Had a first-hand experience with turkish hierarchy today - just at the right time before sunset i had found a very nice, large and green pasture for camping next to a farmhouse. So i went to the house to ask for permission to pitch my tent(Cadir, tamam? *gesturing a house and pointing to the grass*). The woman leads me to the neighbour, who speaks some german(Lately i've met a few men who had worked in Germany for many years). The neighbour tells me that the husband is not at home and we have to wait for him, the woman has no say. 30 minutes later, the son appears. Also he is not allowed to give me the OK for setting up my tent on 3 squaremeters of the 4000 squaremeter meadow. Finally, as it is already getting dark and the family head is still not home, the german speaking neighbour offers me to setup my tent next to his house - not exactly what i wanted but in the end it is the nicer option - running water nearby and in the morning i get breakfast(Homemade french fries, a hardboiled egg and tea).

A lot of hazelnut is grown in the valley i'm going through - my host also has a yard full of hazelnut-bushes and shows me his attic, which is full of harvested nuts(Stored in sacks).

(Bravo! Well done! Gratulations, gratulations! You are brave!)

I just exited a village shop when a mountainbiker in full gear approaches me, speaking german with a swiss dialect. I'm pretty puzzled to hear my own language in the middle of nowhere. Turns out the fellow cyclist has been working in Switzerland for 28 years and now enjoys his pension at the age of 50. We join as we both go to Kasimpasa, where he was born and where he has come back to and built a house with his wife. Inevitably, i get invited to a fantastic homemade lunch at his home - hands down, i ate for two. It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon when i finally leave, but i should rather have taken the offer to stay for the night at his house, as i don't get far in the remaining two hours before sunset. After shopping for dinner in Adapazari i have to hurry and only find a mediocre campspot on a field, close to a loud street.

Today's short ride was smooth sailing through green hills - for the first time since the "Magic Valley" i enjoy cycling in warm weather with a blue sky away from traffic and cities and remember how much nicer cycling under summery conditions in true nature is. The nights are as cold as they're supposed to be for early November, but the new sleeping bag does a very good job at keeping me warm. The weather-report says there'll be similar conditions for the rest of the week - perfect for my planned route through the mountain-ranges between here and Ankara.

Unfortunately my GPS-tracker didn't record any data today, therefore there's only a straight line between the start- and the end-point of today's track :-( It's a shame, the red line that started in front of my flat in Vienna has been broken for the first time...

Even though i tried to avoid it as much as possible(Which mostly ended in detours with dead-ends) today's track went mostly along the D100 - a 4-6 lane motorway with immensely heavy traffic through semi-urban and industrial environment, next to it the highway O-4/E80, even wider and even more traffic.

Seeing this huge amount of traffic(A third of it caused by trucks) and the unregulated and massive urban sprawl which the road was going through, makes me loose faith in the destiny of mankind. Imagine a truck driver, filling his lung with the smoke of burned tobacco leaves, sitting in his big machine that exhausts black waste, moving at 110km/h on a 20m wide sealed surface made of gravel and tar. To the left of him, a second massive street sitting on concrete pillars, sustaining a flow of 60 vehicles a minute. To the right of the truck, the sea, on it's shore a mountain of scrapmetal(We are talking of a 50m high, 70m wide and 300m long pile of rusty steelfragments) which is unloaded from a ship equally large. A few kilometers before this situation, the street was going through a terrain the size of a town full of heavy industry, a few hours later in the day, we will pass through 3 merging urban areas, each housing 200.000 inhabitants, stretching over 30km along the road, hundreds of cheaply(and ugly) built office- and residential-buildings, thousands of people living and working next to roaring motorways, on the hills some 5km away, dozens of new large-scale housings, quickly constructed to sustain the demand for cheap flats. This urban area is tiny compared to the size of the metropolis close to it. Imagine the same shore, the shore of the Sea of Marmara, 3 generations earlier, 60 years ago. Imagine it 3000 years ago. Imagine it in 100 years. Are you sure we're better of than hunters and gatherers? Where are we heading? Can this uncontrolled grow still be slowed down and civilization as we know it continue in a sustainable way?

Late in the afternoon, i took a single chance to flee northwards on a sideroad through hills where i've found a quiet campspot under an oaktree. It's beautiful up here.