Sheep scenery

 

Having had a tourist break in Cappadocia we have now done too long days of over 500km each basically heading North East. Early morning starts because the weather is still better in the morning and we still have some time to visit things, should we wish.

We are now in sheep territory. Sheep's cheese is translated as white cheese whilst cow's cheese is called yellow cheese. We have failed miserably with butter to the point where we have given up. The scenery is sheep scenery, populated with sheep.

The roads are very quiet and quite a number of small roads are nonetheless dual carriageways and they seem to be widening those that aren't even though there is nothing on them. It must be costing a fortune. The surface on the existing roads has deteriorated quite a bit and is very bumpy, especially in the mountains and especially on bends where the lorries brake. The only thing we can suppose is that for some strange reason  it is cheaper to build a new road adjacent to an old one, rather than resurface it. They certainly have the space to do it. Turkey, at least here in the East, seems vast and empty. The other strange thing about the roads is the large lengths of road that are built with concrete block paviours - especially up mountains; the work that must be involved...

 

After Cappadocia we went to Mount Nemrut where a king had built statues and an alter and a tumulus on the top of a mountain so as to communicate more freely with the Gods. We had gone there directly rather than check in first at the abode for the night, as there was quite clearly a storm brewing; thunder and lightning being the clue. So we had to walk the last couple of kilometres to the top from where we parked the bike in all our gear. And the storm never materialised and it was actually quite nice.

 

The following day we headed to Erzurum. Nothing to see here, just a staging post at an out of season ski resort; the ski jumps are outside the bedroom window. Being a ski resort, in or out of season, it is quite high and we are @ 2000m altitude. We had two passes over 2300m to get here and numerous other ones that were all over 1500m. Although the morning started off nice with lots of sheep and their scenery, it didn't continue like that, so 2300m mountain passes with rain turning occasionally to hail as the temperature dropped to 2 deg C. And the roads were rutted and potholed and had clearly had diesel deposited on them. We were probably riding far too quickly as we just wanted to get to the hotel to warm up, which thankfully, we did. Our faces had a free exfoliation from the hail and we did the chilled bit of the sauna for free too.