Inland route

The Black Sea coast is beautiful. But extremely undulating, you keep pushing at your utmost to go up 50 or 100 meters, you fly down to see-level and up you go again. Maddening and utterly tiring. We had the same experience in New South Wales, Australia, and we then decided that we didn't want this again.

So two busses and a very short bike ride took us to Safranbolu. This is a historic Ottoman city that, according to most Turks, you cannot miss. Nice place, very touristic, where we stayed for a relaxing two nights in a Konak hotel, one of those Ottoman houses.

From there we rode east for a week through more or less a long valley parallel to the coast, the sea on the other side of the mountain ridge. Here the climbs are longer, but gentler. Tiring also, but doable. Roads are good, mostly 4 lane but very quiet. The scenery is generally nice, often beautiful and sometimes even more than that. F.i. between Tasköprü and Duragan the valley is romantic, full of rice paddies and storks on their nests on high poles. It slightly reminded me of Austria, though the mountains are higher there, rice paddies absent and the minarets have onion-tops.

Tomorrow, Monday June 15^th, we'll reach Amasya, a bigger town and another historic place. We'll take some rest again there and will have to spend some time on our planning, as information on accommodations is not easily available along the route. This appears to be one of our biggest hangups during this trip.