Dear all,
Finally a sign of live after a long silence! A couple of days after I left Istanbul, the small organizer I used for writing my diary, felt for a small holiday of its own. Since I didn't manage to get it alive again, it has beem rather quite on my website for the last couple of weeks.
After taking a nice break in Edirne, and warm welcome with a local family docter, which invited me to his house and made me his highest guest, it was time to start off with Ramadan. Eventhough I knew the vasting period was about to occur, I already promised my host to cook them my very own Turkish lentilsoup, on what happened to be the very first day of the vasting month, which added a whole different dimension to my cooking. They liked the soup quite a lot though, eventhough they found my use of a blender for preparing it rather unorthodox.
The road to Istanbul was full of adverse airflows, which made getting there quite painfull, but after a couple of days of hard work, and a final etape of about 150km, which took me close to 10 hours to forfill, and follewed the busy suburb roads for close to 80kms, I finally arrived on familiar grounds inbetween the hostels of Sultan Achmet, and the shadows of Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosk.
I was planning to leave the city again as soon as I could; arranging my Syrian visum and taking off again. Fate decided differently, and eventhough I could get hold of my visum in a matter of days, I ended up in staying there close to a week, enjoying myself in popular Taksim, with the many people I met in my hostel, and visiting the concerts of The Troublemakers and Dorfmeister and his band Tosca. I nice bonus with my Syrian visum was the meeting with Erika, whom together with Robin, her boyfriend, will be touring along about the same route I am taking to Egypt. You can follow their adventures on http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Banchory-to-the-Bosphorous-by-Bike/
After getting finaly kicked out of my hostel (I think they also thought my stay in Istanbul was getting way too long), I took a ferry to nearby Yalova, and started riding through the Anatolian cold. After a day of shelter in Eskisehir, weather improved quite a bit, so I took myself into my saddle again. The difference between day and night temperature remained quite high though; during day time I cycled around in shorts, while after a night of camping it was quite usual to find my tent covered with a tiny layer of ice.
Through the bizare scenery that the minions of king Midas craved out of the rocks ages ago, I drove along to the Anatolian plains. Nice and flat, and after taking a wrong turn along the main roads as well, my day distance rose skyhigh.
After a couple of days racing though the countryside, I finaly ended up in a small pension near Sultanhani, where after chatting all day shoesrepairer Farit invited me to his friends, that were repairing old carpets. Never saw something like that, and had a vey interesting night with the facts they managed to tell me about the different kinds of carpets. Besides that, after telling them that an avarage Dutch person would make some 2000 euro's a month, the decided I should become one of them, since the best of them made about 3000. Ofcourse I wasn't too good in repairing there rugs, so after missing a couple of stichtes and pulling the thread a bit too much, they decided the would be better of doing it themselves.
After a great walk in the autumn-filled Ilhara valley, I drove though the first snowflakes to Goreme, the 'capital' of Cappadocia, where I found even more snow falling, and bumped into a group of cycling circus artists (http://www.cyclown.org/). So, winter is comming, making it about time to pass the 5000km mark, and heading off to Syria!
Love,
Eelco
