Farewell Europe, September 2021, Steppe FM :
The last week in the garden goes by quickly, we have a thousand things to do: finish planting and watering, fix the creaky bikes, find our stuff scattered all over the place and plan the route.
We finally leave on September 15th after a last lunch with Georgio. We give ourselves 15 days to arrive in Istanbul, the programme: 650 km, 6500 meters of positive altitude difference and a border to cross.
As we ride the first ten kilometres, the road starts to climb... We leave the coast and go into the mountains. I think that in one month our muscles have completely melted. It's horribly hard! We are dragging ourselves along. We have to do 3 km/h on a road that is barely 6%. At our first break, soaked with sweat, we burst out laughing: have we really ridden so far with such rotten and heavy bikes? We start climbing again, our legs are shaking, with each pedal stroke I curse us for carrying so much. It would be so much easier to travel with a lighter load!
Three hours later, night falls, we stop in a field where a horse is quietly grazing and we set up camp in the setting sun. We have travelled 30 km, we are behind schedule, and this from the first day. On the other hand, the tepee faces the glowing mountains, we cook by the fire and at night we have the luxury of watching a film in the wilderness.
As the days go by, it gets easier and easier. Our muscles are getting stronger, the landscapes are great, the bivouacs too and apart from a few problems with punctures (with a nice average of three per day) we catch up and ride about fifty kilometres per day. Our daily life is punctuated by flat tires. We finally decided to reinforce the tyres of the bikes with a Kevlar sheath fixed inside the tyre. Since that day, our daily life is punctuated by the punctured wheels... of the carts... Which is a little better.
Finally, after a week on the road, many bivouacs by the sea, a few beers offered by locals and a great evening spent debating with a Greek-French woman about the difference between radical feminism and liberal feminism, we arrive in sight of Alexandropouli: the last town before the Turkish border.
There is only one more beautiful descent to get there but the night catches up with us earlier than expected. We decide to go down to find our bivouac. I follow Rico and his squeaky cart, a strange smell of burnt rubber comes up to my nose and suddenly CRACK... I am stopped, I see Rico cycling away before I turn around and see, cut in two, my cart lying in the middle of the road.
A bad evening is in prospect. The night has fallen, Rico has come back and we look stupidly at the two pieces of the carts. The luggage has been spared, we divide it as best we can between our bikes and the remaining cart and re-assemble the other with zips. When empty, it seems to work. We set off again, the headlights light up the road. We don't have any water, a strong wind is blowing in our faces. We ride along unoccupied neighberhoods. Finally, battling against the wind, we find a house that is lit. We stop to ask for water. There is no doorbell, I open the gate and walk through the garden feeling like I don't belong here, the gravel crunching under my feet. I knock on the bay window, a man comes out...
And in fact, he is adorable, he offers us two bottles of water and proposes us to camp in the garden! The next day, he and his wife wake us up and invite us to have breakfast. They live in Germany, he is Iraqi, she is Syrian, they are on holiday here and offer us the best breakfast we have had for a long time!
We spend half a day in Alexandroupoli trying to re-weld the cart. I went all over town going from garage to garage. They all refuse. I join Rico and we decide to abandon the cart. We'll manage without it for the remaining 300 km. We sleep in a field a few kilometres from Turkey.
We arrive at the dreaded border: we leave the Schengen area and leave Europe. We expect to struggle, to have to negotiate to get through with the dog. A line of trucks several kilometres long makes us fear the worst. Nothing like that, we leave Greece without any problem. On the Turkish side it's the same thing, we pass three roadblocks under three huge arches without any problem.They don't even ask us for the dog's papers.
That's it, we are in Turkey, the water is rarely drinkable, the road has been transformed into a 4 lane road surrounded by huge monoculture fields and the people are adorable. We have 7 days to reach Istanbul, 300 km away. There is not much to tell about the first six days. We drive on the hard shoulder of a four lane road. The traffic is not very heavy and the cars do not go very fast. The hills follow one another, and so do the bivouacs a few metres from our motorway. People invite us to drink tea with them, offer us fruit and vegetables, and give us encouraging signs when they pass us.
We arrive in the agglomeration around Istanbul, with 90 km to go before we reach our accommodation. The traffic is more and more intense, the hard shoulder is getting thinner and thinner until it disappears, trucks spitting out big black clouds are passing us. We decide to take the small roads, which add distance and height differences but are much less dangerous. My rear rack, overloaded, breaks for the first time. We push the bike for 100 meters and find a mechanic who fixes it in three minutes. Here we go again.
It's 4pm, we cross the first bridge, we are officially in Istanbul! Except that we still have 60 km to go... One big climb later and we are in the middle of the city or rather in the middle of the capital. There are no more small roads but huge arteries and traffic jams. We start to ride in a very dense traffic. We drive, fortunately downhill, on a 10 lane road. We put all the possible lights on indicator mode. We take breaks every ten minutes to get the adrenaline flowing again. Cars honk, trucks and buses brush past us. Our hands are clenched on the brakes. My luggage rack breaks again... We transfer the stuff as best we can and continue.
Finally we find a wasteland in the middle of town where we stop for the night. A guard comes to see us, we are sure he will kick us out of here except that we are exhausted and there is no other place to sleep. He doesn't speak a word of English, he brings his friend back and we understand that he is offering us to sleep under a tree in the shade and asks us if we want some tea!
After this short night we are back in this urban hell. We ride the last forty kilometres slaloming between the cars on the way down and on the pavement on the way up. We finally arrive at Murat's house where we are staying this week. Tonight we have a much needed hot shower and sleep in a bed!
This is the end of an episode. We arrived in Istanbul, at the gateway to Asia, with our 30€ bikes. Mission accomplished. After 3500 km, 3 and a half months of travel, 2 and a half months of food sovereignty projects, 102 different bivouacs, about 50 flat tires and a multitude of unforgettable encounters, we have finished the trip... on our bikes!
Because we found a golden plan: accompany two horseback rides to help with the logistics before spending several weeks looking after the horses. This time we want to experiment hitchhiking with a big dog: all we have to do is find a nice disguise for Jehol to make him look like a nice harmless dog (which he is, even if he doesn't have the look of it)!