In the evening an old sheperd stole my mango-juice. I didn't care yesterday, but now i miss it... 40.786, 29.484
Back to the routine
distance: 42.46km
duration: 6h 36min
Wake up early, shy away of getting up and try to find back to sleep. Wake up again two hours later, realize you really have to get up now to make use of the short daylight, knowing that it will take minimum 1.5 hours till the bike is packed and ready for leaving. Put on clothes, collect the stuff that's spread out in the tent and put it in the respective bags, move the bags out to the apsis, roll up the matress and stash the sleeping bag into the compression bag. Move everything out of the tent, including yourself. Take down the tent, let it dry a bit if it's possible, roll it up and put it in the packsack. Mount all the bags and the camera on the bike, check if nothing was left behind and start to move into the day.
Same thing in reverse order in the evening, including finding a campspot, preparing food, showering(incl. cooking water), sorting photos, and writing a report(If not too lazy/tired). That's my daily routine and i just got back into it(And i'm even back to pasta with tuna-tomato-sugo, which i didn't eat since Serbia).Marmara Denizi
distance: 33.04km
duration: 3h 59min
To my surprise i have a working internet connection - i was expecting to be offline for a week as the sim-card i bought in Kirklareli 2.5 weeks ago failed to register with the network last week. This happened because telephones in Turkey are required to be registered to a person for prolonged use. The Turkcell-employees in Kirklareli had told me this was not necessary for a data-only card but they where obviously wrong. But it looks like the registration-process got through a lot quicker than i was told in the Istanbul-shop.
Jeff, my host in Istanbul, escorted me for a few kilometers on my way out of the city - since we didn't start before noon, it took a while till i found a place to fully pressurize my new tire and we had to wait for the ferry to Kadiköy it was already one hour before sunset when we finally departed(Jeff had also provided me with homemade all-american hamburgers for the day, delicious! :-)). One hour before sunset and i was still very much in the city. I had seen a hill from the shore with what looked like unobstructed wilderness on top. After climbing the hill - with a fantastic view across the Bosporus and the Marmara sea - and nearly circumenventing it, it was clear that the whole huge hilltop was the backyard of a very wealthy homeowner, who had built a huge iron fence around my campingspot :-/ Luckily i found another, a bit smaller and more obstructed place with flat ground between the other expensive villas on the hill.