A Sting In The Tail

After leaving Cappadocia we rode 600 odd km to Mt Nemrut, an ancient mountaintop burial mount about 2200m high. We rode up an amazing road on a ridge at sunset and were treated to a spectacular view of the surrounding area. We decided to sleep rough that night on George's ground mat as there was very little room to put up any tents. The plan was to get up early and watch the sunrise from the top of the mountain. At some point in the night I rolled over and suddenly felt a sharp prick on my cheek and shrugged it off as being the needle and thread that I keep in my jacket I was using for a pillow. After a couple of minutes I realised that my needle and thread was actually in my rucksack and the prick was starting to tingle. I had the feeling that I might have been gotten by a scorpion, and not wanting to find the bugger decided to try and get some sleep on the safety of a bench for the rest of the night - a difficult job as some turkish chav - aged about 60, decided it would be a good idea to rev his car engine at stupid o clock in the morning.

Just before sunrise we got up and began to pack our things away. I found the scorpion that had gotten me under my jacket. By now the tingling had gone away. Scorpion stings aren't even as bad as mosquito bites and I'm sure the skin on my cheek is much smoother now. We climbed a bit further up the mountain amonst noisy Turks complaining about doing exercise is my guess, to watch a fantastic sunrise. The very top of the mountain is an artificial burial ground and around the base are giant head sculptures, similar to those found on Easter Island, of ancient Greek heroes.

That day we descended the mountain with the plan being to get a ferry across the Ataturk Reservoir. We had to wait for almost 2 hours for the ferry to turn up and for everyone to faff about loading and unloading for what turned out to be a 5 minute crossing. They don't even bother to close the loading ramp which was an interested experience sat on a fully loaded bike in front of it.

That day we made our way through a small Kurdish region to Erzurum. There were a few folk wandering around with guns but mostly people honked their horns and waved at us. Erzurum is one of the last large Eastern Turkish cities where I hope to obtain my Iranian visa, the problem being that it's a Bank Holiday in the UK meaning I can't ring Persian Voyages and the Iranian consulate is only open from 8-12pm on certain days together with the fact that Turkey is 2 hours ahead of the UK so I need to time everything to perfection to make sure I can get things done when places are open. The hotel is only 20 lira a night and food is cheap so it's a case of not getting bored since I walked around most of the interesting places, if you can call them that, yesterday.

I've spent the time getting to grips with Picasa and have uploaded all my photos to that with a link from the top of the blog so enjoy!