Turkey 1

My map says it’s 32km after a certain junction to the Turkish border. After 55km I’m thinking I might be lost. Hmm. Everywhere is a dense green forest, a pleasant enough environment for a Sunday cruise but when you are trying to pinpoint your location it makes things a little difficult. There’s no villages, junctions, farms, anything.

Fortunately I used to be a Boy Scout and in between all the fire raising and boozing we did learn a few things. One of which was: “When you realise you are lost, keep on going until you find somewhere to navigate from.” Either that or it was “When you realise you are lost, stop immediately and retrace your steps.” I decide it was the former and keep going down the seemingly endless winding road threading it’s way slowly through the impenetrable forest.
As luck would have it, just as I’m about to turn round and laboriously retrace my steps, I suddenly pop out of the forest at a border post. I’d been on the right road after all, but those pesky cartographers (I’ve met a few, an idle bunch if ever there was one) hadn’t taken the sinuosity of the road into account and vastly underestimated it’s length. I imagine my chagrin had I spent the rest of the day trundling around the forest in search of a road I’d already found.
After visiting half a dozen different little windows and getting a sheaf of forms stamped, inspected, shuffled, restamped and handed back I am free to enter Turkey.

The roads are pretty good and I make good time, arriving in Kirklareli mid afternoon. I’m soon wandering around town checking out Turkey. It makes a good impression. The people are very friendly, when I stop in shops where the proprieter doesn’t speak English, instead of the curt ‘No’ I’d got used to in Romania, they drag in a friend from a neighbouring shop who speaks a few words. Nothing seems too much trouble and there are plenty of genuine, welcoming smiles.
It would seem rude not to have a kebab on my first night in Turkey so I indulge. It seems it is possible to cook a kebab that is tasty even to the unintoxicated. Just not in Britain.

The following day I head to Gallipoli. It proves to be a beautiful part of the world. The natural beauty of the peninsula seems to make the terrible fighting here all the more poignant. High on a hillside, at the end of a dirt track, I find a tiny cemetery. The graves face out over the azure waters of the Dardenelles where dozens of ships of all nationalities cut snow white trails between the Aegean and the Black Sea.
It’s more sobering than I thought it would be, much more so than an ordinary cemetery, which have little or no effect on me. More sobering than the vast memorials on the peninsula. Perhaps it’s the personal nature of the graves.
I wonder who Private G. Lake of the Australian Infantry was. I wonder if he realised, before he died, he’d lie here for ever, under the Turkish sun. I wonder if he’d think it was worth it.

I leave Gallipoli for Pamakkule and its famous limestone pools. The last stretch is packed with ‘excitement’. In the afternoon it starts chucking it down with heavy, windblown rain. The sky is so dark it’s like riding through dishwater. At a junction a car pulls out to pass a lorry that has stopped in the right hand lane. I’m about 30 feet away and doing 60mph. I squeeze the bike through a gap which feels 6 inches wider than the panniers. The idiot gets the full brunt of my horn and I swear so much my visor steams up sadly preventing him reading my lips.
In Denizli, in heavy, speeding traffic, a piece of plastic trim four feet wide and 8 inches thick comes bouncing out from under a lorry. There’s no time to react, I just brace myself and hope it goes under without knocking me off. BANG! The bike hits it centrally and it is spat out behind me for the next driver to worry about.
Five minutes later a van pulls to a stop in the middle lane of a three lane highway. My stopping distances are better judged now and I stop effortlessly but the truck behind me blares his horn and rips past in a cloud spray about two feet away. By the time I get to Pamakkule I’m exhausted. I spend the the rest of the evening and most of the next day reading ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and pretending it didn’t happen.

The pools are empty. I leave for Ankara to see if the Iranians will give me a visa.