Istanbul

My time in Istanbul has been a blast. Before my girlfriend arrived I was able to look around various districts on the western side, arrange my Iranian visa, meet up with the woman I met in Kesan, and have short conversations with people from all over the world.

The highlight remains discovering the city with my girlfriend. We visited mosques, a hamam, various districts, and went for dinner, tea, and coffee everywhere. I'll let some of the pictures do the talking.

And then again we had to separate once again. And once more in the days afterwards I would have some motivational issues. As before I'll leave those thoughts out of this blog.

Before leaving Istanbul I stayed in a hostel for one more day (because of the timing of my girlfriend's airplane leaving the city). I used the remaining time to change my cassette (not really needed yet, but preliminary maintenance for the remaining journey), replace the chain, and install some new tires that will hopefully fend a little better against the Turkish flora. I've been plagued by a large number of flat tires. So many that I became paranoid and replaced my front wheel's inner and outer tubes with new ones. I'm not entirely sure what was wrong, each time I would repair the tube after meticulously checking all rubber, and upon reassembling and inflating my tire I would find a new tiny leak. My hypothesis, forever doomed to remain untested, is that fragments of thorns were inside my wheel and/or sticking to the inner tube.

My last night was spent at a local stand-up comedy show (in English) performed by comedians from various parts of the world. I had a good time, and went bed early as I had a boat to catch! Just kidding, I wanted to go to bed early but turned in way too late.

Leaving Istanbul

I decided a long time ago to take a boat out of Istanbul, as I wasn't too keen on cycling out of the city towards the east. I checked the schedule the day before, decided it probably wasn't needed to book a ticket for the BUDO, and you'll never guess what happened next. The boat was full. I don't know if I will ever learn.

But no worries, there was a second ferry service on the other side of Eminonu at Yenikapi. Bit of a hassle to get there with a bike, but with a bit of pedaling, a bit of walking, and a bit of rejecting an offer of cup-of-coffee-that-quickly-became-a-request-for-casual-gay-sex, I managed to get there in an hour or two. This time I was able to get a ticket for the boat of 15:15 heading to Bursa (well, actually Mudanya, but everyone refers to it as "the boat to Bursa"). So I gracefully placed my behind on a bench close to the ferry terminal after stocking up on junkfood, and proceeded to pig out and read to pass the time.

Cruising to Bursa

The boat to Bursa was a rather interesting experience. This ferry was one of those relatively high-speed catamarans as I might've written about earlier a couple of months ago while me and my girlfriend were traveling from Pula to Cres in Croatia. The interior has three sections of seats running front to back. No visibility to the front and a few small windows offering that much-needed view of the horizon to the sides. A significant amount of my fellow passengers had insignificant experience with the power of looking at the horizon during a rough vehicular trip.

It started out to my right. I heard the tearing and risteling of a plastic bag dispensed to a passenger. I looked in the direction of the sound and saw an elderly Turkish woman puking into the bag. To everyone's dissapointment she made rather convincing sounds befitting her current activity. It seemed this woman was the harbinger, her hands pulling the bag around her mouth as if she was blowing a plastic war horn, calling upon everyone to join her. Soon the two pathways between the chairs were frequently visited by all kinds of people, their faces eerily white, walking backwards in a pace slow enough to communicate that running was not necessary, but at the same time fast enough to convey that a certain amount of haste was required to reach the human plastic-bag-dispenser in time. A face from a fellow passenger sums up my feelings about the journey. I saw him looking around the boat's interior, a sardonic smile upon his face, rather enjoying the entire spectacle. That was, until that elderly woman started loudly retching again, and his smile vanished.

This entire ordeal lasted for about half an hour. More than enough for a trip that took two hours in total. I was very thankful for the woman sitting to the left of me, who in the initial chaos drenched her hands in perfume, and pretty effectively prevented me from smelling anything odd while aboard the ferry.

Towards the east

Once off the boat I quickly cycled my first couple of kilometers in order to find a place to sleep. Which was a bit difficult, considering the hilly terrain, the many houses, and because it was already getting dark. After a detour and an unplanned ascent I settled between a couple of grapevines. I arrived there in the dark managing to scare a couple of wild hogs. Luckily for me they didn't notice how scared I was those first few seconds.

The day after was spent going around Bursa. After seeing Istanbul I wasn't planning on going through a big city anytime soon. A shame, as it plays a prominent role in the battles that were fought in the Turkish war for independence. I've been reading "Ataturk, birth of a nation" in my desire to learn a little bit more about Turkey, this particular book recommended to me by the woman I met in Kesan and Istanbul, and have been enjoying passing by the various places mentioned in the book. Places I've been like Thessaloniki (where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk spent most of his younger life), Istanbul (the former center of the Ottoman empire), Mudanya and Bursa (fiercely contested cities held by the Greek invasion). I'll be missing several of them, like Eskisehir and Ankara, but will certainly visit others during my travels in Turkey. I can highly recommend reading a book about the country you're traveling in. It's the first time I've tried it (previously making due with reading some wikipedia articles), and it greatly enhances the experience.

After Bursa there was a hill to climb, near the top I got two more flat tires. The second one probably my own fault, I must've snagged the inner tube on something when putting it back inside the wheel. Three roadies found me on the side of the road, gave me some compliments on my journey, proceeded to pose for some instagram pictures with me pumping up a tire in the background, and continued towards Bursa. I prayed to cycleops the holy protector of cyclists that these would be the last of the flat tires for some while, and made my way to travel quite some distance along a highway. Relatively safe, but not the most inspiring scenery. Near Inegol I could take a little breather. I retired in a field for the day and continued eastward the next morning.

Cycling wasn't the easiest the first two days. The hills were hard to traverse and I felt like small efforts took me out of the running for the rest of the day. I decided this must be caused by taking a week-and-half break in Istanbul, and I was simply having a bad case of the day-two-or-threes (an affliction of weak legs and mind somewhere at the start of each cycling trip, I might've written about it a long while ago). The cure was to promptly stop caring about the distances I was traveling for the next couple of days.

For two days I spent my time climbing hills and entering valleys, sometimes cycling bits along the highway when it was unavoidable. I exhanged merhaba's and waves with many people, cycled through villages and noticed fall setting in. Not many leaves were strewn across the roads yet, but many trees seemed to be taking on a yellowish tint. The days were still comfortably warm, but the evenings and their nights would get cold quickly as soon as the sun had set. These two days passed quite easily and apart from some silly touring mishaps (e.g. a road that was replaced by a quarry) not much happened. My surroundings seemed to become more barren as I continued, and I imagined I would soon enter central Anatolia as the kind of desert I had pictured in my mind.

Into the Phrygian valley

But Turkey had a little surprise in store (well, it wouldn't be a surprise if I would do internet searches for all of the locations that are recommended to me, but where is the fun in that?). I was cycling along a particularly noisy section of highway when my route indicated to turn right, off of the highway, towards the south. I found myself cycling along a road just by myself, and as I progressed towards the hills in the distance the noise of traffic receded until it was no longer noticable. Although I wasn't conscious of the desire, I felt a certain relief at being amidst trees without the noise of car and trucktires rolling besides me, as they were for the last couple of days.

The hills around me looked magnificent. They were covered partly in deciduous, and partly in coniferous trees. The coniferous with their dark green needles, the deciduous ones in a large variety of colours. The green, yellow and orange leaves individually visible in front of me, but mixing together into a green-yellow tint on the hilltops in the distance. I made my way towards a hydroelectric plant, a small amount of water was expelled by just one of the generators being active, and the stream was heading in my direction. Its contents gave life to some very large trees which I would like to call by their proper name, but my ignorance prevents me. The water didn't smell all that great, and for some reason I can still remember that it reminded me of boiled eggs with ketchup.

I already felt lucky for cycling through such a beautiful place when it became even better. The next day I made my way through the villages Incik and Basoren, over a mountain and several more villages, towards Doger. I passed through two more beautiful forests.

In the first forest I met a friendly Turkish man over the course of the climb. The first time we just made some attempts at a conversation, but my Turkish is rather lacking. I could only tell him where I am from, how long it took me to get where I was, and where I was intending to go. If I understood him correctly he was taking his car up the mountain for a walk near the summit. I encountered him once more near my highest point. He was watching the ground intently, sometimes picking something up and putting it in a big bag he was carrying.

I said hello once more, and he briskly walked towards me to show me his catch of the day. It was full of tiny fruits I hadn't seen before. He offered me a handful, and gestured that it was good for your heart (touch heart, then thump your chest) and that it made you go fast (maybe? the gesture was touch heart, then punch the air in front of you in a straight line while looking fiercely ahead). I couldn't refuse and ate some of them. They tasted remarkably like apples, making me wonder whether these were the first wild apples I had eaten in my life.

And with that great encounter I made my way through several more villages. Not many of them have looked the same so far. Some of them are obviously quite old, with the brick, wood and loam of particular buildings exposed due to the elements. Others have a large number of new cinderblock-constructed buildings. Some villages are completely inhabited, even if mostly by elderly people, while yet others seem completely abandoned apart from one or two buildings that still seem recently maintained. Likewise there is quite some difference from village to village in the age of the inhabitants, the apparent wealth, and the liveliness as guesstimated by the amount of people outside drinking tea. It makes me want to talk to everyone to figure out what life is like in these tiny little places, but for lack of me speaking the language I'll make do with saying hello to everyone and looking around.

The second little climb towards Doger was just as beautiful. I was convinced I was in the Phrygian valley already. My reasoning was that I was currently in a beautiful place, and for the past days I was busy heading towards a beautiful place called the Phrygian valley, hence I must've arrived already.

The Phrygian valley

But it appears I wasn't. While freewheeling towards Doger a great big rock arose to my left in the distance, standing upon a hill made of concentric rings of a white stone (Sandstone? More of this lack of understanding of the natural world around me I need to fix someday). As I came closer I realised that same kind of rock was everywhere around me as well, with some of those rocks jutting out from the ground in a seemingly unnatural way. Nearer that big rock was a strange formation of rocks with a wavelike shape, like deformed shark teeth or otherworldly propeller blades, with their sharpest part pointing to the sky. All huddled together to form a maze in which the wind was trying to find its way outside.

And it wasn't just this formation. As I continued onwards I found rock formations that were carved out by humans long gone, for them to live or worship in. Their stone steps in the entryways being worn down, much faster than one would expect, to nearly diagonal planes. The rapid wear gave a hint as to how that strange maze must've developed over years of erosion, and perhaps also a hint as to how quickly they will disappear again, like a temporary geological art exhibition. In the surrounding lands a handful of strange rocks were jutting out into the air, their flat tops providing space for a couple of trees to grow. By now only coniferous trees were left of that earlier mixture. I could only describe the landscape as if someone tried to mix a desert, a canyon and a pine forest biome together, and change up the palette with which the entirety was given colour. I couldn't help but marvel at all of this beauty during the day.

I passed by several villages with people in their traditional garbs (I think), working around the many farms that are present in the flatter regions of the valley. At some point I thought I could get a taste for what life must've been like in days past. A thought that was precipitated by a wooden cart with two riders pulled by a horse, and later in the day being corrected into something more realistic by seeing an elderly woman making a video call on her phone.

I made another climb, slowly getting away from the Phrygian valley proper, and at its plateau met a very nice young Turkish farmer. He stopped his tractor to talk, and upon us saying goodbye whipped out his mobile phone, fired up google translate, and using the app asked if I needed anything. It was early in the day and I wanted to keep going, but I noticed a desire to answer that I needed a place to sleep, in the hope that we could talk some more. In the end I didn't, and while cycling was left with this strange realisation that I apparently needed to talk to someone for longer than a couple of minutes and with less of a language barrier. While the more impressive rock formations slowly seemed to disappear from my sights, the land produced different kind of geological sights. Sometimes I could still catch a sight of that magical white rock, somewhere in the distance, on the mountain slopes.

The coming days

It is in this landscape that I traveled eastwards, intending to reach lake Tuz, Aksaray, Capedocia, and Kayseri somewhere the coming week or two. My capacity for being on my own for periods of time, sometimes having a small interaction in a language I don't fully understand, is smaller than it was before. So I'll think I'll put some more effort into meeting people then I have before. I'm in luck, if I plan things right I might be able to spend Turkey's 100th birthday in a city with some other people. We'll see!