Saturday 20 November 2010

From Goreme















It is early and beneath the cloudless the sky the air is cold. The metal ends of the handlebars sting my bare hands, and as I exhale my breath forms plumes of condensation. In the morning light the valley floor besides me seems bleak. The soil is hard and bare and the spindly trees silver and lifeless. I stop to put on a pair of gloves and a woolly hat, and ride briskly towards the mountains. I expect to climb, but the road winds flat through the hills, and soon Goksun is far behind. The tarmac is uneven; gravel has been pasted onto the asphalt, and the sharp edges and little gaps between the stones rattle the wheels and slow me down. The sun rises and the mist fades; the fields turn from grey to green and the autumn leaves begin to glow. I take off the hat and gloves and jumper, and my body warms from riding.


There are villages in the hollows between the hills around me. The houses are ramshackle; big squares two stories high, with only the walls of the lower floor plastered. Above the cemented bricks are left bare. Half the windows are glassed; the rest empty frames, and the slanted corrugated roofs are rough with rust. Outside large piles of wood are stacked beneath frail wooden ornings, and rusty tractor parts lie besides rectangular saloons that've been driving since the seventies.


The road climbs up for a long stretch, and although the incline is gentle, it is slow going. On either side of the asphalt the grassland is strewn with outcrops of grey rock. A shepherd, wrapped up in a thick brown coat, sits on a rock besides a large herd of sheep. I hear barking, and I jolt, and watch a tall sand-coated dog rushing across the moorland towards me. These dogs are all over the plateau. They have thick coats and big black jaws, rounded like a St. Bernard’s. Around this one’s neck there is a spiked metal collar, to protect it from wolves. I stop and stare at it and it realizes I am human and walks slowly back towards its sheep. I watch it go and wave at the shepherd. I was told the dogs used to kill bears and still kill wolves if they approach the flock. Further on the hillsides sharpen and enclose above the road and steep ravine walls block the sun. I follow a sharp bend out of the canyon and the road dips and I ease down. On my left there are the remnants of a long-ago abandoned village; low stone walls, crumbling, and overgrown with tall grasses.


I freewheel down for a long time, running besides a thin stream, shaded by skeletal trees. On the banks there are run-down sheds; boxes of grey breezeblocks overlain by tatty tarpaulins. There is litter everywhere and two guys in all-in-one tracksuits bait a pack of scrawny mongrels. The dogs bark and whimper and the guys laugh, and then they notice me watching and yell out in Turkish. I turn away and loosen the brakes and roll on by.


I reach a valley and icy looking streams cross between the fields. Ahead the little road joins a broader highway, and at the junction is Pinarbasi. I pedal slowly through the little streets. All the shops are closed for Bayram and outside the butcher there is a pile of bloody sheep wools and a cellophane bag of the animals’ severed heads. There is a hotel above a petrol station cafeteria on the edge of town and I get a room and read all evening.


The road out of Pinarbasi ıs flanked by rounded hills, which look rose-red in the morning sunshine. In the hollows beneath the hills there are lakes, still and blue. I stop to take a photograph and then see the banks are cemented, and the lakes are man-made, and I put the camera down. Ahead the road dips and then falls onto a broad plateau, and for miles all I can see are fields of wheat. The air warms, and the road stretches on, and ahead I can see a snow capped mountain, rising high above the golden prairies, far in the distance. As I near Kayseri the mountain looms larger and I can see folds and crags of dark rock, where no snow has settled, between the slopes of white. I descend into the city, past a long line of colouful tower blocks that look plastic from the road, and reach the black walls of Kayseri’s old fort just past midday.

I leave early and ride west across the fringes of Cappaddocia, through pale green hills that roll gently into the distance, carved into fields by low stone walls. I reach Avanos and turn onto a narrow road that passes a low ridge of heavily wrinkled orange and white rock. In the grasses between the ridge and the road there are tall outcrops of grey rock with black, basalt tips. Some are shaped like wizard's hats, others like enormous mushrooms. I turn off the tar and ride on dusty paths through the outcrops and stop and clamber up between them. They sprout from the land for miles, like fields of giant termite mounds, impossibly shaped. I ride for hours through narrow valleys full of the rocks and it is only when I see the sun beginning to set, that I join the road to Goreme.

1 comment:

  1. Great post Rob - I'm intrigued by those sheep dogs (and the wolves they attack...)

    A brief Wikipedia suggests there aren't many of the latter left in Turkey (and the lack of a compensation scheme for lost sheep is possibly why...)

    "Turkey has an unknown number of wolves thought to be as high as 1,000. It is not known if they are increasing or decreasing, and no legal protection nor livestock damage compensation is granted.[2]"

    Shame in my book but then again I'm no shepherd!

    Enjoy your last leg into Istanbul and see you for some goose on Bayham Rd...

    ReplyDelete