View Larger Map
Saturday, November 9th - Beypazari to Polatli - 13,903 km
Both Coen and Vincent are groggy this morning. I suspect they didn’t sleep that well together in a double bed. The three of us dress and pack our bags before emerging from the guest room to greet Gokhan, who is up and waiting for us in the kitchen. He is quiet and respectful this morning. Perhaps he feels ashamed about going too far last night, and disappointed that nothing sexual came of our time together. He boils us eggs and gives us cereal for breakfast.
When we thank him, he cautiously offers us the chance to stay another night, but Coen and Vincent are quick to say that we must move on because we are on a schedule. They stress the importance of leaving right away because we have the long day ahead. He reluctantly accepts his defeat. I am the last one out the door. I pause to wink at him and squeeze his hands, just to let him know I would have done something if we had been alone.
We stop to assess our route outside the town. The highway we are on heads eastward to Ankara, about a day’s ride away, but we want to avoid the big city by going south to Polatli, a much smaller city. There is no direct route though. Our highway goes directly to Ankara and from there another highway heads south-west to Polatli, which would be a two day trip. My detailed map shows unpaved side roads that would serve as a shortcut and save us a day, depending on their condition. We wait until we reach the turn off before deciding our course.
The highway is much busier between Beypazari and Ankara, with a steady flow of buses and trucks racing past us a couple metres away. They stir up the dust and belch blackish smoke. There isn’t much reason pleasure in our cycling along this stretch. By the time we reach the unpaved shortcut to Polatli after two hours, there is no question that we want to take it.
The road is in good condition for being unpaved. There are very few potholes or gravel patches. It is much easier to look at the scenery as there is very light traffic on this road. The valley we are traveling in is flat farming land, probably for wheat or other grains, but the crops have been harvested already and the land is mostly brown or yellow. We can’t move as fast on the unpaved surface, but we are enjoying the ride now, laughing and joking as we go.
At the edge of a same village named Sanoba, an hour or so along the dirt road, Vincent and Coen need to stop for a cigarette break. We sit on a grassy bank beside the road. It is about noon and we are ready for a snack too. As we are munching on granola bars, a farmer’s wife wearing a scarf, shawl and a full-length dress over her plump hips and breast – much like a paintings of peasant women from medieval or Renaissance times – comes running out of her house nearby with a stack of Turkish pancakes under her arm. She gives them to us, demurely looking down. She isn’t allowed to speak to us but is excited by the opportunity to feed us. We thank her over and over, which pleases her greatly, but she scurries back to her farmhouse without saying a word.
“Wow, this is a treat!” Coen exclaims and we all comment on how hungry we are. “This was a great idea to get off the highway,” Vincent adds, and Coen and I agree as we devour the pancakes. We are almost finished when the farmer’s wife appears again, this time with a large watermelon and a knife. We are touched and delighted. This never happened in Europe and probably wouldn’t happen in Canada. She slices up the watermelon for us and leaves us again.
While we are enjoying our treat sitting on the bank, we are suddenly surrounded by a flock of turkeys who have been attracted by our watermelon. They would obviously love some. I never realized how large turkey are – they look so small in the store without legs or heads. They are as tall as we are when we are sitting, and as more and more of them crowd in around us they begin to seem more aggressive. I toss them the rind of my mostly finished slice and they go crazy over it. Soon all three of us are tossing them rinds and they peck at them until the skins are as thin as paper.
We’re back on the bike now, following the twists and turns on my map that lead us to Polatli. We arrive in town around 4 pm and find a nice hotel with two smaller rooms this time. It is assumed that I must take the second room and pay for it myself, but to have someone to cycle with I am willing to pay extra from time to time.
Polatli is a larger city about 100,000. It is pretty old though it doesn’t look particularly ancient. It is near the location of the capital of Phrygia, a kingdom in this region of Turkey sometime before Rome had started building an empire. It used to be called Gordion. King Midas of Phrygia, the one with the ‘golden touch’, was buried near here 2800 years ago. Guide books are useful for these tidbits of history.
We head out for dinner and stop into a dance bar for drinks afterwards. The bar is nothing special, other than the fact that no town since Istanbul has had one. Vincent calls home from the hotel and learns that another small part he wanted for his bike has been shipped to Ankara ten days ago. He and Coen will take a bus into Ankara tomorrow morning to claim it and they will ride from there to meet me in Kulu, a city south of here. I will make my own way to Kulu, heading south from Polatli, and meet them at a hotel listed in their guide. If that doesn’t work, they’ll meet me at in front of the Kir Kahvesi Camii at 9:30 the next morning.
PHOTO 1: Beypazari in the morning sun
PHOTO 2: landscape east of Beypazari
PHOTO 3: old Turkish farmer
PHOTO 4: heading south to Polatli
PHOTO 5: farmer's wife cutting watermelon for us
PHOTO 6: our new-found friends come to swarm us
PHOTO 7: entrance to a caravanserai near Polatli
PHOTO 8: watermelon truck in downtown Polatli
PHOTO 9: a large mosque in Polatli
No comments:
Post a Comment