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The year of living flexibly - while bicycling through Africa
An American couple meets generous vendors and grueling terrain - andexperience the world as few travelers do.
Julie and I stopped on the side of the one-lane dirt road to fix a flat tire. Before long, an enthusiastic Turkish truck driver pulled over to make sure we were OK. Seeing we were repairing a bike, he offered to put us and our bicycles in the back of his truck and take us to wherever we needed to go.
These sorts of experiences - both the adventure and challenge of cycling and also the human interaction - are a couple of the reasons that we decided to travel through Turkey, the Middle East, and Africa by bicycle. My wife and I have traveled before in other parts of the world by bus and train and thought that bicycles could offer perhaps a more rewarding experience.
From our home in Boulder, Colo., we put together a flexible plan.
Fly to Istanbul, cycle through Turkey, Syria, and Jordan and then south to Africa. The plan had to be flexible because there were so many unknowns. How far would we cycle in a month? Could we keep it going for weeks at a time? And there were political considerations. Which countries would we be able to get visas for, and in which countries would it be safe for slow, overland travel? Time would help answer these questions. For now, we have been overwhelmed by the generosity of the Turks.
To say that Turkish hospitality is tremendous is perhaps a clich, but their friendliness brightened our spirits on difficult days. On a hot, hungry afternoon, we stopped at a small roadside vegetable stand and picked out some tomatoes. Apparently I did not take enough, because the man gave me more tomatoes and a bunch of peppers; then he smiled and waved me off, while refusing to take any money. In hazelnut-growing areas, we could barely stop to rest before someone would give us freshly picked hazelnuts.
Traveling by bicycle has forced us to stop many places that we would fly right by in a bus or a car. Many of our encounters have been with people who do not see foreigners every day - especially crazy ones on bicycles. So far people have only tried to make us feel welcome.
Crossing from Turkey to Syria
The international frontier is always a landmark for travelers. For cyclists, even more so. When we arrived in Syria, after nearly seven weeks of pedaling through Turkey, we felt that we were finally getting somewhere. It is quite amazing the changes that occur by crossing these seemingly arbitrary lines on a map. Indeed, watching the olive groves on the side of the road, we could not tell where one country started and the other ended, yet crossing from Turkey to Syria, just south of the Turkish town of Kilis, the changes were instantly evident.
We said goodbye to Turkey's Latin alphabet and the Turkish language in which we had been able to communicate quite effectively. In Syria, we were faced with the challenge of Arabic.
On the Turkish side, the border police efficiently checked our papers and stamped our passports. In Syria, we had to wake each officer whose help we needed. One did not even get out of bed to check our passports.
Our first day in Syria, on the outskirts of Aleppo, we were flagged down by the driver of an ice-cream truck. He got out, said hello, gave us two ice creams, welcomed us to Aleppo and Syria, and sped off.
The prime attraction in the country is the myriad of archaeological sites. In Aleppo, I was taken back a thousand years or more to the days of the Silk Road caravans as I wander into the area of the souqs, the city's covered markets.
