Day two - Princes Island to Erdek

Curtis posted;
After our massive breakfast we headed onto the boat for Istanbul.  Because of the timing we had less than an hour to ride through crazy Istanbul traffic to make our connection to Bandirma.  Given our best efforts of riding on tram trakes, dodging thousands of tourists we missed the connection.

With four hours to kill what else do you do but get a couple of Effes (Turkish beer), kofta and pide's and wait it out in the park.  The boat left at 5:15pm although it was a really fast catamaran we arrived at 7:30pm.  It was a race against the sun to ride the 23km to our camp site in Erdek.  Although riding in the final twilight has its problems it was our most picturesque ride yet.  We arrived at the campsite on sunset quickly set up the tent and crashed. 

Next day we rode into the great little coastal town and stumbled upon one of the best bakeries to date.  Its been hard to find a quiet place to eat in Turkey as we get harrassed by animals each time we eat.  Today was no exception as we had five or so cats spectate our every mouthful (see picture below).  This day was a throw away day finished off with stuffing around in town, internet and buying supplies.  On the ride home we got food for dinner and a couple of beers to finish off a good day.  Cara wipped up an amazing vegetable stew given our small camp stove, and I proved how useless I am by trying to cut bread and slicing open my finger pretty bad.

Cara says - "I turn around and see blood everywhere on curtis' hands... so I lunged for the bread to make sure it was safe, then got out our first aid kit to test it on curtis very sore looking finger."

Tomorrow we are aiming to ride for the town of Biga which is some 80km away.

in the park waiting for our ferry - listening to Bob Dylan..

our lunch which attracked two cats and one puppy

these are small bread rolls filled with cream cheese and rolled in italian parsely

cara cooking

our audience of cats

the finger



the veiw from our tent