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In Which I Reach The Golden Horn
October 15, 2008 by Mike
Istanbul
Route: Gaziköy - Kumbağ - Tekirdağ - Istanbul
I rode my motorbike in to Istanbul today.
Sorry, but I'm going to repeat that.
I rode my motorbike in to Istanbul today.
I rode my motorbike in to Istanbul today.
Me! Little Mike from Norwich. From my Cycling Proficiency Test to this. Wow!
(If you chance to read these words while you're biking up the Limpopo, across the Darian Gap or down Ruta 40, please don't mock.)
It was a bit of a schlepp, more than I'd been expecting. Very glad I didn't ride past Gaziköy last night in the twilight. The roads are in a state and the traffic is very heavy:
.. and after a few miles the road shoots up, up and away into the clouds. Interesting views. You need a head for heights to ride around this coast:
.. through a village, Uçmakdere, so hidden, so forgotten, so utterly not of the 21st century, so decrepit and dirty, a haggard crone squatting on her threshold, a pair of drunk peasants asleep on broken chairs under the village tree at 11 in the morning, dirty dogs snoring in the middle of the one road.. so beyond despair that it made Gaziköy look like New York. Hell, it even makes Ipswich look like.. well. no, I can't bring myself to say it.
Until, after the road had got wider and the villages had started to become towns and the donkeys had become carts and the carts had become cars and trembling, belching lorries and buses full of silent, sad faces and the houses weren't dirt shacks anymore but were now vast, crumpled, concrete apartment blocks, row after row at first, now all thoughts of the countryside banished, a non-stop high-rise forest by the time I turn off the highway and ride the last miles through the 'burbs of Istanbul, no distinguishing features, no high streets or public buildings or parks or character, no roadsigns indicating I might be going the right way (and no way of staying next to the sea, as public roads lead without warning straight in to dockyards or factories or curl uphill and I have to double-back and switch round and second guess.
The population of Istanbul has doubled in the last 17 years. Millions of people live in a world beyond civic planning or planning permission or aesthetics.
Incredible to see. Incredible to ride through. Very lucky that I can ride through, without having to stop, and live.
There is a famous -- mythical? -- Istanbul character who lives in the city but has never seen the Bosphorus. Not I.
I ride on, instead into the centre of Istanbul, heart of two great empires and now of a modern nation state. Past Byzantine city walls and Ottoman villas, catching sight of the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace and there's the Bosphorus with Asia almost within reach on the other side and the Sülimaniyeand Fatih Camii Mosques before crossing a bridge over the Golden Horn to Taksim Square.
How many iconicexotichistorichypnotic landmarks can one city have?
How many cities are there like Istanbul?
And, because I'm not trying to write travel blurbs for anyone's Tourist Office, what's this place really like?
How is it to live inside a population explosion, at the cusp of two continents, in an officially secular country run by a faith-based political party, what's the traffic like, and the food, and the football, and where can we get a drink while looking out over the rooftops to the Blue Mosque and to Asia, or sit in a colonnaded arcade or a packed outdoor back-street bar rammed with students and philosophers and Austrian buskers all drinking Efes and laughing and gossiping and catching up with a local biker I bumped into for five minutes in Italy in March, who I've emailed and txted in the last week or so, and who -- off his own bat and out of the goodness of his big heart -- has arranged parking for the bike and a hotel for me, and got an evening pass off his wife to introduce me to his city and his country and everything I've just described and so much more.
Erkut, you're a good man and a good friend.
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