So, as you might have guessed, great trials lay ahead of us (okay, maybe not quite so dramatic in reality, but still not easy).
Keep in mind that in the morning we had already climbed 300 meters and come back down, and not linearly, but constantly going up and down.
When riding a roller coaster, you experience all sorts of G-forces and tense your abs, while simultaneously getting thrown from side to side. It's the same here — one moment you're dragging your body uphill with all your might, the next you're suddenly rolling down a mountain at wild speeds. We were already mentally prepared for what awaited us, and so we weren't scared when the serpentine road from the picture below appeared.
In Latvia, such mighty and interesting trees are called dižkoki and are even put in guidebooks. But in Turkey, they just stand around everywhere like it's nothing. By the way, at this point we had already climbed halfway to the first summit and exited the small village. I now vividly understand what the literary cliché “sandwiched between peaks” means. It was beautiful and interesting in the village.
First of all, there was a spring with an olive branch. A local guy explained with gestures that it was perfectly safe to drink, so I filled my bottle, which previously held leftover water mixed with rose jam. That was a bad idea, by the way — it leaves an aftertaste in your mouth, quenches thirst worse than plain water, and the petals get stuck in the drinking valve.
Secondly, two girls dressed in city clothes with DSLR cameras ran past us, and didn't even glance in our direction. Considering that everywhere we'd been before we were met with massive attention, such disregard even stung a bit. It seems the girls had some more important goal, or they had been around and bicycle tourists were nothing new to them.
Thirdly, the local elders around were selling spices, clearly gathered right there, and therefore organic and natural to the max. My companions, however, didn't even look that way. I might have bought something, but without English names it's a bit too much like a lottery. Later, by the way, we even saw people who were harvesting these very spices and dropping them in sacks onto the road for transportation.
Well, did your expectations regarding the beauties pan out? Mine certainly did. In this place we were all simply happy. Of course, you could say there are places a million times more magnificent. But don't forget — if you look at the very best first, you'll lose the desire for everything else afterwards — you can literally overdose on impressions. Plus, those places that look absolutely incredible are usually hard to reach and cost a pretty penny.
For example, everyone wants to go to Japan, but that undertaking is not easy, it requires time, money, and solid preparation.
By the way, take note — Sergey is without a helmet. He'd periodically goof off like this and take it off, making excuses that he “controls the situation”. Yes, I know that I can be a bore sometimes, but it still seems very strange to me. How can you control random chance? A helmet is meant for unforeseen cases, after all. At the same time, if you remember, Sergey was giving me advice on how to pedal correctly. And here he is not following a basic rule himself. I'm not even mentioning the extreme guy Igor (the navigator), who doesn't even have insurance.
This was the third and final flat tire during the trip. This time, shards from a lightbulb did the trick. As for the road, the situation was unfavorable: time was slipping away, it had already hit 6 PM, and there was no end in sight to our grand ascent. I'd heard rumors about people who, in a desperate situation, pitched their tents right on the road, but the prospect didn't appeal to us at all. Vehicles were constantly driving by on the road (a dirt one, by the way), so lingering there was out of the question. The only more or less accessible option was to roll back down the road to the village and from there to the sea access — there was plenty of room for tents there. True, it would probably be in a howling wind — and sleeping while the fabric is flapping, according to the highly experienced Shchukin, is very difficult. In general, as we started climbing higher and higher, an analogy with the snow-capped peaks from "The Lord of the Rings" movie immediately popped into my head, and I even started humming the theme song to myself. As well as slowly falling into a cheerful hysteria, which periodically happens to me. You just can't hold back the laughter from a non-scary, cartoonish panic.
On the other hand, I had a tough time on the mountain dirt road. Remember what I said about thin, bald tires? Well, on dirt, especially when the incline is over 15% and there are turns all the time, traction is very vague. Plus, I have standard rim brakes (V-Brakes) — even though they're good, as I wrote before, they are sheer punishment for the hands. If you have hydraulic disc brakes, you squeeze lightly and you're already braking. But here I was squeezing both brakes so hard my hands were falling off. A few more hours of such fun, and my hand muscles would have given out, especially the left one.
So, the picture you see above was taken from an altitude of more than four hundred meters. The GPS showed even more, though with an accuracy of ±46. That means in one day we climbed from zero (sea level) first to 300, and then to four hundred meters. Furthermore, with loaded bikes, and the second time even on a dirt road. This is, no matter how you look at it, a mighty overcoming and achievement. Whoever disagrees, try it yourself in your spare time.
Google Maps visually confirms the readings, and its auto-calculator says “maximum altitude – 400m”. Funny that the numbers in both cases are round, but I didn't rig anything.
Fortunately, this was the highest point on our entire route. Up to this moment, the navigator had been scaring us that the road passed through 600. Fortunately or unfortunately, that highway (an asphalt one, by the way) stayed to the left. In general, the mountains nearby reach 800 meters. It was already starting to get dark when we rolled into a small settlement. There they pointed us in the right direction, but warned that it was still quite a ride to the city. Fortunately, there were already places around where you could pitch a tent, even if they weren't particularly hospitable.
We got lucky — after a 5-minute crazy descent on good asphalt at speeds bordering on insanity, we found something strongly resembling a campsite. But since I've exhausted my arbitrarily set word limit for a single post, that will only be covered in the next part.