Last miles passing...
Gliding under wheels, now gone...
Istanbul: the end.
Well, here we are! It seems silly to try to describe our emotions as we found our way into Istanbul this afternoon. It marks the end of something big: 11,000km (more or less), 20 countries (if you count things like the Vatican), 6 months (today's the official anniversary of the start), and way more time together than either of us has really spent in the company of other people. It marks the beginning of something bigger: Evan's transition to "real life" (starting a job!) and mine to... something else (work, then grad school?). It's the end of tiredness. It's the re-beginning of comfort. We're not even sure what it is; everything is jumbled up in our minds from six months of adventures, and Istanbul will be the place to sort it out.
Getting here wasn't easy.
I'm not just talking about the mental jabber I just shared, but today's ride was not trivial. Our intent in camping so close last night was to roll lazily into the city at 10 or so and enjoy it for the day, but the way was more harrowing than we could have imagined. It was supposed to be about 40km, but with detours we decided it was closer to 60, and with Istanbul being a megacity (12.8 millions in the city), all the roads leading to it are arterial. We started, after a giant climb from the sea up to a few hundred metres, on the road we took yesterday, and since it's now Monday the way was orders of magnitude busier. But it took time to even get that far.
I guess the day really started when we woke up and realised that my tyre was flat. Last night's trip over the gravelly coastal road had taken its toll, so we decided that rather than take it further down the coast we would haul our bikes up a few flights of (outdoor) stairs to start afresh on something a bit more paved. We had a bit of a tiff: emotions were running high as we both don't know what's going to happen after this trip concludes. We passed randomly through residential areas in search of a major road, which we finally found after half an hour or so. We stretched for the last time, and the song we chose to sing (we always sing a song at the conclusion of our stretching, during the knee rotations) was, appropriately and unsurprisingly, "The Final Countdown."
Shortly, we found a swank pastry/tea shop to pause at and gather ourselves before the rest of the ride. Everyone but us was wearing three-piece suits to sit down for tea. We were wearing our cycling outfits. From there we hit the motorway-like highway discussed earlier.
We sped along: the road was flat and fast, and the shoulder was wide-enough to accommodate our loaded bicycles, side-by-side at some points. As we neared the city, the flat turned to rolling hills: terrifying for tiny bicycles who can't be seen around blind curves. At the bottom of one such hill we were greeted with a large and invisible pothole which shook Evan's bungee cords out of alignment and caused us to stop to fix them. We powered through a few minutes' more of traffic before we noticed that his tyre was flatted by the impact, too. We pulled off in a spot that was once an exit to a residential street to fix it and eat lunch to calm ourselves down. It's immensely stressful to bike so fast and barely be able to hear each other... but we were confident we were nearly there.
The road became more and more major, and we were soon desperate to find a way off. A smaller road that wrapped around the airport and came along the coast from the south looked promising, so we charged southward in hopes of finding it. The traffic immediately calmed.
We finally hit the coast again south of the main city, and there were even bike paths along the parks there! Unfortunately, they were absolute rubbish -- populated more with fragments of broken glass and uneven cobblestones than cyclists -- and we didn't deem it necessary to stick to them for long. The side of the road would do.
Eventually, we made it to the city centre. But that wasn't quite our goal. We wanted to hit 4 continents with this trip: North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. We had to cross the bridge for that last one.
Only two bridges appear on our map that cross the Bosphorous, and both are marked motorways. That seems silly, doesn't it? Can they possibly only allow cars across something so important? Ridiculous! We wanted to try our luck at crossing, so we followed the signs and found ourselves at the European end of the bridge with the end in sight...!
But the police were in sight, too. They sent us back. When I say, "they sent us back," I don't mean that they pointed us at a road going the other direction, but rather that they had us turn around and bike/walk against traffic along the same road we'd taken to get to the bridge. That was possibly our most terrifying cycling experience on the entire trip.
So, what to do? We can't bike across the straits, so we settled for a ferry. We had no business relaxing until we completed the route we'd set for ourselves, so we dashed back along the coast to the ferry terminals we'd seen a few kilometres back and hopped the first boat across.
Despite the fact that we felt like our ride to the ferries was a "bike of shame," we were still excessively animated on the ride over. The end of the trip! We were confident we'd done our damndest to bike as close to Asia as we could, and we were being rewarded for our efforts. Even with all the "shortcuts" we took along the trip (renting that car in France, the several ferries and train rides scattered through everywhere...), we still estimate we went over 11,000km in total, and we had a damn lot of fun doing it. As we set foot on the new continent, we clutched at each other and dropped our bikes and whooped and hollered and generally confused/concerned everyone around us. But that was it. It was all we could do. It seems strange to think that there was no seismic shift in our lives by crossing that strait, but the changes came slowly over the entirety of the trip. We're both more sure of ourselves and the limits of our capabilities. We have ideas for "where to go from here." We feel we understand the nature of people and their interactions with each other and their environments, and we've seen the very best and very worst of human nature. We tried to express some of our emotions to each other on the docks, but it was useless. We'd been expressing them for 6 months. That landing, more than a symbol of our determination, really just meant that we had to find a hostel to stay in for the night.
We hit a café for some tea and poked around HostelWorld enough to find arch-ist, a little place just off Taksim square (on the European side) in the central shopping district of Istanbul. Istiklal, the heavily-touristed street, is just a few blocks over, and it's nice and quiet at night where we are. We're staying in tonight, hoping to reminisce about our adventures and calm down. We're playing games (still working through Wolf3D and Indiana Jones) and drinking beers and chatting with the hostel staff. No one's really around on Monday nights, so we've pretty much got the place to ourselves. It's a nice place to think, and we're looking forward to our "reintegration week." We're planning some excursions around the city (things like Topkapi Palace, the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and the Bosphorous cruise are touristic musts) and some relaxing days (we want to get massages and to visit the Turkish baths), as well as some days for making ourselves presentable (we're talking beard trims, haircuts, and new clothes). I know a couple people in the area that we're planning to hook up with for lunches or daytrips or whatever, and it's rapidly looking like our week of rest will be nearly as full as our months of biking. So it goes.