March 1, 2014
This is the end: No! Vegetarian!
I laid awake for much of the night anxious about what the best thing to do was. When morning came and Hanna woke next to me in the tent I felt her pulse. Her resting heart rate, first thing in the morning when it should be at its lowest, was over one hundred. Although it is normal for a girls heartrate to be high after a night in a tent with me, it really shouldnt be that high, and I was worried. I prepared for a difficult discussion, turned to her and with much regret said "Hanna, I think you need to go home. You aren't well. You should be sleeping in a warm bed, you should be eating real food, you should be resting." There would be time for cycling over mountains and sleeping outside in a tent and eating chocolate spread sandwiches, but that time was not now, not for her. She agreed without question. It was a very short discussion.
For reasons which do not need going into here, Hanna actually already had a flight booked home from Istanbul on the 6th, which she wasn't going to take, but now would. She could take a bus back to Istanbul from the next city of Kirikkale, which was not too far from where we were and mostly downhill, so we could first cycle there together.
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We stopped at an Internet cafe just outside Kirikkale and another crowd of men gathered around us. One of these men was staring at Hanna without smiling, and she talked with him and shook his hand, which could only have encouraged him as he looked at her with pure lust. Inside he came to talk with me at my computer and basically asked me if he could have sex with her. I looked at him and said "Dude, I'm not her pimp! Ask her yourself!"
No I didn't. I told her me and Hanna were married and after that he walked off. Lucky he did because I would have really quite liked to punch him in his stupidly idiotic face. The man who worked at the Internet cafe came over with a note that he had written out in English, although how ever he had done the translation, it hadn't quite worked as I looked at the paper and took a moment to work out just exactly what he meant by 'Are your stomachs open?' Despite our insistence that our stomachs were closed this man must have also taken a shine to young Hanna, as she later received a Facebook friend request from the complete stranger, who must have made a note of her name as he looked over her shoulder. For some reason Hanna declined his friendship.
Hanna looked online and found a bus leaving Kirikkale for Istanbul at ten the next morning. It was all happening so fast, she would be gone too soon. But I knew it was for the best, there were people in Istanbul that she could stay with, people that would look after her better than I could, until her flight back home. Our last night together in Kirikkale we splashed out on a hotel room, and went out in the evening to find some authentic Turkish food.
As we walked through the busy central streets looking for a traditional food called kumpir, which is basically a giant baked potato but stuffed with an excessive number of fillings, a man said hello to us. As we were obviously strangers in town, he wanted to help us and, although he could not speak English, he was fluent in German. I may have rather fooled him into thinking I was also with an extraordinarily well pronounced "Was ist dein name?" It was so well pronounced in fact, that I think he may even have believed I was German. He answered that his name was Osman, and he insisted on helping us to find a place to eat.
We walked up and down the street of Kirikkale following Osman as he went in and out of places asking if they served kumpir, all the time talking to us in German. Hanna nodded along and translated bits of it for me. He was a very nice man, well built and slightly balding, with slightly grey, slightly curly hair. In the movie he'll be played by David Hasselhoff. He walked with a limp but in a forthright fashion and whenever we had to cross the road he would step out first and hold out a hand to make the traffic wait while we hurried across. Finally we ended up in a fast food restaurant, where they didn't serve kumpir, but they did serve french fries in a wrap. It looked like an intriguing concept and so we decided to stay and try some. Osman knew we were vegetarian, but as the man was preparing our wraps behind the counter, he threw in a load of sliced meat too. I stepped in "No, no, vegetarian!" which luckily is very similar in Turkish. The man put the wraps to one side and started on some new ones for us. This time he threw in some sliced chicken. "No! Vegetarian!" Apparently, chickens don't count as meat in Turkey. Hanna stepped in, she's good at languages, she knew how to say 'no chicken.'
Hanna and I sat upstairs to eat our french-fries-wraps, which didn't taste as good as they sound, in plastic booths that looked just like McDonalds. It wasn't exactly the romantic meal I'd had planned for our last evening together. The meal was far too full of starch and came with a quite unnecessary free extra helping of fries. If fries in a wrap with a side of fries was a typical Turkish meal, then Turkish cuisine is not all I'd hoped it would be. And then there was the bright red plastic furniture and the headache-inducing bright lights. But I suppose the biggest mood-killer of all was the fifty year old man with a passing resemblence to David Hasselhoff who had sat himself down at the table with us and was continuing to regale us with stories in German.
After our romantic meal for three Osman declared that he was taking us for 'chai.' We then walked halfway across town, past many perfectly good tea-houses, until we finally arrived at one which he liked. We sat outside and I noted that they served some traditional Turkish food here. "This would have been a lovely place to eat" I said to Hanna. "Shh" she replied. Osman ordered us all tea and was so into speaking German with us that he even said "Danke" to the man who brought us tea, who, to his great credit, replied "Bitte." Then Osman's thirteen-year-old son turned up and sat with us (he'll be played by David Hasselhoff's son from Baywatch who, I assume, is still thirteen.) By now I had very much warmed to our host and I decided that it had actually been a lovely way to spend the evening. Hanna listened to more of his stories in German and I mostly looked around and thought about how wonderful the busy Turkish streets were by night.
Back at the hotel we both collapsed on the bed. After a while Hanna turned to me and said, "I've just realised. I don't know how to speak German."
Today's ride: 35 km (22 miles)
Total: 13,835 km (8,592 miles)
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