Sile - there is a sandy beach left from these rocks
We reached Sile at around noon and had a quick beach-time. I also swam a bit but the water was very cold (18 degrees maybe). It was a pleasant place, I thought that we will go through places like this every day, but no, there was no such nice beach until now (we are in Eregli now). We wanted so much to spend a rest week here, but our 30-day Turkish visa did not let us to have long rest days… Even so, we are not sure that we can cross the country in a month! We’ll see. If the steep and killer ups and downs continue, we can only go 50 km a day and even so, we got more and more tired. When there were flat roads, we could cover 20 km in an hour! In the hills, there are lots of pointless steep ups and downs. They are lazy to build a bridge over a small valley – they rather let us descend 80 m and then again climb 80 m, but carefully place a 50 cm gap at the lowest point of the roller-coaster, so that, before the steep climb, we must break down completely to loose all of our moving energy.
The elevation profile - pointless ravines
And this also puts a lot of strain on the brakes. So it was either 1/1 (the lowest) gear and 5 km/h upwards or full hard break and a max speed of 10-15 km/h downwards. This is so much annoying and tiring! Cyclists, please do not come here! Except if you want to train for Tour de France. Then this is a great place. (Sile – Agva, via Karacaköy.) The road is so steep that they don’t even dare to mark it on the signposts! There is only an ascent or a descent sign, but without percentages. Once when I measured it, we asccended 3 m on a 10 m road, which is a 30% ascent (out of Sile)! We are able to climb these only in a slalom (like skiing, just upwards) or sometimes even have to push the bikes. Zsofi decided that she will eat as much as she can because she is always hungry! At home, she gains weight even if she doesn’t eat – on the tour, she looses weight even if she stuffs herself.
The road quality is quite unpredictable. In smaller villages we encountered very bad bumpy roads but good asphalt as well. One day we wanted to avoid the small roller coasters near the beach so we took the main road from Agva to Kandira and then Kefken. This was better because even if we had almost 1000 m ascent this day, it was not so steep and hence not so tiring, and we used our energy better because we did not have to pull the brakes downwards! So we had good rollings on the slopes which was delighting after the Sile-Agva road.
About Kefken: our map indicates that there is an orange road between Kefken and Karasu. So we targeted that one. In Kefken, after we could not find a suitable camping place because of the never-ending village sindrome, a man shouted after us: “Wohin fahren?” Zsofi continued climbing but I stopped and answered, “Karasu”.
- Nicht gut, kommen Sie zurück, nach Adapasari!
I asked him why, and showed him the map, but he told that that orange way not really exists and there are only small bad roads without asphalt, so I checked the GPS and saw that really, it does not indicate a main road there! Why didn’t I check the GPS sooner?! (Maybe because it happened before that it misleaded us.) Then I asked him: “Können wir hier schlafen in unserem Zelt?” “Ja, warum nicht?” So we agreed to sleep in his garden. He spent 26 years working in Germany so he could speak a language we also knew, that was positive. He also had a small apartment on the ground floor of his 3-floor house. But when we asked whether we must pay for it or not, he said that it’s 50 TL for the apartment. But tenting is free. So of course we choose the tent. But even so he gave us the key and let us use the toilet and water inside. It turned out only later (somebody else told us) that there was a nice beach in the near (Kerpe) which we did not visit…
So the next day we took the Kaynarca – Denizköy – Karasu road. We realized that our map’s only function is to indicate the sequence of bigger cities. 
In the villages, there was a strong smell of chicken shit and all of the children shouted “Hello” and then laughed! The air is warm already at 8-9 AM so we usually stop at taps by the road to refresh ourselves with cold water and also to wet my shirt and hat so that I can bear the heat when climbing. (I don’t know how will I be able to bear the heat later – in June, July…)
We found a suitable place for the tent after Karasu, between a soccer court and a cemetery. The grass was very dry here, the ground was sandy, and in the evening a thunderstorm came with a heat wave which I could not understand! Why did the temperature suddenly rise in the middle of the night so that I couldn’t sleep?
The road here was better, going near the sea and quite flat so we could make progress much faster. Only near Akcakoca was there a pointless roller coaster again, but after the Düzce crossing until Eregli it was flat again! In Eregli I found the steel factory on the shore quite ugly, blowing smoke on the city. But the inner town was nice and we met our CS host at the Atatürk statue (where Tarkan sings his song in a video clip, according to our host). We had to follow his car to his home, and again we had to climb a lot! Eregli is a city on the hill, we could see it from the road far before. It was warm but in the room it was even warmer, as the heating was on! (Why? Because 2-3 nights earlier there was a colder night.)
We wanted to leave Eregli and head to Zonguldak today but then we have read Saman’s comment that we should write blog posts more often, so we have another rest day to fulfil his request and continue only tomorrow.
The other reason is that we still not have CS hosts in Zonguldak. Now Zsofi cooks some paprikáskrumpli. Bulent tought us some words which are common in Turkish and Hungarian: like sakal = szakáll, elma = alma, cok = sok, katana = katona, ata = atya, ana = anya.
More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/felix.kovacs/BikeToAsiaTorokorszag#
