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I CAN TELL Steph flew home to France today. Her absence has confirmed that I am not to be allowed out alone. I become one of those souls you know has been released from an asylum. I have been reinserted into society but not so well that I actually fit it.

The story is that Alex and Lydie kindly and carefully explained the route they had taken into Istanbul - which hadn't been along the horrendous road from the west after all - and even gave intermediate distances so that I could ride the same way in the opposite direction. Yesterday it had worked fine. But there had been a hazy section which involved going to a seaside hamlet called Cilinkoz and then finding a road that would be 'rough but pretty good for four kilometres' before reverting to asphalt.

Well somewhere I lost my presence of mind. Because I had a hilly but enjoyable ride out towards the sea, through fields of ochre-coloured soil with cardboard-tinted cliffs in the distance, and eventually I got to Cilinkoz. You know you're there because you descend a hill that feels like falling down a lift shaft and you come out by a crescent of almost golden beach fringed by a handful of cafés and what may once have been the camp-site shown on the map.

You also know because you pass, one after the other, a toll booth and a scarecrow teenager asking for 4TL 50. It's not a big sum - a shade more than two euros but worth more in Turkey - but it's a lot when you don't know what it's for. I don't know Turkish road law but, to me, I was on a public road that went through this little resort and out the other side.

The boy was pleasant enough. He told me what he wanted and I asked him what it was for.

He looked embarrassed, although why he should blush that he didn't speak English while I, in his country, didn't speak Turkish, I don't know. Anyway, he showed me the wad of tickets he was holding and the line, in English, that said little more than 'Toll 4TL 50.' We were getting no further. I don't want to sound money-grabbing but we are talking about perhaps 250 metres of road on which I had no intention of stopping. It would take, let^s say, 30 seconds.

'Where does it go?' I asked, feeling I ought to ask something.

He screwed up his eyes. 'Go?'

'Yes, where...' I waved into the distance like the explorer that I am and he cut me off and, to get rid of me, said 'No problem' and closed his book.

I'd like to say I got the upper hand, that I found Alex's road and chirruped over the four kilometres of ridable mud and then whistled on to my destination. Instead, I found three roads, all as rocky as each other, one of which ended where it met a reservoir. Sheepishly I returned the way I'd come and tried not to catch the boy's eyes. I needn't have bothered. He barely looked up.

The road to Cilinkoz isn't one to retrace in a spirit of failure. It is a healthy, acrobatic road that had me walking that lift-shaft section just after the sea. Bicycle makers have yet to devise a gear low enough to ride it on a machine weighed down not only by panniers but a world of morosity.

I got back to where I had been four hours earlier and bought a lifetime's supply of ice tea at one of several small shops, each called Market. Stand in a Turkish village for 20 seconds and a crowd will form. Each member will want to direct you. Each will speak urgently in words with no connection to English and nobody will think to point along a road and gesture left or right. It is the Turkish way, from which I was rescued by a small, slightly wrinkled man who asked quietly 'Vous parlez français?'

This wasn't the first time but usually the question is whether I speak German. I haven't yet worked out why so many people speak it.

My saviour explained that he had lived for 40 years in Paris and had returned to 'my village' now that he was retired. He gave me clear directions, adding that there was a bakery just the other side of the bridge, and I obediently followed them until I found a beautiful place to camp. I am alongside a rough path of wheel ruts created by tractors and farm trailers. The road is a distance away, higher than where I am but behind trees and scrub. On the other side the land drops into a valley. The path rises to my right, past a shack with a doorless car and a hundred beehives, drops to my left before rising again.

Two farmers have come from my left, whistling and talking bovine language to cows with clanking neck bells. Each has wished me Salaam, used the question I now recognise means 'Where are you from?' or 'What nationality are you?' And each has shaken my hand and wished me a good night.

Lovely people, Turkish country folk.