Bike to Asia

We spent at least 2 hours at the petrol station in Cide hanging on the internet. Then heavy rains came so again we couldn’t make too much progress. We couldn’t find a bigger supermarket in Cide, just the usual small and expensive ones. Nobody speaks English here, it is quite annoying! We also ate döners. We’ve discovered that here in Turkey the restaurants’ tradition is that if you order something (in this case, döners) they bring a lot of other food and drink without asking you. Then it turns out only after you’ve finished that it cost some extra liras – we thought they bring it because it is included in the döner’s price.
After Cide a climb came again and we also met a hitchhiking guy there – we just talked shortly while passing by, but we regret that because it would have been so nice to finally speak to somebody who speaks English!
We only did 26 km this day, it was getting dark so we settled down at the first camping place we found, even if there was no panorama, only bushes surrounding it. When we started next day, we found an ideal sleeping place right after 3 km – just as I expected. It was a small house, carpets inside, a “Yöneldiginde Allah yanindadir” sign above the door, with a small terrace, plus water outside and a separate small building with toilets. It was empty and open. We stopped to wash our clothes – the weather is finally sunny again so they dry quickly on the quickly stretched ropes. Meanwhile, Zsofi also fries some pancakes. I’m afraid that the 450 g Primus power gas will run out, we’ll see. The solar panel has fully charged the netbook so life is good now. We’ve decided to write down notes whenever we can – in this way we can immediately post it on the blog when we find a wifi.
There are some landslides which block the road along the coast – we’ve already met some. They repair the road constantly. By bike we can sometimes pass by without waiting for them to let cars go. Sometimes not. The hillside is quite steep at some points and big rocks are falling down, making the half of the road disappear.  But fortunately the traffic is not big on this road! So when we had to wait for 5 minutes at a construction work, only 1 car queued up. And although the road is very difficult by bike, the nice landscape compensates. We always look at the sea and the nice coastline while riding. We also got used to go on the left side of the road because then we can see more. We had the feeling that this Karadeniz yolu is a bicycle road (it is quite narrow at some points) on which sometimes a car passes by. We don’t like when car comes on the road because we can’t slalom up the steep hills.
The most important sentence we learned is: “Ne kadar?” (How much does it cost?) because at the small vegetable and fruit stalls they never indicate prices. So when we arrive, we ask “Ne kadar” 10-20 times, pointing at every item. They also tend to round the numbers. So 300 g tomato costs the same as 500g.
We like to eat peanuts as snack at short stops. Here, in Turkey, the salt is on the brown skin of the peanut which we don’t eat. If we peel the peanut the salt comes off, so we do not peal it! We try to consume a lot salt because we probably lose a lot with the sweating.
You might be curious how we stand sitting on the saddle for so much time. The answer is: on the first few days when we were riding for long hours without stopping then we could feel our bump in the evening. But since we stop regularly – that is the advantage of the very steep road – it doesn’t hurt at all. Probably it only hurts if we go (or actually sit) a lot at a stretch.
Felix regretted that once we slept at a place where we couldn’t see the sunset from the tent because next day we saw so many nice places where we could have slept. So next day he didn’t want to stop until he found a sunset place. I start usually feel uncomfortable around 6:30pm if we are still not looking for a place to sleep because it is not fun to ride the bike in the dark and it is also more difficult to find a place when you can hardly see anything. So I started to feel that anxious when he said we have to climb another hill knowing that it takes for a while and it is also really tiring. Finally we found a place which was really nice, it was kind of on the top of a cliff.

Many bumps on the Black Sea coast...

We saw the sunset, recorded our every day statistics and went to sleep. The next thing I know is that Felix wakes me up that he can’t sleep because the wind is blowing very strongly and it makes such a noise that he can’t stand so we need to go. It was at 5am!!! I didn’t like the idea to start at 5am but had no chance. So that is how it happened that we went already more before noon than other days.

We visited Doganyurt which is a small city with a square, a bunch of people are sitting in cafe’s and drinking tea. At the end of the day we both were very tired, the total ascent was 1232m while the highest point we reached was only 235m. So we climbed a lot, actually we broke a record with that! To emphasize that even more it means we climed more than what we did at the high passes in Romania or Bulgaria.
Next day we rolled down to Inebolu and had a rest on the beach. Felix asked the hotel’s wifi password so that’s why we have internet access now.
Today, 26th May, Zsofi had a swim in the sea for the first time! It is not so cold as it was in Sile. But the locals still don’t understand why we came here and not to the south of Turkey. They say that summer begins here only in mid or end of June…
The solar charger has charged the netbook from 60% to 95%. At the beginning, it consumes a lot of current and the small battery always discharges and breaks connection to the load (which is the netbook).  But when it is near total capacity, the charger switches from constant current charging to constant voltage charging, thus resulting in less and less current which is no longer a problem for the solar charger and the small Pb battery. So it is a good practice to keep the netbook nearly fully charged when possible.


Tags: Cide, Inebolu

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 4:54 PM and is filed under Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.