Steve's Cycling Blog

From the sound of the talk at breakfast I’m glad I took myself off to my room when I did last night, there were several hangovers amongst the group this morning!

I’d seen a very nice looking cafe as I passed a couple of times yesterday and decided that I needed a real coffee and something better for breakfast this morning.

Having now had three coffees it’s probably just as well my laptop battery’s about to go flat otherwise I’d be tempted to have another one after which I may never sleep again, so time to leave 🙂

I wandered back through town with the castle above being my ultimate destination, but stopping to check out the Grand mosque along the way.

Part way up to the top of the castle I met a local family visiting from Istanbul – one of the lads spoke reasonably good English (particularly given that he was 16). We had fun between us trying to explain to the other member’s of his family what I was doing – I’m not sure they believed that I’d biked from Beijing!

I was coming down from the castle right on midday, at which point there were at least five mosques within 200m of me – it’s quite a sound.

One of the security measures which seems to exist in this part of Turkey is that any police, military, or government building has the road outside closed to prevent anyone being able to get vehicles too close (and ram-raid the building)

The main road through Kars blockaded outside the police station (the Russian-era basalt building on the right)

A couple of days ago as Michael, Ruth and I were walking back we noticed a plaque on the side of the building explaining that it was built in the 19th century, had been a school, and was originally a single-story building. As we were reading the sign the police officers, with automatic weapons were becoming increasingly concerned by our presence and were steadily getting closer to us not looking very happy so we decided it was time to move on!

By now it was time for lunch and I found a really nice cafe which made a great pide (the Turkish take on pizza) which came with a salad of finely slice onion, parsley, picked birds-eye chillis and lemon juice – all of which was really very tasty!

I stopped in to pick up a couple of beers on my way back to the hotel and have found myself a spot in the sun outside the hotel restaurant where I have access to a powerpoint to sit and finish up the last three days worth of blog posts.

The coming week is looking like it might be relatively challenging

The riding week ahead

It’s nice that we’ll have a proper campsite on the second night, and a hotel on the fifth to help break up a long week – as Roger calculated there’s over 7km of climbing and 850km of riding to cover so anything that helps will be welcome!

Today I’ve pretty much been hiding from everyone else in the group and have enjoyed time on my own – though initially the idea of these three days in Kars seemed like it was going to be too long it’s actually worked out really well.

Later: I ran into Bruno in the lobby who mentioned that he had a bottle of Raki if I wanted to join him and others at 1700. In the end it was only Bruno, Rob and I but somehow we managed to get through the bottle. We then went to the same restaurant that I’d eaten at last night which was great again. Back at the hotel Ron declared he had a bottle of wine which needed to be drunk, so we’ve just finished that off too – so much for not drinking on school nights…!

I’ve now got my bags sorted so best I drink another litre of water and get some sleep ready for an 0600 breakfast and a day of riding.