Cold wave in Anatolia! (Taşucu, Turkey – KM 8,390)

On the day that we are finaly leaving Göreme National Park and Cappadocia, we are in Ürgüp and get invited inside a carpet shop for some tea. The employee insists we stay longer to meet his Canadian friend Deborah. Originally from Edmonton and now relocated to Vancouver Island, she has had a love affair with Turkey since 1977 when she came through on a London-Kathmandu bus journey. Since then, she has come back often, even taking guests on very intimate and adventurous tours. Lunch is served on the second floor of the carpet shop, then more tea. Deborah patiently teaches us some key Turkish rudiments and time flies. The petite Canadian offers to put us up for the night at the hotel where she‘s been staying for several weeks. Although we are eager to ride, there is nowhere to go tonight and her company is so rich and warm. Why not?

Cappadocia slideshow

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Since Istanbul we have felt bogged down by short days, cold weather and mechanical problems, but since reaching Cappadocia, a 40 square km area between Avanos and Ürgüp, we have almost come to a stand still with our 6-month old laptop computer slowly dying an early death. Who knew that IT had become as important as a bicycle on a bicycle journey! For six days at Les Maisons de Cappadoce, in Uçhisar, we backed up data, restored the system to manufacturer’s settings and wrote between crashes. Two technicians from Nevşehir agreed we had a hardware problem and should send the computer to Istanbul for warranty repair, which we have just done on the morning we meet Deborah in Ürgüp.

We have been in the region long enough to make friends, bump into people we know on the street and get offered a loaned laptop for free! The repair will take 2 or 3 weeks, so we arrange for our computer to be returned to a tour agency in Alanya, hundreds of kilometres away, on the Mediterranean Coast. Now we just need to ride towards it and the Yörük nomads, whom we are expecting to find at their winter havens along the coast.

The weather forecast predicts cold and snow but we hit the road and climb out of Cappadocia’s eroded hole and up to a windy plateau. Using gas stations and a cheap hotel in Derınkuyu as nightly pit stops we arrive in 1,200 metre-high Niğde in a blizzard. The predicted cold wave across the region, from Turkey to Jordan, is starting tonight, twenty degrees below zero are expected. We dig into our “extreme climate emergency fund” and check-in at a central hotel.

“There has been some kind of shooting in Paris”, Pierre says as I am unpacking our slush–covered panniers. Then we turn the television on and switch it to Al Jazeera English. There we stay for four nights, writing a short assignment for upcomıng tourıng portal pannier.cc and walking down to the breakfast buffet every morning, but mostly we are half naked in our over-heated room listening of distant deaths and catastrophes, of Syrian refugees dying in the cold weather. It is a strange world we live in, a hopeless one if you watch news channels.

Once we emerge from our hide-out we head eastward over the Niğde Massif, to Çamardi and the craggy Anti-Taurus Mountains. The range, connected to the Taurus Mountains is pierced by a narrow gorge called in antiquity the Cilician Gates. The ancient pathway has been the link to and from the Mediterranean Coast and the Anatolian plateau for Alexander the Great, the Romans, Mongols, the Crusaders and Saint Paul. Wanting to stay away from Highway E90, and sticking to the smaller D750, we miss the Gates entirely but climb to 1375 metre-high Kandilsirti pass and down through pine forests to mandarine and olive groves. Finaly we roll into the city of Tarsus where Elif is waiting for us.

The seventeen year old young woman is keen to practice the English she has been studying and takes us as her “guests” for a walk. We are swerving around people on the busy streets, our cleats slipping on the ceramic sidewalk as she joyfully leads us to visit her sister Emine at work at a downtown cosmetic retailer, from where we carry on to St.Paul’s well, the Kirkkasik covered market and Cleopatra’s Gate, a mortar gate formely part of the wall surrounding the city. When Tarsus was the Roman capital of Cilicia, Mark Anthony  allegedly allied himself with Cleopatra here. Exciting stuff.

Next, Elif takes us to Tarsu, the city’s largest shopping center! Bright lights, city folks and dinner at the food court all make for a surreal experience! After a late-night milkshake at a cafe with Emine and her fiance Nevzat we go directly to bed because they are taking us to breakfast in a few hours!

The girls say they are part Yörük, we heard that from a few people already. We are looking for the Yörük that remain semi-nomadic, spending the summers with their animals up in the high mountains under tents and winter down in villages by the coast. Apparently they are a little bit more to the west of where we are, a little more west, a little more….