Black Sea Day 1: Trabzon Arrival

Fast Forward

Getting you caught up: Let’s fast forward about a month to July 21st. Last I left off with the blog, Selim and I were on route from Izmir to Antalya, Turkey. We were juggling so many different things. I was teaching online so I needed a quiet place with really good wifi in order to work. I also had French class for four hours each Saturday and four hours each Sunday. It was difficult to balance wild camping and biking with a need for a reliable work environment. I spent a lot of time searching online for cafés with wifi. Sometimes, we’d arrive and the café would be closed or perhaps the hours online were incorrect. Sometimes, the internet would not work or there would be no outlets or too much noise. It was a bit exhausting on top of cooking, washing our clothes, finding a campsite, showering, writing the blog, YouTube etc. that we wanted to do on top of biking. It was also getting super hot in the South. I would have loved to go further east towards the border with Syria but it was more important to us to keep traveling by bike. So we made a decision to take the bus to Trabzon. The forecast looked promising and the Black Sea region sounded interesting so we bought our tickets once we arrived in Antalya. It was $36 USD per person, including our bikes, to take the 22-hour bus ride from Antalya to Trabzon. We lucked out and didn’t have to pay anything extra for the bikes.

We arrived in Trabzon after a very very long ride and had a conversation about how we’d handle the second leg of our trip. I had now one petit tour de vélo under my belt so I could reflect on what worked and what didn’t. We also started the second leg of our trip with a gas stove. Big win! I decided it was causing too much headache and didn’t make sense financially for us to continue to try to find AirBnB’s so that I could work or take classes. I would put my work on hold which was no big deal because with a gas stove and tent, we could do wild camping and spend $5 USD a day if we wanted. For classes, we would attempt to find a café with wifi but if that didn’t work, I would just hang out in any café with electricity and I could use my Turkcell hotspot from my phone. I think the data and talk package I bought for the entire month was less than $6 USD so that wasn’t a big financial strain either.

So with a plan for how we’d manage our energy, finances, and what our lifestyle would be like for the Black Sea leg of our tour, we were ready to get started. If you’ve been following us on Instagram or Selim on Facebook (he posts regularly there), you have probably gotten some highlights. With the blog, I’d like to try to share some tips, some stories, things we’ve learned, and people we’ve met in a more cohesive format. Hope you enjoy 🙂

Meeting Fellow Cyclists

So we arrived in Trabzon at the bus stop and we needed to get some cash so we found an ATM then headed to the town. So far the best ATMs for us have been HalkBank (Selim’s card) and ING Bank (Alyssa’s card). As we were heading into town, we met a couple of German cyclists who were in Trabzon for a couple days on their trip through Turkey to Georgia. We decided to grab a coffee together at a café near their AirBnB. We learned they had just graduated high school and were taking some time to travel before starting university studies. We chatted about our respective trips and it was really nice to connect with fellow cyclists.

Ikram

Afterwards, Selim and I grabbed something to eat. After our meal, we were given çay, our first ikram. At first, we were a bit confused because it was the first time someone had offered us tea as an act of hospitality since we had been in Turkey.(3+ weeks later in writing this, we are graciously very familiar with this). Ikram comes from the word karam which means generosity in Arabic. Ikram is a gift for a visitor and is important for Muslims as well as nonreligious folks who live in Islam-influenced societies.

Finding a wild camping spot

Trabzon is a big city, very popular with Arabic tourists in particular, so it was a bit more difficult to find a quiet place to camp. We checked iOverlander and found a parking lot near the beach so we decided to head there. There was a huge metal barrier separating the road from the beach, which was really a construction site, but we found a way to maneuver through. We decided to play a bit of cache-cache and situate our tent and bike behind construction material just in case it was a problem to camp there.

The Black Sea

In the evening, we saw a beautiful sunset and got to sleep along the coast of the Black Sea for the first time. It was interesting to think about the geopolitics of the region and the other countries that touch the Black Sea. (This region would make international headlines weeks later when the first grain shipments were negotiated between Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey to bring some relief to countries struggling with bread shortages due to the implications on the supply chain from the conflict.) We did some research and found a few reasons for the name Black Sea. Some sources says it has to do with color symbolism and cardinal directions. Black refers to North and red refers to South. Other sources say that sailors called it the Black Sea because it got so dark during storms. Not necessarily the reason for the name, but it is also interesting to note that the Black Sea is largely dead at extreme depths because it has quite unusual chemistry and large amounts of pollution.