Gqeberha
Time to start traveling again. This time we are heading for Asia Minor tracing a route that has been in my mind for a few years. We fly into Antalya on the Mediterranean Sea in Turkey and fly out of Baku on the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan taking in the Black Sea along the way. We will be passing through Georgia to get to Azerbaijan and, if all goes well, we might have a chance to pop into Armenia as well.
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It has been almost five months since we returned from South America, a period during which our lives have changed course in that we are no longer homeless. Just before we left for Brazil last year we bought a small house motivated more by the increasing costs of short term rental accommodation in South Africa than the need to have a place to call home. But as it turns out we ended up spending a lot more time back in South Africa having quite major alterations made to the house. Now that the builders have moved out we are ready to get back onto our bicycles again.
With the trip to Antarctica taking up a few weeks at the end of our last South American tour it will be almost six months from when we reached Ushuaia until we cycle out of Antalya. As usual we have done very little cycling while back in South Africa so we are terribly unfit. Gqeberha, the city in which we live, is probably the most cyclist friendly of all of South Africa's bigger cities and our house is on the outskirts of the city adjacent to horse and sheep farms. The best cycling routes available are only minutes away but with all the building work and a cold and wet winter, motivating ourselves to get on our bicycles has been difficult. In between all of this Leigh had to have a small operation and she was instructed to avoid aerobic activity for a month. Little did the surgeon know how slowly we cycle! All in all I doubt if our average weekly distance since we have been back in South Africa has been much more than fifty kilometers.
So the first few weeks in Turkey, a notoriously hilly country in which to cycle, are going to be tough. The current heatwave enveloping Europe isn't going to make our lives any easier.
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As an aside, the title of this entry is the name of our home city. Gqeberha used to be known as Port Elizabeth, named in 1820 after Elizabeth Donkin, the wife of Sir Rufane Shaw Donkin, the Acting Governor of the Cape Colony at the time. Gqeberha was the isiXhosa name for the a township on the south bank of the Baakens River which flows through the city. It is a corruption of the Khoi word Gxai Bega, a species of small tree that grows along the Baakens River . The scientific name is Searsia pyroides but it is usually referred to by its Afrikaans name of "taaibos" which means "tough bush". I think the new name has a lovely ring to it but folk who grew up not speaking isiXhose might struggle with its pronunciation so here is a BBC clip to help:https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-56182356.
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Good luck on those Turkish hills, drink lots of tea!
We'll be following along.
9 months ago
We are shaking in our boots at the thought of the Turkish hills, particularly with it being so hot at the moment. After all the hills you and Mart have been riding over the past few months you would think nothing of them.
9 months ago