike-friendly society in Sofia. It’s a beautiful melody he croons—except the part where he envisions leaving women at the sink elbow deep in dishwater. No matter, because many women have already left him in the dust.

Wild campers must beware of landmines in the Balkans - though locals may only warn of bears.

Now that I’m home again and sleeping in a cumbersome nest of quilts, sheets, mattresses and pillows—an unnecessary luxury called a “bed”—there is at least one benefit: I can read late into the night without fear of being seen and mugged by good-willed Turkish Samaritans. This, precisely, happened to me in the highlands near Izmir. The other evening I came across the following words in the second edition of Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook, by Stephen Lord, and I had to laugh: “An ideal camping place is unseen from the road and not in the line of vehicle headlights….”

This is plain, simple, accurate logic dictated by common sense, and I’ve known it for years.

Yet on one particular night in October in the Aydin Mountains, I was lazy and camped just 15 feet above the road. I was drinking wine and reading a book with my headlamp, flipping off the light each time I heard an approaching engine on the road. I felt graceful, sly, discreet—like I was a fearless, wise cat and the mountain all mine. I saw every passerby, but not a soul on Earth knew I was here—until I botched it at around 9 p.m. A car came around the bend and I wasn’t quick enough. My light, which I had restored with brand new batteries that afternoon, illuminated the entire hillside as I fumbled for the button. In a moment I managed to flip it off—but it was too late. The car pulled to a stop just below me, and a young man stepped out. Fearlessly—but with reassuring innocence—he plodded straight up the bank and into my camp and sat down beside me. We chatted for a few minutes, and he said he would be passing by later with a collection of buddies and that they would be sure to stop.

“Great,” I said.

He wasn’t lying. It must have been 2 a.m. when a van stopped below the road. Five drunk young men—the first visibly intoxicated men I think I’ve seen in Turkey—spilled out and began dancing in the highway to Turkish music from the car’s radio. One by one they clambered up the bank to sit with me. None spoke English, and we struggled to converse for the next 30 minutes. I realized that I was a host for once and these fellows guests in my modest pad. I had no tea but I offered wine. We passed the bottle around while making laborious conversation. They furnished me with all sorts of far-fetched warnings: There were snakes here, they said, and roving herds of vicious swine.

“Eh,” I said, shrugging.

They finally stood to go and insisted that I come with them to sleep in a spare bed. I’ve rarely been able to explain to the civilized people of the Earth—at least not in Turkish—that I prefer sleeping under stars than strange ceilings. Yet I held my ground and my friends departed.

Stephen Lord, I was amused to read, has had similar experiences on the road in the Middle East. “Good luck,” he writes in his Handbook, “in explaining your preference for camping over staying in their home where you will be expected to sing for your supper.”

He also writes that “…one reason to pursue ‘stealth’ or discreet camping is that you will eventually tire of being invited into locals’ homes. This tradition of hospitality is especially strong in Muslim countries…Refusal can be awkward so think ahead.”

And stick to the woods, keep clear of the road and beware of your headlamp.

Tucked into my blankets and comforters here in San Francisco, I’ve also been reading through Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, admiring Robert Louis Stevenson’s simple adventures in the south of France. I’m feeling a growing kinship with the author, for it seems he encountered some of the same paranoia that I’ve observed. One night early in his trip he stayed in a monastery—fashionable today among paying tourists but at the time just another option for the wayfarer—and the monks, Stevenson writes, “…threaten(ed) me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death in many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, robbers…were daily and eloquently forced on my attention. Yet…the true, patent danger was left out.”

I’m reminded immediately of all the warnings I received of wolves and bears in Turkey while no practical advice was ever offered about true annoyances and hazards to the bike tourist: steep slopes without ground to camp on, no running water in the next 30 kilometers, asphalt so bumpy it’s as bad as cobblestones, and hunters who drive the roads at night with loaded rifles aimed into the bushes.

And the same mis-prioritized system of cautioning tourists occurs in the Republic of Georgia, where I toured for three weeks in 2010 and never received a single word of caution about the perils of the highways, which in Georgia are exceedingly dangerous. I recall the day I entered Georgia from northeast Turkey. In the first mile I saw two vehicles run oncoming cars off the road and onto the shoulder as they made harrowing attempts to pass others, all parties honking wildly at the others. I grew accustomed to simply ignoring this madness of the Georgian highway. But it would have been nice if someone had kindly warned me, “My friend, watch out on the road or we’ll run you down!”

But almost all I heard about, time and again, was the threat of Armenians and wolves. So feared were the latter of these enemies that on one particular night 10 grim-faced people stood around me in the street, all excitedly chattering about wolves. A girl who spoke English said that a pair of folks in eastern Georgia had been killed by wolves recently. These people had their way, in the end, and I was taken to a home. “Can I sleep out here in the yard?” I asked as we entered the gate. “Wolves,” they answered and stuffed me into a dark room with two snoring men.

The next evening, as I camped high in the Lesser Caucasus Mountains, I heard howling in the wind, across the hills.

I later did some research, and guess what? Fatal wolf attacks did indeed occur in Georgia in 2009 and 2010. In the Balkans, I received bear warnings in 2009, though no one spoke much about the landmines—which are, thankfully, clearly announced by ominous signs bearing skulls and the word “Mines.” As for the feared Turkish bears, two people were killed by them between 2003 and 2008. Still, I wasn’t a bit nervous when I encountered a whopping pile of scat in the hill country just south of Bursa this October.

No warning needed: A huge pile of scat announces the presence of bears.

But as I read through the Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook from the comforts of home, I’m pleased to find that Mr. Lord is all business and reason; the threat of bears is not even discussed. And Stevenson in his Cevennes account further wins my approval when he writes, “I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more than any wolf.”

The great Selimiye Mosque of Edirne.

The Greeks wouldn’t have me. The two men at the border checkpoint just west of Zlatograd took one look at my passport and pointed me right back into Bulgaria. The problem, near as I could understand, was that the Zlatograd customs office had run out of ink for stamping visas. This was ridiculous, but they insisted that only E.U. citizens could currently use this port between Greece and Bulgaria; I would need to go northeastward to Svilengrad, where Bulgaria touches both Greece and Turkey. Here, the men promised, I would be welcomed with state-of-the-art visa-stamping gear.

“How far to Svilengrad?” I asked. The one who answered winced as he did: “Two-hundred kilometers.”

I went northeast across a landscape that transformed quickly from the green and abundant Rhodope Mountains into a sad, dusty plain with lonely villages where men sipped espresso from disposable cups and watched plastic bags bound past like tumbleweeds. There were no thriving plazas or vast heaps of watermelons, no hotels, no beautiful forests, no icy fountains, no tourists. Flies harried me every time I stopped, and the only relief came by continuously moving. I blasted through the drab desert city of Kardzhali and past Perperikon and Monek fortresses and finally slept in an almond grove on a hilltop.

The agents at the Svilengrad border booth had first-rate, no-nonsense stamping equipment and plenty of ink.

“Hey, your colleagues in Zlatograd could use a liter of that black stuff,” I might have joked if I’d known how.

A 90-day, multiple-entry tourist visa for Turkey runs $20—about 35 Turkish Lira—and with a quick passport inspection and a thump of the stamp, you’re in. From Bulgaria into Turkey, the brown, weary landscape continues unabated—but lo! What’s this ahead? Gilded Oz-like spires spear the sky above the clutter and activity of a large city emerging in the dusty haze. Edirne!

In this beautiful old town, the huge Selimiye Mosque is the premiere sight to stare at, with its great central dome cornered by four sky-high spires. It’s behind the Old Mosque, however—humble, worn, faded, outperformed in almost every way—that I find a huge fig tree in the garden adjacent to the plaza. The large black fruits are exceptional, and just a quick tussle with the branches can produce enough for dinner.

Melons come in heaps in Turkey.

But nothing brings refreshment when one is thirsty, famished and sweltering like a watermelon. In the heat of the next afternoon, I collapsed half dead under a tree, pulled out knife and spoon and put away a ten-pounder, clean down to the white rind. I lay inert and immobilized for 25 minutes as my body absorbed the sugar and juices. It worked like gummi bear juice: I bounced back onto the asphalt and devoured 30 more miles of highway before meeting a pair of westbound South Korean cyclists sitting under the only tree for a mile around. I pulled over and joined them. One, a journalist named Moon, told me he’s been working his way around the globe by bike for five years. He sleeps for free any way he can and sends home travel stories from his laptop to pay his meager bills, though he has had some substantial monetary setbacks; in Latin America he was robbed five times, and he is now on his third bicycle.

That evening as I ate a fruit salad with white cheese, a man walked into my bush camp with a gun, marched straight at me as I gaped in shock and sprawled out beside me on my tarp. He set the shotgun between us and said, “Don’t mind me,” like some absurd character in a sitcom. He waved the back of his hand as he looked over my possessions. “Eat your dinner. Read your book.” He seemed to be missing a few screws, and there was something unnervingly absent-minded about him: He grabbed my water bottle and shook it, flipped through my journal, tried to read my postcards, wrote me his address so I could send him one (“Sure, thing, pal”), squeezed the front tire of my bike. Then, he pulled a huge slug from his pocket and loaded his gun. I bolted upright in alarm—but without a word or a glance, the man stood and walked into the darkness. Gunshots echoed all night in the hills until a distant prayer call announced it was morning.

I moved promptly. Next stop: Istanbul, 110 miles away.

My bicycle, ready for its Bulgarian adventure. Photo by the author

Two times while cycling in Greece on lengthy solo tours I have entered a range of mountains that crosses the northeastern edge of the nation. The dark slopes were blanketed with pines, and thunderheads skulked among the peaks. And each time as I ascended into the gloomy, chilly heights, a strange apprehension crept over me, spooking me back into sunny, familiar Greece and leaving the mysterious Balkan nation on the north side a blank place on my cognitive world map.

But for the past hour I’ve been perusing a borrowed Lonely Planet guidebook, gleaning the essential vocabulary and phraseology for where I’m finally going:  Bulgaria. I leave in 24 hours and must know when I arrive how to say “where,” “how far,” “village,” kilometers,” “alone,” “water,” “figs,” “road to____” and “cheese.” Some numbers and a few pronouns, too, will facilitate a smooth journey, which will begin just as soon as I reassemble my bicycle in the Sofia airport, ride out of the city and make my getaway into the nearest hills to camp—maybe to the Vitosha Nature Park, a wilderness just a few miles south of town.

Why Bulgaria? Several reasons: First, I’ve never been there. Second, Bulgaria is situated in what I perceive as the “Old World Fig Belt”—a magical land where the confluence of Mediterranean climate and ancient agrarian culture produce a bounty of free figs to be eaten along nearly any roadside, and what on a thousand-mile bicycle ride is better than that? Third, I’m attracted to Bulgaria because of its mountains—several ranges low enough to be green but high enough to be wild. (That truest signature of a wild place even lives in Bulgaria’s mountains—the brown bear, Ursus arctos, between 600 and 1000 animals in two distinct populations.) Fourth, Bulgaria is eastern enough not to be mundanely western, northern enough not to crush me with heat, and southern enough not be promiscuously rainy.

I’ve had it with this Lonely Planet book. Traveling should be a form of learning, but this darn guidebook keeps blowing Bulgaria’s secrets. I just read, for instance, that espresso is prevalent in coffee-loving Bulgaria. That’s great news—but wouldn’t it have been a wonderful surprise for me to discover this on my own after arriving with a stomach steeled for Nescafe? I also have learned from these pages that Bulgarians nod for no and shake their heads for yes. This is key and vital information—yet slapstick comedy could have gotten no finer than if I had arrived in Sofia no wiser than I was an hour ago. I’ll sneak a few more vocabulary basics from this book, then close it and let the adventures begin.

Bulgaria is layered with relics and shadows of the Thracians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Bulgars, the Ottoman Turks and the Soviet era. Democracy resumed in 1989, and now modernity has befallen this freshly inaugurated member of the European Union. For better or for worse, resorts are now appearing rapidly on both Black Sea beaches and mountainsides—yet I will dodge them. I intend to camp “rough” in the shrubbery most nights, and since Bulgaria occupies 42,823 square miles of the Earth’s surface while containing just 7 million people, rough camping should be easy. What I mean is, consider Italy, where 60 million souls occupy 116,000 square miles: 515 people per square mile. The United Kingdom is even denser, with 660 people per square mile. India, spare me, has 900-plus. But Bulgaria’s population density measures out at a quiet 160 folks per square mile (with, sadly, only a hundredth of a bear per square mile).

I box my bike tonight and fly out at dawn. I bring with me a sleeping bag, a toothbrush, a pocketknife, a journal, a corkscrew and other select items. I pack along, too, a piece of advice handed to me from another experienced cyclist: “If you go Bulgaria,” he said grimly, “God defend you, and bring a spear. The dogs are the devil.” Yikes. Is it too late for London?