No incidents today with barriers or traffic, (other than to say that to travel about twice as far as I did yesterday it only cost me 16 TL off my barrier card, and so yesterday I was definitely well stitched up by Mr barrier man!!)
Just a boring journey east to Ankara and then south to the ferry terminal at a place called Tasucuo near Silfke on the Mediterranean coast. I have decided to go straight to Cyprus and if I have time on the return journey will dawdle more in Turkey.
Apart form yesterdays unfortunate series of incidents I have to say that today I have found Turkey and the Turkish people to be very pleasant. especially the food, which is delicious.
What I saw of the districts around Ankara was mainly masses of high rise buildings being constructed in what looked like new town complexes. But there were millions of them, and they were what I would describe as "gaudy" colours. Not attractive at all. I didn't take a picture because it was difficult when on a high speed motorway. I am a bit nervous of just stopping and parking on the hard shoulder, I've seen lots of drivers using the hard shoulder to undertake!
Right in the middle of the country the road went past a huge lake which reminded me of the salt lakes in Africa. There was a pink tinge to the water (not sure why) and the beaches had loads of dried salt like deposits near the shoreline.
Not much further along the road a huge mountain started to appear on the skyline. I thought it might be Mount Ararat where Noah's Ark is meant to reside, but on checking google I see that Mt Ararat is right over on the eastern side of Turkey. I'm sure someone will know or we will look it up later, but here are the photos.
Most of the journey down to the Mediterranean was through pretty boring open plains with just the mountains in the distance, but as I approached the last 300km we went through a spectacular mountain range called Toros Daglaria. The Turks have build a brand new motorway that winds it's way right through the middle of this range.
Generally I tend to fill up the petrol tank when it gets to half full on the basis of its better to get it while you can (true of many things in life!). The tank had just got down to half full and we went into this new pay motorway system. There was a quite long message being repeated on the overhead displays and I was trying to work out what it was saying, anyway as I started on the new pay motorway section through the mountains I started to wonder whether the message had said something like "this is a new motorway and there are no service stations for a long time"!
Sure enough I gradually worked out that "onclor kiloman" meant 100 kilometres and then deduced that the rest of the message said something like "do not continue if you don't have fuel to last the next 100 kilometres"
I didn't have enough fuel to go another 100 km, and so as we climbed higher and higher into the mountains and it started to rain, I could start to see headlines saying "geriatric foreign biker dies form exposure on mountain". I started to develop a kind of plan for when I had run out of petrol to flag down any car that looked like it might run on petrol and then try and persuade the owner to let me syphon some out into pop bottles. I was expecting problems, but then on the horizon a junction came into view, and as I approached it I could see in the local town a number of filling stations. Relief! As it was, two of the stations didn't have any "benzin" but lucky for me the third did!
No pictures of the beautiful mountains as I was on the motorway again and didn't want to park up.
Arrived at the ferry port at about 7:30 and so bought my passage (cheaper than the Internet from home option) and I have had a nice meal and watched the ferry arrive from Kyrenia. Here are some snaps of the port area and the boat arriving.
More later
TOR
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