Day 48
Sleeping location: Hilton Garden, Kutahya, Turkey
Distance (km today/total): 89 / 4720
Estimated climb (m today/total): 1100 / 40200
Plums from the tree: 12
Day in three words: Water and tea
Breakfast provided some more pocket eggs, as well as little pots to carry jam that were made of the same material as ice cream cones. After you use the jam, you eat the sweet little treat. Genius. On the way out of town we stopped to buy dad an inner tube and me some new cycling gloves. My beloved rapha wool and leather ones have given up after 6500+ very comfy km, and the right palm is now mostly just duct tape. The new ones were £4 and have 5x as much padding, but are somehow less comfy.
We were straight into a series of climbs up to 1100m, but they were less tough than yesterday and as we’re at higher altitude it’s a little cooler. We stopped for coffee in a little town where we were the centre of attention, including from an older guy who’d lived in Germany and tried to speak to us in German (which is not much better than our Turkish). When he spotted me filling up our bottles with bottled water he started insisting that we try the local water, which then wouldn’t stop banging on about. He actually threw away some of the bottled stuff to fill us up 3L of what I assume is tap water. I tried some to be polite, and to be fair it did taste extremely clean and pure, but we didn’t want to risk drinking loads so I strapped the two large bottles to my bike with the intention of ditching them when we got out of eyesight. As we went to leave he tried to empty out our bike bottles and we had to stop him to avoid carrying 10L of water that we wouldn’t actually even drink. The 3L of magic water turned out to be useful as I used it to cool down on hills, and I can attest that it FELT very clean and pure as well.
After some more climbs, again easier and cooler than yesterday, followed by a fun long shallow descent. Over the top was a lot of forest that would be excellent for wild camping - it’s a shame dad is travelling so light as there have been a lot of good places to wild camp over the past few days. But the generously subsidised hotels more than partially make up for this. We stopped for lunch in a small village, where we found a tree absolutely heaving with these little orange fruits. They turned out to be plum, and tasty ones, so we picked a load after establishing that they were ok by pointing to them then making eating gestures at a passing man, who shrugged in a sort of positive way. Further into town we were greeted by a man with a funny shaped face who shouted a lot and was very intense. At first he was a bit intimidating but he turned out to be really nice, and I think he was only shouting because his face growth was messing up his hearing. He took us to a shady bench under the mosque and then made us a load of tea, then wouldn’t accept payment. We did give him some cheese as we had way too much, even after two huge cheese and chilli jam sandwiches (with a pocket egg on the side). We also tried to give him some of the plums but he gestured with his arm as if to say “nah mate there are loads of those around here”. Maybe this was the village of the plums.
After lunch we went through some more rolling hills and fields, before entering 5km of what I can only describe as an enormous post-apocalyptic wasteland with a huge factory at its centre. The earth was bare and scarred as far as the eye could see and some bits were seemingly on fire. Some of the machinery was astoundingly big. Dad reckoned this was some kind of mine and ore extraction plant. It was a bit of a shock after two days of bucolic loveliness.
Then we had a fun winding descent through a few villages which all had hundreds of geese and turkeys* wandering around. At the bottom we abruptly entered a surprisingly built up valley, which contained the surprisingly big city of Kutahya (250,000 nufus**). On the way into town we got the afternoon call to prayer, which was a good one today, very musical. Mosques used to have people who would climb up the minarets at shout at people to come to prayer, but now there seems to be some kind of subscription service so a lot of the mosques have the same call. This does involve a sort of dial tone before and after the call, which is broadcast over the big speakers and kind of detracts from the holiness of it. As it was a shortish day we arrived in Kutahya with enough time to have a wander around. It’s a bustling little city with some nice bits, particularly the main mosque and the bazaar, the latter of which also had some brilliantly weird hats on sale. My favourite was one with a cartoon of what seemed to be a tooth riding a prawn, with loads of Chinese writing below it.
*Fun fact: the Turkish for turkey is “hindi”, which continues the theme of people not understanding where they come from (they are from the Americas) and thinking they are from India. In French it’s dinde (“of India”) in Spanish dindon, and so on. English is the exception as we thought they were from Turkey.
**Nufus is the Turkish word for population, and it’s fun to pronounce it “noo-foos” and refer to the number of noo-foos that each city has
Distance (km today/total): 89 / 4720
Estimated climb (m today/total): 1100 / 40200
Plums from the tree: 12
Day in three words: Water and tea
Breakfast provided some more pocket eggs, as well as little pots to carry jam that were made of the same material as ice cream cones. After you use the jam, you eat the sweet little treat. Genius. On the way out of town we stopped to buy dad an inner tube and me some new cycling gloves. My beloved rapha wool and leather ones have given up after 6500+ very comfy km, and the right palm is now mostly just duct tape. The new ones were £4 and have 5x as much padding, but are somehow less comfy.
We were straight into a series of climbs up to 1100m, but they were less tough than yesterday and as we’re at higher altitude it’s a little cooler. We stopped for coffee in a little town where we were the centre of attention, including from an older guy who’d lived in Germany and tried to speak to us in German (which is not much better than our Turkish). When he spotted me filling up our bottles with bottled water he started insisting that we try the local water, which then wouldn’t stop banging on about. He actually threw away some of the bottled stuff to fill us up 3L of what I assume is tap water. I tried some to be polite, and to be fair it did taste extremely clean and pure, but we didn’t want to risk drinking loads so I strapped the two large bottles to my bike with the intention of ditching them when we got out of eyesight. As we went to leave he tried to empty out our bike bottles and we had to stop him to avoid carrying 10L of water that we wouldn’t actually even drink. The 3L of magic water turned out to be useful as I used it to cool down on hills, and I can attest that it FELT very clean and pure as well.
After some more climbs, again easier and cooler than yesterday, followed by a fun long shallow descent. Over the top was a lot of forest that would be excellent for wild camping - it’s a shame dad is travelling so light as there have been a lot of good places to wild camp over the past few days. But the generously subsidised hotels more than partially make up for this. We stopped for lunch in a small village, where we found a tree absolutely heaving with these little orange fruits. They turned out to be plum, and tasty ones, so we picked a load after establishing that they were ok by pointing to them then making eating gestures at a passing man, who shrugged in a sort of positive way. Further into town we were greeted by a man with a funny shaped face who shouted a lot and was very intense. At first he was a bit intimidating but he turned out to be really nice, and I think he was only shouting because his face growth was messing up his hearing. He took us to a shady bench under the mosque and then made us a load of tea, then wouldn’t accept payment. We did give him some cheese as we had way too much, even after two huge cheese and chilli jam sandwiches (with a pocket egg on the side). We also tried to give him some of the plums but he gestured with his arm as if to say “nah mate there are loads of those around here”. Maybe this was the village of the plums.
After lunch we went through some more rolling hills and fields, before entering 5km of what I can only describe as an enormous post-apocalyptic wasteland with a huge factory at its centre. The earth was bare and scarred as far as the eye could see and some bits were seemingly on fire. Some of the machinery was astoundingly big. Dad reckoned this was some kind of mine and ore extraction plant. It was a bit of a shock after two days of bucolic loveliness.
Then we had a fun winding descent through a few villages which all had hundreds of geese and turkeys* wandering around. At the bottom we abruptly entered a surprisingly built up valley, which contained the surprisingly big city of Kutahya (250,000 nufus**). On the way into town we got the afternoon call to prayer, which was a good one today, very musical. Mosques used to have people who would climb up the minarets at shout at people to come to prayer, but now there seems to be some kind of subscription service so a lot of the mosques have the same call. This does involve a sort of dial tone before and after the call, which is broadcast over the big speakers and kind of detracts from the holiness of it. As it was a shortish day we arrived in Kutahya with enough time to have a wander around. It’s a bustling little city with some nice bits, particularly the main mosque and the bazaar, the latter of which also had some brilliantly weird hats on sale. My favourite was one with a cartoon of what seemed to be a tooth riding a prawn, with loads of Chinese writing below it.
*Fun fact: the Turkish for turkey is “hindi”, which continues the theme of people not understanding where they come from (they are from the Americas) and thinking they are from India. In French it’s dinde (“of India”) in Spanish dindon, and so on. English is the exception as we thought they were from Turkey.
**Nufus is the Turkish word for population, and it’s fun to pronounce it “noo-foos” and refer to the number of noo-foos that each city has
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