Turkey

 Turkey

Black Sea Coast and the Sumela Monastery

We paid for our visas at the border and crossed into Turkey to ride along the Black Sea coast heading to  Trabzon. The call to prayer we hear five times a day, the first at 5.30 am, from mosques everywhere we go. There was an immediate drop in temperature and a cool breeze coming off the ocean.  There was the ocean on one side and hillsides covered in tea plantations among the high rise apartments.  70 million people live in Turkey so everywhere we go there are many people.  The men sit in tea cafes sipping their tea, women shopping in the markets and lots of traffic. The road is a new one and great to ride on, tunnels running through the hills meant the road was flat most of the time. We experienced rain for a couple of days, the first real wet weather we have had but it was not cold so we managed.  Drinking Turkish tea is a great pastime, served in small glasses shaped like an hour glass and served everywhere. Things are more expensive in Turkey than we have experienced before but we expected this and know it will get more expensive now as we head into Europe. We stopped for a rest day at Trabzon and to see Sumela Monastery. Trabzon is an old port town with cobbled streets and narrow alleys with many tourists like us who have come to see the monastery.  We caught a bus up to see the monastery which clings to a sheer rock wall above evergreen forests and a rushing stream, abandoned in 1923 it is now a museum and we shared our visit with about 2000 other people.  It was  a mysterious place, especially when the mist came in swirling around the building giving it a ghostly appearance.  The main chapel is covered both inside and outside in frescoes, most have been damaged, the faces in particular have been scratched out on the lower ones but the one on the ceiling have faired better.