The Long Road Home

Well, I am finally in the last little town on the black sea coast before the bosphorus. It’s dark. The wind is tugging my washing hanging here next to me. There’s a lighthouse, the sea washing into a little rocky bay, the moon. This has to be one of the most lovely places to sit and write.

Tomorrow I hope to ride into Istanbul. I’ve now ridden just under 7000km since I left hk in april.

In Amasra, I saw ROMAN stuff. First time I see Roman things here. There were little altars at the minuscule museum, with carvings of people lying on couches with tables of food. Coins with pudgy emperors, perfume jars. Togas and bony feet.

After Amasra, where I was just exhausted, the going got easier. Long sweeps of wide road, low hills, shallow valleys.

There was old gold autumn sun on brown fields of dry ploughed-up stubble. Miles and miles of hazelnut groves. There were quiet villages with quiet houses, you hear people flapping rugs from balconies, cow bells, people chopping wood across the valleys. Chickens scuffling in dust under gates, cocks crowing. Dogs, quite nasty ones actually.

Across the hills and valleys, everything rustling in the light wind, trees, leaves rushing, sweetcorn rattling. Lovely dappled rippling shade of tall thin trees.

As you go along, you smell fires where people are burning hazelnut shell bits. Cidery smell of fallen apples, delicious smell of ripe peaches and apricots on trees.

There are families bumping along in trailers to the hazelnut fields. Goats and lanky old goatherd men. A lot of really huge square old women walking slowly up the lane in enormous soft baggy patterned trousers tied in at their ankles, big cardigans, patterned headscarves.

I met my first Slav, a Macedonian man and his son running an ice-cream shop in Karasu. Came from skopje in 1959.

There were long stretches near a shipyard where the road was flat curving away along the edge of the sea, cars twinkling far off, like they do on the road along the northern coast of hk island.

I went through Zonguldak, with mines and ships and people in suits driving cars going to work. I’ve not seen that for weeks and weeks. In the evening families were out eating fast food turkish pide in restaurants. There were mums in jeans without headscarves.

There are gypsy camps, where the young women are in flappy bright shawls, with long hair loose out of big bright headscarfs, dark brown faces.

I stayed at a "holiday village" one night, a tiny clutch of cabins at the end of a 3km track to the sea. There’s a power cut so I eat an omelet alone in a wood cabin over the rocks by candlelight. There’s noone else there, just the guardian and his dog. The moon comes up huge full white. A lighthouse blinks from far away, eregli maybe, or alpali back east along the coast. The wind blows in from the sea like mad flapping my washing.

This stretch through turkey has been fabulous, but a bit lonely. I wish I spoke turkish.

Some of the nicest people to be with have been young teenage boys. Probably sounds a bit odd, but they have been lovely. Normally a little gang gathers round as I get off the bike and prop it up somewhere in a village. They grin and point. Some race me into the village. They don’t really ask many questions, just hang around me.  A boy in Duragan with an awful bowl haircut delightedly talked all the english words he knew "bike difficult car easy". They hold my bike up, try and help. I had no idea teenage boys could be so sweet. A fat boy came up yesterday and gave me his crisps and a strawberry yogurt drink. A nasty-looking boy with an earring gave me his penknife. A few days ago, two aged about 14 on their bikes (decorated for Fenerbaahce and Galataseray) came to sit with me at an empty beach. I showed them how to set up the stove. We made tea. People love the stove. They went dashing off and found pebbles and smooth glass to show me. They got seawater and helped me wash stuff. They sat and pointed out each scar on legs and arms told me by actions how they got them. They made a tripod out of stones so we could take pictures with my camera. Then we rode on, to their village, going down hills yelling "ingiltera sampiyon". I feel like some kind of wild Mary Poppins.

Hope it’s not too windy tomorrow. I’m aiming to meet my parents; they’re going to be waiting at the ferry from Istanbul Asia side to Istanbul Europe side.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006 at 6:08 am and is filed under On the Road, Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.