Birthday

Wej prepared coffee and sandwhiches for me to enjoy at the bed in our room at the guesthouse 🙂 Isn’t she wonderful? Then the owner himself came with lit sparklers to celebrate the birthday child still in bed… 🙂

We allowed ourselves to be slow in the morning as a birthday gift and didn’t leave the guesthouse until 10.30. The bikes were parked in backyard of the butcher’s shop beside our guesthouse and when I went to get them he was busy chopping up a few dozens of chicken.

Outside the chicken butcher’s shop

On our way out of Safronbolu we passed the historical center and saw even more than we saw yesterday. Most of the houses look really well kept and I understand that this city is a tourist attraction. Safranbolu is declared as world heritage by UNESCO and I wonder what it means to the owner of the house that we passed that unfortunately had burnt down. Do they have to make an exact copy of the destroyed house or can they build a new one in the old style? If any of you readers know anything about the rules for renovation and rebuilding in a world heritage, then please tell me what will happen to that burnt house.

A mosque with a different looking architecture at the old town in Safranbolu

Yesterday it was a tough climb of 150 meter to reach the guesthouse which our GPS said was at 503 meters above the sea level. Knowing that we during the coming two days will have to climb to 1200 meters altitude it felt really unnecessary to start the day with rolling down to 450, then climb back to 500 before descending to 350 m.

When climbing the last part out of Safranbulo we once again noted a turtle on the road. This road was wide and the turtle was just in the middle of it. Fortunately there weren’t many cars passing by. Click on the arrow in the video link below and you can follow Mr. Turtle’s adventure when crossing the street.

Starting late is equal to not getting far when the mid day heat strikes. Since we started to cycle late we were out of our eating routines and got hungry only after some 20 km. Finding places to eat in Turkey is mostly easy, but not today. We had to ride for almost 45 minutes before finding a truck drivers’ lunch restaurant. A dozen of trucks were parked outside and the food was pre-prepared and we had to go to the counter and point at the food we wanted to order. It tasted good but not even being hot we felt that the 10 TL we had to pay per person was a bit high.

Our lunch at the truck drivers’ restaurant

After lunch we wanted coffee and found a tea vendor along the road some 6-7 km after our lunch break. It was a simple stall and we weren’t sure the vendor would have coffee for sale. When asked he showed he had Nescafe 3 in 1 (coffee, coffeemate and sugar) and none of us like sweet coffee so we asked if he could prepare coffee with the instant coffee we had instead, which he happily did.

The tea and coffee vendor’s stall

Our mission today was to try to climb the remaining 900 meters before the road starts to descend to the Black Sea again. Starting late, being tired and suffering in the heat we moved far slower than planned. In Turkey it is common with water taps along the roads for travellers to drink or wash their faces in. We stopped to soak our caps and sleeves to get a bit of refreshment.

3 minutes after leaving the well Wej said my wheel looked strange and when I looked at it it was half empty. We stopped to take a look and could only confirm that in the league of flat tyres the standing is now 3-0.

My birthday present: Flat tyre number 3 due to parking on something sharp

It was hot in the sunshine so we decided to take our bikes to the shade of a tree on a field beside the road. Right in the middle of the job to fix the flat tyre it started to rain – not very fun when a lot of the bags are opened, we already had our sleeves and caps soaked in water and especially not on my birthday…

Wej pushing her bike back to the road from the shade (!!!!) of the trees

When the tyre was fixed we came to a section which very much resembled Sweden in the summer. A wet road and a forest of pinetrees. It felt very much like it does at home.

It looks like Sweden…

We were tired and a bit disappointed for not being able to reach where we wanted and decided to skip camping and instead check in at the first motel we could find to celebrate my birthday there instead of in the tent. The hotel we found looks like an alpine mountain lodge and we are the only guests. We were too tired to eat anything proper so we only had some light food and went to bed early in order to be able to start early and avoid much of the early afternoon heat.