09.02.09
The last of Turkey
So we are now in Georgia but more about that latter. For now I’ll fill in the gaps on the last few days in Turkey. Thankfullly the road along the black sea is flat pretty much all of teh way from Samsun to the border which is hundreds of Ks and thats awesome. The winds were variable but ever present. Some in front and some (yes) were behind. After trabzon and the hundreds of km of passing through hazelnut areas it was nice to pass through the tea growing regions. The terraced hills of tea are so beautiful. We dropped in and visited a mine that I worked at a bunch of years ago and apart from upgrading the road in there not much has changed. We got free Cay in Cayeli which was cool and had some nice free camping along the way. We met a polish cycle tourist near the georgia border and he gave us his map of the country which was awesome.
One thing I will say about Turky is that after 5 odd weeks the drivers of the country have really started to wear on me. Their constant use of the horn is excrutiating. They seem to have mastered 2 opperations of their vehicles only. Those are the accelerator and the horn. I mean why use indicators when you have a horn. Why use brakes when you have a horn, why use the radio when you can’t hear it over the horn, why use mirrors when everyone else (except cyclists, but they don’t matter) has a horn. They even took great pride at tooting at us while travelling through tunnels to let us know that they were there (idiots!!!) The turkish driving is pretty appauling. Not nearly as bad as the kosovans and a differewnt bad from the Australians but still bad. (I still rate the drivers of Australia in the worst 3 in the world) One Turkish example of great driving was that as we were cruising along a double highway, with not a car in sight in either direction, in good light and good road conditions we both jumped out of our skin as we heard behind us a skretch of brakes. We looked to see a car vear from the left lane across the right and hit the gutter and then roll over and slide down the road towards us. It happened about 200 m behind us and the guy couldn’t have been travelling at more than 80 kmph. I mean, how can you roll your car in perfect conditions travelling at 80. The thing that scared us was that if he had have done it 2 seconds latter he would have taken us out. The tool crawled out of the car ok and got straight on the phone to his family (bugger the police). We left when the crowd of onlookers and finger pointers blocked off the whole road and so that we knew that we’d be safe riding for a few hours.
Anyway gotta head but have fun and I’ll write about our georgia adventures (and wowo they’ve been adventuresa so far) soon.
Tc and Nic
