Off to the Balkans

Berat, Albania, Nov. 20

The Silk Road Ride is over, sad to say. I will continue to add links and maps to this site, but for now my further cycling adventures, riding through the Balkans in November and December of 2009, can be found at

balkanblitz.blogspot.com

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my Silk Road adventures, and that you will continue to follow my cycling explorations in the future!

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Silk Road Bike-u Haiku

For those of you who have actual poetic talent, İ apologize. For the rest of you, İ hope you enjoy this poetic overview of this bicycle journey expressed in the form of a series of haiku. Matsuo Basho is doubtless turning over in his grave.


2002

China

Buying ink brushes
Paying respects to Xuan Zang
Leaving from Xian

Chinese emperors
Lie in vast mausolea
Dead and forgotten

Buddhist cave temples
Honeycomb arid hillsides
Silk Road's eastern end

Cycling through cold mist
Tracing Gansu Corridor
Camped beside Great Wall

Homicidal bees
Pursue me across desert
Anxi oasis

Hot dry hurricanes
Dessicate a roadside corpse
Crossing the Gobi

Travel companions
Across the Taklamakan
Swift-riding Uighurs

Beziklik, Dunhuang
Frescoes adorn rock-hewn caves
Trail of spreading faith

Blazing heat hammers
Tourists in Gaochang, Turfan
Beer under grape vines

Pain spreads slowly through
Swelling joints in Urumqi
Journey suspended




2004

China

Return to deathbed
In rain-lashed grey Urumqi
Two long years later

Otherworldly blue
Propelled by gale-force tailwinds
Leaving Sayram Lake


Kazakhstan

Welcoming shepherds
As I ride across bleak steppe
Cold early springtime


Kyrgyzstan

Farcical frontier
Drawn across boggy valley
Of Scythian tombs

Warm sunshine lights up
Ancient rock-carved hunting scenes
Of Lake Issyk Kol

Mountain passes loom
Aching muscles climb all day
Cycling with Pushkin

Kebabs, beer, bread, borshcht
Filling my empty stomach
Chaikhana in Osh

Fast-moving blizzard
Freezes us on mountainside
Revived in warm yurt

Under Pamir peaks
Detained by bribe-seeking guards
Saved by football match


Tajikistan

Dead yaks mark border
High desert home to slaughtered
Marco Polo sheep

Lenin's statue stands
Above power-line fores
Rain-drenched Murghab town

Source of the Oxus
Defended by flood ramparts
We retreat, muddy

Cold rainy grasslands
Kyrgyz herders shelter us
Crossing the Pamirs

Along Afghan frontier
Hindu Kush towers above
We pedal hungry

Guest of expats
I eat, rest, eat, rest and eat
Break in Dushanbe

Alpine scenery
Crossing the Fan Mountains
Farewell dear Tajiks


Uzbekistan

Stung at border
Cheated times uncountable
Uzbeks rip me off

Floating dream-like blue
Above ancient mud brick domes
Samarkand awes me

Antique minaret
Glowers over timeless town
Gorgeous Bukhara

Ghostly empty streets
Open air museum town
Deserted Khiva


Turkmenistan

Golden statues stand
In soulless dusty towns
Damn Turkmenbashi

Heat like sledge hammers
Mongol-ruined cityscape
Camping inside Merv


Iran

Vodka and cherry
Homemade wine, date palm liqueur
Life in dry Iran

Carpets and pilgrims
Line streets beneath golden dome
Two days in Meshhad

Caravansarai
That once housed Marco Polo
My nighttime shelter

Flawless lines rise up
To a rocket-like apex
Gonbad e Kavus

Two day summit dash
Scotch on peak, hot springs after
Climbing Damavand

Endless traffic jam
Leads into smog-choked Tehran
My time has run out




2009

Iran

Smiles of real welcome
Curious conversations
Welcome to Iran

Sweating through dust haze
Battling traffic lunacy
I dream of water

Cold drinks on roadside
Picnics, dinners, veggies, fruit
Hospitality

Heineken and Scotch
Saadi's graveside poetry
Shiraz in summer

Persian capital
Tombs of long-dead emperors
Persepolis pomp

Tiles shimmer in sun
Mud brick towers, minarets
Esfahan wonder

Assassin castles
Lakeside picnics and swimming
Cycling the Elborz

Dashing cross the steppe
I spot a huge manmade shape
Soltaniyeh's dome

Torrential rainstorms
Kneedeep litter beside road
Caspian seashore


Azerbaijan

Water fountain burns
Gazelles frolic, headwinds howl
Riding to Baku

Oasis of ease
In Art Deco cityscape:
Hostess Natalya

Waves of green hills rise
Higher than the eye can see
Rainy Xinaliq

Returning from the hills
Slope and wind co-operate
Flying Baku-wards

Seki exudes charm
Kish village breathes history
Pedal self-destructs

Like a bad conscience
Huge faces loom by roadside
Cult of Iliev


Georgia

Rolling through vineyards
Past fortresses and castles
Kakheti charms me

Climbing to the sky
A sweat-soaked muddy goat track
The Abano Pass

Wine, khinkali, song
Horse-riding, mountain biking
Tusheti idyll

Good-humoured people
In historic countryside
Georgia's on my mind

Rushing stream waters
Orchards, meadows, village greens
Khevsureti jaunt

Towering ice peak
Backdrop for mountain freedom
Kazbegi sidetrip

Forty-first birthday
In Tbilisi old town
Cyclists' rendezvous


Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh

Deserted churches
Sport intricate stone carving
Armenian soul

Soviet greyness
Blights church-studded valleyscape
Debed Canyon ride

Like desert roses
Beautiful women light up
Ugly Yerevan

Dancing teenagers
Greek temple adorns bleak slopes
Geghard and Garni

Fruit and veg harvest
Ararat looms in background
Fleeing Yerevan

Roller coaster ride
Karahundj stones salute sky
Cycling through cold rain

Forested mountains
Soaked in blood of civil war
Remote Karabakh

Snow line creeps downhill
Industrial wastelands pass
Farewell Hayastan

Georgia (reprise)

Mud road to nowhere
Frozen forgotten highlands
Vardzia appears


Turkey

Fall colours glowing
Highlight volcanic landscape
On the road to Kars

Earthquake-shattered scene
Half-standing churches teeter
By Ani's chasm

Sneering begging brats
Hurl stones and bid dogs attack
True Kurdish welcome

Urartu fortress
Ancient temple hieroglyphs
Dust of history

Magic citadel
Old bridge, graceful minaret
Poor doomed Hasankeyf

Byzantine steeples
Where now few Christians live
Scenic Tur Abdin


Iraq

Comfortingly dull
Smiles of genuine welcome
Iraqi detour


Turkey (reprise)

Desert blooms cotton
Trucks thunder across lowlands
I near journey's end

Temples of the moon
Harran's eternal story
Lost limestone hamlets

Modern city growls
Around baklava cafes
Antep's mosaics

Ancient Antioch
Leaves little to be seen now
But Roman tilework

Armenian ruins
Hgih-perching castles look down
Cilician plain

Lightning and hailstorm
Herald my victory lap
Venetian Ayas

Watching rain pour down
Remembering journey highlights
Melancholic joy

The Victory Lap

Ayas, November 2

I am sitting in an internet cafe, watching recurrent gusts of rain blow in off the Mediterranean. It has been apocalyptic weather for the past 48 hours, ever since I got to within 10 kilometres of the end of my Silk Road Ride. My victory lap was done in blinding sheets of rain mixed with large hailstones, enormous and disturbingly close bolts of lightning and zero visibility. The hail has gone, but the rest of the weather has remained, foiling my plans for triumphant photos with my bike on the beach. Instead I have been lying in bed drinking copious quantities of tea and reading Shakespeare, letting my poor leg muscles relax.

My four-day final stage from Antakya was somewhat anticlimactic, at least partly because of the grey weather. The first day was actually sunny, and I rode southeast towards the Mediterranean through the coastal hills. On the way, I stopped to see the hilltop ruins of the Church of St. Simeon Stylites the Younger. This involved a steep climb of 400 vertical metres, past families engrossed in the olive harvest. There was nobody at the ruins, and I enjoyed having the place to myself. Ten years ago, Joanne and I had visited another Church of St. Simeon not far away, on the Syrian side of the border, and had been mightily impressed by the beautiful cluster of four churches meeting at the sad stump of the saint's rock pillar, chipped away by generations of larcenous pilgrims. This complex follows exactly the same plan, but the four basilicas lie in complete ruined disarray, covered by modern football fan graffiti. From these location, exposed to the cooling mountain breezes, the ascetic saint could look down on Antioch, the city which he viewed as a sink of iniquity. He spent many years living atop a metre-square platform atop a high stone pillar, performing various painful exercises in faith and having his meals passed up to him on a pole. I climbed up the truncated pillar and contemplated the stillness and simplicity of the world and had my photo snapped by a Turkish mother and daughter who had just arrived. It amazed me that two people would choose exactly the same sort of eccentric austerities near the same city, have the same name and end up with the same design of religious complex built around the site of their pillar-dwelling existences. On the other hand, a recent exercise in pillar-standing in Trafalgar Square in London was wildly popular with the public, so maybe there's a Stylite hidden inside all of us.

I dropped back down to the Orontes valley and rode to the Mediterranean, the first time I had seen the ocean since leaving Bushehr two and a half months earlier. The limestone hills backing onto the sea were dotted with ancient tombs and a feat of Roman engineering, the Tunnel of Titus and Vespasian, which saved the port of Seleucia in Pieria from recurrent floods in heavy rain. The city itself was the original capital of the Seleucid province before it moved to Antioch, but it remained as the deep-water port for the area. A lot of Chinese silk must have moved through this port over the centuries before it silted up. I had a delicious lunch of bread and hummus and then went for a swim; while the locals may have found it cold, it was similar to summertime swimming in Lake Superior and I enjoyed the sensation of having arrived at the end of a continent.

From Seleucia I rode along a tiny dirt road along a wild cliff-lined coast, where the only humans in sight were sport fishermen on the rocky beaches. After 30 kilometres I re-entered an area of dense settlement and, just as I was despairing of finding a place to camp, I found a tiny commercial campground, Orient Camping, in Kovacik. Run by an energetic Turkish-born hang-gliding aficionado and autodidact who had recently returned from 28 years in the Netherlands, the only other guest was Mike, another veteran traveller with a love of organic farming and escaping from the industrialized farming that rules so much of the world. We three spent an enjoyable evening of conversation before I took to my tent.

I woke up at dawn to the first drops of rain, and spent the entire next day cycling in various degrees of downpour. I passed through Iskenderun, ancient Alexandretta (Alexander the Great, like his general and successor Seleucus, established an amazing number of new cities named after himself throughout his domains, of which this was one of the first). It was a thoroughly modern industrial port that didn't detain me at all. To the north, somewhere along the blighted industrial landscape, I passed the site of the decisive Battle of Issos in which Alexander inflicted a heavy defeat on the Achaemenid emperor Darius III, opening up the Syrian coast to the Macedonian conqueror. In the downpour, I can't say I saw much all day until I camped in a pause in the rain in an olive grove outside Osmaniye. My tent and sleeping bag were both pretty moist from the night before and it was not a wonderful night of sleep.

The third day out of Antakya I rode all day under grey skies threatening further rain. I visited the deserted Roman city of Hierapolis Castanaba and had the place to myself. The ruins weren't spectacular but they had a melancholy air that suited the weather. I then put my head down and rode steadily across the fat, flat plain of Cukurova, covered with corn and cotton. This was the site of the medieval Armenian state of Cilicia, allied to the Crusaders. I stopped just short of their old capital of Sis, now renamed Kozan, and slept in the final campsite of the trip, an overgrown pomegranate plantation that was too close to a mosque's loudspeaker.

My final day of cycling dawned without rain for once, and I set off early for Sis. I was quite close to the town before the castle loomed out of the mist high above me. It was a stiff 250-metre grunt up a cobblestone road to get there, but it was well worth the sweat expended. Sis castle is one of those perfect fairy-tale castles that you picture in your mind but rarely see. Atop a steep ridge, it is a jumble of curtain walls, circular bastions and hidden underground vaults, sprawled picturesquely among overgrown shrubs and rocky cliffs. I wandered around taking photos, then sat down and sketched the upper citadel. Until 1921 this castle was also home to the second most important archbishopric in the Armenian church (after Echmiadzin), but that, along with all the Armenians who once lived in the area, is now just a historic memory. I had the entire castle to myself, aside from a plethora of lizards and a friendly cafe owner with whom I sat and drank tea.

The ride here took longer than I had expected; my lame map of Turkey didn't show distances to Ayas and guesstimating by eye I came up with a total that was some 30 km too short. I ground south across the plain, passing under the Roman hilltop fortress of Anavarza (I longed to go inside but the tyrant clock was against it). As I neared Ayas, passing a couple of minor Armenian castles, the sky darkened over the Mediterranean and the last 10 kilometres into town was, as mentioned above, a nightmare of monsoon rain and some very painful hail. My visions of drinking wine on the beach and taking photos of the bike and me vanished into the annoyance of trying to find a pension in the hurricane. Once İ had found a place out of the rain, İ did drink a few toasts of wine (one of the foods that travelled west to east along the Silk Road, from its invention somewhere in the Caucasus) and have a celebratory lamb kebab at a restaurant whose owner was so drunk he could barely stand. And that, suddenly, was that.
Ayas is an interesting city, at least what little İ have seen of it so far through the rain. Lots of old Venetian buildings, including a nice offshore castle. Not only did Marco Polo begin his epic 3-year overland trek to China here; some historians believe that shortly after he returned to Europe in 1295, he may have been captured by the Genoans at a naval battle off Ayas. It is certain that during his captivity, wherever he was captured, he recounted his stories to his prison cell-mate Rustichello, a professional story-teller from Pisa, who subsequently published them and elevated Marco Polo from an obscure but prosperous merchant into the most famous European traveller of all time. So Ayas may have launched his fame not once but twice.

I can't believe that it's over, but after 17,725 kilometres of cycling, some 3 million pedal strokes, two bicycles, 11 countries, eight and a half months and too many adventures to recall, I have finally succeeded in following perhaps the most famous and important trade route in history from one end of Asia to the other. I started the trip as a 33-year-old who thought he was immortal, and I finish as a 41-year-old all too aware of the frailties and limitations of my mortal frame. I am very happy, very tired and ready for the next cycling adventure: blitzing through the Balkans.

Riding Day No.	Date	Distance From Bushehr	Daily Distance	Final Elevation	Vertical Metres	Cycling Time	Average Speed	Maximum Speed	Daily Destination

83	10/28	7440.4	87.3	12	1377	6:36	13.2	57.5	Konacik
84	10/29	7533.1	92.7	63	817	5:33	16.8	32.2	outside Osmaniye
85	10/30	7622.6	89.5	27	233	4:57	18.1	53.4	15 km from Kozan
86	10/31	7725.7	103.1	10	606	6:18	16.4	38.7	Ayas