Fortunately, we have titled our posts on Anatolia unspectacular and never concluded with “… third and final part”. Now we continue just as unspectacular… 😊
With rested but again untrained legs we cycled from Telavi through the Tbilisi National Park back to the Georgian capital. It was our third visit to Tbilisi, which served especially to pick up the long-awaited parcel with replacement parts.
For our trip through eastern Turkey, it was the first time that we consulted the travel advice of the EDA (Foreign Office travel advice Switzerland), Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office travel advice Germany) and Foreign travel advice (UK). Since the institutions did not agree in their recommendations, we followed the travel advice of the EDA. This recommends avoiding the South East of the country, especially the border area with Syria and Iraq.
An unforeseen break day in Pertek provided our bikes with their due maintenance and we were able to write another blog entry.
Last time we reported from Göreme. There we watched the balloons at sunrise and later had lunch in the village canteen. During the hottest part of the day we were at the hotel arranging a new shipment of materials for Georgia, researching the onward journey and working on the blog.
The Asian part of Turkey is so big that we have chosen highlights for the journey and set realistic sub-goals. This way we keep our motivation high, even if our progress on our 1:1’100’000 map is very slow. Between the various highlights, we look for the most promising connections, but the most exciting encounters and experiences always happen quite unexpectedly along the way.
