Heading eastwards
This morning we left Cappadocia and headed east, we will explore some parts of Eastern Turkey now.
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| Our friend at the Antalya Cave Pension |
We were not able to visit the Ihlara valley, so that’s one the list for next time, hopefully next year, when we will (probably) travel to China/Mongolia. The departure today was a bit of a bummer today. We wanted to find out about departure times of the ferry in Marmaris for the boat to Rhodes. We will do some charity work there with the foundation Melissa works with. All in all it was not very clear to us, and we decided to give one of the agencies a call later on. After backing up some of our pictures via the pension computer, we thanked our family at the Anatolya pension for our pleasant stay. Alas we left at 13:30 hrs.
Very soon it was raining, but as a result, this made for a very relaxed atmosphere. on a side dirt road of the main road to Malatya. We had a nice lunch with tomatoes, pesto and mozarella on bread!
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| Having lunch in the W123 |
During the chomping we watched the beautiful sky and the mountain range at the horizon. We are heading to Munzu national park, which we chose from the map, but we couldn’t find anything about it in our LP, and no turkish person we spoke was able to tell us something about it.
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| Great cloud formation! |
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| Clouds in the mirror |
When we continued the ride I felt the car was holding back, and started to get a bit frightened of what it could be. It seemed to be mainly when the Benz had to climb, it was getting worse in the mountains, we could only drive 20km/h on some parts at a climb of say, 15%. We were already quite far into the Eastern part of Turkey, so this was not very practical! It was the same feeling as if the car ran out of fuel, so I was thinking it had to do something with the fuel supply. The vegetabel oil we’ve thrown in was only new oil, so that can’t be the problem as far as I can imagine. After filling the car up with some diesel the problem still existed. I also cleaned the air filter, which was a good idea anyways. But in fact, this wasn’t a problem either. Funny thing was, when I tried to explain the service station attendant, who was blind in one eye, what I wanted he was very helpful and took the job out of my hands and did it himself. A trucker who was standing nearby thought this was a good idea and did the same thing too. The very friendly attendant spontaneously shook my hand after I gave some money when the job was done. Still amazed how friendly the turkish are, it is such a relaxed country to travel in! At the time of writing I still don’t know what is wrong, but on the flat roads there is not really a problem, I try to think about it tonight, hopefully I can track it down tomorrow.
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| Impressive mountains when going east. |
We were in fact able to continue the ride, albeit a bit slower than usual. We are now in a hotel 120km west of Malatya. Our hotel is about 120meters of a big minaret and when packing the stuff from the car, we couldn’t even talk to each other, well, we could, but without hearing wat the other said. This hotel was very cheap, about 18ytl (15 Euro), apparently less touristic, as we could see at the entrance, this man seemed not to understand any other language then Turkish. A clean room, and a not so clean bathroom was what we arranged for the night. Cool enough. We had a lot of fun together tonight, hanging around in our room. When we look back to our route today, we have to say it is a real amazing route, stunningly beautiful, we like the Eastern part of Turkey very much so far: Lots of rocky mountains, in many different colors. Sometimes it looked like parts of Morocco.
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| Melissa and me acting foolish | Even more foolish |
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