Last night in Europe

Day 11 588 km (4185 km total)

A very long hot ride today charecterised by an interesting first 2 hours then 6 boring ones and a pleasant surprise at the end.

I set off after a nice breakfast including real greek yoghurt & honey (a favourite of mine, never tastes the same back home) with the aim of getting a bit closer to one or more of the monestaries for which the area is famous.

I had been warned they were quite touristy and didnt have time to go inside anyway, so plotted a route that looked like it would give me a reasonable view. That it did and then some!

The road itself was great fun as it twisted & turned like a bucket of eels

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I wasnt quite sure if those stone walls with gaps in were actual crash barriers or just to give you something to aim for, they were quite mesmerising on a long bend, with very steep drops on the other side.

All of a sudden round a bend I got a glimps of what all the fuss was about ...

 

And then they were all over the place ...

 

 

All very impressive & worthy of a re-visit one day. There is even a spare peak left over if you fancy having a go at building one - subject to planning permission & modern day health & safety regs of course!

Then it was back down the windy road & head for the toll road for the long haul to the Turkish border.

The most impressive thing anout the toll road is the engineering, as I mentioned yesterday.

The picture anove shows one of the many bridge /tunnel combinations.

I entered the toll road just to the left of the picture , came through the tunnel, across the bridge & into another tunnel through the next hill. I counted 15 such tunnel/bridge combinations in my first 40 minutes, with the tunnels ranging crom 350m to 3km - simply stunning!

Once out of the mountains though the road becomes your standard motorway, like the M1 but without the roadworks or traffic. I was on the same road for nearly 5 hours - yawn!

Eventually just as the signs for the Turkish border appeared I exited and turned inland to a little village called Tychero, and headed for a homestay I had spied - & very nice it is too sitting in the garden with a cold one.

Big & long day tomorrow, crossing the border into Turkey, leaving Europe, the Euro & UK insurance cover behind & heading through Istanbul (not stopping except for the inevitable traffic jams) and into Asian Turkey.