- ODO 5228km
- Location Past Erzincan off the highway
- Weather 5-30 a contrast from mountain to valley
What is it with men shouting out of vans trying to scare me? The people I meet and the cars on the road have been growing progressively more and more friendly as I head east. Yet there is still the same guy in the same kind of van who beeps the horn and yells from the hand rolled window to try and scare me. To make me jump. What is that all about.
Today I woke at my campsite on the windy mountain top. It was a really bad place to camp. When I pulled myself out the tent I was inside the cloud that billowed and flowed up and over the peaks to the north. I’d pitched the tent based on the last gust of wind but that must have just been and temporary eddy because all night my head was battered by the tent door as the rest of the sock shaped fabric inflated and deflated like a windsock. I packed up more quickly that I have so far and boiled up some water for hot chocolate which I drank down from my gloved hands. Rolling onto the road and descending from the clouds into the deep stone valleys below opened my eyes to the sheer scale of this part of Turkey. As the day progressed I descended gradually over nearly 100km. The mountains continuing and growing on either side.
Deciding to push on past all of the hotels in Erzincan I got a little complacent with water. Throughout the day there had been many fountains by the side of the road. But typically they stopped just as my bottles ran low. My water filter came scratched so I was reluctant to use it until a replacement element comes from my family’s HQ to Georgia. Until then I boiled water from a mountain stream for pasta and tomorrow will roll down to the next town in search of safe water to drink for the rest of the day. Fingers crossed there will be some.
