The next day Hanna was not better and so we spent a day resting at the house. She hadn't been eating much, complaining of stomach pains, and her heart rate was unusually high. I was very concerned about her but as the day went on she brightened up and we went for a walk together through the village and in the evening she got her appetite back and ate plenty of soup. After a second night in the house she looked much better by morning and said that she wanted to keep cycling, and so we packed up and prepared to move on.

Heart

3

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

Pretty much the first eighteen kilometres of the day were all downhill and went very well, but then the climbing started again. There were three or four steep sections on the way up to the town of Bala, and Hanna was struggling. At one point she came up behind me and told me that she couldn't breath, which, you know, was a bit worrying. Luckily it turned out to not actually be literally true. But she still wasn't eating enough to get her strength back, and I was worried.

Heart

3

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

We had by now given up on the idea of going south to Cappadocia and were planning to turn north and go up to Samsun to follow the Black Sea coast towards Georgia. The coast road would be pretty flat, but the trouble was that Samsun was 400km away and it would be hilly all the way before then. We went to an Internet cafe in Bala and there were buses parked outside. I was ready to suggest that Hanna take a bus to Samsun and wait for me there, but after checking the elevation profile of the route to Samsun it didn't look as bad as all that. Bala was the highest point that we would be at, and there was only one climb that was worse than the one we'd just done. So we decided to try and continue, both of us cycling.

Heart

2

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

Although much of the rest of the day was downhill there were a few steep climbs. On one of these I was leading the way when I heard a crashing noise behind me, which was unmistakeably the sound of Hanna's bike falling to the ground. I looked back and saw that she had fallen with it, and was lying prone on the ground, legs tangled with the bike. It was one of those moments when time seemed to go in super slow motion and a thousand thoughts ran through my head. Her telling me that she couldn't breath earlier. Her telling me that her heart rate was high the previous day. Now she was lying motionless on the ground. Her eyes were closed. Was she breathing? Was she conscious? I was vaguely aware of the sound of my own bike crashing to the ground behind me as I ran towards her. Life-saving lessons from ten years previous flashed through my head. A-B-C - Airway, Breathing, Circumsision...no thats not it, circum... circa... I could see a van coming up the hill behind her. It was one of these vans that drive around wailing out political messages from loudspeakers. Right now it was wailing out some kind of Turkish music like a siren. I decided it would make a very good ambulance. I made a mental note to flag it down. All of these things happened in a split second. Then I was next to Hanna and her eyes opened. That was a good sign. She opened her mouth and said "I'm okay, I'm alright." That was a very good sign. She was back on her feet by the time her ambulance pulled up. I made sign language to the guy in the passenger seat that she was okay and we wouldn't be needing any help after all and that they could go back to wailing out their political music. In fact it turned out that the reason for the fall was that Hanna had turned her head to look at the noisy van behind her, and in doing so had lost her balance.

We were on a smaller road at the end of the day and luckily found a good place to camp behind some trees. The landscape all day had been vast open tundra with nowhere to camp, so we were very fortunate to find this place. But Hanna looked completely wiped out and hardly ate anything again for dinner, even though I was pleading with her to. I knew that burning 4000 calories a day and only consuming 1000 was an equation that was going to end in disaster. She needed more rest but I wasn't sure what the best course of action was.