Piknik Alani and the Hazelnut Coast

Istanbul to Amasra

Don't come this way on a bicycle unless you really like cycling, are not afraid of hills and are very tough in both body and spirit. Or your just a bit dumb like me.
I thought I met the first criterium but have been challenged. Anja, well, she comes from tough East German stock. Some evenings as I was fading away and ready to sleep in the nearest ditch she could keep going up and over another mountain to find a beach on which to make a decent camp.
A few days out from te big city, in a town called Acakoca we took a rest and repair day. I replaced all the spokes on my backwheel with new ones bought in Istanbul. New chain and middle sprocket for my bike also. An incapatibility between new and old sprockets was rectified with a rusty borrowed file but I was busy all day and didn't get to relax and enjoy the beautiful shaded and terraced campsite with big blue views of the sea.
On the second evening a dirty and tired Daniel pulled in and pitched camp next to us. A German motorcyclist on a new BMW Enduro whith whom, as it often turns out, Anja had mutual aquaintences. Going the other way along the coast to us, he had found the coming 300km to Sinop difficult and that with 800cc's Deutsch Teknik under his saddle. This did not bode well for the road ahead. He willingly joined us for our special chicken dinner cooked up on the campstove. A lone traveller happier in company.
The first day after leaving the shady calm of the hostel brought us through wooded steep hills dotted with 'Piknik Yeri' or 'Piknik Alani' where, it seems, weekend folk from the city bring food and pay a not so paultry sum for a picknick table in the shade. As with the beaches here, people dont search for that secluded spot so there are many places with almost nobody and a few places where they all hang out. One of these picknick spots that had fallen into disuse made a perfect campsite, the owner glad to have us and a precedent for our new overnighting technique which we call 'Inviting ourselves to stay'
I have always been a little shy of asking if we can pitch the tent on someones land. Being a follower of the hiding unseen in the trees school or 'crawling into the bushes' as Anja puts it. I go unwillingly cap in hand to ask for a patch of ground for the night but when exhausted, with the sun tiring of its hard days work and an unreckoned town on a mountainside ahead, asking comes easier. One night before Kozlu and Zonguldak in just such a situation we commited to riding steeply down to a cove knowing we had no choice but to stay somewhere there. What we found was what we didn't want. A small beach packed with revellers and rough looking types from the city, closely watched by Policemen patrolling the litterstrewn, sewage smelling carpark come promenade. Our hearts sank and our lips trembled a little as we knew this was an unpleasant and probably dangerous place to pitch a tent.
There lay one possibility; over a hump backed footbridge crossing a still green stream lay a small shady Piknik Alani with a cow meadow behind. Over I went to ask and was greeted in Turkish by a burly type with freindly eyes and a firm 'no' to my question. I posed it another way hoping he had not fully understood me, he put the negative answer another way hoping this time it was clear. We stood like Little John and Robin Hood, both being polite but niether giving ground. His meadow was our only chance of a nights sleep and for some perfectly good reason which I couldn't understand it was closed to us. After a third attempt at asking using what I call the hand jive, I had to retreat to the nightmare side of the bridge where Anja was surrounded by teenage boys and talking to one in German. The nice young lad asked the police for us and they said it was possible to camp here but they would not recommend it, at night there were many drunks and they retreated to the clifftop police station.
A touch on my elbow and a pretty, pregnant young woman asked me in sparse English what I wanted. Behind her stood the burly guy from the bridge, her Uncle who had brought her to translate. We were on bicycles? Were passing through? Wanted to stay only one night and not for the week? of course we could stay. The problem was that they had no toilets. The bikes were brought over and we were accepted into the large extended family of shotputters (the pregnant niece) and wrestlers, three generations of. They were building a small resteraunt and terraces from stone so I stripped of my shirt and swung a pickaxe with the boys.
The meadow was a heaven of calm. We were brought stuffed peppers to supliment our dinner and were invited to breakfast thenext morning.
It seems with Turkish hospitality, even if you invite yourself, you get well looked after. We were too tired and hungry to feel any guilt over our imposition.

TEA

Tea has become an important part of our lives and being invited to sit and drink it a twice our thrice daily occurence. Mostly we take up the invitation which can turn out interesting. In Catalzeytin we were invited by the baker to drink tea in the shade of the fountain in thesmall town square. We sat with the shopkeepers who dissapeared for periodically as customers entered their various emporiums. The hardwear man from the shop that sold everything. The barber, the travel agent and the old guy who spoke a little french through toothless lips.
In one of these coastal towns we were hailed and beckoned into a shady cafe by a man with a dirty shirt and his nephew who had been to England. I was thinking that the shirt had a somehow familiar sort of grime when it came out that we were sitting with the local blacksmith. He was as exited as me that we shared a profession and we crossed the road for a look round his workshop which could easily have been one of my own. As I turned down the invitation to stay a few days and help finish the current railings project an Austin-Leyland tractor pulled up with an interesting adaption on the back. The German speaking Entrepreneur had extended the linkbox, installed benches each side and a parasol for shade. He was making these with the help of the blacksmith and selling them as the future vehicle for Black sea beach safaris.

THE HAZELNUT COAST

Amrasa to Sinop

From Istanbul we had seen maybe a dozen flattish miles but from Amasra the real switchback road begins. 250 km of twisting, bucking serpent connecting communities 30 years before only reachable by boat.
Our whole day here on this stretch is an experience of stickiness. The humidity is so high that even at 30 degrees water condenses on shiny surfaces. From 5pm on everything is damp. As the sweat runs down our arms our hands stick to the handlebars, our bikes stick to the molten road and our eyes are glued to the horizon searching for telltale signs of hilltop. It makes no odds when we reach a summit for we steeply plunge and in minuits are only a couple of kms further on, trying once more to stretch the sinewey tentacles of gravity as it pulls backwards on our packs and our souls.
The thick tar and stone nougat on our tyres we crack off in the early light only to have a new, gloopy candycoat by nine. They say this is a hot summer. I need no convincing.
Where the forrest is hacked back hazelnuts are grown. They are carried on the backs of donkeys and old men. They are given to us in kilo's by grandma's and by handfulls from the pockets of young men. They lie drying by the roadside. It is harvest time and the sound of shells snapping between teeth followed by the patter of discarded shards falling on hard earth is as solid a part of this landscape as the nutbushes themselves, running down a steep valley to the sea. As pine trees with a bluedeep sail-less backdrop or fishingboats hiding their colourful flanks behind tumbling harbour walls as they wait for the cold water and the fish to return. As solid as the high wooded hills with rocky crags sheltering Jackal and boar and minarets who's wailing is hearkened not only by the faithful but echoed by dogs around the valleys as it strikes a wild unforgotten chord in their ears and their instincts.
In a well kept town named Doganyurt we camped on some grass by the harbour and were welcomed by the town. An old man bought us tea and introduced us to his wife. Sefa, the young koafür came to talk then opened up his shop to give me a shave. His friend with MS, confined to a wheelchair shook his head at the call to prayer. A sceptic I suspected, with a sense of humour. A man out for a walk with his wife introduced himself as the local police and asked if we were having any trouble with the boys.
' Not at all ' I replied 'and whats with the pink poloshirt uniform, is Turkey going for the softly softly approach to law enforcement' He laughed and said 'here is my uniform'showing us the concealed pistol in his belt.
'El Commissar!!'
said our sceptical freind saluting. This earnt a jovial slap with a cap on the head from the constabulary and we all turned to watch Sefa's father driving the approaching fire engine as it did double duty as public park watering can.This was a town from a 1950's American film where everybody knows everyone, where not much happens but where everything that is important in life goes on.

We were sad to leave this town and our new freinds as we crawled next morning up the toffeenut road and into the woods oncemore. Infact, we were caught out again for a place to stay the next night for the road turned inland as the sun went off to do its work downunder.
In mountains so steep and prickly it is not easy to find a flat patch to pitch a tent. We turned down a track and at the first bend found the best place on offer. Its funny how a scruffy, uninviting spot reveals its beauty when the tent is up, the fire is lit and food upon the way. Cliffs towered above Jakals howled to the distant Imams calls and we were happy. As long as no-one drove by.
As it seems they always do in Asia, someone turned up. Two guys in a Renault 12 (these funktional family cars are the most common to be seen on Turkish roads. In Romania the same cars were called Dacia's. Renault must have pinched the design, a good one and sold it to the Turks. Typical sneaky French trick).
What in England would often be a 'Get off my land' situation was, as we now expected, a 'what can I give you' one. The men had come to check the pump at the bottom of the lane which sent sptingwater to somewhere up above. In the pumphouse to which I was invited was water, a pump, a tin of grease and some paper napkins. I left with a wad of useful serviettes and some of the finest springwater we had tasted in a while and we drink it everyday. Grease I already had.
Fine is a culture that brings springwater to the side of the road for the drythroated traveller to sup. We are lucky on this coast as thereare many of these springs , often with a cistern and a tap, a picknick table and some shade. We meet many people at these waterholes, willing to chat and offer us hazelnuts. The water the people and the beauty of this sticky black steep sea coast are as refreshing as each other and will remain in our memories I am sure. Will remain long after those of hardship, heat and saddle-sores have faded into the misty hinterground of our minds like distant mountains into the heathaze of an August noon.