If yesterday was a taster to get us back into the feel of cycle touring again, today was the real thing. Sitting in a cafe this evening every part of my body aches and I am desperate to be horizontal. I know that I am getting fitter and total exhaustion is part of the process of getting there – but maybe there are easier ways to be on holiday.

  
But – and it is a big “but” – it was a brilliant, fascinating day which brought out the best and worst of Turkey. We started with a climb and then noted a problem with my front derailleur – the mechanism that changes the chain between the front chainrings. As we were about to start a 500m climb this was IMPORTANT. Not being able to get into bottom chainring on a 10%+ climb with a 25kg trailer is a degree of masochism I will forgo. They are tricky things – another casualty of the flight handling I think. Anyway 40 minutes later it was stripped down, rebuilt and working (well good enough).  

  
The road climbed above Lake Iznik, giving some brilliant views. Then, after about 400m of climbing, we called a halt at a group of huts. There were some workmen who we asked for water – and in true Turkish style insisted we had both tea and water. Relieved, we sipped tea and tried to converse in a limited way. 

  
Many thanks at this spontaneous hospitality and we were on our way. Up and over the top at 550m and then whizzing down at high speed on this excellent but largely empty road to Yenisehir – a dusty but affluent town. This is a fertile part of Turkey. The fields are productive and many of the cars all look in good condition. There are still farmers coming in to town on tractors, with women in the back in full dress for the wind and dust, but we have seen hardly any full burkas. Lots of head scarfs on young women – and there are lots and lots of young people. Large families are still common and there are happy children and young people everywhere, to a far greater extend than at home.
The mission in Yenisehir was to find a bike shop and get Bernie’s saddle fixed after the damage caused in transit. My string repair at the airport would only last so long. We paused to wonder which way to go and immediately asked by a friendly young man, Samet, if he could help and he guided us to a bike shop. The wonders of googetranslate! The repair took an hour or so – and we had tea whilst they fashioned the piece from scratch that was missing. Ultimate ingenuity – “Turkish” said the repair man proudly at the end clearly proud of both his work and his country. It cost TL10 – about £2.50 for that brilliant job – and some smiling photos. 

  
Then to Samet’s shop to buy sausage – which was delicious. He is a 21 year old butcher and has a wife and (I think) a child on the way. He expressed his endless admiration for Bernie who, we reckoned, was probably older than his mother, and was cycling across his country. He guided us out and we said our goodbyes. If he is reading this (and we gave him the website) – he is a credit to his country.

  
The road took us across the valley and then we stopped by a stream for lunch, just before the next big climb. The temperature was now between 35 and 40 – climbing to 41 degrees at the height of the afternoon. We were at 320m and had to climb to just shy of 700m. It was a tad tough – but with lots of breaks we did it. The scenery was hazy and difficult to photo, but more vegetables and corn growing along the road. Beautiful and green with lot of wild flowers.
The road was a mixture of old and new. The new was dual carriageway with a good shoulder but the old parts had tight corners. Lack of any ability to see around the corner did not stop some trucks overtaking. Others showed patience and overtook when it was clear. There was one near accident – not involving us. An on-coming truck came around the corner to see a truck on its side of the road as it had just overtaken us. Screeching of brakes, on coming truck slides to the edge (well slightly off) the road and no one bats an eyelid. Just another day on the roads. But they all give us a very wide berth and most beep their horn in a friendly way. The impatience is just a potential for accidents.

  
Eventually we dropped off the plateau and into the town of Bilecik – a modern, friendly place, with its wealth built on aluminium smelting. We planned to camp but were too knackered to go any further so found a cheap hotel. We were starving, which probably did not help our state of collapse, but passed the Turk Telecom shop and decided to get a SIM card for our ipad mini. If we had known the process would take an hour we wouldn’t have bothered but aided again by the google translate app we got through it and got it all working. Finally we ate and then collapsed at last. Fitness will return but the process of getting there seems harder each year.

So, it was time for the off. A pleasant breakfast at the hotel with the glimpse of the Blue Mosque minarets from its top floor restaurant probably billed as a ‘view’

We packed up and said a friendly good bye to the hotel staff and freewheeled down the hill over the cobbles of the old town to the nearby ferry port. We negotiated getting on to the ferry, a friendly young chap helping us get in the right queue, and we pulled away from Istanbul to cross the Sea of Marmara to Yalova ,thereby avoiding a days ride through Istanbul suburbs (for those new to our blog, ferries don’t count as cheating as you can’t cycle across water).

 
My inability to understand Turkish when booking the tickets on line meant I had booked first class seats (something labelled eco I took to mean economy) so we had a very plush ride!

We pedalled off the ferry and after as brief stop for provisions found our way out of town pretty easily – well there was really only one road, the main road to Bursa, a large dual carriageway but with a broad shoulder we could cycle on so not too bad. I knew we had to go over a ‘hill’ out of Yalova but we hadn’t quite anticipated a 350m climb! It was also 30 C and quite humid and we felt very unacclimatised but as always we got to the top and rewarded with a long downhill to cool us down (again, those of you new to this blog will quickly come to realise our obsession with how many meters climbing we do and the temperature – our other main obsession being food). 

At the bottom of the hill we turned off the dual carriageway and on to a quieter road for the 40km to Iznik, most of it following Iznik lake. To start with our view of the lake was mostly obscured by olive groves and we had our first picnic in the shade of olive trees.

We both admitted afterwards finding the final stint to Iznik tiring and feeling rather alarmed at our level of tiredness after a relatively short day…..but our fitness is what it is and we will get fitter, we will get more acclimatised and the whirlwind of the last few days before departure will fade in to the distance.
We didn’t have out usual rule of it’s raining and so we will get a hotel, so we made up a new rule that we were tired and therefore needed a hotel! Iznik sits at the far end of the lake and we booked in to a hotel with a lovely view over the lake. We were fairly certain we were the only people staying in the hotel so negotiated rather meanly to get a cut price (old habits die hard) – but we paid for the discount when we found we had no hot water (it is being repaired….wait 5 minutes etc etc….). So after a ‘refreshing’ shower we wandered into town. Iznik is a proper buzzing little town with the remains of an encircling roman wall and fortifications, several 14thC mosques and a musuem in what was described as a ‘soup kitchen’ built by a sultan for bis wife. We were unable to clarify what that meant as the ‘soup kitchen’ was a large multi-domed building but along with almost every other building in Iznik it was closed for renovation. 

   
 
We could see Iznik had potential for a good tourist stop but at this point it was well and truly closed! Soo we just enjoyed just strolling around, stopping for Cay and lemonade .

We got  back to the hotel just as a thunder storm passed through (so we didn’t need our new rule after all and could have continued to convince you all we are hardy types and not really here for a holiday…..)
In the evening we strolled out again along the lake shore to find something to eat. Cafes here only do drinks so you need to look for a restaurant. Unfortunately there was a big football match on and the only restaurants were showing the match at full volume and crowded with cheering male supporters. We found a cafe/restaurant which had a menu and had one of those experiences which made us feel we were really back on the road. Every item we pointed to on the menu they did not have, except for one. We didn’t know what it was but ordered two of them and hoped for the best. We ordered with potatoes, which with any luck might be chips but he then came back to say there were no potatoes! Anyway – it turned out to be like a cheese toastie with some salad. OK but we had to fill up on the last of our snickers bars back at the hotel! Note to self….. don’t run out of food!

 (David is writing this). I am writing this on a ferry from Istanbul to Yalova, just across the bay. The sun is shining, it’s Sunday morning and the bikes all seem OK.Yesterday the wonderful Geoff Elliott got up at an impressively early hour to get us to Birmingham Airport. 

  
The flight was a flight – not great but not bad. The business of packing up the bikes and getting and getting them into bags is now very familiar; even if we have not done it for 9 months since the end of the last trip.  

  
As we left the plane in Istanbul we got that hair dryer feeling – walking into heat that we had not experienced for months and feeling it had come from an artificial source. But it was just how it was and how it will be for the next 6 weeks. We packed up the bikes and found that Bernie’s saddle was partially broken. A repair job with string and ingenuity, and we were on our way.  

Getting out of airports the world over involves cycling on a motorway type road, and so inevitably, as we pulled over, the police came to investigate. They were friendly but their first question to me was “How old are you”. The implication from this immaculately presented 30 year old Turkish copper was “What is someone of my Dad’s age doing on a bicycle!”. They also wanted to know where we were going and what we thought of Turkey – so we repeated the often expressed view that we were in the most wonderful place in the world (at least until tomorrow when the geography will slightly change).

A 20km into the Sultanahmet area and back to the small but grandly named “World Heritage Hotel” where we were greeted like returning friends. Perhaps there have not been too many English cyclists staying since we were last here, so there was no danger of confusion. We were also greeted as returning friends at the same restaurant, which is frankly more impressive.  

  
I had worked most of the previous night to get the last of my jobs done. The solicitor who got my written advice that was completed at 4am knows who he is, is probably reading this and I can only hope he will recognise the time the advice was written by its quality. But QC references all done, the last of the item on the To Do list was completed at about the time that the sun came up. So by last night I was fairly knackered but it’s good to be here.