[originally published on may 19 2022]
[Editor's note – I'm way beyond Edirne, but due to reasons of, well, inability to manage time reasonably, I've already written most of this post in Edirne, but haven't gotten around to publishing it (pictures are always the problem). But it's already written, and while some things are no longer relevant (I get along better with the set-up, for example), it was true at the time, so be it]
starting is hard, but it's still worth starting
On the second day of riding, the world threw a headwind at me.
Now, there are many things I could try to explain about my trip in these posts, but if there's one thing a person has to experience for themselves to *really* understand it's this – headwinds. And specifically, how much headwind is the devil itself.
Ask any rider and he will tell you that anything is better – rain, sun, hills, mosquitoes – just not a headwind. A headwind just makes every meter feel like a struggle, and unlike the climb, it doesn't even feel fair, just crushes all morale. And as if Murphy himself read the asterisk in my previous post that mentioned a headwind, I was sent a fifty km/h headwind to prove that very point. I finished this day completely exhausted, physically and especially mentally.
Nature throws rain on me on the third day. I hate driving wet. I mostly hate being wet and cold in my feet. So as soon as the first drizzle starts I protect myself from head to toe, including rubber gloves. Luckily I'm not a person whose hands sweat almost at all, which is very helpful in climbing walls and in this case. Disappointingly, in practice it hardly rained on me. What's more, all this protection takes a lot of time, and there's nothing to say, it's hot, I put on and took off my raincoat something like 6-7 times today.
Speaking of things that take forever and a half, I admit that I am at the limit of patience for the backpacking set-up. I'm very, very tempted to throw everything away and buy a pair of paniers. It takes forever to pack this shit, you have to fiddle with straps all the time, the front bag is messing with the gear cables, there's no place to stick something on the bike quickly. Everything is a hassle. There's no doubt that the ability to go through tough terrain is excellent, but to be honest I will see if I have the patience for off-roads at all, roads are simply faster. Today I not only rode on roads, I switched from secondary roads to the highway by choice, simply because I wanted to get to the town i aimed for (and also because it felt safer, the shoulders were much wider on the highway). I know this show is going to take time to get on the road and gain momentum, so for now I'm holding off on big decisions until after I get some real experience, and specifically after the mountains of Bulgaria, where this set-up should be very useful.
The landscape in Thrace, the land between Istanbul and Bulgaria, is… lovely? Lots of yellow turnip fields, lots of other agricultural fields, and mostly, mainly, lots of small valleys. A lot of them. A topographic map of Thrace looks like a close-up of an old farmer's hands, deeply furrowed. There's a certain beauty to it, but it's also quite exhausting. I prefer continuous ups and downs. Not all the time going up-down-up-down. breaks the momentum of both.
And yet, there was quite a bit of beauty along the way, even on the less successful days. And what can i say, seeing things from the height of the bicycle seat is always different.
The people of Thrace
The Turks, for their part, are incredibly cute. Everywhere I stop, they invite me to sit with them and drink something, and it happened to me more than once that I bought myself a coffee or some food, and they simply said me "on the house" or simply gave me more food just like that. Although the prices here are at par with third world countries (thanks to the inflation that Erdoğan promotes), I don't feel that they perceive me as a rich European that they can milk some cahs out of, but rather as a somewhat eccentric traveler ("Why not a motorcycle?" is a question I heard more than once) and a adorable person to whom one can be generous. Bicycles bring out the best in people.
Bicycles also "force" you to go through all the points on the way from A to B. The implication is that you also pass through places that well, there is no reason for a stranger to pass there, which means that you are always a little exotic, and there is no feeling you get in normal tourist centers, of "Oh, here's another tourist, great" (that is, the feeling I would get every Friday Mahane Yehuda market, back home)
I did answer "Canada" most of the times when asked where I'm from, although probably in 99% of the cases it was completely unnecessary, and the few times I said Israel, the responses were either completely indifferent or something like "Oh, I had an Israeli boss at one of my jobs, he was cool". And yet, it costs me nothing to lie, and I love Canadians.
The only exception to the loveliness of the Turkish people was on the fourth day, on the way to Edirne, that the draybag fell off my bike with my jacket/coat, on some remote country road, and although I noticed it barely 200 meters away, and only two cars and a scooter passed by while i rode away, By the time I got back, it wasn't there. It was a shame because A. It was a very useful jacket and B. It was just really bad luck. The chance that in these few minutes a person will pass that not only will he not call me (because it was clear from whom it fell), and will not even pass indifferently, but will take it for himself – it is not high even on a busy city street (and call me naive, I truly believe that these are the exceptions). But on a dirt road outside a remote village – it's really, as i already said, terrible luck, and what perhaps saddens me the most is that it slightly spoiled the great experience I've had so far with the people of turkey.
Sinan the (bicycle) engineer
And yet, I like them, and my favorite Turk so far is of course Sinan. Not Sinan the architect and engineer , although he is definitely also a Turk that I admire, but Sinan the dentist. We came in contact in a very amusing way – a month before the trip I was approached on the street in Neve Tzedek in Tel Aviv by a guy named Yohan who was sure that I was some kind of tourist on a bicycle trip, but no, I just go around in life with lot of things on my bicycle. From there he put me in touch with a guy named Sinan that he knew through Warmshowers (which is like couchsurfing, only for cyclists), and really recommended me to meet him. When I arrived in Istanbul, he ended up not being available to host, but he suggested that we meet and he would help me get organized. Well, I thought, we'll probably meet, drink coffee, chat a bit and I'll continue my errands.
what ended happening was different. We met at 10 AM in Kadikoy and continued to hand out all day, riding between bike shops and then going to his house and working on my bike until 10 PM (and we only stopped because he had to go celebrate a year with his girlfriend). I have never seen so much bike repair equipment outside a bike shop in my life. The man had a bike stand and brake-bleeding kit, and the extensive professional knowledge to do whatever was required. The amount of time he spent helping me get ready was crazy.
Sinan himself is one of the last of the radical secularists in Turkey, a staunch hater of Islam (and religions in general) and quite fed up with Erdoğan's eternal rule and the de-secularization he feels Turkey is going through, and we had interesting conversations about politics (he is quite sure that the attempted coup a few years ago was a dummy attempt) and life in general.
He is also one of the most anal people I have met, who really puts an emphasis on the visibility of the bike, which created many amusing moments between him and me when it came to handling the bike. Anyone who knows me or my bikes knows that I'm a big believer in function over form, and what works, works, while he's a big believer in doing things "right". He scoffed at the ductape I had affixed to the bike, and forced me to take it off. When he saw that I was pushing the lower parts of the convertiable pants into the sock instead of taking off my shoes and taking them out, he said something like "you really don't care how things look, huh?". We had two funny days together.
medal of honor/dishonor
It's hard to explain how deep a relationship I have with the equipment I carry with me. it's not only all my possessions in the world right now, it's what responsible for allowing me to continue on the path. And since, as I said in the previous post, I kind of dived into this trip without much prior experience, there were some good decisions that were made and there were some… not as good decisions, so I thought each post would point out a wonderful piece of equipment and a piece of equipment that could do better.
So the first Medal of Honor goes to my multitool, the RATCHET ROCKET LITE DX, which, as the name implied, is actually a ratchet. I don't think I can overstate how much I love this piece of metal.
While a regular multitool requires you to try to get it into the desired screw, and if the screw is in an inaccessible place, then turn it over and over again like a idiot, then for this ratchet, no screw is out of reach, and of course, the concept of a ratchet is genius, and allows me to open anything on the bike in a few moments. And oh, how many things I opened and adjusted during the preparation for and during this trip. There was a bike shop that the mechanic asked me to use it, because it was much more efficient than working with his tools. It also has very, very fun clicking sounds, which among other things makes it a great game for nephews if you want to talk to their parents quietly.
The only downside is that it works with drill bits, and bits are a thing that can be lost. The solution is to be very, very anal and religiously return them to their place, and carry a few spare bits, two things I do do. Beyond that, it's just a perfect object, buy it as a gift for the cyclist dear to your heart.
The medal of dishonor, on the other hand, goes to my quilt. What is a quilt? Oh, I'm glad you asked. In the ultralight world, they came to the conclusion that what keeps you warm is the air trapped inside the sleeping bag, and since we sleep on our backs, it crushes the air from there, and doesn't help you at all. So they just cut the back out, and instead there are straps that are supposed to connect directly to my air mattress. (That will get his medal of dishonor too, someday).
At this point you may be asking – but Oren, doesn't it allow cold air to enter? isn't much more of a hassle than a normal sleeping bag? And what happens if you lose these little straps? And the answers are – it does, it is, and you're screwed, as I found out in the hills of Bulgaria, at -2 degrees, but I'll get to that in a later post.
It will be said in it's defense that it is very small and very light, but it's just not worth it. I'll buy a normal sleeping bag next time
And now, Bulgaria
So that's it, so after a day of getting organized in Edirne and a bit of sight seeing (the city still contains the original Sinan's masterpiece, who was probably also a pretty thorough guy with a developed aesthetic sense) I was ready to leave for Bulgaria.
Turkey, you were pretty good overall, see you in the future!
Next post – intended adventures, unintended adventures and the horror – wet socks in the hills of Bulgaria. Also, a bit about bi-polar urbanism in Plovdiv. stay tuned?
And for those who made it this far, a bonus question that will be answered in the next post – what do bicycles, Frankenstein and the Mormon religion have in common?
Feel free to write in the comments, I approve them anyway at a two week delay
יצאתי לשאוף קצת רוח 