We start climbing from Karahayit to 1000 meter and higher. The road leads us through nice and green landscapes. Ascending goes slowly, while we follow the valley to a higher part of Turkey. With the height the temperature drops below the 20 degrees and we have to get used to that. Until now we are spoilt with warm weather. The colors around us are fantastic and when the sun shines on the trees it’s even more beautiful. During our days of cycling we are surrounded by golden trees and now and then by a top of a mountain. The temperature is around ten degrees and in the evening it drops to five or lower.

After a long and beautiful day of cycling we arrive in a small village at the 15th of October. 15 km before this village we saw some hotels but we hesitated and decided to go further. In Sentigret we find out that the only hotel in town is full. After a nice conversation with the owner we can sleep in an empty room. The owner brings us two mattresses and we ask him what the price will be. “That’s not a problem” is his answer. OK. We go to the center of the village to eat something. Here we meet a group of guys who are deaf. They have a great way of communicating with us. They type questions in English on their mobiles and their English is better then all the other people in the village. Our new friends make it clear to us that the food in the restaurant isn’t any good. So we buy something in a shop and go back to our hotel, where we cook our own meal in the kitchen. We drink a cup of tea with the owner and the next morning we have breakfast together. The moment we are ready to leave I ask what we have to pay and I receive two apples as an answer. We were his special guests.

Our first real autumn day brings us cold and wet in Yalvac. We just started cycling when it started raining and it didn’t stop. We were lucky to find a hotel with a hot shower. It was the most expensive hotel in town, but we got a good price and we thought we deserved a warm place to sleep. We see the first snow on the higher mountains, but the rain disappears and we can cycle further with dry feet. We move in the direction of Konya and Sultanhani. The descent just before Konya is fabulous and so is the view on the city. We leave the mountains and cycle further on a kind of plateau. The wind is very cold and strong but it’s great cycling here.

After Konya we continue cycling on the plateau with the cold wind coming exactly NOT from behind. The road has only one bend in it which makes it kind of endless. In Sultanhanni we are rewarded with a nice hostel. There is a “Caravaneri” in this village where the caravans used to come to spend the night safely. It’s nice to take a look here and to think about the live theses people used to live. We are cycling the route of these caravans and I think our bicycles are loaded with stuff like their camels used to be. The hostel where we stay has also been the one where Rob and Lucy stayed. These two Dutch cyclists are on their way to China and left the Netherlands just two weeks before we did.

Just before Ilhara we cycle across the first rocks, for which the area ‘Cappadocia’ is famous for. In this area there are houses and churches cut out in the rocks, where people used to live. The rocks have some nice structures, colors and shapes. The fairy chimneys are well known around here. At the point where we see the first rocks, we see a bus of a Dutch travel agency (OAD), which passed us by a couple of times this day. We have a warm welcome, especially when they notice we are Dutch as well. Some nice conversations, questions, and pictures follow. After the signatures we continue cycling uphill. At the top the group is waving and filming us. The cheering is great when we arrive at the top! We stay for two days in Ilhara. We spend a day walking around the beautiful valley where a lot of houses and churches have been cut out in the rocks. The impressive thing is that ones there lived 80.000 people in the valley. It is nice wandering around and we walked up to the churches and houses. In some of the churches there are still frescos on the wall.

In Derinkuyu we visit an underground city. A guide leads us trough the narrow alleys where people used to live in time of danger. A wine factory, a school, a church and stables, everything was there to survive. The underground city is there since the time of Alexander the Great, but in 1953 they discovered it again. It is nice to crawl through the narrow ways and it is amazing how it is made.

Since October 3rd it is ‘Ramadan’ in Turkey. We expected we would have to get used to it but it is fine for us. Around 5:00 AM someone is walking around with a drum and we hear the praying from the mosques. Sometimes it is hard to buy some bread during the day, because everybody will eat in the evening. At the moment of sunset we hear a big shot and after this the restaurants are full. The people can eat and drink again. During daytime we won’t eat in sight of the Turkish people, we find ourselves a quiet place outside a village. It’s ok to eat somewhere inside and we notice a lot of Turkish people who don’t go along with the Ramadan.

In Goreme, The heart of Cappadocia, we spend a great time. We enjoy walking around in the crazy landscape. Everywhere we see the most beautiful rocks which are fantastic for photography. For the rest we relax around our hostel and we look at the map to make a plan for the next part of Turkey. The cold is coming and we know we have to hurry a bit before the snow is coming. We hope we can cycle everything, but it is late in season and winters are colder than we expected. Our route is leading us through a higher part of Turkey, where we will go above the altitude of 1900 m, so the chance of encountering snow will be bigger here.

The day before yesterday we arrived in Pinarbasi. It is a little place at an altitude of 1520 m surrounded by mountains. On television we saw that it snowed for more than a meter at some places. The weather forecast says also that there will be more snow in this area….And when we woke up yesterday the world was turning white. The route would lead us to 1900 m that day and the people in the hotel warned us for a lot of snow. We didn’t want to get stuck in this small place, so we decided to take a bus to Malatya. From here we could take a train to Iran if it would get worse with the weather. After waiting for a while the boys of the hotel called us because the bus was coming. They stopped the bus while we carried our stuff to the bus. After some wrestling everything was packed in the bus and we were ready to go.

With a bit of a strange feeling in our stomach we were watching the white world from behind the windows of the bus. We wanted to cycle so much, but we knew this was the best decision. We want our trip to be fun and getting stuck by a lot of snow is not what we want at this moment. We drive 250 km by bus before we arrive in Malatya. The weather forecast for tomorrow seems a bit better so we will cycle to Elazig. From there it will be 4 days of cycling to Tatvan where we will take a boat to the other side of the lake. In Van we have to see if we can cycle further or that we need to take a train into Iran.

Karahayit – Dazkiri: 95km
Dazkiri – Sentigrent: 102km
Sentigrent – Yalvac: 70km
Yalvac – Beysehir: 95km
Beysehir – Konya: 98km
Konya – Sulthanhani: 113km
Sulthanhani – Ilhara: 99km
Ilhara – Derinkuyu: 57km
Derinkuyu – Goreme: 38km
Goreme – Kayseri: 76km
Kayseri – Pinarbasi: 94km
Pinarbasi – Malatya: 250km (by bus)