Beyşehir to Antalya. 199.69 km, 2120 vertical metres, 3 days

“This time, when I say it’s the last cold day, I really mean it,” I told Shreyas, as we left Beyşehir at 8 am, 5 degrees, drizzling. The third-largest lake in Turkey was flat and grey to our right. The shore had receded considerably thanks to dry conditions in the last few years, dried mud covered in weeds.

I was almost grateful to get a flat tire, 7 kilometres in. A reason to stop! Luckily there was a petrol station and we needed fuel for our stove anyway. I eventually identified the leak thanks to water in a petrol station bucket and drank some free petrol station çay to warm my hands up first. This did give me a lot of flat tyre anxiety for the next few days but so far so good.

The area got increasingly rural and the clouds got closer. The mist threading through lush pine trees reminded me of a screensaver. As the road became a dirt pack, more than an hour went past without seeing any cars. About 300 vertical metres from the top of the pass, four men with front paniers and top-end mountain bikes zoomed past us, their bikes spattered with mud. They didn’t stop to talk. “It’s very cold up there,” yelled one, droplets of water in his beard. “We’re Polish,” said the next, skirting around a puddle.

At this point I had already gone back to my ugly outfit of polypro on top of bike shorts, socks on hands and merino hoodie under my helmet. As we reached about 1750 metres, a perfectly formed hexagonal snowflake landed on my dry bag. Its mathematical perfection was a nice distraction from the shreds of ice in the windy clag.

But then we were on the other side of the pass! The clag started to dissolve and there were swooping hairpin bends with waterfalls over the road that reminded me of Rohtang Pass in India. We descended almost 1300 metres and then I saw an empty meadow by a little stream next to the blue river and insisted we camp there.

Another group of 4 French bikepackers passed us at about 6pm in the sunny evening. They were also going the opposite direction to us with long distance set ups, front panniers and fuel bottles strapped to bottom tubes, heading to Georgia. This massively triggered my bikepacking imposter syndrome. Even though we’d just cycled 78 km over 1300 vertical metres I thought about how slow we are going, how much we stop, how many sights we enjoy instead of going fast and furious, how we have the wrong gear. I was wearing a skirt, a completely unnecessary item! Shreyas is completely unaffected by these feelings but listened patiently to me talk about it all evening as I chopped up our delicious meaty morels to have with pasta, tomatoes and cheese.

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The part where Shreyas has a technology kerfuffle with his bike GPS and has no insight into the climbs on the biggest day of climbing

Those who know me are aware of my penchant for technology, so it was without surprise that some of the excitement for this trip was being able to use my secondhand Wahoo Elemnt Roam bike GPS/computer to navigate Türkiye and later on India and Mongolia.

But tech can be a double edged sword. I managed to turn off the feature that shows me all of the upcoming climbs on the route, as well as the feature that shows me my progress on the current climb. I guess I just enjoy knowing these things, but it’s hard to explain properly why. IYKYK.

I soon realised this shortly into our ride, but by then I did not want to stop the recording of the ride to turn the feature on via the phone app, potentially splitting my ride into two parts. For those of _us on Strava_ this is an unacceptable fate. Especially when you would have to try download the separate files and stitch the ride together, all on a mobile phone using your wife’s hotspot and janky connection because you’re too cheap to get a tourist SIM card.

I decided to soldier on, hoping to attain some cycling nirvana of not knowing what’s ahead and taking the hills as they come (which Shanti has been doing everyday, in fact she only knows about each climb’s distance and grade because I tell her unprompted). In the end it sort of worked out, maybe my eyes weren’t glued to the computer the entire ride and I noticed more of my surroundings, but when it came to about 400m of climbing on dirt roads I was pulling my phone out at each stop to check the elevation graph on Komoot and see if my lived experience on this climb was accurately represented by a dark orange section signifying a certain percentage gradient.

In any case, there is something interesting in this day and age of GPS navigation. Pre-GPS, with paper maps and asking for directions, did people see as many things in a day as we might? We roughly know what we want to see along our route, but Google Maps is also telling us there are things off that route that also exist and can prompt some more unexpectedness, which is certainly a theme of travelling by bike!

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The next day we only had 30 km to cover which led to a wonderful sleep in and read in the field. We didn’t manage to leave the campsite until 11 am. It was warm and sunny and much greener than Turkey’s interior. We entered the Koprülü Kanyon National Park and had a great swim at the edge of the rushing river then an excellent lunch of bread and potato salad and cherries at a mountain lodge. We stopped for an even better swim at a side stream, all grippy limestone and cool rushing water. I thought of Himachal Pradesh and farms and pine forest in other places I have called home, feeling so alight and strong.

After spotting some scrambling lizards and peering over the edge of a canyon, we proceeded down a series of Rafting and Kamping establishments with different degrees of fanciness, the river getting wider and blue, like the Ganga at Rishikesh. Then I saw a third swimming spot and I simply could NOT resist. A turquoise pool with big trees reaching their roots into the water and an arched Roman (?) era stone bridge behind the modern concrete road bridge. I felt, firmly, that it would be rude not to swim in such an eminently perfect place. All the hot people in the world, like Shar and Oak in Lucknow, would want me to enjoy the swimming hole, so I did.

We talked to a Kurdish man at a farm about figs and onions and the influx of visitors, but it was easy to see why people want to come to this place with its greens and blues.

The campground we eventually settled on was filled with dogs, cats, chickens and turkeys. It cost $40 to set up a tent with only basic water and toilets which irked me, but that is the flip side of lots of tourists.

In the night, an absurd situation occurred. I woke up at around three am with… something furry?… next to my head. A cat! specifically a slightly smelly brown cat who started purring the moment I touched her. I had poked my head out around midnight to look at the stars and not fully zipped the tent, and I think she had widened the gap with her paws. I shooed her out, but three minutes later she was back. She began crawling up the tent inner, on top of the mesh and under the fly, getting very wet from the heavy dew in the process and making the tent roof sag. She was dropping bits of sand and dirt through the mesh, freaking Shreyas out and making me worry her claws would rip the fabric. When I pulled her off, she did it again… at which point, thoroughly defeated and too blurry with sleep to consider other options, I decided that she would cause the least trouble if she just slept with us. She curled up on the sleeping bag as a big warm lump and we only saw the grime she had left on it in the morning. “Oh, she just wanted to be loved,” said the campsite guy when I complained.

I felt quite sad to be biking out of the kanyon the next day, especially when I saw some free and cat-free campsites down the road. And lots of dancing luminous poppies. The land was so different to the other side of the mountains, orange groves and olive trees and huge greenhouses filled with eggplants and bananas and curly bright lettuce. The orange groves, specifically, make me feel like Lily James in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. Our preferred route by the river was closed for road works so we had to do a 10 km detour on a highway. The other highways we have been riding have mostly been empty and far from major cities, about two or three cars passing a minute. This one had about 50 cars a minute. It made me feel exceptionally connected to Shreyas, to have to trust that he was behind me as the cars roared past, communicating only the most important directions and nothing else.

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These blogs have been largely focused on where we went! and what we saw! so this is a good moment to describe what the experience of biking so much in general is like for me. I like how quiet it is, the routine of legs moving round. Slowly, I’m getting more stamina; the weight of the bags doesn’t annoy me so much, even when going up hills. A few times I’ve listened to podcasts (on my favourite topic of Çatalhöyük) but mostly I just think: writing ideas, or stuff I want to make, how the landscape reminds me of other places I’ve lived, what happened to the Russian girl I say next to in Grade 11 science, headline formulations that annoy me, what makes Uprooted by Naomi Novik a near-perfect book. Sometimes I also just sing musical songs in my head. I try to remember to relax my shoulders so my neck doesn’t hurt, adjust my hand position or butt, roll my ankle with the pedal. When I get hungry, it’s like a switch: suddenly I am a yawning chasm, needing food. This also takes up a lot of my bike thinking time. Because I’m looking at Shreyas if he is ahead of me I also think about him and how lucky I am that my husband (!) loves biking as much as me, and how capable and adaptable and excellent he is to travel with. If I see people I often wave or say merhaba; kids almost always wave back. To my great relief, I like biking just as much after 700 kilometres of it. We’ve crossed enough distance now that it would be a big day of driving – but the fact we have done it slowly and stopped so much means I feel I have seen so much more than the world slurring from a highway.

Our destination was Antalya, a city of over 2 million people on Türkiye’s south coast. The highway got faster and busier as we got closer – although a detour to the Romans ruins of Perge was pretty fun. It became obvious that we would have to cross two motorway exits, a terrifying task. Hopefully my bright pink shirt made me visible. I trusted that all would be OK as I crossed the first one, resolutely not imagining how a mini truck would feel hitting me. (This doesn’t really work). Shreyas yelled at me for slowing down then apologized, because it is very stressful. A few kilometres later, we had to cross a two lane motorway exit. After Ankara, how had we ended up entering a city at 5pm peak traffic on the highway again?

10 metres never feels further than when it contains 100 cars a minute. After some complaining about our fate, we backtracked along the footpath to a pedestrian over bridge. Carrying my fully loaded bike up an escalator is an absurd skill Turkey is forcing me to improve at. Some more footpath negotiation and we were able to turn off into a much more peaceful route into Antalya.

We have now been here for two days, staying with a generous but taciturn bike mechanic who wears white linen suits and abundant cologne to work where he changes into overalls, listens to extremely loud AI generated YouTube stories all day and makes fruit platters for his guitar-playing friends. Antalya feels totally different to Ankara, with its warmth and Roman and Byzantine ruins and hundreds of tourists. There is a chain of mid ice cream shops advertised by men wearing traditional waistcoats, an old town with warm stone walls, and the sea! it was so exciting to see it yesterday, shifting greens and blues. We started so far inland, and we have come so far, and now we’re here! The plan is to weave around the coast to the city of Izmır and keep heading north – I’m planning on more delightful swims. We have three and a half weeks until we need to be in Istanbul and a lot of ground to cover.