ZUMZUMZUM- from Romania to Thailand on a bike

From Malatya to the southern side of mount Nemrut you can take 2 roads.
The first is long and boring, some 300km of highway going round the Taurus mountains.
The second is 100km long going right over the mountains. Of this 100km, 20 are on unpaved fire-roads.

We took the second route (naturally) 🙂
The first 70km are on a nice winding mountain road (resembling Transfagarasan).

In Turkey thy love to cover the roads with small pebbles (criblura ? cum se spune in engleza?), this can be a real hazard sometimes.
This road was freshly covered with 2-3cm of this pebbles.

On a steep uphill hairpin, with the Africa Twin fully loaded (2 people, 60kilos of luggage), the front wheel is so light that you are lucky to get any traction even without the damn pebbles 🙂

Anyway, after some 80km, the tarmac stops, and you get on a fire road going right under the Nemrut peak

Ioana was busy taking photos:

Highest elevation (according to my new ultra high tech watch) 1650m

We met different kind of steeds on this road.

We left ankara in the afternoon, happy that we finally solved the visa problem. We couldn’t reach Sivas before nightfall, so we decided to stop in the town of Sorgun.
We only managed to find a dreadful hotel on the outskirts of the city at a huge price.

In the morning we left at 6 o’clock to go to Divrigi.

Divrigi has a little 13th century mosque and hospital. Lonely Planet describes it as Turkey’s least visited monument (although is a UNESCO World Heritage site). It is really out of the way in between Sivas and Malatya some 90km from the main road, and after a 1950m mountain pass.

The plan was to start from Sorgun and an stop in Divrigi for the night after 350km.
The mosque and the hospital (a mental hospital built in 1200 🙂 ), are simply breath-taking. You really can’t tell from the pictures, you have to there yourself.

The problem was that the hotels in Divrigi were beyond awful , even worse than the Sorgun thing. We decided to go to Malatya to have a decent night’s sleep.
So we ended up with a 610km day.

As a sidenote/rant, The turkish hotel industry is a lot like the romanian industry in some ways. There are lots of old, state-owned hotels, which are awfull, dirty and overpriced.
If you are in a tourist area you can find small private-owned hotels which are reasonably priced and clean. But if you are in a small town out of the main tourist path…you are in  bad position.