Day 53
Sleeping location: Otel Tu-Ba, Elmali, Turkey
Distance (km today/total): 125 / 5262
Estimated climb (m today/total): 900 / 44900
Turkish food bingo: HOUSE!
Day in three words: Along the highways
A mostly unremarkable day along the big roads which are often the only way through the mountains and valleys here. The first 45km was dead flat or a slight climb along wide valleys full of wheat and cows. It’s fascinating how the conditions change from one valley to the next, both in terms of natural vegetation and what crops are grown. As the road was quiet we rode side by side and had a long chat about the state of the world/politics, which was mostly just me banging on about the evils of capitalism. We stopped for coffee in a nice shady town square where everyone was playing this mysterious game with numbered tiles. After this there was a gentle climb for a long way, but it was made more difficult by the heat, which was the hottest since I first arrived in Turkey.
In Korkuteli we stopped for lunch and scored big on Turkish food bingo - lentil soup, ayran, sutlac and Turkish coffee*. I also had to establish a point to return to** in this town, and chose the big new mosque in the middle of town. After lunch we had a long but very gradual climb up a quiet dual carriageway that had been brutally carved out of the hillside. This deposited us into a huge desolate valley, similar to the one two days ago, which was completely empty apart from incredible numbers of goats (seemingly unsupervised). The rest of the road into Elmali was pretty rubbish; narrow, busy, bad surface, bit of a headwind, and we just had to get our heads down and get it done.
Elmali is the first point since Istanbul we’ve seen before, as we visited 9 years earlier on a previous holiday to Kalkan. Fun fact - it literally means “with apples” as they grow 20% of Turkey’s crop in that valley. It was nice wandering around the (very beautiful) mosque and bazaar and remembering snippets. There was also a nice little park where we had tea last time, which had been tarted up extensively, although they had kept the little water feature which still had a load of ducks gallivanting around in it. I wonder if they were the same ducks. In general the whole town seemed a lot smarter and more affluent than last time, but had still retained its quaint small-town Turkishness. At dinner I played with a little ginger cat who then followed us for ages after we left. I named him Rusty and was hoping to smuggle him into the hotel, but a little girl ambushed him and carried him off in a very undignified manner. Stay strong Rusty.
*Ayran is a wonderful salty yoghurt drink which we have been guzzling down as it is full of electrolytes and protein, and surprisingly thirst quenching. Sutlac is cold rice pudding with a caramelised top, and is delicious.
**Slightly complicated this. To legitimately say that I’ve cycled from Lands End to Cape Town (in my own head, anyway) I need continuous tyre tracks from one end to the other. Because of the situation in the Middle East I’m having to fly from Antalya to Amman, but we’re cycling to my parents’ house in Kalkan, not Antalya, and the distance from Kalkan to Antalya is too great to cycle in time. So I am getting the bus from Kalkan back to Korkuteli, where the route from Istanbul “forks” to Kalkan or Antalya, then cycling to Antalya, which means I will have cycled in a continuous line from Lands End to Antalya (excluding ferries and the 7km in Switzerland where the road was shut).
Distance (km today/total): 125 / 5262
Estimated climb (m today/total): 900 / 44900
Turkish food bingo: HOUSE!
Day in three words: Along the highways
A mostly unremarkable day along the big roads which are often the only way through the mountains and valleys here. The first 45km was dead flat or a slight climb along wide valleys full of wheat and cows. It’s fascinating how the conditions change from one valley to the next, both in terms of natural vegetation and what crops are grown. As the road was quiet we rode side by side and had a long chat about the state of the world/politics, which was mostly just me banging on about the evils of capitalism. We stopped for coffee in a nice shady town square where everyone was playing this mysterious game with numbered tiles. After this there was a gentle climb for a long way, but it was made more difficult by the heat, which was the hottest since I first arrived in Turkey.
In Korkuteli we stopped for lunch and scored big on Turkish food bingo - lentil soup, ayran, sutlac and Turkish coffee*. I also had to establish a point to return to** in this town, and chose the big new mosque in the middle of town. After lunch we had a long but very gradual climb up a quiet dual carriageway that had been brutally carved out of the hillside. This deposited us into a huge desolate valley, similar to the one two days ago, which was completely empty apart from incredible numbers of goats (seemingly unsupervised). The rest of the road into Elmali was pretty rubbish; narrow, busy, bad surface, bit of a headwind, and we just had to get our heads down and get it done.
Elmali is the first point since Istanbul we’ve seen before, as we visited 9 years earlier on a previous holiday to Kalkan. Fun fact - it literally means “with apples” as they grow 20% of Turkey’s crop in that valley. It was nice wandering around the (very beautiful) mosque and bazaar and remembering snippets. There was also a nice little park where we had tea last time, which had been tarted up extensively, although they had kept the little water feature which still had a load of ducks gallivanting around in it. I wonder if they were the same ducks. In general the whole town seemed a lot smarter and more affluent than last time, but had still retained its quaint small-town Turkishness. At dinner I played with a little ginger cat who then followed us for ages after we left. I named him Rusty and was hoping to smuggle him into the hotel, but a little girl ambushed him and carried him off in a very undignified manner. Stay strong Rusty.
*Ayran is a wonderful salty yoghurt drink which we have been guzzling down as it is full of electrolytes and protein, and surprisingly thirst quenching. Sutlac is cold rice pudding with a caramelised top, and is delicious.
**Slightly complicated this. To legitimately say that I’ve cycled from Lands End to Cape Town (in my own head, anyway) I need continuous tyre tracks from one end to the other. Because of the situation in the Middle East I’m having to fly from Antalya to Amman, but we’re cycling to my parents’ house in Kalkan, not Antalya, and the distance from Kalkan to Antalya is too great to cycle in time. So I am getting the bus from Kalkan back to Korkuteli, where the route from Istanbul “forks” to Kalkan or Antalya, then cycling to Antalya, which means I will have cycled in a continuous line from Lands End to Antalya (excluding ferries and the 7km in Switzerland where the road was shut).
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