high and windy days

For all its quality and expense my tent beats like a drum in high wind. I left easy sleep behind in the cave. Compounding matters, espresso ground coffee beans are unheard of in Turkish supermarkets - I subsist on joyless bandit coffee. In Urgüp I last-minute camped in a building site when a CouchSurfing host stood me up, dashing hopes of the first domestic amenities since İstanbul. In Kayseri I brought untold hilarity to the tailoring quarter whilst finding a patch and a patcher for the seat of my disgraceful cycling shorts. In a Sivas hospital I laughed, grimaced and paid through a farce of x-rays and ultrasound - unable to make myself understood that it was only a splinter gone too deep for my tweezers and wanting only for a steady hand and scalpel. It is a funny set of indignities one submits to in travel. Frustrations of exhaustion, embarrasment, and petty discomfort. Of being the stupid one without recourse to language, the ever obvious one who has no privacy. The under-washed and over-paying. The incorrect and ignorant, the un-understood. The demanding. The blessed and spoilt one bereft his familiar luxuries. Do you sell muesli? Laugh and smile. Or beer..? No problem, no problem. Do you have wi-fi? Yes hello my name is. Forget breakfast cereals and proper coffee, Europe is ever further and I know less and less. Why did you come here? Oh it's just on my way. But on your way to where? Oh I don't know. But what's your job? Ah shit - I quit it. It was a nice one, though.

The nights are cold now. I bundle up layers inside my sleeping bag, sweat in the middle and chill outside. It is hot enough still by day to stop the afternoon. Under a tree or petrol station awning. Often when we stop the inquisitors are indefagitable; never have I had to answer so many questions on the nature of my relationship to somebody. Yes we ride together, no we sleep seperately. No we're not married, nor do we rub index fingers whatever that means. In small towns and villages I'm routinely quizzed by men of all ages who tilt their heads conspirationally and persist gesturing, apparently desperate for some salacious detail of the European sexual condition. The honest answer that Laura and I are aquaintances become riding companions becoming friends doesn't seem to cut it. For me it is a minor, sometimes comic exasperation. For Laura the wrong answers beget disregard or outright disdain. We tried siblings, family, to little avail so I am grudingly reconciling myself to a pretence of matrimony apparently necessary amongst people so unimaginatively gendered. It can be draining and lately if the energy to be English or German, brother, sister, husband or wife feels lacking we just ride fast and wave instead. And that's a shame because of course there are far more instances of the genuine welcome than the seedy inquisition. The four gentlemen who flagged us down this morning for glasses of their own Ayran were so perfectly good natured that I seriously considered deleting all  of the above. The shepherd who welcomed our tents two nights ago in Gemerek was as gentle as the lambs he introduced us to.

We're a day's ride from Erzincan and starting to see Iranian trucks on the road. This morning was the first two thousand metre pass - there'll be lots more from here on. I've seen scores of camera-shy eagles the last three days. I like the chilly evenings; last night a camp fire of dung.

Erciyes Dağı near Kayseri

Gemerek

Gemerek

toy police - surprisingly convincing

approaching Erzincan