Aksaray-Beyşehir

260.7km, 1342 vertical metres

Merhaba from drizzly, lakeside Beyşehir, which is an improvement in weather from our previous edition in snowy Cappadocia more than a week ago.

Sultanhani and the caravanserai

In the 13th century, caravans hauled by animals carrying porcelain, honey and spices along the Silk Roads network we had biked a section of. The Seljuk sultans built caravansarai as safe stopping points with high walls and places to sleep, encouraging trade. In the 21st century lines of trucks now carry goods through Sultanhani and don’t stop at the caravanserai, an impressive stone structure with an elaborately carved edifice. Which is a shame because the hamam and scent rooms seem like a great way to refresh after being on the road.

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Kokarkuyu village

For us, the sultan wouldn’t be hosting us, so we continued down very rural roads dotted with energy infrastructure – underground gas storage and solar farms – and stopped in a village playground where we met Osman. Some Google translate later, as well as a chat with his brother in England who told us the village’s name translated into “smelly village” and we soon had a campsite set up and surrounded by locals who were curious about our cooking set up (they promptly left us to eat alone once we had finished). They provided us with eggs and tangy sheep yoghurt which we combined with some honey for a great dessert.

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Karapınar and Acıgöl

After passing Europe’s (Turkey might be in Asia but China and India have them handily beat) largest solar farm we reached Karapınar. We met up with Fatih, who we had met at the previous village and offered to host us. It was an extremely generous offer and we had lunch, dinner and breakfast the following morning with him and his mother in their very spacious and modern apartment. We could even leave our bike bags and ride unburdened to Acıgöl, a volcanic crater lake that we looped.

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Çatalhöyük corner, or, Shanti gets to talk a lot in this part

Fatih’s mum gave me a big hug as we left and some beautiful socks she had knitted. Yes, knitting is helping me make friends in Türkiye! I was exhibiting a rash that seemed like saddle sores (non glamorous biking affliction alert) so we decided to get a bus for the next 40km of flat highway. And incredibly smooth experience where we turned up at the bus station, conducted a brief Google Translate summit (an old man hilariously said ‘I won’t play those games’ in Turkish when I held up my phone for the live translate), a bus was leaving in 5 minutes and we didn’t even have to take the wheels off the bikes! 

We were headed for one of Turkey’s oldest heritage sites. I heard about Çatalhöyük a few months ago, as part of my extended ‘deep human history’ kick. Most of our species existence has been pre-writing and pre-agriculture. This is in stark contrast to how, for example, navigating Turkiye regularly makes me feel amazed that people managed to travel before digital maps and translation apps. 

Çatalhöyük is the biggest known neolithic settlement, with 3000-8000 people living here between 7000-5600 BCE. For context, there were some Roman burials here in the early CE – but in terms of time, we are closer to the Romans than the Romans were to Çatalhöyük. 

On the flat, flat plains, the archeological site is a mound that rises 21 metres above the flat. We had seen some of the artefacts in Ankara, like an obsidian mirror and flint blades, wall murals with paintings of small people hunting large headless animals – aurochs? The museum didn’t have many of the artefacts (I would highly recommend visiting Çatalhöyük and the Konya Museum, Museum of Anatolian Civilisations or Aksaray Museum) but it did have heaps of context about the archeology. For example, paleobotanists had scraped soil samples from the site, soaked them in water and filtered out the dirt to examine the type of pollen and figure out what species were being cultivated and eaten. There were videos of experimental archeology to determine how bitter acorns were prepared for eating and wild pistachios were ground into a paste, or seeds made into a porridge. 

The houses were built next to each other out of mud bricks, with no space between walls. There weren’t doors or streets, but ladders to a hole in the roof, which was also the chimney. Presumably people walked over the roofs to travel through the town. People were buried under sleeping platforms in the houses and the houses were painted with white plaster and red pigments, with paintings of volcanoes, geometric designs and wild animals. When a house reached the end of its life it would be partially collapsed and a new house built on top, creating the mound. 

I’ve read a whole book about the intellectual problem of “deep time”, the Earth and the universe’s billions of years before humans were even a shadow on the landmass now called Africa. Even Çatalhöyük and it’s people seem so distant from me, yet there I was, walking among their houses. The exhibit was peppered with kind of inane questions. “This is how people in Çatalhöyük decorated their house. How do you decorate your house?” As much as this approach annoyed me, I think it’s the only way to think about people so separated from us. All week, we have been stumbling through conversations in Turkish, talking about family and food and bicycles and work. We don’t even know what language was spoken in Çatalhöyük but somehow I feel sure that we’re we to encounter each other, there would still be so much common ground (but maybe not on the topic of bicycles). 

We biked another 10 km to the town of Çumra, found a cheap hotel, then scurried around to pharmacies to get some more saddle sore treatment options before the shops closed. 

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Çumra to Beyşehir took us two more days, as we finally started climbing out of the Konya plain. On a rocky road next to a dry canal a guy beckoned us into his carrot packing warehouse and gave us some veges to munch. The fields were all churches up with harvested winter crops making space for summer agriculture. It was sunny enough on the first day to eat some Turkish ice cream for lunch, then find a highway rest stop to camp with some snowy mountains poking their heads out. The next day, we turned off the highway and cycled through some very cute mountain villages with blooming cherry and apricot trees. Lots of spiny rock bridges and long stone edifices to enjoy. It was all going well, bar some shepherd dogs working themselves into a barking frenzy at the sight of our wheels. A particularly delightful gentle downhill surrounded by blossom trees turned Shanti into a speed demon, soaring downhill and missing a turnoff. This meant another 10 km of highway riding and a premature ending to highway villages, but at least we had made it to our warmshowers host at the cycling association in Beyşehir.

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Mushroom hunting in Beyşehir (also by Shanti)

When we reached Beyşehir, the head of the local bicycle club told us that a club sponsor would pay for a night in a hotel room. With tired legs and clothes in need of a wash, this was pretty sweet. He also told us there was a family mushroom hunting expedition the next day- did we want to come? 

We quickly revised our ‘floppy rest day’ plan in favour of saying yes to interesting opportunities, and got into vans with lots of kids and parents the next morning. After a stop to look at some impressive stork nests, we reached a pine forest on the edge of Beyşehir National Park, the big lake (bigger than Lake Taupō) stretching large and glossy behind us. The problem with mushroom hunting is that it is hard to know whether we are bad at it, or if there were just no mushrooms. After a frustrating hour poking at roots, I spotted a wrinkled taupe morel! And then another, then another. We found about 12 then no more, but I was satisfied – after some stream hopping and rock clambering I chatted to some of the other people who had come along. An engineer showed us photos of the shotgun he uses to go hunting and another person teased Mustafa, our host, who had known him since he was in school. It was a nice way to feel a bit more part of the life of the city, and the handful of morels was a bonus too. 

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Those morels deserved a good campsite, and we had seen a national park on the map that deserved them. That’ll be in the next blog post!