Day 83 (Turkey): Kahta - Narince (”Every human being has a free mind”)

today’s distance: 54km
total distance: 5455km
riding time: 4h

I woke up feeling not so great … not sure what had happened. But I knew that it would be a rather short day. I set out and instead of taking the shortcut to Narince and thus the turnoff to the top of Mount Nemrut, I ended up slogging up the valley I would have crossed and took the long way around. It was tough and I should have known it, but it was very much worth it. I headed in and was taken by how little traffic there was, but also by how steep the road descended only to climb again soon thereafter. That would be the story of the day. In the background you can see the terrain over which I climbed out of the valley again in the early afternoon. Steepish …

I passed an old bridge on my right before turning aroun on the other side of the valley.

It was rough, but I eventually got to Narince, where I stopped in the right place it seems. My question whether I could leave my bike around the store for the time it would take me to get to the top of Mt. Nemrut (I had decided not to spend the night further on up) was met with a yes and quickly things were organized for me to get up quick. Aslan and his family own a store and a restaurant where he offered I should spend the night if I wanted … but first it was up to the top.

After I was dropped off, I hitched another couple of rides, the last one with an Austrian couple going all the way to the top. I was going to ride it up. Not that day and not any day with a loaded bike. It’s really steep though the surface is much better than I thought it would be.

I met Christoph and Agnes again on one of the lookout places for these statues as we both rounded the mountain on different routes. I kept wondering who in their right mind would tell people to heap a lot of material on top of a mountain and then have some statues built there. It just struck me as a strange idea. Agnes also said that the top of the mountain must have been 25m higher in the past, but too many people trampling on the stones have brought it down quite a bit. The views though are trule spectacular and the figure give you an eerie feeling … but see for yourself.

There are lots more pictures of this amazing place on the flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/markuswagner) site.

The way down took a bit longer than the uphill, but I got back before sunset - but too late to really go anywhere from Narince. Aslam made sure that I was staying at his place and among other things we got into a discussion over religion. He wanted my take on things and I told him that I am not overly religious - and with the help of a ubiquitous translation program that seems to be on every Turkish computer we managed to have a pretty thorough discussion (and which also produced the title line for this blog entry). What struck me was his “proof” he showed me as to the existence of God - which could have come straight out of a Christian fundamentalist store. He popped in a DVD which had footage that could have come out of promo DVDs for these groups and was clearly inspired from such movies. It then turned to Islamic religion and more Koran sequences which I couldn’t understand, but the professionalism of the movie was quite amazing. Just as I was thinking about food - and for some reason the awesome soup I had in Italy came to mind - we went for it. Funnily enough, we had a stew-type meal, rather reminiscent of that same soup I had been thinking about. Good stuff. So was the whole day … it started out a bit on the rough side, but turned to be amazing.

Some things have clearly changed over the last few days … especially the dresses that people wear. The first place that this really struck me was Adiyaman where I saw a good deal of women walking with a lot more cover despite the sweltering heat as well as the men who wear different-style pants (hard to describe, but I will post a picture in the near future). What has remained the same though is the hospitality that I have received.