It seems somewhat unfair to only give Türkiye one page on my travelogue. For a country of such unexpected size and varied scenery it surely deserves more. However it was only really ever going to be a transit country for me. Sad though it might sound, one of my greatest pleasures is hunting out a cool bar with good music and nice company but this was never going to happen in Türkiye really. I guess this is the southwest tourist Mediterranean region but it never really took my fancy.

So as it turns out, I decided to cross Türkiye along the Black Sea coast on the way to Georgia and chose a less well-worn path for the return journey.

Black Sea coast

Having swerved Istanbul altogether (I’ll go back properly one day) and having enjoyed a grand crossing of the Bosphorus I found some digs to rest and recuperate. Nothing much to note about this lakeside lodging other than a curious lack of room security and a great Game of Thrones in joke.

It’s a rather uneventful and increasingly scary route heading East along the Black Sea coast. A ridge of mountains a mile inland from the sea means that all traffic is forced onto the main dual-carriageway artery. This might be OK except that the traffic includes a huge amount of thundering lorries who have very little respect for a puny motorbike. It seemed the further East I got the less they cared. Throw into the mix heavy rain showers and what starts as mildly annoying fully loaded artics 6 feet from your tail is just plain life threatening. The views over the sea were nice in parts and some of the little seaside towns seemed nice enough too. I stayed in one half way along the coast and thanks to an upgrade from booking.com I ended up in possibly the biggest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, complete with balcony and sea view. The breakfast was also something to behold.

Eastern Turkiye

Returning back through Türkiye I swore I wouldn’t endanger my life further on the Black Sea coast road so decided to cross the border with Georgia in the more remote East. The border crossing turned out to be a little hairy, but eventually I was on my way. I had a long day’s riding to do to reach the safe haven of Erzurum and the riding was awe inspiring. For the first time on the trip I had perfect roads, no traffic and sweeping landscape views. Parts of it reminded me of the Argentine or Chile plains and mountains. The only down side was the cold. The cold. The increasingly cold cold. The not enough layers cold. The bum numbing, finger freezing cold. I wondered why things seemed to be going from bad to worse in this department until I flicked the sat-nav view to the data screen which revealed I was over 2000 meters… shit! I didn’t know Turkiye was this mountainous. The snow capped mountains to my left and right left me in no doubt how high I was. And I hope I don’t break down now, I haven’t seen a car for a while and it’s mighty mighty cold. Did I say it was cold?

What a relief it was to check in to my hotel which is bizarrely in a ski resort. The thick wooden architecture and double glazing was brilliant to help me defrost. A luxurious and refreshing nights sleep was had, but I was shocked into action when I threw back the curtains to see settled snow all around and a decent flurry underway. Blimey, this was supposed to be a spring bike ride with everywhere warming up not freezing over, it was MAY after all!!

I thought I’d better get up and out before the snow settled any further and left me trapped there awaiting a thaw. The road took me back into the town centre, where there is a funny ski jump type structure in the middle of town… weird! Oh it is actually a ski jump!

I wanted to get across Türkiye as quickly as I could but it’s a bloody big place. I consulted my advanced weather app – Windy – which helpfully provides a plethora of weather data, and picked a spot in the countryside where it might be possible to wild camp. I found a spot which looked like it would be dry and only dip down to about 7 overnight so decided it was just about do-able. And so it was. Wild camping isn’t much fun though is it?… once you zip the tent shut you hear every shake of the tent and howl of a (distant or close) dog and fear the worst. I’m sure it’s a psychological brain trick where the brain takes limited data then fills in the rest to scare the shit out of you.

Needless to say I was glad when dawn arrived and I could pack up and get ready to set off. However, caution is needed here… I knew I was quite close to the Syria border but didn’t really appreciate how close. The Foreign Office guidance for travellers prohibited any travel within 20 miles of the Syria border and the sat-navs choice of route took me within 2 miles of it. I mean, it would probably be fine but would you really want to break down there? I decided to re-route and take the exra miles on the chin.

I worked out that even covering 400 or so miles a day, I’d still need 2 more stops in Turkiye, so I decided to route through Cappadocia, the tourist and insta friendly village with thousands of cave dwellings and a famous hot air balloon location. Again I opted to wild camp. I’d picked a spot using google maps that looked off road, but had a dirt track and was some way from any dwellings, I hoped to get set up there about dusk and be off at dawn. Everything was going fine and it was an awesome camping spot until about an hour after I fell asleep I could hear a car getting closer and closer… oh dear. Then the engine stopped … oh shit! And I heard a voice “hello… hello…” “erm … hello?”, “ do you need anything?” “erm… no thanks I’m just gonna camp and be off early in the morning” “ ah OK, let me know I you need anything”…. and off the car went. How he got up the steep dirt track that I struggled with on the bike, I’ll never know. I think he was just showing some accommodating Turkish hospitality but bloody hell mate didn’t you think it would spook me in the pitch black at 11pm? Again I was more than happy to awake in one piece at the crack of dawn and I was in for a treat.

Cappadocia is famous for ballons and when I opened the tent door I could just seem them in the distance firing up. Over the course of the following hour I brewed up a cuppa, let the sun re-heat my bones and watched them glide across the horizon, it was sublime.

A couple of other things stuck in my memory about Eastern Turkiye.. firstly the militarisation. I’ve never seen so many army checkpoints and forts perched high upon hills… all apparently on alert. The occasional armoured cars flying past me on the road. It is of course still a conflict zone between the Kurds, hopeful for their own homeland and an increasingly authoritarian Turkish government. You know a country is authoritarian when you see rows and rows of 100ft flags with someone’s face on them, as I saw elsewhere in Türkiye.

The other eye opener is the obviously massive investment in infrastructure. I probably rode for hours and hours on near deserted perfect motorways and across amazing bridges (I am a bridge lover). Sometimes there’d be a roadworks sign and I’d slow right down to see an army of Chinese contractors beavering away on some new massive civil engineering project or other. The most bizarre thing I saw was a brand new motorway services. Sparkling clean, with all the facilities you’d expect at the best stops in the richest European country. This place had it all… except… cars. It was like being in North Korea. Sparkling buildings and sweeping roads but just not a soul on them.