We passed 75000km

Two turkish men were trying to understand what I meant, they didn’t understand what I meant, it’s difficult to depict. After a while I saw him open a wooden box and got a glimpse of what looked like bread. Actually it was bread! “Brot!” He replied, ah yeah, I should have said it the german way. The something funny happened, he was cleaning the table which stood there, put two chairs under it, covered it with some papers and took some vegetables and gestured if we wanted to eat something there, and drink some tea. I walked to Melissa who was still in the car and told her about the friendly guys in the mini market, who were very happy to have some tourists there, they wanted us to stay for a while.

Later on, when other people came in, a turkish man who was a foreign worker in Germany in the 80s, told us they they were happy to have us here, because tourists just don’t stop here.

On the road to Nemrut

We ate the prepared lunch with pleasure and they happily watched us, refilling the glasses with tea, when empty. How generous these people are, and how kind, is one of the best things in Turkey. When Melis was smoking a cigarette outside, she was hearing people talk about ‘Holland’ all the time, and sometimes a new person walked in to have a look.
After this special lunch, we continued our trip.

During our drive I thought of this second fuel filter from the Elsbett system, which can be closed because the original fuel filter is connected in parallel with the SVO filter, when you close the second one, the first one is used. The Elsbett filter is a fine filter, and the engine restrain might be caused of the SVO from the supermarkets here, which is probably more thicker and that’s why the fuel can’t get through the fine filter fast enough.
This was indeed the problem, the car had more power again and no restrain anymore.

In the afternoon we entered Malatya, this was a quite a big city, compared to what we had seen today. We found ourselves a supermarket and I got inside to find some fuel. They had the 18L cans of Sunfloweroil, and after I put the cart full of these cans we went to the cash desk. The woman saw the cans but could only speak turkish, she began talking to us, looking worried about what we were going to do with this. I ‘explained’ with my hands, that we are using this as fuel, by making gestures of steering a car. Now she looked even more worried and in the mean time while she was talking, more supermarkte staff arrived and after a while six persons stood around us and a couple of them tried to say we’re crazy to put it in our car, “you, cooking this!” (pointing at the oil) “Not in car!” I was not able to explain that we know what we are doing and we smiled and left, “Car kaputt!” the shop manager warned us yet, bummer that I was not able explain it, they did not understand a word.

We continued our trip, heading to Nemrut national park. We found the relatively small side road to Mount Nemrut and short after that the Benz started climbing the roads in the mountains, and did the job very well, this famous OM617 diesel engine. After a while, driving on the climbing road, we saw some very small puppies dribbling on the side of the road.
‘Did you see that?’ Melissa asked. ‘Yeah, puppies?’ I asked.
We continued driving and kept on talking about the pups. ‘Where that really pups?’ I told Melissa that there was probably someone around. But we couldn’t get is out of our heads, we hadn’t seen anyone around.
We knew, if we would drive back and they were indeed alone, we knew we ended up with these two pups, although we thought we’d seen two of them.
After 15 minutes we decided, we had to go back, otherwise it would bother us te rest of our trip anyway.

So when we got back we stepped out of the car we tried to see if they were still there. We couldn’t see them, I saw a big stone and a shock went through my veins. I saw a very big stone and it looked like the pups were under it! The stone was thrown on the pups to kill them!?!?! I told Melissa to get back in the car, then at least she didn’t need to see it. But she wouldn’t go back, she wanted to be sure. I saw something moving, I walked down the side of the road over the stones and checked the pups. It started to move, there were five of them, and they were just asleep, using the stone for warmth, as they missed their mother of course.

Unbelievable, 5 pups which were thrown out of a car!

‘There are five of them! All alive!’ I yelled to Melissa. She was so happy to hear and walked to the big stone too.
5 nice cute little puppies woke up and started dribbling around. We startet to catch them, the first one was very easy and the second one followed soon. Then after one hour we had four of them, we had put them in a box in the car.

Safely in our car.

The last one was difficult, after quite a while it was gone and I walked further away from our place, the place where we had seen the little pup for the last time. I couldn’t find it and was afraid we had los it. Then I heard Melissa scream it was over there.

I walked back and was glad that it did not run away from us deciding to find a place to hide somewhere else. So we started again to surround it but it still had energy to run or walk away.
So stupid, the pups were only a couple of weeks, 8 or something and already faster than us. We tried with the cheese and other food again but gaining trust was still a problem.

“It will get dark soon” I said. Then, when it walked up again to the road I was able to come close. It was between the side of the road and the stones from the slope. I walked towards it very slowly like we did all the time, and all the time when you’re about 2 meters close it usually starts to move. It looked very scared but this time I was within these 2 meters and still the pup was there. I move towards it so slowly, I had to get it now. It looked me in the eyes but didn’t move. Finally I was so close I was able to grab it, it started to yell like they did all the time when something scary happens. “I got it!” I yelled to Melissa, she ran to me and saw me standing with the pup in my arms. We could cry from happiness, we did it! After four and a half hours of trying we finally had all five of them! This strong pup was responsible for nearly the last 4 hours! It was a very emotional momen, standing there with the strongest pup in the world, finally it gave up and we were able to get it.

After we tried to convince the pup we didn’t want to do no harm we put it in the box too, where it’s brothers and sisters were waiting for some hours. Then we had to figure out the next step: Now what? First we put the pups in the front of the car, 5 of them in this box was really too small and in front of Melissa they had more space. They were totally exhausted and the strong one was finally tired too. Luckily it was, because that was probably the reason that it didn’t start to run the last time.

The last pup, it took us 4 hours to get it!

When they were all in the car we decided to go on to Mount Nemrut, try to visit the big heads statues and in the mean time we will try to call/sms friends to see if there is a stray shelter for them around here. On the way to Nemrut some guy in an old Mercedes bus which was approaching us started flashing with it lights. When we stopped he told us that the road was blocked a bit further, because of too much snow, we were not able to reach the top. Well, then we need to drive back from where we came from. in this place called Malatya we stopped to go to an Internet cafe and tried to find some dogfood, that, is not too easy in this part of Turkey. They really had to eat and drink so we drove around for a long time, finding big supermarkets and search them through. In the end, Melissa manage to find dog food, it was even puppy food! This was so cool, we could give them what they needed! Then, the search began, calling people, browsing on the Internet.. When I was in the Internet cafe, between a lot of young people who where chatting and gaming, I tried to find organisations who could help. In fact, at the end of the evening we got very helpful information of one of our friends. He spend all his time on the Net to find addresses where a good shelter was to be found. Melissa knew that municipal shelters were not the place to bring them too. These places are usually the end station of the dogs. So what our good friend Henk told us, was that there were only 2 municipal shelters in the vicinity. In fact, in Turkey there was only one good place, a foundation supported by some well known good organisations, there was only one problem: This was located in Fethiye, roughly 1200km away from here. As if you have to drive from Amsterdam to Barcelona over the national routes just to drop a couple of pups. From another organisation in Holland they told us that the only way to help them is taking them with us to the Netherlands, which was definitely no option, because we had some charity work plans in Greece ahead of us. So in fact, we had no other solution then driving to Fethiye, to give the pups a chance on a good life.
We were tired and found a place a couple of kilometers from Malatya to rest, as much that was possible with the 5 pups in the car.

All very tired, it were some scary days for them. Especially today, they we’re afraid and exhausted themselves nearly to death to escape from us.

We parked the car and were laughing about the situation we were in. There we were, in midnight sitting in the are, too tired to think, 5 pups walking and playing around.
I really had to sleep, we had 3 days of driving ahead of us, with stops every 2 hours or even less for the pups, driving from East-Central Turkey to the atlantic coast line.
We had tried to sleep in our front seats, Melissa had to go out with the pups when necessary, so I could get my hours of sleep because I was the only one to drive.

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!

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.

Great cloud formation!

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.

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.

Melissa and me acting foolish	Even more foolish

Based on tips in the Loneley planet and on the map we had received from our friendly pension owner we had quite a full program for today. We took more than one hundred pictures today, this illustrates how stunningly beautiful Cappadocia is, at least according to us. In fact one cannot describe it really, I’ll show pictures of it, they can illustrate Cappadocia way better then my words.
We planned to explore at least the various cave valleys, like the yellow, rose and the red valley and the cave houses. There was also a church with various images carved in the volcanic stone. We’ve put the Benz away and walked through this area for quite some time, enjoying it, we were alone all the time, I wonder how it is in the high season.

After our exploration in these valleys we went to an ancient city which was carved out of a very big rock. When we got there some guy started to talk to us and wanted to know if we would climb that rock and he offered to guide us. We didn’t, and we also didn’t want to buy his turtle carved out of stone, and went on, this guy following us. Melis wanted to stay down and relaxing on a terrace with a cup of coffee.
I ended up with this guide, climbing on the rock It was not an official guide, I know, but he was so persistent and I felt really sorry for him actually. Usually I’m quite difficult with this, persistent in saying that I don’t want it He told me there was much to see and I wouldn’t be able to find it all by myself.
“Yeah, right”. Disappointedly he walked back.
I walked upwards on the huge rock trying to check out the things to see myself. This fake guide, did tell us that the inhabitants left this city after an earthquake some 600 years ago. He also told me there were nice fresco’s to see in the church.
After I paid the city a visit and walked downwards to Melissa I met our friend again. He asked me if I saw everything and I had to admit thta I didn’t. Thus, we went up again.
He showed me indeed a lot more and couldn’t tell me very much, but he was able to show things I didn’t see. I ended up paying some Ytls and bought his turtle of stone too.
I felt sorry for this guy, that he had to to go through so much hassle, for just a few coins.

After all this, we continued the tour through the area. On our way we saw a turtle crossing the road, a tour bus coming from the other side had stopped and the tour operator was already busy to speed the turtle’s process to cross the road. After that we visited another small village, which also had an old part with houses carved out of rock, as a lot of villages have in Cappadocia. At the end of the day we went back to the valleys around Goreme and drove on a couple of dirt roads, twisted through the landscape of fairy chimneys.
This way we had to drive between the walls of the chimneys and it became smaller and smaller, and after a while we were driving with our wheels completely on the walls, it was exciting to do this, but sometimes a bit scary, then Melissa had to get out of the car and check the space between the car and the walls and see if everything worked out.
The path had become deep in the middle and the curves in it made it even more difficult. After investigating a very difficult part, measuring, considering, thinking, thinking again, I decided this was not save enough to do this, and go back. The problem was if I would give it a shot, I couldn’t go backwards because it was really small and there was a curve in it too. The Benz was too wide to go through this tiny part and I wouldn’t take the risk. I was able to turn around and we drove our same route back, without any problems.
After the sunset it was getting dark so we drove back to our cosy cave. It was a very special day today, lots of beautiful things we saw and the adventure of driving here. We didn’t have the time to go to the Ihlara valley anymore, it was too much. Tomorrow we are leaving again and drive to the East of Turkey.
This night we went out for dinner in a restaurant in Goreme. We had a very good vegetarian pizza and after that we talked with the waiter, who spoke very good english. We had a very good conversation about life and our home countries. It was a pleasant evening and a perfect seclusion of our time in Cappadocia.

Cappadocia

Valley, Goreme

Odd shapes again

View from a cave

Ancient carvings

Ancient city in the rocks

Strange shapes by erosion

Me, driving through Cappadocia

Another W123 T-modell, you don’t see the W123 in Turkey too often.

Urgup, Cappadocia

Heavy steering

More exciting steering

Ballooning in Cappadocia

When it’s getting late in the afternoon, the light becomes very colourful

Sunset

Sunset

Having breakfast @ the Antalya Cave Pension

This was the right moment to investigate the Saharagelber, see if everything is all right. Everything was quite okay, hardly any oil usage, and all other fluids were okay. I also fixed the pot meter of the dashboard light, we didn’t have any when it was dark until now. I didn’t have time to fix this before departure so I did this today. I’ve brought a lot of tools with me and some small materials, so with that I was able to fix it. I’ve checked all the connections, tubes and lubrication points. I’ve replaced one fuse and until now nothing more happened since the 4600km we’ve driven. I also glued the Zebrano wood to the dash.
At the end of the afternoon I decided to drive around on my own, Melissa kept reading.
I was longing to drive around in the Saharagelber again So, I took my camera and drove around Goreme, stopped at every place where I wanted to take a picture.

Goreme overview

As a result, most of the time I was stopping, taking a picture, driving and stopping again, taking a picture, driving and so on. It’s great to drive around here, there are loads of small winding dirt roads which are a great to drive on, some are a bit difficult so I had a lot of fun today. The Benz is in its element here, it’s great to see with how much ease she is able do these things. Driving here is a real pleasure and you can get everywhere and stop at very nice spots, being alone nearly all the time. And everytime when I stopped and looked around, I was magicked by this stunning volcanic stone environment created by previous volcanic explosions, with all these strange caves and fairy chimneys, morphed by erosion. After sunset I went back to our cosy little cave where Melissa was (still ) reading

Volcanic environment

The ‘Chimney valley’

The W123 in the volcanic landscape of Cappadocia

Odd shaped, but recognizable…

The Saharagelber in the Goreme valley, the sun was setting, still shining a bit on the car and the trees around.

W123 Sunset

Driving in Cappadocia

Driving in Cappadocia

source: http://www.bookrags.com/history/worldhistory/cappadocia-ema-01/

This was really fascinating, from the Kaymakli ancient city 3 etages were open to the public, and there were five in total. Our small guide ran through the small passages and told us that these people used to to that too to move very fast and able to block passages with big rolling stones. He showed us wineries, kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms (for the regular and the richer families), meeting rooms, etc. Really impressive.

Inside the underground city of Kaymakli	Corridor

A family house
Kaymakli

After we investigated the city we walked back to the Saharagelber. It was still raining and we decided to drive to Goreme, from this base we would explore Cappadocia. Since it was raining we would then find a cosy place were we could do some reading or something.
We drove through this beautiful area and it all was a very nice atmosphere after all, a bit of rain, driving through this weird quiet area and listening to good music. Near Goreme we began to see the fairy chimneys, the weather had cleared up a bit and the rain had stopped.
We were stunned by the view of these chimney-like caves. This area really looks awesome! It is so weird, so beautiful, like another planet. We found a nice room in the Anatolya Cave Pension, it was a room in the cave we took, and we both said to ourselves, that this room was one of the cooles we ever had on our travels. You can see ‘our’ cave on this picture here (on the left): anatoliacave.com/resimler/029.jpg.

If you tend to stay in Goreme some time, really visit this pension, it’s such a nice place!
Very friendly people, and a beautiful pension, a place to be and a place to remember!
The room we had was as you can see in such a cave and is really, really cosy. We actually had two rooms, and a very luxe and clean bathroom, and it was definitely cheap too. The url is Anatoliacave.com After we installed ourselves in our new home, we sat down with the pension owner and his family and drank some turkish tea. He told us about what to see and where to go in Goreme. Mellissa and I both agreed that this must be paradise.

The Antalya Cave pension

Cave cooking

The rest of the day we hung around there and relaxed a bit and played with the dogs. There was a small dog, called Pascha which reminded us of one of our own dogs. At the end of the day I watched the sunset from a hill nearby, where some other backpackers were to be found too, I was surprised to meet my new friend Pascha there again The sunset with all these strange morphed caves and the sight of the colored mountain gives an extra dimension to the sunset, and on top of that, it all colors very beautiful. After that I walked back and saw a very cosy cafe-like place called The Flinstones. This was a very cosy place, also in a cave, I decided to ask Melissa to go there tonight, and we did. But first we Melis made our dinner in our tiny comfortable cave.
This was *the* place where fellow travellers were chatting with each other and sit and relax. A hearth in the middle kept the place warm. One of the visitors started playing music, vocals and guitar, this girl had a pretty voice and it was a pleasure to listen to. Oh what a night! Sometimes, when exploring the world, you come across a place which impress very much and has a very relaxed atmosphere, In my opinion, Goreme, Cappadocia ist just like that.
After a boatload of wine (for me though) it was time to go to bed. Still happy to be in Turkey, still amazed about the hospitality and the kindness of the turkish, and the beauty of Turkey itself.

Sunset in Goreme

Close to our pension, Goreme. The sun was setting and a lot of people were watching it., myself incluis

The travellers place to be: The Flintstones in Goreme

Our pension last night	The nice W115 of our hotel owner

After some time we stopped at a very nice spot with a beach in front of it and had a cup of coffee on a cosy beach terrace of the restaurant. There were hardly any people around here, and after we sat there for a while we decided to sit on the beach for a while. I also took a dive in the sea, which was a good refresh for it was very warm. We relaxed some more and then left again, in the direction of Cappadocia. We won’t see the sea for some time now.

We were quite late again, so we would arrive during the night.
Late in the evening we entered a small village (I guess it was Derinkuyu). We found one pension which appeared to be full, we didn’t get any offer to sleep somewhere else, so we continued our trip, the man of the pension told me ‘Kaymakli’ a couple of times, so there we were maybe able to find something (it was already nearly midnight). We managed to find something in Kaymakli indeed so we were lucky to find the door still open. This pension looked okay, if there’s a bed and water it’s okay already. We made it, it was already 00:30am, but managed to find a place to sleep.
After we walked the stairs we found two men in a room and we arranged a room. The turkish man spoke a bit english and we had a short chat about the ancient underground city we had to check out here in Kaymakli, he borrowed me a small book of Cappadocia and I read some of it in our room. First get a good deal of sleep and tomorrow we will check out the underground city. Melis cooked a nice meal again and we enjoyed it with some wine.
It’s getting exciting, tomorrow we will see what Cappadocia is like…

Always disappointing to see how all the garbage is thrown of the hill by the local people.

Garbage	More garbage

After we woke up this morning and tried to clean the remnants of our rice fighting yesterday, we continued the coastal route. This route is indeed beautiful, if you happen to go to Turkey and you are somewhere around here, definitely check this out. After driving a while we took a small path along the rough line of the rocky coast and found ourselves a very nice place where we took the time to clean things up and for me to fill the jerrycans again and fill the car up with PPO. This cost us quite some time and it was getting dark already. Only 30km before Anamur we already had to stop, we were lucky and found a nice old hotel which was very simple and run by a turkish family. This place was very relaxed, with a view on a small beach. We went inside and a friendly turkish man offered us some turkish tea and by sign language we were able to arrange things. I parked the Benz next to his old W114 Mercedes, which was in the family for all its time, something like 32 years if I remember correctly. It seemed we were the only guests. We had our tea in their restaurant in front, and he and his family were watching TV. We were sitting under the TL lights on plastic chairs and tables with white-red blocked patterns, really cosy There was also a shower in their restaurant, for roadtravellers stopping by and need to refresh. The rooms were okay, he told us the showers were hot, ah yeah, we heard that before

Taken by Fedde, after our Termessos ruins visit

74062km on the clock, travelled 4094km so far.

Some info about Termessos:

Termessos is perhaps the most interesting ancient city in Antalya region. It is a Psidian city built at a height of 1050 meters in the Taurus Mountains. Termessos constitutes an unusual synthesis of a large number of rare plants and animal species, which are under protection in the Termessos National Park. When turning off the Antalya-Burdur highway (11 km.) in the direction of Korkuteli, the Termessos signpost will be seen 14 km. further on, and Termessos itself is a further 9 km. A visit to this site requires time and the stamina to walk uphill, because Termessos is built entirely on a mountainous area difficult to access.

See for more info: This article @ Antalya-ws.com

Termessos has a lot of tombs	The amfitheatre

Amfitheatre again

After the ruins we went back to Antalya, we passed the big Kipa supermarket and wanted to check-out if they had vegetable oil. We wered stunned how big this place was, a gigantic K-mart like warehouse. I was glad to see they had 5L bottles of sunflower oil, that’s a whole lot better than the 1 liter bottles. In the supermarket, after I filled the shopping cart with 135 liters in total the turkish people around us were stupified. We saw them watching like “What is this guy doing with that stuff?!?”. A turkish man couldn’t restrain his curiousity and walked towards me and asked what I was about to do with this. He only spoke turkish and no english or german or french, but he was so amazed, he just *had* to know (otherwise he probably couldn’t sleep I made some gestures by virtually steering a car, and I guess he’d understand At the parking lot of the Kipa, Fedde helped me with filling the car up. After that we had to separate, we brought Fedde back to the Citadel of Antalya and we were heading east in the direction of Anamur. It was already past 7pm, so we tried to make it to Side and look for a pension/hotel there. We didn’t want to drive in the dark as we sometimes do, because the coastal route of Turkey is amazing.

When we entered Side in the evening, it looked awful. Side only seemed to exist of awful gigantic resort buildings, the part of side along the coast that is. After looking for a while, we found a small one which was okay, and not too expensive. Melis didn’t want to spend the night in the car, because the lack of water to wash ourselves with. In our room we Melis made a dinner with rice. We had a lot of fun tonight, this time it resulted in a rice fight, we bombarded each other with rice, too much fun we had Tomorrow we depart again to continue the coastal route.

Wondering what we are going to do with it..	Fill ‘r up!

Filling her up again	Manavgat falls

On the road to Side (Manavgat)	Along the coast