Tayakadin to Istanbul

July 20th
55km (879m vertical)

After 4,056km, we made it to Istanbul! This Orient Express trip is over and most of the other riders are now heading home. Only Graeme, Manon, Nicole, Al, Fred, Stewart, Mike and I will carry on to Beijing next week. In the meantime, I'm off to Moscow for the next five days. Looking forward to a change of pace and some time off the bike.

Very pretty last day of cycling in Europe, but little things seemed to go wrong for me all day. There was a lovely curving downhill, but I dropped my chain at the very top of it so I had to take the whole hill without pedaling. (There was no where to pull over until the bottom.) Then my cycling computer stopped working properly, since the sensor was loose from all the bumpy roads. Finally, just as I pulled up to the mighty Bosporus I filled up my camera's memory card and had to start deleting old photos in order to take new ones.

At the finish line there was a little celebration on the river before we all got onto a boat and cruised to our hotel nearer downtown Istanbul. The river is beautiful, with lots of lively cafes along the banks and apartment buildings mixed in with plenty of green trees on the hills beside the river. There were many local swimmers, who waved and called out to our boat.

It turns out that the Silk Route tour to Beijing starts from a different hotel than this Orient Express trip ends at, so Al and I took our bikes over to the new hotel this afternoon. We bought a map, cycled 2km along the Bosporus, took a ferry across to the Asian side, rode a frantic 2km the wrong way on a busy one way street, then climbed a steep hill for 100m to reach the new hotel. Our only saving grace is that the traffic was so heavy that it wasn't moving. This made cycling safer, but our taxi ride back to the first hotel took forever.

Early morning climb:

Grassy valley (with children playing soccer):

The Bosporus!
Me on the boat.

Manon, Graeme, Nicole and me relaxing on the boat.