March 11, 2014
A long ride east: And the small matter of a mountain
After Avanos I followed a main road east for several somewhat unextraordinary days. On the first night I did have a most wonderful camping place, on a hillside with big rocks around me and a view down over the city of Kayseri and directly in front of me was the massive snow-covered volcano that I had seen from Cappadocia a few days earlier. Now being much closer the view of this titanic volcano would have been really quite incredible had it not been almost entirely hidden from view by heavy cloud cover.
Other than this near-miss with incredibleness the scenery remained rather bland as I rolled on into fierce winds across the great prairie-like central plateau of Anatolia. To break up the monotony there were of course the usual invites for tea. In Sarkisla, the only town I'd seen in all of Turkey with quite a few bikes, a man named Mural bought me a glass and he very proudly showed me his bike which, to be fair, was a bike.
A potentially less pleasant event took place in a gas station where I had stopped to fill up my water bottles. A man befriended me and for some reason put his arm around me as he directed the man behind the desk to type things into google translate on his computer. I leaned over the counter to see what this man wanted and read, with some horror: "Would your abdomen opened?" The man still had his arm around me and was smiling in a slightly unnerving fashion and at this point I had terrible visions in my mind of the news story that was inevitably to follow; 'World cyclist seen walking into Turkish gas station; two days later found in ice bath with kidneys removed.' But before I had time to faint in panic the men made eating motions with their hands and I realised that they were just asking me, in that very strange Turkish turn of phrase, whether I wanted something to eat.
On Monday I had a steep climb and I decided to rename the day 'Very Small Mountain Day.' This was based on the fact that I had already made up my mind to rename Tuesday 'Small Mountain Day' and Wednesday 'Big Mountain Day.'
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Why had I decided to rename days of the week you may very well want to know? Well it was because I had calculated the elevation chart for this route and seen that I was going to have to do two pretty major climbs, a smaller one on Tuesday and a bigger one on Wednesday. From that the names almost wrote themselves.
When I woke up on 'Small Mountain Day' I was a little surprised to be greeted by the sight of snowflakes falling on my lovely little riverside camping spot. Although I was at about 1300m above sea level I had been at a similar altitude for more than a week with no hint of such wintery weather conditions. And whilst it was beautiful, it also felt somewhat like an ominous sign of things to come on the climb ahead.
Unfortunately for me the snow soon turned to heavy rain, which was much worse. By the time I arrived in the town of Zara, at the bottom of the climb, I was completely soaked. I found an Internet cafe and sat in there for a while, the owner being a wonderful kind man who let me put my jacket and gloves on the top of the woodstove to dry. The only downside of this was that my jacket did melt a little bit and possibly almost caught fire, and I rather foolishly put my hand on top of the stove to see how hot it was, burning three of my fingers in the process.
But I couldn't put off cycling up the mountain forever, not unless I took the bus, or went a different way, or gave up and went home, none of which I did. Instead I slowly but surely made my way up a steep road with snowy peaks on all sides, thinking, with a heavy dose of naivety, that the most painful thing about this climb was going to be my three burnt fingers which were stinging something awful.
But then it started to rain again, which was annoying because it made me all wet. I kept persevering though with the climb which was becoming much steeper and longer than the name I had given it implied that it was going to be. Then the rain stopped and was replaced by pounding hail. At this point in the narrative I agree that it would be usual to describe the hailstones as the size of golf balls, but I'm not going to do that because I'm trying to keep my story as close to the truth as possible. In reality the hailstones were the size of salt crystals. But not the tiny fine table salt crystals, I'm talking about the big sea salt crystals, and there were a hell of a lot of them, raining down like tiny little bullets. All of which was a tad annoying on the climb which was now becoming even steeper and longer than I had ever dared thought it would be.
But then the hail stopped and the scenery was really nice and I began to think it wouldn't be too much longer until the top and things were really looking up. It was shortly after I was thinking this that the blizzard blew in and I was blasted by icy cold snowy winds, which somewhat dampened my spirits again. My thoughts now turned to just what I had done to make this mountain so mad. I realised it was probably annoyed with me for calling it 'Small Mountain' and was seeking its revenge in any way possible.
I wasn't going to be defeated though and after battling through the snowstorm and enduring near whiteout conditions approaching the top, I finally reached the summit. I was more than 2000 metres above sea level and posing for a photo in the snow at the highest point of the whole trip on a windy mountain pass. Needless to say there was a man there asking me if I wanted chai.
That was because there was a building on the summit which housed the snow plough operators and I was invited inside to warm up and have a glass of tea and something to eat. It was all a very pleasant way indeed to celebrate making it to the top of the first mountain. Now all I had to do was reach the top of the second mountain which was only 200 metres higher than where I was now. Climbing to another 200 metres in altitude would, however, have been a lot easier were there not first a 1300 metre descent, all of which would need to be regained.
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As I walked outside to begin on this descent the snow was still falling and there was a sudden loud roll of thunder above my head. This mountain was really pissed. I figured the thing to do was get down as quickly as possible, something that was initially made much more difficult by the snow which was now covering the road. The irony that the men that should have been out ploughing the road had not done so because they were too busy enjoying a tea with me was one that was not lost on me. Because of the road conditions I had to brake a lot and realised that the three fingers that I used for braking, by an extraordinary coincidence also happened to be the exact same three fingers that I had burnt, making the whole thing even more painful.
But it was only a short while before I was down below the snowline and then it was just the heavy freezing rain that had me wanting to cry. It soaked through all of my clothes and made me so cold, the whole way down the mountain was nothing more than an almighty suffer-fest. How much cold and misery could I possibly take? Thirty kilometres of it, that is how much. On the plus side, the scenery was varied and interesting and, although I didn't much want to stop and take pictures, I did take this one for your viewing pleasure:
'Small Mountain Day' had left me battered and burnt, wet, cold and miserable, and all I wanted to do was get my tent up and get some rest. I pulled off the main road to try and find somewhere to do this on a muddy track that led into a field of some sort. It was already dark and I couldn't see exactly what it was, but it was really wet and muddy, and the mud stuck to my tires and got blocked between them and my mudguards, which quickly made it almost impossible to push the bike any further. Just then a car came up the track and parked in the middle of the field. I was a little off to the side and it hadn't seen me, so I somehow forced my bike over to a corner and waited.
I didn't know what the people in the car were doing but I was basically trapped. My hiding place only backed onto a cultivated field that I couldn't camp on or travel across. Going anywhere else would have exposed me to whoever was in the car, so instead I just sat in the dark and waited. I didn't know what the car was doing in the field but I assumed it was quite likely to be either a couple having sex, or people up to something suspicious and/or illegal. I waited and waited. If the field hadn't been so muddy I might have just gone past them back to the road, but I knew trying to do that would have just resulted in my bike grinding to a halt halfway, which might have been slightly awkward if anyone was in the midst of a moment of passion; "Oh hello! Don't mind me, I'm just pushing my bike through this muddy field. Trying to anyway. Obviously I'm stuck here now. But don't worry, I'll be gone in a minute, just need to find a stick to try and work some of this mud out, you carry on, don't mind me, I'm not interrupting am I?"
So instead I just waited and waited until finally the car did eventually leave. Free at last, I tried to push my bike down to the other end of the field where there were some trees. This was a complete failure. I instead had to take off the bags and carry them down, then remove the mudguards from the bike, which, by the way, I've renamed mudtrappers, so that I could push the thing. Eventually I was able to put up my tent and collapse into it, utterly exhausted from a very trying day. 'Small Mountain Day' had been one hell of an effort. I was glad I didn't have to do that again!
'Wait, what day is it tomorrow?!'
07/03/14 - 47km
08/03/14 - 112km
09/03/14 - 81km
10/03/14 - 75km
11/03/14 - 92km
Today's ride: 407 km (253 miles)
Total: 14,541 km (9,030 miles)
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