Bodrum, Söke-Bergama

 339.45 km, 2374 vertical metres

Bodrum is a town of rich people. As the ferry drew in, I saw the harbour bristling with yacht masts. It was 7 pm, and a hilly 7 km ride to where we were staying with a bike mechanic. Tiredness, noise spilling out of restaurants with prices in euros, and the hot evening sun combined with the hills to make me feel VERY hot and annoyed by the time we arrived. 

Our host, Aydin, works as a bicycle mechanic during the day and does motorbike deliveries in the evening (pay bike mechanics more!!). We didn’t know when he would be back, so we had to wait. 

Often, travelling is a waiting game: to check in to a hotel, for a delayed bus to leave, to find a toilet. Most of these problems can be alleviated by bikes, where you can just go. I tried to do some drawing as I waited, but while my legs might be stronger, this trip has not yet cultivated my patience. Eventually Aydin turned up and let us in (he was super lovely and it wasn’t his fault!) and I made dinner. 

After consulting the map, we decided to skip some flat highway and get a bus for 120 km to the town of Söke. We spent the next morning wandering around a Crusader castle – lots of rigid edges and right angles – which had been converted into a museum for funds from underwater archeology, stuff recovered from shipwrecks. Presumably some of the hefty entrance fee (it was nearly $50 NZD each) goes to the upkeep of peacocks, who were very interested in my lunch. I drew lots of pictures of glass flasks and ship bones. 

We reached Söke in the evening, and stayed with Hasan, a primary school teacher with a lot of hobbies. His mother made us some food, his cat pranced around, and he played some folk songs on the guitar for us. It’s a big climb out of Söke, a medium sized industrial town, but probably one of my favourite parts of this leg of the trip. The green fields and olive groves nearly glowed in the morning light, and there were bright flashes of wildflowers by the side of the road. Eventually it became quiet gravel, with the angular limbs of wind turbines rising above the ridge. Round and round like our tired legs. 

Downhill to Selçuk, which is close to the ancient city of Ephesus. We didn’t have time or money to visit – supermarket cats and bread for lunch in the shade was just as appealing.

While the borders between seas are somewhat arbitrary, people say that this area is where the Eastern Mediterranean becomes the Aegean. A brief, sparkling swim, and a diversion inland to the site of Klaros. Once a temple to Apollo, it is allegedly the “third biggest prophecy centre of the ancient world”. It now has some pillars in an area that was filled with stagnant puddles from the rain, and some fragments of statues. It always gets me when marble is carved like fabric, like I could imagine the sculptors forming something soft out of stone, a solid miracle.

On the cycling app Rolling Around, we had seen a campsite 5km down the road – which was for the best, as it was already 6pm. We had just finished our risotto dinner with the sunset trailing over the ocean when the jandarma showed up and asked for our passports. It wasn’t clear why, but obvious what: camping here was forbidden, we should find a hotel. Where? They suggested a town 20 km away, but the sun was setting. We packed up the tent – sunrise views were not to be, and felt slightly troubled and suspicious finding a camp spot down a side road. By the time the tent was up for the second time, it was nearly fully dark. 

From Selçuk, we had been using the Eurovelo 8 route, which begins in Spain and goes all the way east to Cyprus, with a section on the western coast of Turkey. This makes a nice change from having to piece the route together ourselves. The route was supposed to go all the way west to Çesme, with the option to hop to the Greek island of Chios, but after 20 straight kilometres of unfinished resorts and dusty, built up towns, Shreyas and I agreed to cut across the peninsula instead. Because it was flat, we went a lot faster – we had some chewy vanilla and coffee dessert to revive ourselves in the town of Seferihisar the next day, then went east when he hit the north coast. 

The notable part of this area is how much military presence there is. There were clusters of tanks, a few fighter jets doing drills overhead, the sound of shooting practice, and walls of military housing with signs forbidding photography and drones. 

The ride into İzmir, Turkey’s third biggest city, was surprisingly straightforward — there’s a coastal bike path for 30 km around the harbour. I didn’t like the headwind (though I am trying to learn, I am very bad at drafting off Shreyas, so I get very tired) but it was delightful to see heaps of families enjoying picnics and views of the ships (including grey navy ships) in the harbour. 

When we checked into our hostel in the early afternoon, the panic started setting in. We only had 10 more days in Turkey! Only a week of biking, one of which should be a rest day! I had started this trip with a sense of spaciousness, time to try all the different Turkish desserts and see so much of the country. But suddenly I could see the trade-offs. A day exploring İzmir would mean we had to take a bus part of the way to Çannakale. The ferry timetables weren’t very amenable to going to Lesbos, the Greek island we had hoped to visit. More time biking would mean less time in Istanbul which is surely a fascinating. And there was the rest of our trip to plan, transportation in India, dates to confirm. With so many decisions to make, the hostel didn’t feel very restful, especially given it was next to a nightclub with thumping bass music until 3:00 am. 

Thoughts about airline baggage limits plagued me for much of the next morning. It helped slightly that we were on a bike path skirting the Gediz Delta, which has a lot of flamingos. Seeing their sinuous necks snaking through the opaque and polluted water helped me forget about the irritating diversion through İzmir’s highway’s on a futile search for one of the rare ATM’s without a 10% withdrawal fee. Talking to two women biking east to Georgia then China helped more. Only seven more days of biking were doable by comparison.

We kept losing time to the headwind, although at least it alleviated the hot sun. The flatness and agricultural development didn’t help with finding a campsite. There were several polluted canals with rickety bridges to walk across to the fields, and lots of furrowed earth and hay bales from recent threshing. We asked in three separate places if we could pitch our tent, but we’re greeted with confusion or instructions to try a glamping place that didn’t let you bring your own tent. Eventually, there were some pine trees with burned rubbish underneath them, crawling with red mites, and a sense of not being that welcome. But at least the flowering camomile made a nice smell under our feet as we wheeled the bikes from the road.  

On the last cycling day of this leg, the wind was finally in our favour. Unfortunately, the security guards were not. Something must have changed since the EV8 route was designed. Trucks full of coal dust trundled past, leaving a strange feeling on my teeth. It might be a newly constructed port – a guard at a gate told us we could not go through. Without doubling back at least 8km, our best option was to take the bags off our bikes, lift them over a small gap in a barrier, and wheel them along a narrow maintenance footpath on the wrong side of a highway exit. 

Luckily there wasn’t much traffic, but we turned off the road the moment we could. Then, another obstacle! The road led past a turnoff to an oil refinery and for a reason that was not clear to me, bikes weren’t allowed through, even though cars were. These security guards seemed grateful for some excitement. They offered us some water. They took photos of our passports. They called their superior. They asked about our trip. Their superior came, and said he was with the police, though he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. More passport photos. More questions about where we had come from, oh what a nice area, Turkey is so beautiful. At this point they had asked us to wait next to the barrier, to be out of the way of cars. We asked whether we could go back on the highway but there was another superior to consult. More waiting, then the obvious answer: back to the highway for you. 

A brief swim in the harbour of Aliağa, bulging oil infrastructure in the background, islands in the harbour. Greece is so close! But we were turning inland, on the smooth hot highway, kilometres disappearing under our wheels. 

By early afternoon, we had made it to Bergama, where we waiting in a park for our host Tuğba to return from her work as a dentist. She and her husband Çana and daughter Çanar were incredibly kind, making dinner and telling us about their lives, the health system in Turkey, and how university education works. With lots of lovely cobbled alleys, and small bazaars displaying parchment (invented here when Egypt stopped exporting its papyrus so the Pergamon library wouldn’t get bigger than Alexandria) and woven carpets, it has been the perfect place for a rest day. We visited the ancient Pergamon city, ate eggs and eggplant, and are leaving with clean clothes and full bellies for the final section to Çannakale.