kaleb's blog: birthplace

Before the crescent flags and guns of the Turkish border - the welcome smiles and sweets of its officers - I'd more or less managed to follow the original Via Egnatia, tumbling as it does through crumpled patchworks of trim hay and ripe figs; battalions of sunflowers bowed and browning. But the narrow of Eastern Thrace pinches the flow of traffic to and from İstanbul - scenic routes are killed off. On entering Turkey I was pressed into a six-lane hell of speeding cars and the rank radiant heat sickening off too-close lorry engines. The cycled approach to Istanbul is notorious. I tried, failed, to avoid it by sea (should've gone to Gallipoli - my hoped Sarkoy ferry didn't exist) and detoured exhaustingly up steeps and slopes beneath the scarps of Tekir Dag only to wind up committed back to that inevitable, ugly highway. Ultimately I conceded, happily, to bus the final hundred kilometres.

A novel good of the narrowed traffic is the steady stream of cyclists one meets touring the other way. There is an excitement in spying loaded bicycles approaching, straining eyes to distinguish touring paraphernalia from the more usual shopping bags and child seats. The ubiquitous stuff sack precarious across panniers; closer the leather tan and scrappy clothes. Notably there was Noel who'd ridden France to Georgia and half way back without spending any money, and Adrien, on his way home to Switzerland having reached Beijing. Awkward verge huddles gleaning and sharing, where have you been and how? Nobody too comfortable, nor wanting to part - encouragement and reassurance in talking roads ahead, affirmation, advice and only the faintest sully of resentment at having to drop pretensions of an especially rare endeavour.

Late in Tekirdag I bought kofte and bread, a bottle of ayran and found a place to sleep beneath a boat standing out round back of the marina. Matey said it was fine; calmed his dogs, made me tea and an hour later chuckling delivered yet another bedraggled cyclist who'd had the same idea. In the morning we caught the bus together. Anthony's bike was pretty shit (as were my pliers which broke on it) - rear rack and spokes collapsing all over the place - but we shared his load and limped into Sultanahmet, all long distance bravado before the tourist hoards who hadn't seen us get off the bus. It wasn't just my pride glad the bus had stopped a few miles outskirt - I had a huge thrill riding into town. Four months and four thousand miles from leaving home: taxis and marigolds, fishmarkets and the call to prayer rising to a crescendo of familiar childhood sensations as we approached the Bosphorus . We ate balik ekmek by the Galata bridge, exchanged congratulations and farewells, obligatory emails and I rode off to stay with Margaret in a flat I last visited twenty-five years ago.