Day 152: Sunday 17 August – Grounded in Göreme, by Ken

Jane was still asleep on her camp stretcher when I got up.

We ate our breakfast outdoors as the sun came up over the Mediterranean wanting to make the most of our last sight of that sea, possibly ever. As we ate I noticed a mermaid basking on a swimming platform in the early morning sun.

Mermaid On Swimming Platform

Camp Dog

It Would Have Been Difficult To Get Mabel Any Closer To The Beacch

With nearly 400km to drive today we were on the road before 9:00. It would have been earlier, but as we were filling Mabel’s fresh water tank I noticed the upper external vent to the fridge was on the verge of falling off. I had removed it in Kaş when trying to find the source of the water leak in the kitchen. It had been a very tight fit in Mabel’s bodywork, but now it was very loose. I solved the problem, at least temporarily, by padding out the vent with duct tape and reinstalling the vent.

For a while our route followed the coast passing some extremely busy resorts where the sea was packed with Turkish bobbers. We passed an old British registered motorhome that pulled alongside us at traffic lights. They had driven from London and were about to turn round and head back.

Busy Resort

A length of busy dual carriageway was lined with stalls selling lemons and süt misir. Drivers were stopping at random in the slow lane to purchase from the stalls making driving for Jane trying to say the least. We found a safe place to pull over, we just had to try süt misir. The stall we picked seemed to be a family business run by a couple and their daughter, the latter had good English. Bubbling away on top of a wood fired stove was a large container. The young woman lifted the lid to reveal sweetcorn in a light brown liquid. We bought two which were wrapped in outer leaves of corn for 5 lira – she obviously saw us coming! The corn was hot and we decided to leave it for later.

Sut Misir And Lemons For Sale

Our Sut Misir

Staff Of The Sut Misir Business

As we skirted round Mersin we were as far east as we were going to get on out trip (34° 59’ 28” East (36° 56’ 57” North).

West of Mersin we joined a motorway that would take us north to our destination in Capaddocia. We had thought long and hard about using the motorway without a toll smart card, but we had tried very hard to get one. We hoped we might find somewhere to buy a card en route, if not we would just have to take our chances.

The shoulder of the motorway link road and then the motorway itself were packed with men, women and boys selling small baskets of lemons. For a while there was absolute chaos as drivers jumped on their brakes to stop and buy. Every now and again we came across other stalls on the hard shoulder. One man even had a stall adjacent to the hard shoulder behind coils of razor wire and a makeshift ladder to get over the wire. There is little doubt that driving in Turkey is full of surprises. Just imagine that happening on the motorway out of Wellington!

Lemons For Sale on The Motorway

No Need To Pull Onto The Shoulder To Stop And Buy Lemons

Or If You Break Down

Razor Wire Wasn't Enough To Deter This Lemon Seller

As we skirted Mersin we caught up with a caravan being towed by a ute. Much to our surprise we noticed two men were sitting in the back of the caravan. As we drew near we got friendly waves from the two men through open windows at the back. Then as we overtook one of the men took photographs, or video, of us on a smart phone.  A few minutes later the ute started to overtake us, now the man in the back of the caravan was hanging out a side window with his phone. I guess it’s fair to say that driving in Turkey is never boring!

Two Men In Caravan On Motorway, One With Camera (Nothing unusual in that is there?)

Might As Well Get The Left Side Too

A short while later we passed signs advising there was a tolling station ahead. A gantry signed lanes marked OGS and HGS. We had no idea what OGS was, but HGS stood for Hizli Geçis Sistemi (Fast Toll Collection System) for which we had tried and failed to get the smart card required to use tolled motorways. Just before the toll booths was a lay-by in which lots of cars were parked, mostly badly. Jane pulled in and ahead we could see a building with a Ptt sign on it. I grabbed my passport, the completed form that hadn’t got us a card in Bodrum and joined the queue outside the building. As I waited I noticed about 50% of the traffic passing through the toll station was triggering sirens, presumably indicating they were out of credit. When my turn came I handed over the HGS form, my NZ drivers licence and my passport. The form came straight back with the man indicating I should sign it. I did, even though there wasn’t a line for a signature. After that it only took a minute and for 50 lira I had my smart windscreen sticker and an assurance I had paid enough to get us beyond Istanbul on motorways. At less than NZ$30 that didn’t seem very much.

Moment Of Truth As We Approach Toll Station

Got It!

Jane was really pleased to see me return with our sticker which I placed low down on the centre of the windscreen as shown in photographs outside the Ptt. While I was gone Jane tried her süt misir which she pronounced as disgusting. I tried mine, the corn was like ball bearings and tasted as though it had been boiled in dishwater, perhaps it had? One bite was more than enough.

Jane managed to weave her way through the chaos of cars abandoned in the layby by drivers visiting the Ptt and onto the motorway. We drove through an HGS gate and absolutely nothing happened, the lights and the VMS screen all stayed dark. What a disappointment, did this mean the system wasn’t capable of reading an UK plate?

We pressed on and the motorway climbed into a mountain range with Mabel’s satnav (it was working for once) showing we got to 1450 metres at one point. We descended on a grade signed as 7% for 10km. on the way down there were two arrestor beds that could double as ski jumps in the winter. They made our budget constrained proposals for Transmission Gully look puny in comparison.

Truck Arrestor Bed

More Plants Being Watered, This Time In The Median

Rock Fall Shelters

The motorway climbed again and we pulled into a rest area in the mountains for lunch. Even before we had come to a standstill a man started walking towards us. His clutch cable had broken and he had been waiting for hours for a breakdown truck to arrive. He had no water and his family were very thirsty (while we were in the mountains the temperature was still in the 30s). Could he buy some water from us? We gave him a 1½ litre bottle from our store in the garage. We asked if they needed food but they were OK on that front having eaten before they set out. He asked where we were going and it turned out he lived in Cappadocia. He advised caution on hot air balloon flights saying they were dangerous!

As we ate our lunch of bread, cheese an avocado a flat bread truck arrived. After the driver had photographed the car (presumably to counter any claims for damage) he winched the car efficiently onto his truck and was gone in a matter of minutes.

The motorway petered out near Nigde. We were disappointed again as Mabel failed to excite any attention as we passed through the toll station. From Nigde we took two lane roads to Göreme. Nearing the town the landscape changed dramatically. Gone was the agricultural land we had crossed after leaving the motorway. Now we were in hill country with the remnants of stone houses and caves in the hills rather like the sassis we had seen in southern Italy two years ago.

Nearing Göreme we saw for the first time the tuff (volcanic ash) chimneys for which Cappadocia is famous. Pinnacles of tuff towered out of the plain, sometimes in groups, sometimes singly. Caves were evident in some of the pinnacles.

We Were Now In Potato And Onion Country

Here's some of our first glimpses of the landscape of Cappadocia:

Goreme

As we drove into Göreme on the outside lane of what I thought was a dual carriageway a car turned into the road and started driving towards me. I had to make a hurried detour to the right to avoid it which Jane didn’t appreciate. (Driving the road another day we found the car was driving the wrong way on the dual carriageway!).

The road in Göreme changed from a smooth pavement to rough stone pavers creating a lot of shaking in Mabel and Smarty must have been feeling it too. We passed the very busy outdoor museum and started to climb a steep hill. We made a tight left bend at the bottom and the road became steeper. Mabel was struggling in 2^nd gear and as we neared an even tighter right bend on the steep gradient I tried to switch from automatic to manual first gear but was too late. Mabel stopped and I couldn’t get any traction on the polished pavers. There was no way we could unhitch Smarty with all her weight on the tow ball and decided to try reversing down the hill with Jane in Smarty keeping her pointed in the right direction. It didn’t work, Smarty veered to one side and we were well and truly stuck. Traffic was piling up behind us and signaling its annoyance by way of its horns.

I began trying to get Smarty off managing to pull one of the pins out of the A-frame. Then, as if from nowhere, half a dozen young men appeared and began to help. One directed traffic, another chocked Mabel’s rear wheels with rocks. Then they all mucked in trying to help me. None of them had any English but their enthusiasm overcame any language barrier. One kept calling me ‘monsieur’ as we tried various ways of freeing Smarty with Jane easing her forward to relieve the load on the A-frame. We tried hammering out the pins with my rubber mallet but that didn’t work, one man wanted me to undo a bolt on one of the shackles, but I didn’t have any spanners. The most impressive thing about the group of helpers was they never gave up, a clear leader among them gave instructions to the others as we tried different ways to get the A-frame off. This went on for a good 15 minutes, I think in other places in the world by then we would have got a shrug of the shoulders and the help would have evaporated. But not in Turkey, there was no way they were going to give in. Eventually, the leader managed to rotate the A-frame through 90 degrees (me taking out a pin meant Smarty was only connected through one shackle) and the tow hitch came off the ball. I hurriedly removed the A-frame and jumped in Mabel.

Even with the weight of Smarty off the back Mabel would not go forward. All I managed to do was spin the wheels and make a lot of smoke. The men stopped traffic coming up the hill so I could reverse down to where the gradient was lower. Another man stopped traffic at the top to allow me to swing wide on the bend that had caused all the trouble. He signaled me to drive and I got round the bend without any trouble.

Unfortunately, Jane and I were far too busy trying to extricate ourselves from our predicament to take any photographs.

I drove on to Kaya camping with Jane following in Smarty about a kilometre away. There the leader of the group was waiting for us. He made a show of checking Mabel over with a big grin on his face.

Yasar, the camping ground manager, came over to see us after we had set up Mabel for our stay. We were keen to take a hot air balloon flight. He told us Monday was fully booked, Tuesday was a possibility, but we could definitely go on Wednesday. He suggested we drop by his office later and he could give us some ideas on what to do in the area. We did and he couldn’t have been more helpful producing sketch maps of walks in the area, warning us not to buy from certain stall that would rip us off, or to take a taxi tour because the drivers would take us to local businesses where they received commission.Yasar suggested we visit the smaller underground city of Kaymakli, it being less crowded and less cramped than the larger Derinkuyu. He also recommended buying a 3 day museum pass that would save us money.

Later in the evening Yasar came over to let us know there had been a cancellation and we could take a hot air balloon flight in the morning. We were tired and didn’t want a very early start the next morning. We preferred to wait until Wednesday.

It had been an eventful trip and the people we had met in Cappadocia couldn’t have been more helpful.

Today's Trip (386km)
Black Line Bottom Right Is The Border With Syria
Most easterly point of the trip relative to places on this map was between Tarsus and Adana)