Journey to the West Country

Solo cycling 14,000kms from Korea to the UK

[j2westcountry]

One year ago today, I set off on the most challenging adventure of my entire life. I still can't begin to describe the gratitude I have for everyone who helped and supported me along the way. From my unforgettable friends in Korea, to the wildly hospitable strangers of the Central Asian deserts... from the warm-hearted cyclists across Europe, to my ever-supportive family at home. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. 

Here is a short video I made of my journey. We are still taking donations for MAG, so please share, like and donate. Thank you.

https://vimeo.com/90169152

[j2westcountry]

Saturday 23rd November - Good Days and Bad

Northern Serbia, Hungary and Slovakia have been another set of standard cycling days, some good, some not so good. In Budapest I met up with a few old friends from secondary school who had flown out from the UK. It was a great few days spent walking around the city, a typically British tourist excursion, taking in the sights at the castle, the market and the river, then getting really drunk on local beer. We rented our own apartment which was great, the weekend wasn’t very restful for my body though. After Budapest, I left the main roads and joined mostly country roads along the Danube river that led me into Slovakia, to Bratislava, then on into Austria and Vienna.

  Here’s an original observation for you. There are good days and bad days in life. This can be applied to cycling. Let me tell you what happened recently in Central Europe using this predictable format.

There have been a couple of bad days recently. Leaving Belgrade, when a carrier bag lodged under my rack-pack fell off, carrying in it my US$200 raincoat, my Ortlieb water bag, two bike locks and my Chinese knock-off Crocs (they weren’t expensive but they have sentimental value, they got me through 5000km of desert looking like a twat, but a comfortably-shod twat), that was a bad day. When I got thrown off the Hungarian highway by the police and forced to cycle on the smaller country roads with minimal lighting and no raincoat on a cold and rainy evening, that was a bad day.

But the worst day I’ve had recently was probably the day I crossed from Hungary to Slovakia. It started with rain and ended in more. Bearing in mind that after carrying that raincoat for around eight months and only having to use it about 5 times (5 days of rain out of 250 odd is not bad), the week I really need it when entering the rainy countries of Central and Western Europe, I lose it, I am already not in a great mood after panic buying a cheap hoodless raincoat on the way out of Budapest. I had camped not too far from the banks of the Danube and it had been a fairly restless night. Not just because of the cold and rain, the dampness that was seemed to spread through the down stuffing in my sleeping bag or the rustling of the trees above me on this windy late autumn night, but because of something, some creature, probably some sort of rodent, burrowing away in the vestibule of my tent.

I had already moved the rubbish bag from my dinner of tuna, pesto and pasta and put it inside my tent to deter any animals from making noise outside my tent. However this little guy was quite determined, and obviously thought he had struck gold when a weary prat cycling across the world decided to camp right next to his home of hedges and broken trees in a little woods near the river. At first I could hear him making noises in or around one of my back pannier bags. It was late, around 1am, and I was too cold and tired to get out of my sleeping bag, so I just hit my bag through the inner tent a few times. I carried on doing this every ten minutes or so, whilst whatever it was out there had its little party in my pannier or around the vestibule it now resided in. Every time I hit the wall of the tent, the rain that was steadily hammering on the outside all night found ways to seep in, and the floor was wet and everything else feel gross and damp. It must have been about 3am, when I finally gave in and became so tired that I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more, rodent or no rodent. I had removed food that was accessible like my open bag of pasta or half eaten loaf of bread, so I thought it would eventually give up.

In the morning I woke up to find this:

The little bastard had gnawed a hole into the wall of my inner tent, right next to where I had put my rubbish bag in the corner between what I thought to be quite impenetrable walls. So something, a rat or mouse or ferret, had got into my tent and was probably rifling around my belongings right next to where I slept! I felt like I’d been robbed! I cautiously made my way around the tent in the morning, a soft rain still coming down outside, in case the little twat was still in there. The area seemed clear, but when I looked in the pannier, I found that a packet of my favourite type of biscuits from Turkey, that I was saving for a day like this, one that started off depressingly enough to warrant being regarded as a metaphor for a negative period in one’s life, as well as literally being a rainy day, had been broken into and eaten! This little git, whatever it was, had managed to get through a whole unopened packet of Albeni’s, a rip off twix chocolate bar in biscuit form. I had been lucky enough to make it through the trip without having anything more than a bike light stolen in Urumqi in Western China, but that morning, I felt truly robbed. By a rodent.

That basically set the precedent for the day in terms of my mood. The rain let off for a while, but the overcast skies and gloomy lighting told me that it would be back later. It was, not long after I crossed the Danube from Hungary into Slovakia. Getting into a new country was momentarily pleasing, but my pace these days for moving didn’t seem to be what it was. Ever since I was thrown off the motorway in Hungary, I felt like I had been moving a lot slower. When I was pedalling safely along the hard shoulder of the highway, I felt like I was a person on the move with all the other cars and buses, people going places, getting down to business (even though it took me a day to do what a car does in 90 minutes). On the smaller roads, where I constantly had to check my map and move to the very edge of the tiny lanes to let traffic pass, I felt like a snail trying to traverse a football pitch. Around 3.00pm it felt like it was nighttime already and the skies opened up with all the rain the sky had been saving for me for the last 245 days. Riding through the pitch black, on country roads in the pouring rain and chilling wind, without a hood is not what a good day consists of. I used my baseball cap and wooly hat, but the rain soon got through, and I was soaked and shivering by 8pm. The lack of pace on these small roads was getting to me, and I longed for the days I could speed along the hard shoulder of a motorway on the less restrictive roads of non-European countries. With the knowledge that all my clothes and my sleeping bag were damp, I knew it would be horrible to camp that night. The prospect was so demoralizing. My money was running very thin, and I knew I couldn’t afford to pay for accommodation as much in Europe as I could in Turkey or the Middle East. I had sent out a few Couch Surfing and Warm Showers requests, but had got nothing in return. Camping was not going to be an option much anymore, and hotels were getting so pricey that turning to the kindness of strangers on the internet cycling travelling and cycling communities was the only option. An enjoyable option when people respond, but a bit demoralizing when you get no responses. The fact that all these minor things were getting me down, when I had been through things that were so much harder before, was making it worse. I was lucky enough to find a room in a guesthouse around 9pm, for 27 Euros. So at least it was a dry ending to a shitty day.

But you know what I’ve learnt? There are good days and there are bad days. Has anyone ever pointed that out before?

The next day, feeling quite refreshed from a dry night’s sleep aided by the mini radiator crammed into the corner of my shoebox room, I checked my emails to see that I had a place to stay in Bratislava. I set off towards the Danube, with an overcast sky, but thankfully no rain. When I got to the Danube (I had taken a detour to get to the town with a guesthouse) I was delighted to see, after crossing a huge dam, that I had a long designated cycle path all to myself, along raised banks so that I could see the green, rain-soaked countryside and villages to the left of me. The enormous locks along the Danube and man-made waterways around the Danube reminded me of cycling on my first ever long distance bike trip just over a year ago, from Seoul to Busan, the only trip of that kind I had taken before starting this monster journey from Korea to England. This put me in a good mood, and when I stopped to take some photos, the realization that I had a strong tailwind behind me for the next 60km was the icing on the strudel. I arrived in Bratislava, ahead of time, and although the rain had begun again, I was in great spirits and met up with my Warm Shower’s host called Vladimir. Vladimir was an interesting man in his fifties, who not only enjoyed cycle touring, but also winter swimming in the Danube! He had a great deal of knowledge to impart on the city of Bratislava as well as his field of linguistics. He kindly sent me off the next day after having a meal with his co-workers, with some snacks and a Slovakian beer.

Perhaps that good day doesn’t sound as incredible as it could be. There were no monumental landmarks passed, in terms of both distances and actually physical monuments (well, maybe in Bratislava). It’s almost hard to describe what exactly made it a good day. Perhaps, it was the sense of freedom that returned upon getting on the bike and riding next to a huge, open river. Or the tailwind with the beautifully paved cycle path all to myself. But in truth, I think it was realizing that with the day before, when motivation was low and all hope seemed as dismal as the weather and there seemed to be no way out of this water-logged cycling mess, that there was light at the end of a 24 hour tunnel, and anything can be overcome when looked at in the light of a next day. Getting through that difficult period will always be rewarded, whether it’s with subdued weather conditions or a rejuvenated sense of confidence in yourself that you made it through that shitty day before. That’s what I experienced in Hungary and Slovakia, anyway.

So bad days can always be followed by good days. As if you needed to read another blog telling you that.

[j2westcountry]

262 days I've been on the road, with only 3 more left until I reach the end! If you've been following my journey on Facebook or through my blog or instagram, please like/share my journey through the Facebook, Tumblr or Instagram page and donate to MAG, the charity for which this is all for, to help me reach my target. They clear land mines and remnants of conflict in areas of the world that really need assistance. Thank you so much to everyone who has donated already, I promise I'll get round to thanking you all individually when this mad last dash of punitive cycling is over! Cheers! https://www.justgiving.com/paul-lombard/ https://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/Journey-to-the-West-Country/635406153141421 http://j2westcountry.tumblr.com/ http://www.journeytothewestcountry.com/#!social-media/c2q4

[j2westcountry]

Day 251: Weather Changes. #germany #resenburg #nuremburg #weather #changes #cyclinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry

[j2westcountry]

Monday 11th November - Standard Days

I’ve been quite enjoying my life, these days. There were so many times on this trip that I have longed for an existence of normality, or times that I have been frustrated at never having a real home. Times when I wondered “what the f#ck am I doing?” or questioned my sanity for ever thinking I could go through with a ludicrous journey. But these last few days have felt a bit like a return to normality in terms of riding. Normal, perhaps, only in the sense that I have been able to get back into my daily cycling routine.

The ride from Sofia to Belgrade was pretty ordinary, with slightly warmer weather than Bulgaria, and some surprisingly beautiful scenery all across the Southern Region of Serbia. The few days of moderate relaxation I spent with my parents in Sofia were concluded with a short trip to the train station to buy tickets for a train to Belgrade, where they would meet me a few days later. The station and its staff were stuck unmistakably in the Soviet era, with the building’s dull overbearing structure and the sales assistants’ peculiar ability to balance their lack of enthusiasm with their impatience. After a lot of grumpy exchanges with these various ticket sellers or information assistance, we manage to buy some tickets and a day after this I waved goodbye again, setting off to start the four hundred odd kilometres from Bulagaria to Serbia.

As I mentioned, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary for these few days, as I cycled across the amicable, green landscape of Serbia and the daily routine of a standard “journey to the west country” day was restored. The same sort of day that I was able to experience in the less abrasive parts of Turkey, or in the Eastern parts of China, before the windy, dry deserts of Western China and Iran, the shockingly high temperatures of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the mad mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and fluctuating security levels in Iraq and Southern Turkey. The days without these factors, were standard days. So I thought I would write a bit about what a standard day consists of, a routine that has kept me sane over this insanely long and lonesome travelling period.

A regular day can start at any given time in the morning, and is not fixed, due to differences in levels of exhaustion from the previous day of riding and the fact that I can sometimes be a lazy bastard who hates mornings. Mostly no earlier than six, and no later than nine. Nine is very late if I'm camping. As a general rule though, I am usually on my bike around 90 minutes after waking up, after getting dressed, making breakfast, brushing my teeth and packing up my home for the day. In a hotel it can be more or less, depending on if there is breakfast or free (procrastination inducing) wifi. I start my ride with a fairly heavy blast of upbeat music, something that I know that I can ride to all the way through, for about an hour. Preferences of this type of music vary from day to day, but it would usually be something electronic with a fast pace.  Favourites on this trip have been Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 tour, or Soulwax Under the Covers Pt 3 compilation. After this hour, I’ve hopefully gained some mileage of around 15-25 kilometres. Here I usually stop for about 10 minutes of stretching and eating and apple or banana or whatever other fruit I could find at the market/supermarket. I then spend the next couple of hours listening to something at a slightly slower but steady pace. This could be any music and would differ each day, either stuff I hadn’t heard before, or something I hadn’t listened to for a long time. This has been great to discover new music or rediscover old gems. I then would usually stop for lunch, usually eating something I was carrying like bread, meat and cheese in Europe and Turkey or interesting crackers and cakes in China. If I was lucky there would be café or motorway service station. I devoured many a lamb kebab on the highways of Central Turkey and Iran. In China I might find a soup kitchen, where I could tuck into a bog bowl of Lanzhou Ramien (Beef noodles) for about 50p.

  After lunch I would usually slow my pace a little bit more by listening to a podcast or two. The Adam and Joe BBC 6 Music podcast has been a staple show I’ve listened to, which has definitely helped keep me sane over the majority of the past year. This American Life was sometimes very decent, but can be a bit hit and miss. Various others like Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy, Ted Talks, Ricky Gervais and 10 O’clock Live helped me digest whatever strange meat/cheese/carbohydrate mix I had had for lunch. Adam and Joe, though, have been a given, almost every day, especially since I found a way to download all their old shows with the music. These last couple of months I must have listened to about 50 three-hour recordings of their entire Saturday morning radio show on BBC 6 Music. I mostly listen to it for the fully-grounded and inane British banter, but it has been great just to have a recording of the radio with music to listen to, keeping me sane in the more desolate parts of the world, even if they were recorder 4-5 years ago. Consequently I have no idea what current music is like, but I’m very up to date on inoffensive indie tat and electronic synth-pop of aimed at British middle-class 25-30 year olds, of the 2008-2009 period.

Hopefully by this time, I am about two thirds or more of the way through my required distance for the day. The last few hours are usually taken up by some more upbeat music to get me through those final kilmetres. On a lot of days, particularly when I had had a late start, I would have a weird second wind, a buzz of adrenaline when the sun went down. As Nick noticed in parts of China, I could be a bit sloppy when the sun was blazing down and the heat was affecting my body temperature, but as soon as the sun went over that horizon, I would be off in a shot, steaming away down that highway like a boy racer’s nitrous injected Vauxhall Nova.

The time that I would stop can depend on daylight and the mileage gained. If I was camping I would usually set up camp as the sun was setting, around 40 minutes before complete darkness, so I would usually cook using a head-torch. Occasionally I have had to set up my tent in the dark, particularly since the days have become shorter. If I was staying in a hotel, I could keep going up to any late or early morning hour. The latest I’ve cycled until is 4am before getting a hotel, but sometimes in China with Nick, we would cycle through the whole night if we knew we were going to have the next day off, then get a hotel room in the morning. In many hotels, if you check in after 6am, you can have the room until 10am or 12pm the next day, for the same price. Winning! Night riding can be great in an area that isn’t particularly scenic, and there is something very calming about the starry skies and reduced levels of traffic that allow you to focus on just moving forward. Some of my biggest kilometre gains have been in the night. You just have to make sure all the relevant batteries are charged.

That, pretty much, is the standard routine I would get into on this trip, when there weren’t interfering factors such as unbearable heat, soaking rain, walls of wind or stupidly steep hills. That’s what made up the days between Sofia and Belgrade, although on the last day before Belgrade I did push myself to get to 205km before midnight, my current personal best. Many have done better, but for now, for a person who isn’t particularly into sports and didn’t really cycle much before mid-2012 and carrying 35 kilos of weight, I am quite satisfied with that. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a slightly boastful ending to a short run-down of how, someone who has never really excelled at routines and discipline, through venturing out on an overly ambitious trip with little background or training has finally managed to find a routine and discipline he actually likes. I have used these skills before whilst studying, or working, but I’ve always loathed them. Now I feel like I can finally appreciate them for what they are. Well done, me, it only took 29 years and an 8000 mile bike ride to finally do what a normal person can do at adolescence…  Well, maybe I’m just realising that you’re never too old to master your skills. Albeit, slightly pathetic ones.

You’ll be pleased to know it’s not the only thing I’ve got out of this trip, but one of many things I am happy about because cycling across the world. I’m glad that over 240 days of meeting hundreds of people, seeing dozens of different cultures, exploring incredibly different landscapes, pushing my body through the harshest of conditions and most extreme temperatures and making it through to the other side, that I can still find a couple of other pros to put in the heavily one-sided “pros and cons” list for a cycling trip from South Korea to the UK. The question for me now, as I draw near to the end of it all is: can I actually apply this to a normal life?

[j2westcountry]

Wednesday 6th November - Civilization

Leaving Turkey was a lot simpler than getting into it. A few glances at my bike, a quick stamp in my passport and they waved me ahead past the three or four other cars that were at this peaceful little border crossing. Far less of a ruckus than the Iraqi-Turkish border which was like something out of the Book of Exodus, this one had a charming little tree-lined no man’s land with a cheerful male and female guard on the Greek side welcoming you into the European Union through a quiet little gateway and into their green and flowery customs enclosure. This was more like something out of The Secret Garden, although the lead characters still had big guns and threatened to use them when you took photos. Still got a few snaps though:

Greece, considered by many to be the birthplace of Western Civilization, creator of the first democratic system the world had ever seen, and of course the homeland of the Olympics. How fitting that with my ipod on random, the song Civilization by Justice should come on. The lyrics The beating of a million drums, the fire of a million souls, Civilization reverberated, not only through my eardrums, but through the very essence of this ancient and mystical land, a land rich in historical artefacts as it is in its foundations of philosophy and justice. A land rife with beauty, both artificially in its architecture and 4000 year old history, and naturally, in its 3000 odd islands or Mediterranean climate. Too bad I wasn’t there long enough to care about any of that. My time in Greece lasted around three hours, which I’m told is as long as the term served by the last Greek prime minister.

  At this point in my journey though, it didn’t really matter what country for I was in or how long I was going to be there for. I was in Europe. I had finally crossed the political boundaries from Asia into Europe. I had come 11,000 kilometres on a hybrid mountain/road bicycle carrying seven bags of luggage, a dog’s toy pheasant and a jar of marmite. I had gone through desert, mountains, pastures and flats. I had gone through warzones, near bombsites, crossed rickety bridges over huge rivers and pedaled into dark and dusty tunnels, and I was still alive. I was still breathing, I was still leaning forward on my handlebars, pushing forward, rotating the pedal crank with the balls of my feet, up and down, over and over, all day long, panting away, feeling aches in my toes, cramp in my fingers and pressure on my palms, but feeling more healthy and alert than I ever have done in my entire life. I did my best to enjoy it as much as I could while it lasted.

I cycled for about 30 kilometres and enjoyed the green landscape, modern signposting and relaxed drivers, before the sun went down and I arrived in the small town of Ormenio. Where I chatted with the locals for a bit, enjoyed a brilliant meal of pork chop (pork!!), chips and greek salad in exchange for a ten euro note I had changed in the bank in Edirne, another pleasing moment of realization that this would be one of the last few currencies I would have to use before getting back home. I enjoyed being in Greece, and I enjoyed being back in Europe. Too bad I was only there about as long as Greece benefitted being in the European Union before the world economy went tits up.

  Sorry. I’m not making fun of Greece, just making fun of the government’s spending policies in the lead up to the global economic crisis. I would love to travel around Greece properly one day, but unfortunately, this time, I pretty much only went through so that I could say “I’ve been to Greece”. I did have a terrific meal there and I wish I could have spent more time sampling the brilliant Greek cuisine. I will definitely go back there to one day and experience the beautiful beaches, crystal clear waters and amazing food that Greece has to offer, and it will be for a lot longer than three hours (Which is about as long as the Greek economy was stabilized before it needed another bail out!) Sorry… sorry… I don’t know where these are coming from.

Bulgaria was the next crossing. Just a few kilometres from where I had dinner I came to the border. Going from Greece to Bulgaria was easy as pie. Just a quick flash of my passport and I was through border control and customs quicker than you can say “Uncle Bulgaria”. It was pitch black at this point. I was fully fed and feeling good from the big meal I had had in Ormenio. And was ready to cycle some more. Unfortunately the roads were completely unlit and most of my bike light batteries were weak so I only had a dulled headlight to show me the way ahead. I wanted to push on though, and get another 60 or 70km done, as I needed to be in Sofia within a couple of days to meet my parents, who were coming to visit me in this Eastern European capital to drop off some essential supplies such as bike tyres, new lights and pork pies. I set up camp around midnight, after making some ground and slept on a raised bank off the highway that flanked the picturesque river that I would discover in the morning.

The next two days were an easy 230 kilometres or so to the capital city. The drab uniform blocks of flats from the communist era reminded me of my time in Central Asia, but with subtle changes, the small changes that I have experienced all the way through this trip from country to country in this slow migration from Eastern Asia to Western Europe. For this part, it was the road-side posters of scantily clad women that caught my eye, as they are designed to do. But it wasn’t necessarily because I was attracted to the suggestively bulbous eyed blondes in leopard-skin brassieres or tattoo-laden, garish goths in dog collars holding bottled beers, but because they were women and they were allowed to be on adverts. An advert for beer, no less. This is the type of blasphemy I hadn’t seen since, well, pretty much for the whole trip! Korea and China were too conservative for this and the Middle East is the Middle East (and Turkey, with a current government that has a society headed firmly into the column headed “Middle East”). The Central Asian countries (the ‘stans), although having many inhabitants that were still Soviet in their vodka consumption, would say it’s sacrilege to have an advert aimed at women, or with a woman in it, or even considering the existence of women. So, yeah, a minor change, but it was quite a surprise. I saw my first Lidl on this trip too, that was exciting.

Arriving in Sofia around 9pm on a Saturday night, I was surprised to see the streets fairly empty for a capital city. The nights were getting colder, and I needed to find a place to sleep fairly quickly so I checked into a dorm at a hostel, and met my parents the next day. After eight months of cycling through some extraordinary countries, it was wonderful to see them and share a few days of normality with them in what, to me, seemed like a very pleasant and quiet city (after riding through Istanbul). It also didn’t hurt that they put me up in their nice hotel and brought an array of treats produced by the Cadbury’s and KP brands. Soon after I would leave Bulgaria, and go on into Serbia up to Belgrade, where I would race my parentss train to, to meet up with them once again. (The train won the race)

[j2westcountry]

Day 241: Rainy Bratislava. #slovakia #bratislava #rainy #cyclinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry

[j2westcountry]

Friday 1st November - Turkish Nights

The second half of Turkey from Osmaniye in the South where I left my brother, to the port town of Bursa near Istanbul was fairly conventional cycling, with no big surprises. There were some kind-hearted people and some weirdos, but mostly it was just a return to regular cross-country cycling.

As I moved slowly across the huge land mass from East to West, there were changes in terrain and politics that culminated in the huge metropolis that is Istanbul. People became less friendly on face-value, religious practice was more relaxed, food got more expensive, towns more developed and power cuts less frequent. I saw the first McDonalds I had seen in six months, the last one was back in Xi’an in central China. I was never a huge McDonalds fan in the past, but I ordered half the menu that day. It got colder and almost frosty, which I didn’t really picture when I thought about cycling through Turkey, but I was glad I had my -10 degree proof sleeping bag. And it started getting darker sooner, a sign that winter is coming and is unavoidable, no matter how much I try to out-pedal it.

People in Turkey are not interested in the fact you are a tourist like they were in Iran and Iraq, but they are still quite interested in the bike. In one small town I passed through I stopped for what I thought would be a few minutes to ask in a computer shop if they could fix my camera. An hour later I was doing an interview for the local newspaper, as half of the shopkeepers in the road had arrived to see what was going on after I explained about my trip to the one guy who spoke English. By the time I left they had fixed my camera, given me spare batteries and fed me lunch, all at no cost. Here is the article that appeared online. It appears I’m now famous in Bolvadin!

I cycled a fair amount each day, with not much in the way of breaks. I usually cycled for six days and gave myself one day off. One day I had an off-the-cuff moment where I wanted to make a birthday photo for my old flatmate Michael (Brummy) and I decided it to involve a cow, a bit of medical tape and a sign saying “Happy Birthday Fishman” written on it. I spent about 5 minutes following a cow around a field before I realised someone was watching me. Then I realised I was in a field, in the middle of Turkey, dressed in cycling gear at 10 o’clock in the morning chasing a cow around for a mildly amusing photo opportunity. Then I realised the constant cycling was getting to me a bit. I left the poor cow alone and just made this instead:

It took me about three weeks to cross all the way from the Iraq border to Istanbul. Although people were less friendly on first sighting, they were still very warm when you got talking to them. Three times when I asked in petrol stations if I could camp outside, they told me (in Turkish and body gestures) that it was too cold outside and offered me a room. The first time I got a real bunk bed in a sort of shift-workers lodge:

The second I got a tiny room in the back with a toasty heater:

The third time I got the luxury suite:

Two young lads from Diyarbakir:

Who were holding the fort at a petrol station up in the hills near Bursa offered me this:

And although it had no heating, it did have a toilet and washroom, not to mention this lovely forecourt-view:

A day after this I arrived in Bursa, or more specifically Mudanya, the port town near Bursa which connected this satellite commuter city with Istanbul. I took the ferry to central Istanbul after advice from many other cyclists such as Alleykat, an Australian couple who I met coming down a hill in Kyrgyzstan and I’m pleased to see are in the Far East, in Japan, having explored Korea. They told me I should avoid the insane Istanbul traffic by cycling down one of the port cities, which are the same distance as if I were to cycle into Istanbul, but less mental. I’m glad I did it because the ride out of Istanbul was something I never want to do again.

Istanbul is an amazing city, so unique in its layout and atmosphere. When I first arrived I had no idea how hilly it was and ended up pushing my bike up one of the steepest hills I’ve come across to get to where I was staying. It’s such a huge city, you really need a local or someone who has lived there to help give you a clue about what’s what. Luckily another friend from Korea, Laura, who kindly let me use her flat to sleep in, was living here in Istanbul. I met a group of people from her school and we went to an interesting improv night a kind of theatre space where you could bring your own alcohol. It had been almost a full dry month since I last drank in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan, so I made up it in the bring-your-own quota. The morning wasn’t fun but it was great to have a couple of days off in the city and meet other people of my former profession (if I can call my ESL teaching a profession).

Leaving Istanbul on a highway, on a bicycle, as I mentioned, is not a sought after experience. It didn’t help that it was getting dark by the time I left, as I had picked up some camping gas and new brakes from far away shops in the city. The fiery sunset in the clouds over the Istanbul skyline was pretty spectacular. Once I finally got out of the chaotic traffic, it was fairly nice and calm, but it had become quite foggy and hard to see in the dark. I camped that night at a motorway service station, with my tent inside a kind of open chalet. It was quite nice and sheltered, but I woke up in a very damp dew-filled tent and sleeping bag. The next night was the same, so the last night I spent in Turkey, I chose to get a hotel in the town of Edirne to air out my tent and hang up my sleeping bag to get rid of the dampness. Edirne was a very nice city, which made a change from the usual border-town pits of inequity. After a good night’s sleep, I loaded up my bike again on that sunny day, elated that I had crossed the last huge country of the trip, onwards to the border of my home continent: Europe!

[j2westcountry]

Friday 18th October - Turkish Days

Darkness in one of the most tense border regions in the world is never a good thing,  so it was unfortunate that there were thousands more trucks, cars and people crossing here than any other check point I had been through on this trip. Once I eventually emerged on the other side with a Turkish visa stamped in my passport, hours after arriving, the sun was just disappearing behind the western horizon beyond Syria. The road to the nearest town was totally rubbish: a large dusty and windy, empty land with the odd eerie-looking mechanic’s shop or deteriorating café. You would think you were in a scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre if it wasn’t for the hoards of people staring from cars and trucks, waiting endlessly in a 20 kilometre queue to the left, whilst Turkish trucks boom up behind you, no thoughts spared for the stupid cross-country cyclist as their anger is taken out on the road, after waiting hours, probably days to cross back into their country.

The Turkish border town of Silopi is as appealing as its names sounds. Badly assembled, a bit greasy and falling apart, I didn’t want to spend much time there, but after the most chaotic crossing I had experienced yet and the sun having gone down, I needed to reassess. The road that I should follow, the only road, was going directly next to the Syrian border. I knew there would be nowhere very safe to camp in this area, and with the enormous, loud trucks of the night almost taking me out at any given opportunity, I decided to get a hotel. I found a very average looking place for 35 lira, a currency I had forgotten to obtain after the chaos of the crossing, but luckily the young guy behind the desk took 18 dollars and gave me the change in lira. The room was bare with a touch of grubbiness and the shower was basically a hose on a tap, but anything was better than camping out in Silopi.

The next morning I vacated the premises fairly quickly after having some bread and peanut butter for breakfast. I took out some lira from the first cash machine I had seen in two months (since Tajikistan) and attempted to buy a sim card, but the cheapest was 40 lira, more than the hotel I just stayed in, so I decided not to bother. I rode the next 30 kilometres with a tense awareness of my proximity to Syria and of past incidents that had happened to other cyclists in this region. I had read blogs of cyclists going through here in times of unrest, describing it as a lawless place with groups of kids forming circles around them and savagely attempting to steal things from their bikes. Luckily, the mild amount of trouble I came across was a lot more tame and unenthused.

My first encounter was a group of kids who appeared from a small hamlet next to a petrol station. As soon as they spotted me from afar, they began shouting and running, garnering the attention and support from their fellow infantile comrades. As with most kids I have encountered along the way, I attempted to diffuse any ambiguities as to whether or not I am an enemy or not, by smiling and waving hello. But as soon as I saw one of them crouch down to pick up a rock, I immediately switched to angry teacher mode and turned my voice to its most booming and intimidating level to shout “DON’T YOU DARE!” (maybe with a few more harsh words thrown in there as I wasn’t in school) and watched the kid stop instantly in his tracks, his facial expression changed from savage excitement to a shocked glumness as he dropped his stones and backed up a few steps. The human being in me felt a bit bad for deflating a young kid who was just joining in fun with his mates, but the disciplinary ESL teacher in me thought “ah, I’ve still got it”.

The second encounter was a bit less juvenile than rock throwing. As I cycled along a very windy road that ran just a few metres from the river that divided Turkey and Syria, past the watchtowers where soldiers stood looking out into the troubled country, I came towards two teenagers stood at the side of the road. They held up their hands making the hand gesture for money or cigarettes, as I realised many adolescent kids would do in this part of Turkey. But with these kids, one of them was holding up a knife, it seemed in a way to scare me into handing over money or cigarettes. Unfortunately for them, I was more concerned about the huge trucks driving recklessly behind me (as they all do here in Turkey) so I unintentionally ignored them. It was about 15 seconds later that I realised the kid with the knife was chasing me. However his attempts were pretty futile, as he wasn’t putting much effort into his run and was not able to keep up. It was a quite a pathetic attempt at mugging really, but I guess his heart wasn’t really in it. The whole episode hardly even registered though, in terms of fear. Not just because it was so lacklustre attempt, but because I didn't even realise it was happening until I was half way down the road, well away from them. Oh well, better luck next time, lads.

The British foreign office website advised against all travel in this area, especially the westward road that runs parallel to the Syrian border. Although I hadn’t really listened to them with regards to Iran and Iraq (they weren’t too keen on them either), I decided to go along with them this time, and avoid the one long stretch along the border that was avoidable, and head north into the mountains. As soon as I passed Cizre, the second border town in this area (Silopi for Iraq, Cizre for Syria), everything suddenly became really pleasant. A beautiful, mountainous scenery just appeared out of nowhere. It seems I was concentrating so much energy on the belligerent trucks and war-torn country to the left of me, that I ignored the enormous range of mountains to the right. So after Cizre, after a short ride along the river, I turned a corner past a hill and saw this sort of thing:

I now saw why so many people had told me about how lovely Turkey is. The grass seemed greener and a wild array of clouds punctuated the sky above the mountains like the remains of tiles that had been knocked down after a storm. The wind was calmer, sheltered by the mountains, and as I cycled up and down the windy (as in meandering), hilly road, I saw a huge canyon developing to the right of me, where I would set up camp for the night. It had been so long since I’d had a peaceful camping experience, I decided not to waste the last hour of sunlight cycling upwards, but just to enjoy the sunset from my tent whilst cooking my dinner on the edge of this enormous canyon.

The next few days were tough riding, but really beautiful in terms of scenery and weather. I camped a couple more nights and stayed once in a hotel, before I passed through the city of Batman, and onwards to Diyarbakir where I was to meet my brother, who had flown out from England to join me for a week. I had one day off in Diyarbakir whilst my brother assembled his bike and got acclimatized to South Eastern Turkey. We stayed with a couch surfing host named Murat, who kindly put us up, and introduced us to some local cyclists to help assemble my brother’s bike. This particularly came in handy the next day, when we attempted to set off for Danny’s first day of riding, only to find that my bike had a number of problems and was giving up on life. It started with a frustrating puncture, as I had just changed it the day before without even riding it, then progressed into structural breakage of the rack which is disastrous for a tour cyclist, as it holds up all of the pannier bags. Luckily, Cilem, a nice girl from the Diyarbakir biking society quickly helped us find a couple of decent bike mechanics to fix the problems. My bike troubles continued in the week though, in the way of punctures and breaking bag clips, but at least there were people like Cilem and helpful bike shop owners along the way to make it easier.

It was great to ride with my brother for a week, to have company, and to share the frustration of punctures. The roads in Turkey were much smoother than Iraq, but my tyres were worn down and the desert-like conditions meant there were many strands of metal from blown out truck tyres on the ground. It was all very reminiscent of my last month in China, when I was cycling through the desert on nice highway roads, but with unrelenting wheel problems. Only this time I was with my brother instead of Nick, we ate kebabs instead of noodles, and there was a load of tea instead of staring. Despite the problems, we still had some very nice days of riding, and the weather was perfect in that it was sunny in the day and cooler at night, much nicer than the day and night time sauna-like temperature of the Iraqi desert. It was a shame it was such a short-lived visit! You can read a better outlined version of these events in Danny’s blog.

The Southern region of Turkey had its ups and downs, literally and metaphorically. It was pretty to cycle through at times, but less attractive in others. People are friendly on the whole, in particular the Kurdish people, who live in these parts and would often give us free fruit and tell us “this not Turkey, this Kurdistan!”. But the devastating problems in Syria means that there are a huge number of impoverished refugees in this area, and crime, especially theft is very high in this region. In the cities people were begging and there were a lot of attempts made by young kids to grab anything they could from your belongings. It could be difficult to be calm and sympathetic sometimes when incidents like this or the boys with the knife happened, but I just had to remind myself that they were refugees, who just needed some money after fleeing their own country. A couple of times we offered them bread or fruit, sometimes they would take it, sometimes they wouldn’t. It’s very sad to see people, families, who were living normal lives in what was a developed country, have their world ripped up in front of them over the last two years, having to find a new home and a drastic drop in the quality of life all because a political tyrant won’t step down. I hope that one day these people can go back to having normal lives in a stable country they can call their own.

That’s a rather sombre note to end this post on... Next post, cow chasing!

[j2westcountry]

Day 219: Lone Tree (2). #turkey #tree #nofilter #cylinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry

[j2westcountry]

Day 117: Leaving Istanbul. #turkey #leaving #istanbul #cylinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry

[j2westcountry]

Day 216: Teeming. #turkey #istanbul #teeming #instagram #dailyphoto #cylinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry

[j2westcountry]

Day 212: Lone Tree. #turkey #lone #tree #eskisehir #highway #silhouette #journey #journeytothewestcountry

[j2westcountry]

Day 210: Ilgin Graveyard. #turkey #irgin #graveyard #cyclinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry (at Ilgın)

[j2westcountry]

Day 207: Water Tower. #turkey #watertower #postrain #cyclinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry

[j2westcountry]

Saturday 5th October - Iraq

It was getting dark as I crossed the border from Iran into Iraq. The seasons which have changed already in Europe are catching up in this part of the world, and it’s hard to believe that as the days are getting shorter, a whole Spring and Summer have passed since I left Seoul on a chilly late-winter morning. I’m still cycling though. Entering Iraqi Kurdistan was fairly simple. Plenty of intrigued border staff with enormous guns poked at my passport and goggled at my bike (one guy even rode it when he thought I wasn’t looking)then they stamped my 15 day visa in my passport and gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder to send me on my way.

My first night in Iraq was a fun but surreal experience. As the light was quickly fading, after buying a quick tin of tuna and some bread for that night’s dinner, I started descending the mountain from the border town in hope of finding somewhere to camp before complete darkness fell. I knew that because there were still many active landmines in these Kurdish mountains, I should not camp too far away from the road. Preferably in a lay-by or service station. However this area was very rural and I couldn’t see any suitable places. The border was at the highest pass on the mountain, so it was all downhill. Downhill roads are great in the daytime but a chore at night, as you have to watch the circle of light illuminating from your headlights with thorough surveillance. In the last few minutes of the dusk light a pack of dogs set upon me, which I’m proud to say I shouted down with a terse tone and mouthful of swear words only equaled by a park bench loitering British teenager drunk on White Lightning. But I was now starting to feel quite anxious about where I was and where I was going to sleep. A building on the side of the road that looked like it had been bombed turned my face from anxious to alarmed, as I began to wonder why the hell I had crossed that border into one of the world’s most unstable countries. About 20 metres down from this building was what looked like some sort of temporary truck camp. I pulled up outside a large tunnel tent that reminded me of temporary bunkers built in World War Two. The interior was more modern as a group of men sat eating dinner watching Sean Connery in The Rock on a large flatscreen TV. Slightly confused and not in the mood to attempt another broken English conversation using hand gestures that usually lasted 10 minutes and would go no-where, I turned my front wheel back towards the road. As I mounted my bike to pedal away, however, a voice came from the darkness where only the orange glow of a cigarette end hovered like an unhealthy firefly. “Hey man, can I help you?” A well structured English sentence, with an appropriate use of a colloquialism!“Yes!” I answered. “Where the hell am I?”

It turned that this was a camp for Romanian and Turkish construction workers who were building a new road from the Iran-Iraq border to Irbil, the Kurdish capital of Iraq. The stocky man with a friendly face introduced himself as Christi, a 34-year-old Engineer from Bucharest. When I asked if I could camp on their grounds, he offered me a floor with a mattress to sleep on in a temporary flat pack office room. I had struck gold! Not only did I have real walls surrounding me on a spring supported mattress, but facilities that included a toilet, hot shower and a wifi connection in the office. This was better than a luxury hotel! To top it off they invited me to eat a huge meal with them, and fed me several beers and whiskies. Quite an enjoyably strong treat to digest after spending the last month in prohibition Iran, the whisky went down well with loud conversations about European politics and traditional Romanian music thumping in the background. The rest of the evening got a little blurry, but I vaguely recall being taught how to do traditional Romanian dancing by an ex-police man. I woke up in an office terrapin in the middle of the Eastern Kurdish mountains without a clue where I was and a raging headache, but what a great night for my first night in Iraq!

The next day was very bright and sunny, with a cool headwind blowing up the mountain, with a downhill descent that lasted 30 kilometres. An ideal situation for a healthy cyclist, but not for one with a stonking hangover. My head felt like this:

The truck horns and engines were much louder and more offensive to my ears than on a normal day, and the flat tyre I had on my front wheel half way down the mountain took twice as long to fix. The scenery in this corner of Iraq is beautiful to look at but the high quantity of petrol tankers and makeshift petrol stations in this oil rich area, means a chemical odour of crude oil hangs around in the air. This, coupled with the tense knowledge that you’re only 300km from Baghdad and the fact that everyone in the street carries around massive AK47s and Kalashnikovs, means there are fewer worse places I can think of in the world, to be with a hangover.

I arrived in Soran where I had been considering staying in a hotel when planning my route, as it was the first major town I would reach in Iraq. A proposal that was ardently green-lighted as a result of the previous night’s consumptions. As it turned out, amazingly I knew someone in this town. Donnie, an American guy from California who worked at the same place as me in Korea, had just started a new job at Soran University. It was hugely reassuring to hear that another fellow ex-Seoulite was in this region at the same time. We met up and got some lunch together and walked around the town sharing stories of our travels of recent years. It was great to catch up with him and have him share the local knowledge he had learnt about Iraqi Kurdistan, not to mention the pleasure of having a conversation that wasn’t in broken English for once. Unfortunately he didn’t have enough space at his accommodation for me to sleep, but after weeks of sleeping in shared rooms or shared surfaces in Iran, and with a delicate head and stomach I was quite pleased to have my own hotel room.

The next day I woke up without a hangover, but a sore throat and stuffed up sinuses in its replacement. The cooler mountain air and the night with the Romanians had obviously done my body no good, so I decided to take a day off to give it time to recover. Most of that day was spent resting in my cheap hotel, washing my clothes and backing up photos, only leaving to get food and supplies for the journey. As I sat in the social room area that looked out over Soran town after a Skype call with my parents, I noticed people watching the news on the television quite intently, more closely than usual. Five bombs had gone off in Irbil, the normally safe capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the next city where I was headed. Six people had been killed and dozens injured in the first violence in the region for more than six years. All Kurdish people I had met had told me that this region was safe and that it was only the south of Iraq that was dangerous. Now these same people were watching aghast at the images on the TV screen. A genuine sense of fear and uneasiness that wasn’t present before began to dawn on me, as I anxiously re-routed my journey on google maps.

The following few days I spent in Iraq were mostly quite calm, cycling through desert conditions again but in a slightly cooler season and enjoying the wonderful hospitality that Kurdish people have to offer. Once or twice I ducked my head in terror to the screeching sound I thought sounded like a rocket but turned out to be just a circular saw in a car shop. I cautiously camped one night behind a large concrete road buffer in an area where my bag had been flung in an amateur attempt at testing for mines. (The area had obviously been cleared and worked on but it had been a long day and I just felt like throwing my bag anyway) On the way out the small town of Akre, a smiley man in a checkered shirt pulled up next to me in his car and we talked a little. He offered to buy me lunch which I gratefully accepted, then I talked with his cousin on the phone who had spent 14 years in Portsmouth on the South Coast of England, and was back in Iraq for a month to visit family. The chipper South-East English accent on the end of the phone belonged to a guy called Haider who told me I could stay with him when I got to his city of Duhok, about 80km away. Again, I accepted appreciatively and stayed a couple of nights in his Kurdish family home after being welcomed in the first night with a cold can of Heineken (Alcohol is more widely available in Kurdistan, and is sold in the small Christian communities of the region). They fed me extremely well and machine-washed all my clothes, which was a great improvement on my standard hand-washing attempts. Any fears I had had about my safety were entirely not present whilst I was staying in the Kurdish household, and I was only reminded of the issue when the internet was cut off throughout the city. Haider said it was because of the violence in Irbil, there was speculation that a bomb may go off in this city of Duhok, so they had cut off communications as a way of preventing remote detonation. Still, in this friendly family household where the normal everyday activities of washing cars, watering plants and watching TV continued, it felt as safe as any house I had lived in, in Cheltenham, London or Seoul.

I cycled up to the northernmost tip of Iraq on the final day, crossing the chaotic border in the late afternoon. The safety of Kurdistan had never been an alarming concern to me, until the bombings in Irbil during my visit. But even then, the highly visible police presence in countless road check-points and the sheer generosity and kindness of the Kurdish people (a continuing trend after my experiences in Iran) made it still feel like a secure region. The Kurdish people in Iraq are proud of their heritage and are using the huge amounts of money generate from the oil under their land to stabilize and develop this region. They treat their guests well, not just the tourists like me, but the displaced people. Near Akre, Haider’s cousin pointed out an enormous building that looked like a school, which was being built to help cope with the biblical sized outpouring of Syrian refugees into Iraq. The Kurdish government seems to be doing all it can to help the displaced Syrians, but aid charities such as MAG are also using their resources to help with the Syrian crisis in the region. It makes me proud that I am doing this bike trip in the hope to raise money for this meaningful charity. Please help me by donating to them. They are helping people that currently cannot help themselves and are in desperate need of assistance. Thanks so much to everyone who has already donated. Next stop: Turkey… I’m almost in Europe!

[j2westcountry]

Day 194: Wild Camping. (05/10/13) #turkey #kurdistan #wildcamping #camping #camp4collective @camp4collective #cyclinghomefromseoul #journey #journeytothewestcountry