Leavin’ Europe

So finally, I was riding my bicycle into the city of Istanbul. The D100 is a road with six lanes going in each direction, adding up to a total of twelve lanes, and it was rush hour.

I had been on the bike since early in the morning to cover the remaining 110 km to the hostel that I had booked a week earlier on. But there had been a strong headwind all day with dangerous wind shears from left which made crossing the numerous hills a very slow procedure. I was already two hours behind my schedule but though I had reached the city, there were still 30 km more to come to make it to its center.

Every 500 meters there were cars entering or exiting the road and nobody seemed to ever have encountered a bicycle in there lives. To maximize my survival chances, I ended up managing the traffic around me by pointing at specific car drivers and signing them to overtake or stop their car in a way, that would leave no doubt about that I was in charge here. Then clouds appeared out of nowhere darkening the sky. I was riding on the lane most to the right of the street but I had to share it with hundreds of small buses. They were taking people home from work and where stopping constantly at seemingly random locations. Numerous times they would overtake me, just to slam on their brakes immediately afterwards and right in front of me to let somebody get off.

Low on energy I took a quick 5-minutes-stop to crack open a pack of cookies and to get my headlights out of my handlebar bag because it was getting obvious that a storm was approaching. Just when I was setup and ready to go I realized that my rear tire had gone completely flat in the meantime. The traffic had been taking my full concentration and I had been unable to watch the road surface as closely as I would usually do. I pushed my bike away from the bus stop I had been using as my personal parking space and off the road to a small street around the corner in front of a flat with loitering cats. I got my rain gear out just in time for the storm. Being watched by the cats, I removed the small but very sharp piece of metal that was responsible for the puncture and replaced the tube as fast as possible while defending my cookies I was eating in between from the cats.

When I was setup and ready again, the light was nearly gone and I was getting tired. A couple of kilometers later I realized that something was wrong with my gears. And right at that moment, one of the gear cables snapped. As I would later find out, I must have been changing gears by accident, while I was fixing the flat and the gear box was not connected to the rear hub. And me forcefully changing gears was eventually to much for the poor cable. The result was, that I was stuck in my 11th gear, which is alright for flat terrain, but hard to impossible to ride with uphill. Most of the inner city main road was under construction and the lighting conditions were poor. From the center of a roundabout on small hill, a pack of huge dogs intercepted me even before I reached the top and chased me for a couple of hundred meters, probably irritated by my blinking flash light at the front of my helmet.

About 6 km from the hostel, I left the road and was riding uphill into the center of Istanbul. The slopes were so steep, that it just became impossible to continue to ride the now single speed bike. So I had the push the 60 kg a couple of hundred meters uphill through the traffic. Sidewalks are generally out of the question, because the curbstones are just to high and there are rarely any ramps to find in Turkey. On top of the hill I reached Istiklal, the busy shopping street of Beyoğlu in Istanbul and was riding in little more than walking speed following close behind the tram to make it somehow through the crowds of people. Twenty minutes later, I arrived at the hostel. It was 11 pm.

The last three weeks before the departure had been stressful and I found myself being still in a todo list mode for a couple of days after leaving Berlin. Internalizing that the tour had finally started took me even longer. The first time it hit me was at a hostel in Bratislava, while I was talking to others on their journey through Europe. It was there when I realized, that the tour had finally started.

While I stayed there, I was doing my tax report at daytime, hung out with other hostel guests in the evening and was basically kidnapped on my last night by Niki, Suzi and their lovely girl gang of majoring English and German simultaneous translator students to the huge semester party taking place that night. I have not been a student for a couple of years and I did not have any ticket either, but 15 Euros later the party was on.

While I was on the road, the first thing that struck me after leaving Germany was the vast amount of road kill. Czech Republic and Slovakia were by far the road kill heaviest countries I have been to so far with dead wild animals every 500 meters or less.

Hungary was quite clean but took me some days to getting used to fact that any road with a decent surface seemed to be closed for bicycle traffic. And the smaller roads were incredibly pothole infested. In my usual manner, I first ignored the anti-bicycle signs but eventually ended up in a traffic police control and was given a friendly warning that the state road I was riding on was closed for bicycles, tractors etc. So I mainly kept to the smaller Hungarian roads until crossing the border to Romania. Some of the cities were incredibly beautiful. Definitely worth seeing a second time without the bike!

After a small detour to Esztergom, one of the oldest towns in Hungary (thanks to Niki’s suggestion).

At the 2000 km mark in Budapest.

Romania was the first country on the journey, that felt somehow different than the ones before. Riding into the first village, there were chickens and cows by the side of the street. Not being restricted by fences or leashes, the animals where just wandering around with no one to keep an eye on them.

And there were dogs. There were so many dogs. Running free in the villages and their surroundings, many of them had really bad manners. And I hated them. Leaving Arad, the first big city I went through in Romania, I was literally chased out of town by a pack of eight dogs for about two kilometers before they got bored of me. There were very little road kills, but they were nearly always dogs.

Finding a camping spot for the night was no issue anymore. A big part of Romania consists of endless green grass plains over which the shepherds lead their sheep. And so after a long days riding, you could just stop about anywhere, get of the road and pitch your tent. In the morning I sometimes met the shepherd and his dogs and chatted and mimed a bit of friendly conversation before riding off.

In a small town called Tela, Mirdea invited me for dinner and to sleep at his families house. After meeting his wife and daughter, and a delicious dinner, at which he talked about his time in a variety of different countries he was working back in the nineties, he showed me around his workshop.

He holds eight diplomas, most of them engineering sciences and was working in a variety of fields including repairing old timer cars and working at an airport. After he injured his back, he turned local and expanded his workshop and work on his house. It’s really amazing what he has done with the place. He built a couple of generators by himself, all working of different and efficient energy sources, and tons of other stuff. As a special highlight, he constructed a large wind generator. At the time, he was connecting his house the a nearby canal.

Though we did not share a common language, we could communicate quite easy with each other over the evening. (Well, most of the time, it was him who was talking.) I was really amazed by the hospitality he and his family were showing me – a total stranger on a bicycle.

Crossing the Carpathians was more difficult than expected. Not the mountains themselves where the problem, but the roads leading to them. At first, they were usually full of car and truck traffic blasting by, with no shoulder for me to ride on. Then, merely a kilometer before the mountain range, though the traffic had significantly lightened up by then and a shoulder was in place, the dreaded “no bicycle” sign appeared without warning out of nowhere. The first one I still took serious and made a 250 km detour eastwards to try a multi-digit road there. Of course the result was the same in the end, so I ignored the sign and continued heading to the mountain range. The local bicycle riders were doing it in the same way anyhow.

The next day, just after crossing a major mountain pass, I met Jérémy. When I checked-in at the Hostel Blues in Bratislava, the receptionist told me about a french guy, who had just left two days ago and was also cycling on a route down to Istanbul. Three weeks later and 1200 km to the east, I finally met him and we rode together for a couple of hours, before continuing on again on our own. His goal is riding to China, but meeting friends in Thessaloniki first before riding to Istanbul. And I had already decided on a date with a shower and the local washing machine in Bucharest.

I was on my way to the Bulgarian border, taking a small break and eating cookies, when a car stopped in front of me. A woman got out and handed me a one liter jar of soup with huge slices of meat in it. She smiled, got back into her car, and drove of. The jar was still warm.

The Romanian-Bulgarian border-crossing was the first one, where I had to show my brand-new passport. Until that point, all gates where up and nobody cared who was passing them. The border police took a quick look at my passport, smirked a bit at the glance of my appearance and the bike, and I was through.

In Bulgaria, all dogs I encountered were civilized and behaved friendly. Finding a camping spot was still relatively easy and a bit like in Romania with grass plains beside the road. Also, you get a pepaid sim card with 1 GB of data volume for about 2 Euro. The weather was great and though the terrain was hilly with a couple of plateaus to climb up to, the days were flying by.

Getting into Turkey took a bit longer. If I recall correctly, I had to show my passport eight time in total. I crossed the border just a little before sundown, so I (probably illegally) camped just 10 km off the border near a field. In the morning, a small convoy of military troops in a transport stopped after I had just finished packing up and was ready to leave. They told me, that I could not stay here because of a military base just 200 m over the hill. I thanked them for advising me, shook the leaders hand and rode off.

The roads in Turkey are in a very good condition and it was nice for a change not having to zigzag around all the time. But the best thing is, that the major roads have a wide shoulder for the most part. Anything from 80 centimeters to 4 meters. And despite the occasional broken glass on the ground (people through glass bottles out of their moving cars), it is clean and in the same condition as the road.

I reached Edirne to stock-up on groceries, to get a Turkish sim card and purchase a road atlas of the country. The first to items on the list were easily done, but it proved to be impossible to get a decent map of Turkey, which really amazed me. At the third gas station I tried, a young clerk told me about a stationary I should try and even bought me a sports drink while chatting and his friend approached. I ran into his friend again after having no luck at the stationary, a first year physics student and basketball player, who made it his personal mission to help me find a map. Overall we tried different shops for about 90 minutes, including the local bicycle club and a major mall.
Edirne: very hospitable, but absolutely mapless.

In Istanbul, my quest to find a decent map would continue. The only one available was one issued by the government, which only covered the motorways and major roads at a scale of 1:1,000,000. No use to me. Even in a city of 20 million people, it proved to be impossible to acquire a useful one.

What I did find though were some new friends and a new fellow touring cyclists, this time from Britain. Augustin had started at the north of France and is cycling up to Hong Kong, or as far his budget will support him. Coincidentally, he also met Jérémy while he passed through Austria. It is a small community.

Fixing the cable on the bike turned out to be a pain in the ass. First of all, I had never done it before. And second: I just realized that Rohloff had used T20 torx screws for their external cable box, which is not a common standard for bicycle equipment. And my all-in-all great multi-tool provided me just with the common T25 and a T15 screw drivers.

Istanbul is a great city if you want to browse around stuff. There must be hundred-thousands of small shops all over town, cramped in even the smallest spaces and corners. Most of the time, many shops of the same type build clusters, from just one street full of musical equipment shops to a whole district that is famous for just one thing.

It gets problematic, if you need something very specific. Like a T20 screwdriver. After a day of trying every possible shop within a 3 km radius without any luck, I was getting ready to take a longer trip to another district far away. On my way to the underground station, I saw a small cluster of bicycle shops. Augustin had mentioned them to me the night before. I did not really think that they would have the tool I needed and I was right. But after asking them for suggestions, they send me off south west to a bridge. I asked around there and then I found two guys, each just sitting under the clear sky beside a table, on which they had tools spread out. With the help of pen and paper, some miming and a bit of haggling, I finally walked away with a set of torx screwdrivers of decent quality. I spend a day searching without any result, but it took me only 10 minutes with the help of the local shop owners to find what I was looking for.

Equipped with the right tools, it took me two hours to repair the bike and another two hours for some secondary maintenance that I performed while I was at it. In the end, I was ready to go, but had to wait for two more days because of thunderstorms. I was convinced that it would take me most of a day to leave Istanbul. During the week I stayed in the city, I quickly became accustomed to the traffic and developed a feeling for how it worked with all its seemingly random movements, horn honking and people ignoring even the most fundamental traffic rules. It was just a very different system compared to the one I was accustomed to. It was useless trying to conquer it with a German mentality of rules and order. So I adjusted quickly. But I was not leaving town in heavy traffic and heavy rain.

In the evenings during my stay in Istanbul, I usually hung out with friends. Cheap but good dinners and beer or çay accompanied us over the week. And when they were smoking outside the hostel, I sometimes joined them upping my calories count with the help of some cookies.

The evening before leaving Istanbul.

Just before crossing the Boğaziçi Köprüsü.

Asia!

After a week I felt a bit sad of leaving, but I was eager to press on. It would be good to be on the road again. For leaving Europe, I had decided early on to cross the Boğaziçi Köprüsü, the first of the two Bosporus bridges. Opened for pedestrians after it was built in the seventies, accessible over elevators inside the pylons on each side, the bridge was soon to be closed for anything but motor traffic due to the vast amount of people who where jumping off the bridge to commit suicide. Two days before I left the hostel, another suicide attempt had occurred and had been broadcasted on TV. I was told that the police presence on the bridge had been ramped up.

Crossing the bridge on the road as a cyclist is illegal by itself, because it is officially a motorway. But it had been done before by a number of people with different degrees of success. Some had made it over the bridge and through the toll booth on the Asian side without problems. Some had reached the Asian side just to be stopped by the police. Some did not even made it on the bridge before the traffic police stopped a bus to transfer them to the other side.

The bridge would be my only chance of a continental crossing by bicycle on my whole journey. I was determined to at least make it to the other side.