Back on the bike trip beat: 300km left into Istanbul. A few more nights in a tent, a few more cracks at stove cooking - and one last border crossing, the last on this wild rambling pan-European tour. We've crossed into more countries than you can fit on that damn "Countries visited prior to entering the U.S." line on those bloody customs forms they make you complete every time you want to pop over to Fortress America. In order: Denmark to Germany to Holland to Belgium to France to the UK back to France to Spain through Portugal and back into Spain across to Morocco and again into Spain then back in France to Monaco to the last tiny stretch of France to Italy to visiting the Vatican and back into Italy to Slovenia to Croatia to 10km of Bosnia to more Croatia to Montenegro to Albania to Greece - and now into Turkey, and that doesn't even count the in-flight border crossings taking us into Canada, Iceland, Switzerland...thanks to Schengen, we have precious few entry stamps to show for it; nevertheless, like faithful unpaid photojournalists, we maintain a separate album on Picasa for each stretch through a country.
Ah, but this is not the same trip anymore. We can slow down a bit now - flight leaves on the 23rd, some 11 days hence, and that's more than enough time to slug across 300km, especially for two battle-hardened cyclists used to blazing through 100+ kilometres a day. Longest day: 190km. Highest point: 1500m or so along the Camino de Santiago. Slowest day: 26km over 10 hours to cross the Pyrenees via the hiking trails from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Roncesvalles. We think about these things on occasion - just numbers, meaningless by themselves. How do you convey the magnitude of 11 000km, as we estimate our cumulative distance will be to Istanbul? You don't, except maybe in passing, some kind of Powers-of-Ten overview. 10 km from the airport to Copenhagen, 100 km to the end of the first part of Denmark, 1000 km to Amsterdam or so - and 10 000 km to Athens.
Enough of that: we start off with the ritual café stop, this time in a super-posh downtown Alexandropouli joint with red pleather-quilted walls, for a couple of frappés. These iced coffee drinks are all the rage here, but our morning stop merely serves to demonstrate our ignorance in this important cultural matter - for they are served in highly concentrated form, and are meant to be diluted before consumption. The waitress is appalled that we fail to grasp this, and insists on making - gratis, mind you - two new ones so that we may properly appreciate the wonders of frappé.
Our knowledge of frappés thereby expanded, we lurch out of Alexandropouli around 1100 to spend our last Euro - the last Euro of the trip! everything is down-to-the-wire ultimate this-or-that for us now - at the Carrefour on the periphery, grabbing such staples as snack and starch and breakfast yoghurt. We then ride for some 20km or so before starting to feel the midday hunger. Not so severe as usual, what with our lazier-than-usual morning schedule, but still there; sadly, the town we stop at barely has a schoolyard, let alone so much as a bakery or market to grab food in. For that, we have to ride up over a smallish hill into the next town 5km off, where we at last find a bakery and spend the dregs of our Euro, whatever change we had left over from the Carrefour stop. Now we really are out of Euro - well, almost; we count maybe 3€ among all our change. Another souvenir of the trip...
...and the highway connects with a motorway some 10km before the border. The only alternative is to slog up along the Greek-Turkish border for some 80 km to the other crossing by Edirne, so we grit our teeth and barge along the motorway despite the near-certainty that, like before, some policemen with zeal to match their boredom will stop us. That mercifully doesn't happen; as it turns out, this stretch is seldom travelled, and so we are treated to two lanes with a massive shoulder to ride in and maybe three vehicles to contend with the whole time. Last 2km now: so flat that we can see the first border post, the post for exiting Greece, down the road as we pick up speed in our last-border-crossing-on-bike-of-the-trip excitement. We reach it in short order, hand over our passports to the Greek officials, get stamped out of Greece, Schengen, the Eurozone, and the EU...
...and enter the largest no-man's-land we've seen, a 2km stretch of road crossing a river patrolled by a friendly joint Turkish and Greek military detail - at least as friendly as a bunch of tense youth cradling assault rifles can be. The river marks the border - there is a car bridge over it, and the railing is painted to mark the country: blue and white on the Greek side, red and white on the Turkish. More guards at the end of the bridge - and then we finally see the Turkish entry post, this massive complex with a duty-free market and several lanes to service demand at peak hours. The first customs post we pass through is staffed by a guard who evidently has never seen cyclists come through here, for he greets us with "Are you crazy?" "Yes." "I knew it! Go through." Then we enter the multi-lane madness between the customs and passport control booths. First we stop to grab Turkish lira at the duty-free market, which is equipped with an ATM for exactly this purpose - and are glad that we did, for the passport control kiosk immediately informs us that we must purchase a visa from the visa kiosk. We round up our bikes, head over to the visa kiosk, fork over 90 lira (about 45€) apiece, and receive some fancy stamps together with a small sack of mint-flavoured candies that the man staffing the visa desk generously gives us. Surely these are the most expensive mints in the world! It is more than a slight burn to shell out so much cash for our last border crossing, quite ridiculous given that borders are more or less completely open throughout Schengen, but there's no turning back now...
...and we are now in the flat agricultural part of Turkey, surrounded by more farmland than we've seen since - well, since the flatlands near Larisa, which we suppose is not so long ago; but before that, the last flatlands we saw were back before Trieste in Italy. Non-mountainous road has been a luxury for this last part, a luxury indeed, and we are immensely glad to have it in our general built-up exhaustion from which there is no escape save safe arrival in Istanbul. Farmland means another thing, too: scant land to camp on. You don't want to be sitting in your tent on some cropfield when the mechanical tillers come knocking. We find one piece of land that might be suitable, a sort of grassy patch overlooking some impassable washed-out ditches not far off the road, and pause there to cook dinner - but soon think better of it, recalling some advice from Asterix in Thessaloniki: he never camps between towns, for it is far more dangerous than the cities. No one is around to see anything, no one to hear - and even though there is a petrol station just up the hill, we fear that this close to the border we might run into vagrant border-dodgers looking to work over anyone they can find for anything they can get. We pack up the stove, let out a sigh - it was a decent site, after all, at least slightly protected from the noise of the road - and head on towards the next town...
...and, in a throwback to our Albanian days, see that the next petrol station we run into comes equipped with a smallish hotel. Why not? Might as well have some minor luxuries in this last part. We haven't really had a vacation - cycling is hard work, even more so when you're hell-bent on covering 11 000 km in six months, and we deserve the rest our bodies crave. We check in, pull our gear upstairs, and sink into a nice warm bed. Maybe we will attempt to make Tekirdag tomorrow; although we have enough time to take it slowly, we find that we are incapable this close to the end. We want to get there - to hit Istanbul running, to roll in and pack it all up and spend our time drinking tea and eating as much kebap as we can cram down our throats before hauling it all somehow to Atatürk International for the flight home. Good night!