Day 84 (Turkey): Narince - outside of Demirli (three strikes, no one out)

today’s distance: 100km
total distance: 5555km
riding time: 6-7h

Early morning it is in the countryside … and I was up a bit earlier than usual. That didn’t mean a really early starting time though. After finding Aslam in the bakery across the street and after having breakfast, I finally headed out after fending of an offer to work in the fields. I think I wouldn’t have been a good farmhand anyway.

Aslan had predicted no climbs … yay. How wrong he was. The day was one of those with the highest altitudinal changes of the entire tour, more than 1400m was what my bike computer told me at the end of the day. It started right after town too. Undulating countryside - it was great visually. But there was a sense of considerable poverty when you take a closer look at the houses.

Once I got to the ferryboat, there was a lot of bruhaha about who would get on and who wouldn’t. The Japanese tour group bus which I had seen taking a wrong turn up Mount Nemrut seemed to be safe, but everyone else seemed to up for grabs. My bike didn’t seem to be an issue and only one car was ultimately left for the next crossing.

The other side greeted me with a major uphill, about 7-8km on the serious side and the remainder until Siverek a sometimes flattish and sometimes undulating ride.

A stop here and there yielded these pictures …

The afternoon was a bit dreary … don’t get me wrong. The countryside was beautiful - in hindsight. Once I got away from Siverek (which felt like a massive furnace), it was all uphill from there. Add to this a very strong and unrelenting sidewind and a lot of traffic (meaning that it was hard to find a rhythm) and you get the picture. On top of that though came some - let’s say - unfriendliness. Already in the morning I had a stone thrown at me by a kid in a village. Not something to make me happy. His mother just stood there watching the scene and didn’t intervene at all. Which made me even more angry I must admit. What is wrong there? In the afternoon, I had a bottle thrown at me out of a van while passing me and hitting me in the back and was also doused with water by a passenger in a truck. Not sure whether the latter was meant as a friendly gesture, but it didn’t feel good. The bottle incident sort of left me speechless and I couldn’t react fast enough to read the license plate.

Towards the end of the day I was simply looking for a place to crash. There was no shelter in sight, just wide open expanse with a lot of noisy traffic. I pulled up at a gas station where two young guys were working. They were adamant that I not go into the village not far away and said to pitch my tent behind the gas station. My hunch is that it has something to do with the minaret missing in that village.