Turkey (local)

From April 19th to May 22nd I rode 2523 km in Turkey. I stayed in Marmaris the first week as the ticket I had bought in Copenhagen included hotel there for one week. I rode 268 km there to acclimatize, get tanned, and work out where to ride next in Turkey. After this week I first rode 745 km eastwards along the Mediterranean from Marmaris in the SW-corner of Turkey along the coast to Tarsus, then 919 km across the country to Havsa at the Black Sea, and then 593 km westwards along that coast. It was mostly quite easy being tourist in Turkey - no problem finding accommodation, mostly food is inexpensive, no shit-bureacracy or taxes at the borders, i.e. the basics work well. Turkey is also a very beautiful country, and extraordinary things happen, as I experienced on May 11th. What is then bad in Turkey? Millions of honking truck drivers, and lack of adequate maps. Some basic info is included at the end.

Trip 2 started August 2nd and ended September 5th. I started riding in Igdir in E-Turkey, from there I rode straight westwards. The itinerary (or places I slept) was as follows: Igdir (Ararat) - Kagizman - Horasan - Erzurum - Erzincan - Imranli - Sivas - Akdagmadeni - Yozgat - Kirikkale - Ankara - Sivrihisar - Bozhuyuk - Eskisehir - Bursa - Bandirma - Gelibolu - Uzunkopru - Edirne. That was 2078 km and took 20 days in the saddle - 104 km a day on average. There was less climbing than on trip 1, only few days involved more than 1000 m climbing.

This is the story of a one-week-long trip in Anatolia [...], much of it having been done by trekking bike. The protagonists are two university lecturers in science, both with a solid interest in history, archaeology, and simple life in nature. Virtually all the ancient 2,000 to 4,000-year-old sites we visited are unknown to the general public, because of their remoteness from the tourist trail or because of their inaccessibility to tour buses. Nevertheless, most are absolutely fabulous sites. [...] I mainly wrote up this trip report so as to show that the ``real Anatolia'' still exists. So just sit back and enjoy the story for the sake of the story. I dedicate this report to the Anatolian people, those of yesterday and those of today, hoping that they will stay true to themselves tomorrow.

Le violente eruzioni dei vulcani Erciyes (3916 m) e Hasan (3268 m) avvenute tre milioni di anni fa, avevano ricoperto l'altopiano intorno a Nevsehir con tufo, una polvere composta da lava, cenere e fango. I venti e le piogge, erodendo queste rocce friabili, hanno creato dei paesaggi surrealistici spettacolari a forma di cono, di pinnacoli, di burroni scoscesi, dipinti con dei toni che variano dal rosso all'oro e dal verde al grigio.

For Kurban BayramI (``Sacrifice Feast'' in English, ``eid-al-adha'' in Arabic, in honor of Abraham's pledge to sacrifice his son (though God then bade him to sacrifice but a sheep), i.e. the Islamic holiday in the middle of ``Hac'' (``Hadj'' in Arabic), the Islamic pilgrimage month to Mecca), I drove with my Turkish friend TuGrul to the Mediterranean Sea for a mountain-bike tour in the Taurus Mountains. Here's an account of how we braved physical adversity and faced the impeccable logic of rural Turks.