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As we continued our long ride East we took a few days in Greece to catch up on some work before beginning the Odyssey of crossing Turkey from West to East! Our plan had been to cross East below the Black Sea as the Ukraine would not have been much fun weather wise in April. This would mean riding the entire length of Turkey which is no mean feat being a thousand miles long.
We continued on to Istanbul with Jenny’s parents where we sent a few days visiting the historic mosques and markets before saying goodbye to them as they would be riding back to the UK from here. Jenny and I would continue alone now and we crossed the Bosphorus river entering Asia and headed straight along the well maintained Turkish motorways to Ankara.
Dueto the sheer length of Turkey we could not take the time to follow an off road route across the country as this would have taken weeks so we chose to beeline straight East using the motorways. We did however decide to take a few days in strange little town called Goreme in an area known as Cappadocia.
Cappadocia is a hot dry desert area almost in the middle of Turkey and standouts out due to it’s strange looking rock formations known as the “fairy chimneys”. What is stranger about the area is that homes and hotels are built into these formations so that most of the town is underground. It is a little touristy for this reason but is great fun and was reasonably quiet as we were there in the off season. What we were more interested in was the maze of tracks that circle the area that are used by offroad quad and buggy tours. It was an ideal place to get a little warm up of offroad riding before we moved farther East where it would be more remote and difficult.
We had a great time sweeping between the chimneys and we found ourselves in a really cool gorge that we followed up as far as we could go. High up on the cliff face where the remains of ancient troglodyte homes and it was quite a weird and cool place.
After a good nights sleep we began the long trek East and it was quite hard work as the roads are quite straight and boring. The East of Turkey is not visited much by tourists and is quite different to the West. As we reached the border with Georgia we actually encountered snow as we climbed the mountain pass.
In total we spent around 9 days in Turkey and Istanbul and Cappadocia were definitely the highlights and worth visiting if you are passing through from West to East, just be prepared for the boredom of the motorway!
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