Travel blog: Riding towards Iran
London to Sydney by bike: Cycling through Turkey
Sunday, 11, Jul 2010 11:29
This year we're following the odyssey of Peter and Christine Helliwell as they undertake an entirely self-funded bike ride from London to Sydney to raise money for charities Medicins Sans Frontiers and Mary's Meals. The intrepid couple will be sharing their experiences in a blog for Travelbite.co.uk and here is their 13th blog entry:
After Erzurum we cycled on with Dean, expecting to take three days to reach the border town of Dogubeyazit. It turned out to be an eventful three days. First of all, on the afternoon of the first day we were overtaken by a tractor and a trailer, the driver of which unfortunately was clearly not used to cyclists and pulled in before he had fully passed us, knocking Dean off of his bike.
Thankfully he wasn't actually run over and in the end suffered just some bruising, but at the time he was concerned he had damaged the elbow he broke previously in Bratislava, which would have been a disaster. Not much fun at all. Then in the afternoon we had two punctures which was annoying.
In the evening we set up camp on a dry river bed, a nice secluded spot that was quite comfortable because of the sandy river bed. None of us slept very well though because we were woken up by what sounded like something big padding around our tent and growling or grunting!
Pete was brave enough to investigate but whatever it was disappeared by the time he got out of the tent, only to come back when he got back in! It was probably only a fox or something, but then we are in bear country (indeed Tom and Ollie saw a dead bear on the road just a few days before) and it certainly sounded big enough to be a bear.
Not only that, the bag of rubbish that we had placed about 50m from the tent before we went to sleep (in case anything decided to investigate it) was missing the next morning, nowhere to be found. The joys of wild camping!
The next day Dean realised in the morning that the previous day's collision had left his front wheel wobbly and potentially dangerous. We all agreed it was best for him to hitch to the next big town to get it fixed. This proved to be quite easy because we came across a military checkpoint where Dean enlisted the help of the soldiers, who were only to keen to help.
They stopped the next bus and got the bus driver to take Dean and his bike (well the bus driver was hardly going to say no to an armed soldier) to Agri, 80km away. He didn't even have to pay. When he got to Agri he was able to get his bike fixed without a problem, and we caught up with him in the evening.
While he was waiting he got talking to some locals and ended up with an offer of accommodation for all three of us for the night, very welcome after the long hot day's cycling that we had. The climate has really heated up now, with temperatures topping out at between 30-35 degrees Celcius every day. So hot that the sunshine melted the tarmac on the roads, not great for cycling at all.
We are hoping that Iran and other hot countries use something different for their road surfaces as it is no fun cycling on tyres covered in melted tar! We were planning on reaching Dogubayezit the day after we stayed at Agri, but we had a late start talking to our hosts, it was really hot and then a tremendous headwind kicked in.
We had been told that there were some nice hot springs about half way to Dogubayezit so we decided to have a short day and spend the night there. Wasn't quite what we had envisioned - it turned out that the thermal hotel was open, but was primarily used to billet soldiers and police in the area, rather than being aimed at tourists.
By the time we established this it was too late to cycle on, and the hotel said we could stay although the thermal baths weren't operational. It was very cheap and the rooms had baths in them - not quite a thermal spa but a bit of a luxury nonetheless - so we decided to stay the night. The next morning we had only gone 10km up the road when amusingly we bumped into Tom and Ollie again - they had left Erzurum a day after us but hadn't had to deal with being knocked off their bikes, bike repairs etc, so had caught up with us without knowing it.
They were camped in a small Kurdish village, all of which came out to watch when we pulled up on our bicycles, no doubt a fairly unusual sight round here. Tom and Ollie had also met another cyclist called Ian, a GP who it turns out lives just down the road from us in London - small world or what!
He is on a long-distance trip to Kathmandu so has joined the 'gang' for a while. That means that we are now a group of six, five guys and Christine, who is feeling rather outnumbered but quite safe which is good.
We had a nice 50km ride into Dogubeyazit, which lies at the foot of Mount Ararat, which is 5,137m tall. Crazy to think we will be cycling to almost that altitude in just a few weeks. It was Christine's 30th birthday and Dean's 32nd birthday so that night we had some beers in the hotel, along with cake, balloons and presents (mostly stickers for our bikes and that sort of thing), before heading out for a kebab and a water pipe. A very pleasant evening all round.
Tomorrow we head into Iran, where we expect that websites such as facebook, our blog and many others will not work, so this may be the last update for a while. Think of us sweltering in 40 degree Celcius heat (in fact it is 44 degrees in Tehran today, ouch) - suddenly cool British summers seem quite appealing!
Peter & Christine Helliwell
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Copyright Peter & Christine Helliwell 2010 All Rights Reserved
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