Türkiye week 1: Kayseri-Aksaray (plus Ankara airport)

279.5km, 3394 vertical metres, lows of -2°C

OK, let’s get the obvious bit over with first. If you’ve heard of Cappadocia (the second ‘c’ is a ‘k’ sound fyi), you have probably seen photos of hot air balloons floating over a rocky landscape. Did we see this? Yes we did.

Close examiners of the picture above will notice some things that might differ from your ideas of Cappadocia: snow! In a week biking through, a dominant theme was that it was cold, with highs of 5 or 6 degrees and lows of -2. Our first week of cycling has taught me that even if you’ve read a lot of bike packing blogposts and travel guides, there are limits to imagination. I couldn’t really know what it would be like, and how it would feel, until I was there.

On our way to Turkey, we spent a week in Melbourne, testing our bike packing set up, cavorting around museums, enjoying the free public transport and generally being on holiday. It was a nice prelude to be in a place where English is spoken, and to do admin like booking train tickets and reading travel guides. We were staying with my friend Maddie, who was not only incredible in terms of local bike route advice and putting up with endless chat about bike boxes, but also lent me Elif Batuman’s books The Idiot and Either/Or to reread.

In Either/Or, protagonist Selin goes to Turkey to write a travel guide. This is what she says about Cappadocia: “The photographs often showed an unnatural number of hot air balloons, suspended at various heights over what was generally described as a ‘surreal moonscape’ or a ‘fairytale landscape’.” She goes on to talk about all the dwellings carved into the rock, little holes and doors and windows that people used to live and pray in. “It was another confusing thing about Cappadocia,” Selin continues. “The sculpted-looking rocks had got there through erosion; the holes, which looked like the result of an obscure natural process, weren’t – unless you considered ancient people hiding to be a natural process.”

While Selin gets distracted by a subplot involving a bus-station officer, Shreyas and I were focused on the goal: ride around Cappadocia following the “Cappadocia Delight” route from bikepacking.com.

We arrived with our bikes in Ankara, and found a completely empty corner of the airport to put the pedals, wheels and handlebars back on. After some mind bending squinting at the map, trying to figure out which exit was required for riding on the right side of the road, we pedalled out.

This turned out to be a BIG MISTAKE. I am pretty brave with traffic but was nearly crying when I realised we had to bike past a motorway exit , then walk across a narrow bridge where we had to hold our panniers because it was too narrow otherwise. I scraped my shins repeatedly on the pedals. Eventually we gave up and called not one but two taxis because all the taxis were too tiny for our bikes.

My favourite part of two days in Ankara was going to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations because I loved how WEIRD some of the decorative items from the past were! Screaming 4000 year old boxes where you have to get your stuff out by putting your hand in a guys mouth! Two headed ducks! Jugs designed so that your vessel can be filled by four tigers spitting into it! Lots of thin sheets of gold for diadems! Apart from that we went to the giant Anıtkabir (the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), ate gözleme and çigkofte, and recovered from jetlag.

Shreyas, my route research prince, had sussed out seven hour slow train to Kayseri, south and east of Ankara. We’ve been using an app called Warmshowers to find free places to stay with people who want to host cyclests, which turned into staying in the dingy clubrooms of Argos, a local cycling club. This definitely set the theme for the week: lots of accepting hospitality no matter what shape it takes, lots of unpredictability about where we would sleep.

Because we had arrived in Kayseri in the dark, it was incredibly exciting to wake up the next morning and realize just how close Erciyes Dağı, a 3900m volcano with ski field, was. It’s still covered in snow! We wove out of Kayseri, and by the time the highway-averse route took us into a random truckyard with a scale reminiscent of the Anıtkabir, we felt like we were truly out of the city.

In springtime all the apricot trees in Turkey are flowering, and these clusters of pink make for a delightful landscape. It’s very dry, with lots of exposed earth. I keep thinking of comparisons to other places I’ve been, like Spiti (dry villages with shepherd dogs) or Sydney (museums with lots of human history and red roofs). The skill, I think, is to appreciate things on their own terms.

Selin’s description of Cappadocia is accurate: there truly are holes in almost every cliff and canyons of dry pale stone. Some of the stone houses and churches you have to pay to get into, but there are so many that there are lots you can just wander into with no issues.

The photos might be dreamy, but there is lots in-between the tourist towns and swirly fairy chimneys. Dry fields, some flocks of sheep and goats, barking shepherd dogs which like to chase bikes, trucks and buses, chipped signs for restaurants which have been removed due to government regulations. Though it’s a tourist area, many people do not speak English, and we have been picking up scraps of Turkish (mostly food words) and using Google Translate a lot.

On the second day around Cappadocia, after a LOT of pushing our bikes over muddy sections, it was clear that we were not as into off-road riding as the route designers. While I’ve done a few multi-day bike trips around New Zealand with Shreyas, we’ve put a lot more thought into our set up this time (two changes of clothes each and a frame bag!). Even so, having a tent on the handlebars and two full paniers is heavy and unwieldy. Stage one took us two days – we could have gone further, but it’s surprisingly remote. While there is good cell phone signal everywhere, there are long sections without villages and finding food, fuel and a place to sleep takes lots of planning.

On our third day of riding, it started to get seriously cold, for what turned out to be three consecutive days with highs of about 5 degrees. We cut that day short due to forecast rain, camping in the garden of a restaurant in Soğanlı. In the morning, the droplets had frozen on the tent fly. As well as two sleeping bags, I wore a down jacket to bed and was still only barely warm enough. Because the temperatures were the absolute limit of what our equipment would work for, and the route was going to take us another 500 metres up we re-scoped, finding a route that stayed around 1200 metres, even though it was sad to miss the scenery.

Inner Cappadocia has less of the ethereal landscapes, with lots of fields covered in rubbish and cut through with highways. We wanted to try camping at Narligöl, a volcanic crater lake, but by 5pm it was around 0 degrees , so we slept in a small mosque some people at a petrol station had pointed to instead.

Things improved after about 15km of cycling the next morning. It was still freezing – a call with Oak suggested the very useful idea of wearing socks over our gloves to keep our hands warm – but the sun came out and the shining slopes of Hasan Dağı, another 3700 volcanic mountain appeared. It felt so miraculous to be on this empty road, resilient against the cold, spotting dogs and blossoming trees and the prospect of menemen (eggs, tomatoes and capsicums) for lunch.

Shreyas and I have been working on silent communication, like when we saw another bikepacker after lunch and wordlessly agreed to go over and say hi. Naoyo is from Japan and has been biking around the world for 3 years, covering over 50,000km so far – which seems difficult to imagine when we are only 200km in to a much shorter journey. Since he was going the other way, he gave us some advice about biking through the canyon, pointing to a part of the map that was really hard. Or did he mean really easy? For the next half hour I replayed the conversation and couldn’t remember which part of the map meant what. Once again, preparation and knowledge had limits, and the mind-melting effect of constant looking at maps might need to be studied. We would just have to figure it out for ourselves…

After hauling our bikes over a narrow, rocky section, I had the strange experience of some French hikers applauding and filming as as we passed them – we were wearing a lot of layers but it surely didn’t look too hard? A restaurant owner in the town of Selime said we could sleep in one of his rooms for ₺1500 TL, about $60 NZD. It wasn’t a great deal, but he was friendly and hospitable. After three nights of cold camping, we were happy to say yes – and luckily enough, since that was the night it snowed.

Since reading E.M. Forster’s book Howard’s End, the phrase ‘Only Connect’ sometimes runs through my head. There are so many times when even the slightest insight into another person’s mind seems impossible, all the barriers of self and family, culture and personality, knowledge and time that stand between us. Yet connection is possible, it happens again and again.

So perhaps my fav part of cruising around Cappadocia was not the frescoes in an 11th century church or an amazing cheese and bread breakfast in Ürgüp or scampering to look at some pyramid-like ‘fairy chimneys’ after brushing my teeth or even waking up to see the land covered in a thin layer of snow with hot air balloons floating above. It was in the tiny village of Güzelöz. It had been raining and we had just biked about 10km across a plateau, seeing nothing but rotting sacks of potatoes and a solar farm. I was wet and cold from the rain and stumbled into the first open looking building I saw, a room with some snacks to buy, where two men were smoking and eating bread.

They asked us to sit down and gave us bread, with vanilla tahini halva (think ‘soan papdi with tahini’) and then some tea. When we were almost ready to leave, someone led us to the bakery behind the shop, where women were rolling out rounds of chewy, puffy bread on long trays – apparently something Güzelöz is known for. A video journalist was making a video about the bread, and put us on camera holding some more bread. The men from the shop helped me tuck the bread in my panniers without folding it, and it felt like this gift of warm generosity on a cold day, random and delicious and true.