Figure 8 On A Bike

Erzurum had been a decent first stop for our winter tour, but Susan and I were both excited to go see the higher, colder, and hopefully snowier mountains of central Asia. But since we're Americans, and any land route from Erzurum to that part of the world has to pass through Russia or Iran, it was back west to Ankara first, before catching a long flight east, to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Besides, that gave us time to do a little sightseeing that we'd passed up during our previous stopover there. Walking through central Ankara

We left Dr. Aslan's nice hotel and flew to Erzurum Türkiye. We were unsure about the place we had booked here as it had zero reviews and two different addresses on Booking.com. We messaged to ask what to tell the taxi driver and she called and talked to the driver to get us where we needed to go. This place was BIG. It had an extra bedroom and a living room. We moved our stuff in and quickly had to get to the grocery store as this place was lacking in some basics like toilet paper - which I can forgive in a culture that doesn't use it...but there also wasn't any hand soap...We were looking at staying at this place for about 3 weeks so it wasn't a huge deal to pick up some stuff as we probably would have run out during the stay anyway. The place needed a handyman though and there were a lot of small things that were NOT great for a long stay. Oh well, live and learn. It was above a grocery store and that was awesome! After so many weeks of having limited access ...

After almost 7 weeks (and minus one week in Istanbul), Susan and I finally bid farewell to the southwest corner of Türkiye and the Mediterranean Sea. We looked forward to starting a new stage of our trip after making a trove of good memories (fun climbing and international travel time with friends) and a few less-good memories (Susan in the hospital); but it was almost time to put our new, giant, heavy bags to use and find some Winter! One stop first, though - Cappadocia. Erciyes Dağı towers on the horizon of Cappadocia

It was time for us to say goodbye to Peak GuestHouse. We ended up being there for a month! Which was maybe a little too long to stay in a guesthouse. We said goodbye to Aysel and took one last transfer with Ocan to drop off Hong-Yen at the airport. After dropping Hong-Yen off, Ocan pulls into a roundabout to leave the airport area and immediately gets hit by a motorcyclist. This occured across the street from the police station so first responders got to the man quick. The motorcyclist left in an ambulance and we were directed to the police station. Ben and I stayed out of the way while Ocan went in and out of the police station with various papers from the van. Finally, he was released and he drops us off at the bus station. Our vague feelings of unsafety while driving in Türkiye were justified. We bought our bus tickets for Çıralı , a sea side beach town with climbing access. The bus ride was a beautiful ride down the coast. The bus dropped us off on the side of the highwa...

Hello dear Figure 8 Readers! My name is Hong-Yen, and I’ll be this week’s guest blogger. Saturday, Nov 25 Daily journal entry - No sleeping in. Breakfast and second coffee. Shuttle to the airport. What should have been a short flight turned into a long day of delays due to weather. We finally get to the guesthouse at 9PM after a long and somewhat perilous drive in the storm.   Our last second coffee at the airport

Maria and I got dropped off at the Antalya airport together for our flight to Istanbul . Maria had a much earlier flight than me so she was allowed to go through security and I got to wait between security one and security two of the airport. It is more awkward than I realized trying to hang out in public places and not sit. I spent some time pacing. I spent some time reading leaning against a wall - oops, leaning is also NOT great for my back. Back to standing straight and reading. But then a nice family waved me to their seats when they left them and I didn't know how to turn that down politely so I took a seat for a while and then creakily stood up after I was sure they were gone. In the end, I paid for some curly fries from Arby's so I could stand at their high table to eat and read. Eventually I was able to go through second security and wait at the gate. Where I did some floor stretches. On the flight I sat for take off and landing and for the ten minutes we hi...

Susan in the hospital :( Susan said her back felt better in the morning, so we took both our empty backpacks and a bunch of grocery bags and walked down the hill towards the main road, ready to haul back a big load of supplies. It was too early for us to have breakfast at the guesthouse, but we figured it should be easy enough to find some coffee and food in the city, and caffeine headaches usually don't set in until the afternoon anyway. We weren't sure how we'd pay for the bus with no bus card (maybe our credit card would work?), but that was a future problem. It became a farther future problem when, still walking out of camp, saw the one morning bus cruise down the road beneath us - looks like we're taking the 2 mile to the next bus stop in Akdamlar. We got to the stop and waited around for maybe 40 minutes, unsure if a bus would actually come, when to our relief the TK-21 came rumbling by, did a u-turn, and picked us up, and our Mastercards even worked to pay t...