Crossing the border into Turkey reminded me of the first day of school. I had a small sense of the curriculum and I was really anxious to get started on this large, daunting country. But I thought to myself: Will it be difficult? Will I enjoy it? What will my teacher be like? At first I could only answer the third question. My teacher, Kellen, told me a couple months ago that we would be travelling through the middle of Turkey. After some back and forth emails with other cyclists and more research we decided to follow the Black Sea coast (Karadeniz in Turkish) the entire length from Georgia to Istanbul. We had 1400 kilometers and 13 days to get to Istanbul, where major changes and new surprises awaited all. It would be a very difficult ride, but one we hoped well worth the effort.
We crossed into Turkey and found the road immediately pressed against the sea by 100 meter tall cliffs. The smooth, flat freeway led us to our first night’s stay in the city of Hopa. The impression I got of Hopa was that of a typical shady, uninviting border town – this could be due to the fact that we did not yet speak any Turkish or that it was also the scene of the first fisticuffs I’ve seen on the trip. Either way we were ready to move further along and dive into the country. The next evening we spent in a much more welcoming city, Trabzon.
The day before we hit Samsun we even ran into two women cyclists on the road who were also considering the same route. “Oh, I heard it is tremendously beautiful,” they said. “But you’re going to try to do that in 8 days?! Did you know that if you summed up all the climbing you will be doing from Sinop to Istanbul, it is the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest twice?” Gulp! Almost 60,000 feet of climbing! That night Kellen and I looked at the Google Earth elevation profile to see what we had in front of us. The diagram that looked similar to a seismograph during a massive earthquake. We shared a quick nervous look and then thought better of it. “It’ll be worth it,” we both said, “and plus, we can handle anything, we’re Kyzylkum Desert veterans.”
After watering the street for 5 minutes the hotel owner came running up the stairs and began banging on the door. I was lying on the bed and told him to come in. He stormed in the room and burst open the bathroom door. Kellen was quick to grab his family jewels and gave the man a confused look. He pointed to the hallway and both looked to see water rushing down the stairs. Kellen assessed, “Hmm, yeah that’s not good.” The owner pulled the plug and went back to smoking his cigarette while he stormed out of the room. I sat on the bed laughing hysterically at the whole affair. The next day they even had mops ready to attack our soggy room after we left. Sometimes we cause quite a stir when we visit these cities. After this we went out to visit the city of Amasra and old fortress and took loads of photos. We followed this by a delicious seafood dinner along the water. It felt like we were on a normal vacation for the first time.