Turkey

March 20th.
One 30 dollar visa later, and I’m in.
Borders are often defined by some distinct geographical change and the landscape shift here is that the mountains come right up to the very coastline, leaving the barest squeeze of space for a road to cling onto the side of the steep cliffs.
Automatically I am reminded of Japan with the combination of sea lush green steep hills and distant snowy mountain tops that ocassionally pop into view.
The road is spacious and horizontal. I had been told by numerous cyclists (who of course have all come from the opposite direction west to east) had all insisted that the road was really easy… my introduction to Turkey is of gale force gusting head wind and heavy driving rain. At the first small town most people seemed to be ducking for cover, peering out doubtfully wondering when it might be sensible or not to attempt to go home.
Doing the same I think twice about riding, and then, probably rather stupidly, decide to go for it.
At some point in the day I arrive in the small town of ‘Hopa’ where I attempt to buy a warming cup of tea and a big plateful of something hot. Between my total lack of Turkish, me looking like a walking disaster zone and the teenagers running the cafe clearly not grasping the severity of the weather, they at first succeed in providing me with a barely warm burger and pretty much nothing else.
Do you have pizza?
No.
Surprising as this supposed to be a pizzeria.
Can I have chai?
No.
No chai? The surrounding hills are full of tea bushes, and you have no tea? Oh for fucks sake. Are you being willfully useless?
I point at someone eles soup. No denying the existence of that. I get soup. Very very lovely it is too. Somewhere between pumpkin and roasted hazelnuts. And a coffe appears. Okay. This is better.
I had hoped that my rain battered appearance would have spoken for itself; any person my own age would have gone ‘oh my goodness! I must cradle you gently and pander to your every whim!’
But these are teenagers. And teenage girls go clubbing on freezing February friday nights wearing almost nothing. I am sure it stunts brain cell functioning…
After the cafe I go to thevsupermaket opposite and load up on cake cheese and fruit. I am not generally a big fan of cake, but the circumstances demand it if I am to continue for much further.
Back on the bike;
The weathers beating is ceaseless. And way on down the roaf, finding a camping spot is not easy. A nonstop barrier separates both sides of the road so straightaway my options are cut by half. That leaves the bits between the road and the sea. Which amounts to almost nothing. No quiet little side roads off the main drag here; left is a wall of rock, and to my right the almost immediate sea. only sporadic scraps of litter-strewn grass right next to the road and the large sea defence rocks… the latter being where I pitch up on my first night in Turkey.
Mercifully by late evening the rain has ceased. Having spent the night wearing nothing and wrapped in two patchily damp sleeping bags and not having the warmest of kips, by morning the sun is rising, unhampered by rain. Its warm and all my wet stuff (ie everything) gets laid out on the defences to steam gently until dry…
The next day is march 21st and the first day of spring, and by the laws of all things right and proper, the weather behaves itself.
In Rize I visit a cafe, ostensibly to do wifi comms but end up chatting over numerous cups of very good chay with the cafes manager a friendly chap who speaks reasonably good English on account of having run a hotel down on the agean coast for many years. Now he’s packed that in to do the same up here…
I leave his pleasant company to get myself out of Rize before it gets a chance to get dark. No camping in citys for me.
I find a little village sitting on a tunnel bypass route and after some effort find a good spot for camping.
March 22nd
In the morning its raining, so I sit and write this. I notice now that as I arrive at finishing this sentance, I can no longer hear the rain on my tent. This seems then a good place to stop for the moment…

Sunday 26th march.
Having a morning in bed. In tent. I watched ‘My Dinner With Andre’ last night, an existentialist film, two failing playwrights discussing the meaning of life over quails and fish terrine in a posh new york restaurant. Sounds like it should be dull but it was fascinating…. why do we just slip into easily identifiable roles that dull our minds instead of actually being awake to every moment? Good question.
I roll from one place to another; covering approxiamately 65kms a day. Sometimes people want me to stop, and I don’t; got to make sure I do my 65kms! Nothing is going to stand in my way….
Heading on average in a westerly direction I have decided I like Turkey. Its a refreshing change from the crumbling state of Georgia. For much of the time I was in Tbilisi I was in love with the place with its piled up tattered old buildings and medieval looking old women… but by the time I had passed through many mountain villages, the site of half its buildings being in some advanced state of demise coupled with the stony looking faces about me, Georgia finally became depressing. That was the mountains. Towards the coast the weather warmed and houses looked considerably more intact and so did its people.
Crossing into Turkey from Sarpi to Sarp, a village split in two (how does that work?) Everything of course looked exactly the same, but I am struck by just how much Turkey, certainly on the coast anyway, isn’t broken.
Mongolia was a country that seemed to have risen out of the mud; ulaan baatar was a soviet experiment in rotten concrete… Tajikistan was a country so poor that it barely had anything that could be be left to crumble (except dushanbe which was apparently built last week). Uzbekistan was a place I felt of simple elegance, but thats possibly more a measure of where my own head was at.
Actau was a twentieth century oil town blip and Azerbaijan was a blanked out horror story of slushy snow and deeply unfriendly dogs.
On the Joy of Facebook.

Monday 27th march.
I wake up camped out a mile from the busy main road. The incessant all day ear-crashing sound of traffic now dulled to a distance.
Instead I find myself completely surrounded by a vast hazelnut plantation swathed in early morning birdsong and a deep mist that is condensing to invisible droplets of rain that I only know are there because I can hear them softly pattering on my tent fly. A faraway mullah welcomes in the day with his ullulations to complete this wonderous atmosphere.
Since the middle of December my desire to write has dried up. What I have been writing has been cleaved awkwardly from a sense of duty to habit…. what I have started must always be continued… in that time, with unlimited internet access in Georgia and whilst staying in hotels in India, I have become obsessed with the machinations of donald trump… the combined effect of his miserabilist fascistic would-be power wielding and my own internet addiction of scouring for trump gossip squeezing every last bit of possibility out of facebook has meant my own dull decline out of the reality around me, with only one foot seni-engaged in it much of the time.
Upon my arrival in Turkey amidst the most dreadful wind and rain, I had in the appropriately named Hopa attempted to buy a sim card for my phone so that I might continue to feed my internet habit… in the Vodaphone shop I bought the card, paid 90 Turkish lira (twenty quid) for 5 gigabytes of data. Except the electric was off… I was assured that my card would be activated as soon as the electricity was restored. When would that be? Ooh, maybe about an hour or two… definitely before 5pm.
Five days later, I still have no internet on my phone only an irritating little message telling me that my card is invalid, which pops up as often as it can possibly manage. It would seem.
On passing the first other Vodaphone shop I have seen, some 300kms further west along the coast, I present my non fully functioning phone to an obliging young man… various phone calls, much keyboard tapping and 45 minutes later, I am told that I need to pay another 120 lira to have my foreign phone registered…
Upon reflection, secretly I have been cursing my mental ascent up the arse of the internet, obssessing about how I might still maintain contact with friends without being obliged to soak up every bit of life-fluff they and their friends I have never even heard of are posting for all to see…
I take out the sim card and give it to the helpful young lad. He can have it. He is very happy to be given it. He now has access to five gibberbytes of information overload for free. He is welcome to it.
Problem solved. I hope.
I can grab free bits of wifi (or wee-fee as the turks call it) in petrol stations and hotels should I require it. No more evenings spent looking for trump latests… now I can do something else; watch a film. Read a book. Or would you believe it, I could in fact do neither and exist without my phone and actually engage with the evening around me.
When I first started this trip more than a year ago, I was dismayed that everywhere I went in hostels and hotels, restaurants and cafes in India, I could not find anyone to talk to. The reason? All around me, every potential interesting conversation with any person from almost anywhere in the world was thwarted by the fact that they were on either uploading their photos, writing their amazing blog or more interested in facebook.
At the time I felt that something monumentally worthwhile had died. The opportunity to see new worlds, enjoy new perspectives, escape from the comfort zone and become a newly enboldened person by the magical experience of encounters in the new and unknown.
Murdered by the internet.
Yes, we are all going to go and see the taj mahal, and yes we are all going to travel a long way on an uncomfortable Indian train. But none of it is really real. It becomes half-observed through the lens of what we can show our ‘friends’ on facebook or on our blogs.
A chap called louis whom I spent some time with in Georgia wrote a blog piece. It was incredibly verbose and rather intense. But what he wrote struck a deep chord with me…
Do I visit these places only to write my all-important travel blog? To provide entertainment for my followers? Does that mean then that I travel for their benefit or my own? At what point can I call this a truly selfish experience?
Who needs actual connection and precious memories when you can bludgeon your senses with yet another forgetable selfie?
It bothered me at the time. I was deep in trumpland and begrudgingly writing stiff vacuuous nothings, barely enough to cover my tracks. All reflection gone.
When I started out on this trip, I cared about my own fame and my own glory. I basked in the adorations of those few who told me via facebook that what I was doing was a Marvellous Thing. Of course I sucked it all up, and somewhere along the line I unwittingly started playing the game and became the internet addict eager to tell every momentous detail of my Marvelous Thing.
The irony was, that I was sharing hostels with ‘travellers’ in China, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, uzbekistan and Georgia who were almost none of them really interested in talking to each other, all booking into the same cheapest hostel as defined by booking.com and all of them up the arses of their phones and laptops blogging about their Marvellous Thing.
No-one ever sat round a fire drinking beers. Nobody ever played a guitar. Nothing ever descended into a drunken wild party that I will never forget. Nothing unexpected and wonderful happened. Ever. Just dormitorys full of international silents with their heads bent to their screens, the silhouettes of which look like the once living, now hung by the neck by a rope.
No wonder I couldn’t be bothered to write a blog anymore.
Yesterday I sat for thirty minutes whilst an unusually large stripey-spiralled snail uncurled itself from sleep. It was the most interesting thing I had seen in ages.

Tuesday 28th march.
So the journal entry for yesterday monday 27th march gets posted on facebook. Yes. Spot the hypocritical ironic ambiguity. Various comments came back varying from agreement and sympathetic opinion to just plain sympathy for the mashed up fuckhead that I am currently being. Probably. Weelll… its all been stirring in me for ages and I was done with being polite about it all. I rather hope it might shift something in me, even if its only my writers block.

The road into Samsun is hideously ugly. Its been raining all morning and I’m starting to get cold. I had met some sweet iranian cyclists who had decided to jack it in for the day and go and find somewhere warm and dry to spendcthe rest of the day. After they had gone this struck me as a singularly intelligent move. Also I couldn’t understand why their bikes were spotlessly clean and free from mud. My bike was covered in crap. Having booked a hotel (the cheapest one, as per booking.com of course) I made my way towards Samsun. It was cold. It was raining. It seemed the road was filled with a million trucks. Hotel; good move.
Grey polluted water pools everywhere hiding broken tarmac and minor pot holes. Barren grimy industrial estates pass me by; the smells of diesel, hot plastic, frying chicken, a warehouse full of new sellotape. Strangely, I rather enjoy the smells of industry. I guess they are quite exotic for a terminal loafer such as myself.
I shall forever associate the combined smells of diesel, hot mouldering cut grass heaps and layers of old sweat trapped in my dads hat with his endlessly toiling ethic. I love the smell. He was a good bloke my dad.
I get lost. Messing around trying to find the right way by using my phone in the rain is awkward. Its all done with soggy plastic bags, rapidly numbing fingers, steamed up glasses and a drip on my nose.
The outskirts of Samsun are grimy and grim. The centre is worth the effort. Not old or historic but thriving, and thriving is always good. What is immediately apparent is Turkeys broad range of lovely high quality food. Shops full of herbs and nuts look and smell marvellous. Fresh locally grown fruit is stacked high. Oranges, apples, apricots, dates. Whats noticable is that the only thing that shows any sign of having been imported are some of the bananas with their little tell-tale oval labels.
Turkey, once an empire, is clearly still capable of providing for itself; a true bread basket nation. And speaking of bread…. Turkish loaves are huuuuge. Takes me a day to get through one… lovely chewy round loaves 14 inches in diameter and six inches high in the middle. Soft fluffy yummy white insides with wonderfully chewy crusts that take quite some effort to bite through. Hmmmm!

In the Divan Otel, in my room everything wet gets spread out to dry. I have my first wash since entering Turkey 7 days ago. I must stink.
I arrange to meet Nathan somewhere west of here in four days time probably about 150kms away.
Leaving the next day, heading inland from the coast is clearly going to be an uphill battle. Excepting a couple of downhill drops, one minor, the second major, I cycle upwards for 55kms. Surprisingly, its not too difficult. But then thats one of the few advantages of specifically taking a big noisy road designed to cause the least struggle for trucks. The 700kms to Istanbul is going to be noisy and not at all the intimate experience of taking quieter back roads. So why don’t I take the back roads? Because its all mountains and hills like the lumpiest bits of Wales you ever saw. Bolleaux to that.
At the end of my day, still tangling with my own facebook fuckup palarver, I discover that my rear wheel has a crack in the rim. Bugger. Either I freewheel all the way back to Samsun and get a new rim/wheel or I bodge it and scarper. Currently thinking to bridge the weak area by aralditing some nails or other sturdy bits of metal across it all. Either way its going to need replacing at some point. Cant say I fancy my rear wheel unexpectedly exploding whilst roaring down some bloody great hill. I thought I heard something go crack yesterday. That must have been what it was. Poo poo.
Wednesday 29th march.
By all the laws of logic, today should have been a bit crap, what with beginning my day with my near-exploding rear wheeled bike lying on the grass outside my tent waiting for me.
I thought I was going to stash the bike at the first available petrol station and hitch hike back to Samsun and attempt to rectify the near-mashed wheel in either one of the citys two bike shops.
Instinct told me not to bother. It seemed most likely that if a city only has two bike shops then the likelihood of even one of them being able to change a rim would be minimal.
I go for the bodge it and scarper option. Out comes the trusty epoxy and along with a cannibalised jubilee clip chopped up for its flattened out bracing potential, on it all goes in a big black sticky messy lump. Either its going to work or its not.
The sun has come out and its so totally lovely I am back to shorts and only my shirt for the first time in the north since bukhara in uzbekistan. Hurrah!
Enjoying the warmth, I remind myself that today is about 95 percent likely to be one of those days where I have to stop every two hundred metres to attend to some new and mysterious irritation emanating from the bike somewhere. Mentally braced, it occurs to me to remove the over-snugly fitting mudguard. With an even slightly buckled back wheel all its ever going to do is rub. So I take the bugger off, stash the stays in a pannier and tie the half mudguard piggy-backed onto the front mudguard. Ha! gotcha!
About three minutes after I set off on the main road, a car stops in front of me and the chap driving gets out, tells me has part of a cycling club in a town not far off my route and that if I need any assistance I should call him. With his hand on his heart he states that just wants to help me, whatever help I might need.
What a gentleman. With him as a safety net beneath my days endeavourings, I feel my burden lightened. I feel like he is an angel. In two days I will meet up with Nathan who is bringing my new tent and more importantly, a jar of Marmite. The sun is warm. I have people around me. I have had nice responses to my facebook wibble. I feel happy. Even though my wheel might yet still explode…
Something in me shifts. My sense of urgency, worthless in the face of uncertainty, is obliged to evaporate. Two elderly gentlemen at a petrol station summons me to drink chay with them. This happens every day in Turkey but usually I just wave people off and continue on my way.
I have already spent an entire morning farting about with the bike. A cup of tea in the sun with a couple of old duffers isnt going to make any difference…
And relax….
Where the day before had been 90 percent up, today is rather obligingly 90 percent down, so I still manage to make up my daily quotent of 50 to 60kms.
I come away from the road to camp, finding my way through a squiddly little farm village, all lime plaster and old fashionedness and away into a quieter nearby field.
I have noticed that turks are very keen on keeping chickens. They free range everywhere. Chickens make a roundabout look more beautiful.
As the sun begins to set some bird new to me but old to the landscape twitters its ‘I’m going to bed now’ song. Distant dogs bark (as usual) and a shepherd and three young lads slowly manoevre two separate flocks of rather handsome sheep; not the fat-arsed weird sheep of Central Asia but normal, proper sheep-shaped sheep. As the sun sets behind them, the light glows a white aura round their fleeces and I am put in mind of the sheep paintings of the pre-raphaelite painter william holman-hunt.

I have decided that I like Turkey. As usually turns out to be the case, the country that I am visiting only because its on the way to somewhere else is proving to be very lovely.
Turkish people are very friendly (certainly more friendly than the Georgian mountain grumpsters), Turkish food is elaborate and varied and yummy, the scenery seems to ever-changing from coastal hills to mountains and flat bits. So far no dogs have attacked me. Thats nice. Lets keep it that way please.
I am finding it most refreshing that Turkey is actually intact; every country I went to after China has been in some state of partial deleriliction, and Georgia was by far the most bombed-out looking of all of them.
Turkish buildings all have their rooves and all their windows. No mangled sticky-out bits of steel bar and piles of rotting broken concrete for the turks. I am surprised how much Turkey reminds me of Japan. Its the landscape that does it I think.
Okay enough of this. Time to watch a film. Tonight a 1964 English imagining of what england would have been like if we had lost the second world war.
Good night.

Thursday 30th march.
In gumushacikoy (now in my top three of excellent place names) I met a black furry flying beetle who landed on my hand in order to help me eat my tomato sauce flavoured crisps.
Today was a lovely day. The sun was warm and I had an all day tailwind driving me along a perfect tarmac semi-motorway with not too much traffic and plently of space. I rose up very long gentle inclines followed by equally long gentle declines sufficient to induce in me the most minimal effort. Not only that, but the scenery was stunning. Varying widely from sharply sticking up oddments of rocky outcrops topped with stranded pines.. (it looked like it was straight out of one of those classic Japanese prints), through tunnels and out onto following alongside a broad winding river nestled in alongside newly ploughed fields, sprouting wheat and sometimes tree-filled hedgerows. Sometimes layered in terraces; sometimes Japanese and sometimes very English. Herefordshire maybe.
As well as meeting a hungry furry beetle, stopping for lunch I had a fly-by from what might have been a hummingbird. Or a speedy hummingbird-shaped thing anyway.
A storks nest; an unlikely looking object, a massive shaggy raggedy thing perched directly on top of a telegraph pole, looking like the worlds biggest mop head. Here, there is only its nest (adopt best hushed David Attenborough tones), but the nest itself is riddled with burrows into which a few dozen finches have also made their own nests. Some way further on the next day another identical storks nest sits precariously on top of a telegraph pole. This time the stork is home, a magnifient sleek white bird preening itself and keeping its beady eye on me as I take a photo or two. In contrast to this regal bird, again beneath a dozen or so minion finches flitter and twitter about busily. In the world of symbiosis my guess would be that the combined body heat of dozens of finches is going to keep an otherwise exposed large stork nest rather cosy. There would have to be some pay off for putting up with all that relentless busyness.
I pitch my tent behind an enormous outcrop of rock to hide me from the noise of the main road. I am pitched next to soft brown new plughed fields next to the river. Nestled into the mountainous silhoetting skyline an old village on the opposite bank has a sky blue mosque sitting vividly in its middle, its fingered tower pointing up to a new moon that is aimed directly above.
As twilight draws in, I am repeatedly investigated by a solitary bat. It flickers back and forth in and out of the rising dark.

I had been marginally dreading Turkey. I had been told tales of vicious nasty dogs and hordes of small boys eager to de-bike me with rocks. I must be doing something wrong cuz I haven’t had any such encounters. Hang on; I am only half way…
Entering from the north east was tea growing country. Steep slopes bore the regular bold green haircut of millions of neatly trimmed bushes; they stand about half a metre high and get cropped four times a year. I want to grow my own tea should I ever end up living back in england.
Beyond Trabzon heading west tea is replaced by thousands of acres of hazelnut plantations. The Ulker chocolate factory is here in the middle; a standard use for hazelnuts is to make Chococrem and other Nutella-type yummies. I have since learned to stop buying chococrem as all that happens is come of an evening I just sit in my tent and finger my way through an entire tub in one go…
Turkey has more chickens than anywhere else I have been, ever. They patrol grass-bare front gardens, roadsides. No splattages mid tarmac. Why did the chicken cross the road? Well actually I don’t think it did. Clearly they are much smarter than people generally give them credit for.
Samsum, upon my exit, featured at the top of a long hot sweaty urban climb, a vast statue about 5 metres long of a pheasant. Don’t ask me why.
So; chickens and pheasants, but no turkeys. Why anyone would choose to name their country after a largely inedible and rather ridiculous bird is weird anyway. And surely the country in between Turkey and Hungary should be called ‘Burp-whoops-sorry-i-think-i-ate-your-dinner-if-its-any-consolation-it-wasnt-all-that-tasty-land’. I guess ‘Bulgaria’ is just easier.
Upon reflection, Turkey really ought to be re-named ‘Chicken’.

I am excited! I am due to meet up with Nathan again… not knowing how far I am going to get and where our paths will actually cross, we wifi each other and re-arrange meeting points three times.
Eventually (after a small nail decides to give me a flat tyre) we meet and he hands me my new tiny tiny tent and my new tiny tiny sleeping mat. In our chat about his brand new land rover that he has driven all the way from belgium and other things, he asks me what I thought of Georgia.
After telling him how shocked I was by some of the decreptitude in the mountains, he offers this explanation:
When the soviets took over Georgia, the mountain herdsmen were naturally resistant to being ‘collectivised’. As a punishment, the soviets deliberately split up families sending half down into the valleys to work in cotton factories and the other half were forced to live in artificially created new towns. On my second day of cycling, on my way to David Geredi monastry, I had encountered a particularly wrecked looking village called Udabno which Nathan now informs me means ‘desert’.
I had wondered at the time why on earth there should be a town in the middle of nowhere that seemed to produce nothing. Now it made sense. It also explained why the streets of Tbilisi were filled with begging old people who had fled these places after the fall of communism to come to the city but were now left with nothing.

Saturday April 1st.
First night in my new tent.
Loads more space! Loads of condensation! Ahh…. i’ll figure it out. I am knackered. Taking the morning off. Possibly some of the afternoon too.
Bleeaur.
I have already passed through several places eligible for top ten placings for best place names. Yesterday I passed through: ‘Zincurlikulu’, ‘Karasapaca’ and the previously mention ‘ Gumushacikoy’.
I have been trying to locate Cappadocia, one of Turkey’s most famous and well-known tourist attractions (Nathan thinks it’s in the north east next to Georgia, previous investigations makes me think it’s halfway between Ankara and the Syrian border. An old man at a service station pointed to about twelve different places on the agean coast where he thinks it could possibly be). During the course of not finding it I do discover instead a place called ‘Batman’. Now if there wasnt some sort of homage to the caped crusader himself I really would be shocked.
I would go there, but it would be a there-and-back journey of about 1600kms. And probably all I would find when I got there would be some bored old men, some even more bored sheep trying to eat sand and huffy-puffy women strutting about making sure that everyone gets some sort of dinner tonight.
So I won’t go there, I won’t see that and I won’t buy the tee shirt.
A splodge of a day, only 15kms further on from myvstart point, I have lunch at a restaurant at a point where my route meets the road to Ankara. An investigation via my phone finally reveals the exact whereabouts of Cappadocia. Its 150 kms south east of Ankara. So I was right after all.
Do I go or don’t I? Part of me just wants to push on and get to Holland asap so I can still do the santiago de compostella walk. Then again I have been wanting to go to Cappadocia for abput the last twenty years. Im sort of in the area. Id be an idiot not to go.
Can the hotel next door stash my bike for a week? Yes, says a very sweet young lady with fully operational English. How much do I need to to pay you? Nothing. Is there a coach to Ankara? Yes. In 45 minutes. It can pick you up 200 metres from here. I will book a seat for you.
Wow. That was swift. I hastily book a room for Ankara, aiming to get an onward coach to Cappadocia the next morning.
The coach journey is like travelling in an eletric toaster with the heating on full and when I get to the bus station in Ankara when I attempt to locate the hotel I have booked it seems to no longer exist. Bugger. Now what? One mind-calming pot of yoghurt and a bag of crisps later I walk back to the bus station. Its 11pm.
When’s the next bus to Cappadocia please? 1am. So a short wait then another night ride in another electric toaster coach. Arriving at the main town of Nevshehir, we are swiftly transferred to a free shuttle bus to the place of choice. I go to avanos in the northern end of Cappadocia. Its 5am.
Arriving in avanos I stick my tent up in a strip of park next to a river and get some serious zeds in whilst I still can.
Waking four hours later, my day isnt really in motion. My brains not really working and the post office I was hoping to post off my old tent and sleeping mat isnt open; it’s sunday. Shite. Now what? An ice cream, a sit and another sleep.
By 1pm I have had a brain invigorating lunch, gone to mcdonalds for a chocolate milkshake, free wifi and plan making for my trip here.
By 2 I’m sorted. I get the bus to goreme; I had a spectacular picture on my phone that id had for ages. I showed it to the guy whod brought my lunch. Wheres this? ‘Goreme’ he’d said.
At goreme I set out to walk to an open air museum.
**CAPPADOCIA AND KAYMAKLI UNDERGROUND CITY**
I am back at the hotel in Ilgaz where my bike is by 2pm. After a somewhat gobbledygook conversation with a stand in hotel guy, I finally get my bike back.

The week that follows is a continual rollercoaster road, still on the D100. Gradually the magnificent mountain and rolling hills become more populated and roads more busy with lorries. Every day it’s stripey weather; rain; not rain; rain; not rain; rain… and headwinds. Mostly the headwinds are fairly gentle thank goodness.
I have a new tent. Made with 20 denier silpoly without a net liner. Its very light. Its also a condensation nightmare. Until I figure out how to deal with it. Its great to be able to sit up inside it to do my sit without having to do it outside in all weathers. My previous tent was a bivvy tent that weighed almost twice as much.
The closer I get to Istanbul the denser the traffic. The D100, already a dual carriageway becomes also the O4; a motorway, and the two run alongside each other and snake about and criss cross as they both pass towns and hills. As the landmass physically narrows, there seem to be no gentle alternate routes. In a way I don’t mind, at least I am getting to Istanbul fairly directly. Ish. What makes it complicated is my trying to figure out how to get onto the local service roads that run parallel as often as possible… dual carriageways are dull and noisy whilst the service roads are mostly less frenetic though not necessarily safer. Bus drivers seem to have noticably less regard for cyclists than truck drivers, and having to negotiate many more junctions and slip roads is something that requires total attention at all times.
Today probably I will reach Istanbul, though actually I am aiming to get a ferry in xxxxx to go to a small island, xxxxxx. Whilst in Ankara, I had met a greek fitness instructor in the hostel and he had recommended the island. Not only did it have a really good cycle mechanic, the kind that does his job out of passion, but also that the island is car-free. I can’t wait! And the ferry is only 5 Turkish lira too (about 1.25 pounds.)
A day or two in Istanbul, and then (gulp) I cross the straits into Europe. Goodbye Asia. You’ve been good for me. Though I think I am ready for Europe now. I think. Hang on I haven’t even got to Istanbul yet…

Monday April 10th full moon.
Today was an endless weave through industrial estates and urban chaos… surprisingly I rather enjoyed it. It made a nice change to have plenty of variety in my day but I am pretty sure I wouldnt want to do it all the time. Highlights of the day were the very many cats that called the shorefront promenade, so along with picnicking families with wobbly toddlers and young couples holding hands, old men sitting smoking fags whilst staring out at the sea, keep fit joggers and sort-of cyclists, cats stalked territory known only in their minds; super-imposed over the human one. Cats lounged, smiled at small children, ate scraps of tossed kebab, licked their nether regions and did cat politics whereby they just sat and out-stared each other. Along the way, there were even a few little yellow cat houses perched on the sea defence boulders.
This is just before I reach the ferry for buyukada which leaves from bostanci. Will there be a ferry? I have no idea. The sea is calm and it’s broad daylight. Its only just gone 6.30pm.
I pay 5.50 lira for me and the same again for the bike.
20 minutes to cross and here I am; there are two cars at the portside and thats it. Eveyone else is getting about on bikes, electric scooters, little electric buggys and horse and carts. In half an hour I have cycled to the other end of the island and managed to make camp just as the sun is going down. Phew. Long day. Good ‘un too. Tomorrows mission: find a bike mechanic to sort out my rear wheel.
Tuesday April 11th.
I finish the tiny loop of tarmac that girdles the island. I think that if you went flat out on a racer you could probably get all the way round in about twenty minutes.
Back in the town I manage with minimal effort to find Turgay (‘tour-guy’) the mountain and sports bike specialist. He glances at my bike and promptly declares that he doesnt have the replacement parts I need. Fair enough. Bikes have a tendancy toward an irritatingly high degree of non-standardisation.
He points me off to an old fella just a hundred metres down the street… every shop is either a cafe or a bike shop. That coupled with the milling throng of a hundred nonchalantly ownerless cats and the even more milling throng of wobbling and randomly weaving would-be cyclists it’s a chaotic bohemian heaven.
Then add to the mix a regular quantity of no-nonsense paired horse and carriages which come bombing through at a dominating ten miles an hour and you have an non-engined version of traditional Asian urban chaos.
Once, about thirty years ago I visited Christine my girlfriend at the time in Utrecht and the conditions were similar; I was on foot and she instructed me to obey the pecking order or get scrunched. I was to look out for and dodge the unexpected movements of cyclists who not only were they coming from the ‘wrong’ direction (along with everything else) they would also be getting out of the way of cars. And the cars were busy dodging the trams, and the trams werent dodging anything mate so you’d better bloody shift out of the way. I visited Utrecht again in 2016 and the dutch seemed to have completed their mission to make the city a safe and friendly place to move about in. It was 8am and there were almost no cars at all in the city centre. Only a few delivery vans. It was peaceful and lovely. I checked the date on a newspaper. Maybe I had come here on a sunday by mistake. Nope. Definitely a busy working monday morning. Maybe the dutch were all still in bed smoking giant spliffs, eating pancakes and having wild group sex with their neighbours. All at the same time. Maybe not. Can the dutch be the town planners for everywhere please?
Here I was, narrowly avoiding getting mown down by horses (really!) Whilst trying to avoid the young Turks who are clearly not a nation of natural cyclists; about 1 in five seemed to be managing a straight line and only half of them had worked out how to be in something other than bottomest gear… watch their little knees pumping away like crazy bless ’em.
And then the cats. Clearly they had worked out how to dodge between the human topsy-turving without losing their tails whilst flitting between their cadging food from be-seated cafe customers. I get got later by a particularly convincing ginger tom with big round green eyes. Very well-behaved he was too. Funny how he turned up ten seconds before my fish and chips arrived. Clearly a master at his work. After I left I saw him perform the same act to a couple who had just sat down a few feet away. A whole town of ‘Six Dinner Sid’s. (a very funny childrens book abook about a very well fed cat who seemed to have six pampering owners, funny because each owner thought they were the only person in the cats life).
I have a new policy in life. Any animal that comes blagging food from me can have some. Sometimes they don’t even ask and when I give them some they merely eye it suspiciously. I have met way too many mangey abandoned dogs on roadsides in the middle of nowhere. They look most sorry. Bless them too.
So. Bike wheel repairs.
The old fella, flat cap on and rollie in mouth, I imagine him to be some faded cycling star from years gone by. In my dreams. He chops all the spokes off my hub and disinters the now useless spiky remnants and offers up a nice new rim. Halfway through respoking he realises that the rim has the wrong number of holes. He tries to bodge fit them. He abandons that and tries a new hub which is nowhere near the quality of my shimamo hub. He fiddles with that for ages. I feel like I need to get out of his way to let him figure it out without me breathing down his neck so I go and chat to a couple of kurdish guys from trouble-afflicked Van.
Some time on, non-ex racing warrior old fella calls me over. He fits the only available chainring cassette. It has six rings. My original one had eight. In my hopeful mind, he is a cycling guru. It must be alright. He fits the wheel and inflates the tyre. He hadnt changed the tube to account for the now deeper rim. The valve barely pokes over the edge of the rim. How am I supposed to pump my tyre up if I get a flat?
With a huff and a puff he wearily replaces the tube. The first replacement has a hole in it. And so does the second. The third one holds. Clearly I am getting a quality service here.
I set off down the street trying to check my gears. This is very stressful under the chaotic circumstances of the street. I find a nice quiet residential road. My shifters are indexed for eight gears. I have six. The chain is old and a bit stretched but sits comfortably in its old chainrings. The chain clatters awkwardly over the new rings. It works. Sort of. Its not great. Is this wheel going to hold up for another 5000kms? I would quite like to enjoy my ride, not endure it. Worrying.
I give my spokes a squeeze (like you do). The wheel might be true for now, but the spokes feel hopelessly spongey. I doubt I would be out the other side of Istanbul before the wheel caves in completely.
Ten minutes sat down doing nothing and saying hello to an about-to-drop sleek mum-to-be cat and her dad-to-be following her closely. Cat family. Wow.
What to do? Old non racing warrior flat cap fag fella seemed exasperated by the end of my wheel change and he’d done a total bodge job so clearly going back to him for refinements was out of the question.
I decide to find Turgay again and I show him my crappy spongey wheel. He agrees with me. He also points out that my bike is supposed to have a complete shimano gear and chain system. What I have been given is a load of wonky crap. He asks if I got the repair done by the guy he sent me to?
Yes, I had…. Turgay disappears off down the road to see the old guy. Probably to tell him off for fobbing off a round the world cyclist with a bunch of hooey.

Turgay returns five minutes later, declaring that he will sort it all out. In seconds, a lovely new deep double-rimmed wheel appears (hang on I though he didnt have any?!- he later tells me that he’d initially thought my wheel was a 26 inch rather than the 28 inches that it actually is), and he fits the whole lot in moments. He perfunctorly works his way round the rest of my bike tweaking cables and making my brakes nice and sharp. Sexy new happy bike!!! Yaaay!!!
Whilst he’d been doing this I had been talking to a local chap who only last week had returned from a tour of mountainous greece. I ask Turguy how much I need to pay him and when he says 50 lira (ten quid) the guy id been talking to insists on footing the bill. Wow, thats kind. In return I offer them the stupidly expensive bag of fruit I had just bought. At first they refuse, but I trick turguy by getting him to hold the bag whilst I grappled with something…. and then I rode off laughing.
I feel so happy.
Ive renewed my bike, ive worked out how to make my new tent less like a weird thing and more like home, ive defacebooked myself; I am back fully in real life. For the moment I am nowhere near busy roads. I make the most of it and return to last nights camp spot and have bread and cheese for supper. Which will also be breakfast. Ooh! And the tub of yoghurt I had forgotten about. Which miraculously hadnt bust its guts when Turguy had flipped my bike onto its back to fit the wheel. That was lucky.
Sunsets and camping and supper and yoghurt and trees and twilight laughing and hooting passing cyclists. Then a roosting pheasant. Then sit then bed. Fab.

Wednesday April 12th.
This morning. Write. Decamp. Admire my new wheel. Get ferry back to mainland. Hit Macky Dee’s for one of their thick milkshakes and wifi; I need to figure out a two day plan for Istanbul and my onward route to bulgaria.
13th April
There was the dimmest possibility that I might be able to make the mega-milestone crossing into yer actual Europe across the bhospherus via some sort of bridge. Or even a tunnel. The former I am informed by rumour is undoable, and I wouldnt want to make my grand exit/entrance via a noisy smelly underwater tunnel even if they paid me.
The ferry is cheap and actually probably the nicest way to get to Europe. Instead of watching the road I can watch Istanbul itself with its many enormous grand mosques hoving into view. Ironicly my first view of Europe couldn’t be any more Asian if it tried.
Do I feel a sense of poignancy? Ermmm. Not yet.
Off the ferry and my satnav directs me (unwittingly) right through the middle of an extremely busy pedestrian only bazaar… I get halfway by riding extremely slowly withmy hands always on the brakes and then give up and get off. It was only a matter of time before I knocked over somebody with a pile of something or others on top of their head.
I stay at the cheers hostel and hear the tale of my french room-mate who managed to get mugged by the local mafia to the tune of 1500 Euros… he’d ‘made friends’ with some random guy he’d met in the street, who took him for drinks, then dancing girls, then an informal gathering with some rather heavy duty chaps and a convenient ATM machine. Oh dear. He won’t do that again, poor sod. He told me that the amount was what he had budgetted for his entire 3 month trip.
Feeling the need to feed my addiction for oranges, I head out about 9pm and get hustled 4 times on the way to find my fix. And then the oranges cost 5 lira. Anywhere in Turkey I could have bought a whole bagfull for that much. But needs must.
The following day I visit the enormous blue mosque. It didnt strike me as being especially blue inside and was most definitely sandstone-coloured on the outside but that didnt stop it being very interesting. I have been in a mosque before. I just about manage to time my visit so that I narrowly miss sharing the beautiful experience with about 150 uproarious squawking schoolchidren. After that I visit the spice bazaar and then the park and fall massively asleep.
Yes I am in Europe. It feels weird to know this, as if the man-made geographical boundary is an arbitary concept overlaid over what actually is. Its slightly odd.
Before leaving I have one of ‘magnetised’ moments when leaving the hostel becomes very unappealing due to lovely conversations. I meet two very decent American chaps, a chap from manchester and have a very enjoyable breakfast with a very decent chap from Karachi in Pakistan.
Just before leaving also I meet Ben (half Swiss half Czech and raised in Tenessee) who has walked from Czech and is aiming for Dharamshala. A lovely dreadlocked smiley young man. Beautiful.
Finally after many numerous photos of us all and my bike and Ben’s fabulous trailer-full of gear I eventually leave. Its midday; often I don’t start til midday anyway.
By the time ive gone 25kms I finally have escaped Istanbuls orbit. I stop for lunch at a roadside restaurant, and they give me the meal for free. Oh! I hear tales of unbounded hospitality a lot, but this is the first time a restairant fed me for free. And no I wasnt blagging; I was fully ready to pay.
A big ‘teshelek ederim’ later and I’m in countryside. My road the D020 is brand new motorway and virtually empty. Some way later, still on the D020 and it’s a slightly over busy normal one lane each way carriageway with no bike margin. I kinda preferred the motorway…
Passing through endless rolling shrubby forest, everything looks much like an English forest but in the burgeoning?? heat the wildlife is not the same. I meet another tortoise excitedly going about its daily duties (chew grass, move slowly, look like a big horse poo, ponder existence.) Its all go for tortoises. On the roadside a couple of giant antlered stag beetley things, numerous squashed snakes, a squashed hedgehog, a squashed badger, numerous permanently sleeping dogs; dead but not squashed. Another baby tortoise upturned waggling its legs uselessly rapidly dehydrating in the morning sun. I pick it up. Its got a badly cracked carapace but the little blighter seems as lively as a tortoise usually might be. I find a shady spot to put him in and empty a water bottle round it and pray.
I have an all day head wind which is rather tedious. I stop for a breather. Three teenagers pass me. One approaches and gives me a chocolate bar. (Well done that man!) Then an old fella comes and refills one of my water bottles. He empties it first before refilling it with new water. I had only filled it ten minutes earlier. Never mind…
Later on I have chay with a blonde haired chap who tells me about his his twelve years living in virginia and new york with his crazy irish girlfriend and some business about pulling an insurance scam at a carpet factory. Naughty man.
He tells me the wind will bring rain, either tomorrow or the day after. Im not sure which is more tedious wind or rain. As long as I don’t get both at once… that really is rubbish. Today was hard work but tomorrow I turn 90 degrees towards north and if the wind is still the same it will have become almost a tailwind. Well I can hope can’t I.
Monday April 17th.
By now the turks will have counted the votes from their referendum. An exercise in Turkish ‘democracy’ where the nation votes to decide whether erdogan gets allowed have more power or whether his status remains the same. Good luck with that European Union application guys…

The wind did indeed bring rain. Rather too enthusiastically I thought. It rains solidly, heavily non-stop all day. Fun fun fun. I really should take up selling coconut juice on a beach somewhere.
Heading north from kirklareli the landscape changes dramatically and looks how like the few pictures of greek mountains I have ever seen. But with rain. This is no-mans land. Clearly the turks have no surging desire to go to bulgaria. I feel like I really am at the corner of Europe. The villages with their nuclear missiled mosques and their accompanying ullulations are gone. No shops and the only signs are for quarry works.
In the morning I had waited til midday in the hope that the rain might stop; by 4pm I have had enough. I feel weary. I spot a disused little concrete shed at a quarry works and head for it.
My tent was already soaking wet from the morning so pitching again outside in the rain was going to be a massive no-no. Inside the shed I scrape away dust and detritus into a heap under a dripping leaking roof. Hopefully the dirt will absorb the water so that it doesnt run over the concrete floor and into my tent.
My tent sort of does semi free-standing. I run its pole through its length and prop it up against the wall, and with my bike standing right next to it it shouldnt fall too far if it decides too. My inflated sleeping pad inside defines my internal floor area for now. Its an extremely slack sloppy soggy effort. I can only hope that air blowing through might dry it out a little… but with no sign of the rain easing up, this is what is known as a ‘fat chance’…
I peel out of my clothes. I am totally soaking wet. Fortunately I carry extra clothes specifically only for wearing in bed which are meant to stay dry otherwise. Putting them on feels like sanity.
All my soggy peelings get wrung out of their dirty water and hung up on nails. Maybe they might dry. But probably not.
I am sharing the shed with a swallows nest. I only realise this when the adult bolts the nest in what seems like alarm at my presence. I hope it doesnt abandon the nest.
A little later I hear growling. Oh gawd hear we go. Then the inevitable relentless barking. Now what do I do? Laying horizontal with a thin mesh between me and mr shouty I don’t exactly feel super-safe. I find the pepper spray and the dog dazer. Having discovered from a couple of nights ago that that dog dazers ultrasonics don’t work when merely aimed through a tent wall, I stick my hand under a flap and then silently zap mr shouty and his soggy friend he has with him. I kind of feel sorry for the poor things; out in the horrible horrible rain and now I have nicked their dry place. I consider sharing it with them but suspect with the peanut that god seems to given your average dog instead of a brain, they would probably only want to kill me instead of sharing. They have gone. I hope they don’t come back but find somewhere else.
I am not adequately clothed and it’s a cold night. I know I must have got some sleep coz I had crazy dreams that I don’t remember.
In the morning the clattering roof-top rain has stopped. I pray that the sun has come out.
It hasnt. Its snowing. I have my still wet clothes to put back on. I am already cold. This is the point where I consider my options between hypothermia, mild insanity or involuntarily throwing up out of the bodily need to rid itself of unnessecary fluid.
Gravel trucks are driving past over in the distance. But here I am; struggling. If the swallows were not here, I would light a fire. But I’m not going make them suffer on top of my being here. Glad to see the parents again. Well thats something good.
Think. A situation like this requires forethought. I load up on the glucose syrup id bought the day before yesterday and ate the rest of my soft cheese. I need pure ready-to-go energy, right now.
I put every cold damp bit of clothing I have on. Surprisingly I start to feel less cold. At least I am starting to trap some valuable body heat. If I had stood around wondering for very long I would have lost what body heat I still had. And that really would be bad.