A hazy dusty morning greeted us as we left Istanbul on the morning of 11July at 0515hrs. We woke up early to avoid the world famous (Alex says it’s the worst in the world) Istanbul traffic. Alex had met Daniel Woodley, an Englishman, who was cycling from Brighton to Australia. He had had an Aussie follow him from Sofia, who gave up after 4 days, and a German girl followed him along the Danube. Since the poor fellow was all alone, we took pity ? and invited him to join us.

Dan’s an amazingly brave lad – he has a knowledge of bicycles and bicycling comparable to the average carrot, but he’s still doing this cycling trip, supposedly alone. In the last few days we’ve taken apart, fixed, greased, lubed, tuned and cleaned more parts of his bike than I knew existed. It’s proof of the existence of God that he’s made it so far. That being said though, all his problems only started after he met us and we started to tell him everything that was in bad shape on his bike, and since then he’s bent and broken a chain, got a flat, had to retune his pedals and lubed every single moving part on his two wheeled disaster machine. But our help with maintenance has been adequately repaid by his knowledge of German – a lot of people here speak the language, and life has been easier.

We are following the gorgeous coastline of the Black Sea and have passed through towns that seldom see foreign tourists - Sile, Agva, Kandira, Karasu, Alapli, Zonguldak and Çaycuma (respectively). A lot of those towns were beach resort towns, Sile and Agva being quite expensive (Singapore prices) due to their popularity with people from Istanbul, we assume. At the beach towns of Agva and Alapli, we bivied (only used our sleeping bags for shelter) using the tent as a groundsheet and woke up to find our sleeping bags wet from condensation in the morning.

The locals from the little towns that we passed through were incredibly friendly. We have now lost count of the number of times we have been invited for Çay (local tea). Many times, the tea house owner simply refused to accept payment, or the locals would treat us. Johann thinks that this is partly due to Dan’s amazingly disheveled look – he wears the same gritty shirt to cycle, relax and sleep and only took out his other one when Alex chided him about it. Everywhere we go we feel like pseudo celebrities – groups of children would shout “Where are you from!” (which is apparently the only English phrase they teach, along with “What is your name!”) and the local men would rally around and discuss (probably) how crazy some people were. Then began the whole dance of charades as we described with hand gestures and impeccably crap Turkish where we were from, where we wanted to go, ask how far the next town is.

We’ve been pretty slack the past few days – only averaging 60ish km a day, but there were some hellish hills. Johann had to stop halfway up a hill for the first time in his life, and Alex says he’s done more hills in the last week than London to Istanbul. We’ve had to stop to fix a certain Englishman’s bike a few times, and Johann’s a tad slower on the hills, trying to catch up with people who have been on the road for months. He makes up for it by tearing away the downhills though.

At Zonguldak yesterday we met some locals who invited us home and we stayed there for the night. The whole village had gathered to see us as we made our way to our guest’s house. Of particular interest were our gears on our bike and the cameras we were using.

Many locals even stooped down to count the number of sprockets on our cassettes. It was very humbling to stay with the locals, and they were such good hosts as to even serve us dinner and breakfast.

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