To Trabzon
Well, after a bit of a slog through the heat of the Coruh River Valley and then rough roads of the Black Sea Mountains, I’ve finally reached TRABZON and the BLACK SEA. I rode down into Trabzon early this afternoon, really hoping to get a lovely romatic view of the sea from some scenic high lonely peak etc, but in the end what happened was it was raining and the road down to the sea out of the mountains had various quarry works at each side, and then furniture warehouses and a Scandia car showroom, and lots of petrol stations. And then I punctured about 5Km from the city, and got very dirty mending that. I hadn’t seen the sea at all until finally I swung up a flyover and there it was, grey and flat and quite boring, with a few ordinary ships and jetties and port offices. Not really a good place to cry out “thalassa thalassa”; and think of classical history. I can’t really do that anyway, as I don’t really know any, but I got a very nice email from my dad a week or so ago, telling the story of Xenophon leading the Greeks back home through the Caucasus, and have been thinking about them as I rode through the same mountains, looking forward too to see the sea.
I seem to have been in the north east of Turkey for ages. Actually I’ve been riding hard, without a rest day since I left Tbilisi on 6th August. It’s lovely, but very hard country, remote, hilly, winding roads. And without really meaning to, I seem to have picked one of the toughest wildest routes.
My plan for the last bit into Trabzon was to go over the Black Sea Mountains through the Altindere National Park, and thereby see the famous abandoned Greek Orthodox monastery at Sumela kind of efficiently on the way down into Trabzon. It looked straightforward on the map, a single road, one junction, and all encouragingly edged with green, which means “landschaftlich besonders schoene Strecke” on my Euromap. Well, it WAS beautiful. But hard. I slogged metre by metre up the Kostandagi Pass, on wretched slippy gravel, walking, pushing the bike. The wind over the top was blasting so hard that the metal sign for the pass was shaking and rattling. There was a vast beautiful empty landscape below, bare hills, clefts, valleys. And there was a fork in the road. No sign, no car, nothing. Just rolling lovely hills and rolling clouds and rain starting to fall. Hmmm. I waited for about 20 mins but noone came. Noise of wind. No car to be heard. Time going on. So I decided to go right. I think that was wrong but I don’t really know, as there were then lots more confusing tracks and turns and no signs. I just kept rolling downhill. After about 10km, a car came by and an old man who spoke German said I should go left, which was back uphill. Another long hard stony climb. Oh. I’d obviously gone badly wrong. And they said Sumela was still 30km away. I would have to walk pushing the bike and so it was probably going to take another 6 hours. Oh. I put out of my mind the fond idea I’d had all day of reaching TOURISTY Sumela with the nice wood bungalows I’d read were there, and cheered myself thinking of my cosy tent and cooking up some soup on my stove. Hmmm. Difficult. I’d really been looking forward to fluffy towels and nice sheets. Going wrong and getting lost is really annoying. And quite scary on the mountains alone.
Well, I battled on thinking I’d do another hour then camp, but what happened next was that a huge 4×4 came along, and stopped. There were three men in it, a big boot, and an empty seat. And they were going to Sumela. So I accepted a lift, put my bike in the boot, and took the empty seat. They were Trabzon people, coming down from a mountain festival near Uzungol. It was cold. You could see odd people in headscarves and brown jackets bringing cattle across the empty hillsides. It turned out the men in the 4×4 were hungry, and one of them had a cousin who had a yayla summer pasture mountain cabin not far away. So suddenly we all went there and had a big dinner of sac kavurma which was a kind of hotpot fondue, aryan, a yoghurt drink, and wild rocket. The wood cabin had an iron stove and we all sat round and ate hot roasted chestnuts and drank black tea.
Then they turned on the generator, banged the TV and watched Trabzonspor football team play Gaziantepspor. Trabzonspor lost, and it all got very late, so we all stayed the night in little gabled rooms in the roof. So, finally this morning, they drove me across fabulously beautiful mountain pastures down into pine forest, and to the turn for Sumela. So I did make it to the monastery, and then finally to the sea. Thanks a lot to Serkan, Sait, Ayhan, who were in the 4×4, and Hasan, whose very nice hut it was. Up till this point when I got lost in the Black Sea Mountains, my plan had been going ok.
I came down from the high Anatolian steppe then along Imerhavi valley through Savsat to Ardanuc. There was an eerie gorge, with ruined castles, and black and white Egyptian vultures flapping up from the rocks.
In Ardanuc, there were men playing backgammon at tables under the trees. I went to the post office to send home some stuff, and it took ages because they’d lost some important piece of paper you apparently need to do international mail, so people were banging cupboards and shaking files, and they invited me into the back and gave me tea while I waited.
After Ardanuc, I came to the Coruh River, which is, I read, one of the world’s wildest places for white water rafting. It was fiercely hot, 45 degrees every day. I thought my eyes might dry out with hot wind blowing over them. Is that possible? I was putting my head under taps at water troughs everywhere to try and keep cool. Roads empty, tiny winding lanes, dirt tracks. In the towns and villages, lots of women are in full chador (not sure spelling), black or white, sort of gliding along the hot roads in the villages.
Butterflies everywhere, meadow browns (I think - not v good at butterflies), copper coloured ones, tiny blue and brown ones in pairs, big swallowtail types, white and yellow and red. Very few birds. Is it too hot? I sometimes saw crows in big flocks, a few magpies in quiet villages, some jays and blue rollers again, a few buzzards.
I went up to the astonishing abandoned Georgian orthodox church at Dort Kilise. It was built in the 11th c but abandoned during the Crimean war (I think) and is now a huge ruin high in the hills, covered in grass, with fallen
masonry and rubble inside, empty niches, fading frescoes.
I’ve stopped for the night in some lovely places. A tree house by the river in Yusufeli. A house high above the village of Arzular at the foot of the Black Sea Mountains, where the local bus driver and his wife invited me to stay. I gave my bike horn to their son Suleyman and I could hear him blowing it as I rode away across the valley. A pension house all red rugs and cushions where very sadly a man had just been killed rolling his car off the road, so there were lots of women weeping and I was in the middle of it not sure what to do, shaking hands with all sorts of upset people. And I camped out by the Coruh river in a poplar wood with frogs croaking.
I’m trying out Turkish sweets. In Bayburt some old men showed me to a proper pastanasi sweet shop and I had nut chocolate tart. I had a earthenware pot of cold sutlac rice pudding at Sumela. I had kadayif shredded wheat with honey and nuts in Ardahan. Tonight I’ve bought little slices of sticky stuff called mebrume from the grocer opposite here in Trabzon. It’s made with pistachio nuts, I think.
Well, here in Trabzon I’m leaving behind the remote bit of northeast Turkey that used to be part of the mediaeval kingdom of Georgia, with its castles and ruined orthodox Christian churches, and I’m now in places where the Pontic greeks lived and Xenophon came. Trabzon is the end of the silk road (maybe? not quite sure), but amazingly - to me, after slogging it by bike - I keep finding that these Anatolian towns here are places Mongol warlords came through, and destroyed, in the 14th c. Can hardly believe that Timurlane, who died at Otrar the ruined desert city which I went to, way way back in southern Kazakhstan, came so far. But I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised, at least they had horses. Might be easier than cycling, actually.