Rocks and trees and trees and rocks

by Sheila on 06 Aug, 2014 - 4 comments

Apologies for the lack of updates lately! We’ve been putting in some serious driving hours, and by the time we get to our destination with WiFi our brains are boiled. Time to catch up on Turkey:

While in Istanbul, we saw that at least five other teams were in the city intending to visit the Turkmen Consulate to get their transit visas. We also needed to stop by in order to have the visa stamped in our passports, but with so many people expecting to be at the Consulate, on August 1st we decided to forego a trip to Cappadocia and head to Ankara instead to visit the Turkmen Embassy. This turned out to be a wise move; the Embassy was completely empty, so we got our transit visas in our passports in an hour! We also found a great calendar at the Embassy of President Berdimuhamedow participating in various physical activities. July featured the President exercising:

Ankara turned out to be a decent town for a national capital. A lot of building developments were ongoing, and with the creepy number of Erdogan billboards/pennants/flags/promotional vans aside, Ankara was chill and stylish. The neighbourhood where our hotel was situated had a plethora of delicious, creative and inexpensive restaurants, and it felt akin to the Plateau of Montreal (the Plateau being far more hipster of course). One bizarre thing about Ankara – they had a very specific speed limit set for the roads:

On the 2nd of August, we left the bulk of Turkish civilization behind to head into the countryside of central Turkey. Very, very empty countryside. To the country’s credit, the vast majority of the roads we drove on were in good condition. On the other hand, we can confidently say that central Turkey consists of rocks and trees and trees and rocks and…yeah.

To make sure that we avoided nighttime driving in the middle of mountainous nowhere, we decided to divide our drive to Tbilisi into 3 days from Ankara. Before we set out, we looked up hotels in Erzincan and Erzurum (the larger towns in central Turkey) on Expedia. The cheapest hotel in Erzurum? USD 1,700. The cheapest hotel in Erzincan? USD 350. WTF?! These towns are quite literally in the middle of nowhere Turkey with nothing that appeared to be tourist attractions! Nonetheless, we rolled into Erzincan in the early evening and as luck would have it our first pick was a more reasonable (yet still 4-star) hotel.

As we ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, we asked the friendly waiter what attractions were in Erzincan that merited having so many expensive 4- & 5-star hotels:

Mom: So, what brings tourists here? Is there something special about Erzincan? Why do people come here?
Waiter: Tourist? No tourist.
Mom: No tourists?
Waiter: Only two tourist. points at us

As it turns out, Erzincan and Erzurum have a lot of businesspeople that pass through – likely for mining – that supposedly justifies the number of hotels in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, we don’t know either. There really isn’t much to Erzincan:

On the 3rd of August, we departed Erzincan for the Turkish border town of Ardahan. This portion of the drive featured, you guessed it, more rocks and trees:

We didn’t know what to expect with Ardahan, but the drive into the town was lush, scenic, and involved a lot of farm animals. The decent Turkish roads we had been driving on sadly left us for loooooong stretches of gravel.

By some additional miracles, our car came through unscathed. I’m beginning to think that we’ll need to perform some kind of ritual animal sacrifice in order to keep this kind of luck on our side.

After driving around the four whole streets of the town, we settled on Kafkas Ari Hotel. It looked okay on the outside, but signs like this for the hotel’s elevator can make less desperate travellers think twice about staying:

After some negotiations by pictographs, we settled on accommodations and a young bellhop took our bags to our room. As the bellhop attempted to explain the WiFi password, he took out his phone and I didn’t believe what I saw at first. He flashed his phone screen again and, yup, my eyes did not deceive me. This was his phone background:

So we stayed at a white supremacist hotel for the night, apparently. Happily, we were joined at that hotel by team Two Guys & an X with whom we convoyed all the way to Tbilisi, so there was less fear of being attacked by Turkish nazis or something equally questionable.

I should mention that we’d been treated very well by the Turks throughout our drive. Special shout-outs go to the bus and truck drivers that took it upon themselves to look after us on the road. For example, en route to Ardahan we saw a friendly trucker on the road with whom we exchanged waves. Later, as we were having a short picnic on the side of the road, the trucker reappeared. He pulled over and came out of his cab to see if we needed help. Since nothing was wrong, we gave him a slice of cantaloupe for his trouble. He asked us where we were going (Tbilisi, then Mongolia) after which he checked our tires and told us to watch out as the roads would not be good. Once he finished his cigarette, he waved goodbye and was off. It was very kind of him to look out for us and our beleaguered Polo, & it’s always nice to have friends in vehicles larger than yours on the road!

Turkey was a whirlwind of a week, but it’s on to Georgia.