MONDAY Kelly and I walked into Maçka and changed money then hitched a ride back to the camp. We spent the rest of the day doing nothing!

We checked out of the hotel and caught a dolmüs out to Maçka.  We bought some bread and tomatoes then set off to walk the 3 1/2 km out to the camping ground. By the time we got there it was stinking hot so he pitched the tent and spent the rest of the day watching the crowds of locals who flocked out to have lunch at the camp restaurant. We also did some washing and aired all our gear out.

RETREAT FROM UZUNGÖL At 7:00 I crawled out of the tent into a cold, wet and gloomy morning. We packed up our camp in the misty rain and walked down to the hotel where we had çay and the cook boiled our four remaining eggs for us. By the time we got to Uzungöl a cold driving drizzle had settled in and as we sat waiting for some kind of transport down to Çaykara it got progressively colder and wetter.  The village was quiet as a graveyard and the only movement was the occasional villager walking past staring at us as if we were mad!

Eventually, a dolmüs arrived and we loaded ourselves in for the trip down. Directly below the village, the river began its steep descent down the head of the lower valley, the water leaping and rushing over the black boulders strewn down its bed. Further down, as the stream gathered momentum, the valley narrowed until the water was descending in a series of low waterfalls and tortured cataracts. All around us were the eternal and endless greens of the deciduous trees, blending perfectly with the dark olive shades of the conifers while interspersed with both were the myriad shades of green and yellow mosses and ivy.

By the time we reached Çaycara, it was raining solidly and the waters of the stream flowing down from Uzungöl merged with those of another stream to form a foaming and roiling river. The dolmus stopped for an hour long lunch break but we stayed inside while the rain beat a steady tattoo on the roof. When we left Çaycara we bumped our way down the road to Ob and the murky Black Sea then turned west along the coast road to Trabzon.

When we arrived in the city of Trabzon we checked into the first hotel we found and each had a wonderfully HOT shower. After relaxing for a couple of hours we went out for some food at a Lokanta then went back to the Otel Çoruh Palais and retired.

THURSDAY. Morning… and the sun is finally shining and the mist is completely gone. I got up at 7 and walked a couple of hundred metres upstream and took some photographs then went back to camp and got the fire going. By the time we had breakfasted on boiled eggs, tomatoes and bread it was warm and sunny so Kelly and I went for a walk up the river leaving Linda to mind the camp.

The sun was warm upon us as we followed the river upstream, it’s bed slowly gathering steepness and the cold, clear water gathering speed as it leapt over the boulders and swirled over the roots of overhanging trees. The sides of the valley rose steeply above us with the trees growing thickly upon them in a beautiful pattern of greens. above the treeline, wide alpine meadows covered the mountain tops, the green of the grass is mingled with the yellow and purple of wildflowers. Dotted about the high meadows were houses of dark stained wood giving the whole area a distinctly Swiss look.

Eventually we tired of walking and headed back down to camp where Linda had set out all our gear out to air.  We sat around for a while then Linda and I headed off down the valley to explore.  We stopped at the hotel for a Coke then carried on down past the lake, it’s waters now a beautiful turquoise blue colour.  There was a road leading up through the cluster of wooden houses on the hill above the village so we followed it until we had a panoramic view of the lake with the twin minarets of the mosque in the foreground and the dark greens of the mountains beyond. 

We sat for an hour amongst the profusion of wildflowers growing beside the track and soaked up the warmth of the sun while below us people toiled in their fields, children laughed and chatted and the eerie call of the musseins echoed up from the mosque. On our way back up the valley we sat beside the lake eating hot bread, a chocolate bar each and locum which we had bought in the village.  We also stopped again at the hotel for a Coke and to pinch [steal] some salt.

When we got back to camp I rigged up a fishing rod with a stick, some catgut and a hook that I’d bought in the village and went off to try my luck at fishing. I pissed around for an hour so without getting a bite so we had to have boiled eggs and homemade tomato soup, eaten out of an empty can for supper!  We sat around the campfire yarning for a while then crawled into the tent as the mist it once again rolled in. During the night it rained and there was thunder and lightning.

When we woke up at 8:00, the mist was still hanging around the hills but was showing signs of clearing so we packed up our gear then Linda and I set off up the road to find a campsite.  Kelly wasn’t feeling well so we left her sitting on the porch of the hotel. We walked for about 20 minutes until we found a perfect campsite amongst some trees next to the river. It was obvious from the number of old campfires and the amount of rubbish lying around that people had camped there before. I left Linda sitting in the sun, which had broken through the mist, and hitched back to the hotel to get Kelly and her stuff. We hitched a ride back up the valley in a dump truck and set up our camp. I spent an hour or so collecting firewood and while I was doing that the mist rolled in again.

Once we were fully settled in,  Linda and I left Kelly to guard the camp and set off down to Uzungöl to buy some more food.  We tried to buy some fish from one of the two fish farms on the outskirts of the  village but it was too expensive so instead we bought a dozen eggs, some tomatoes, garlic, spuds, onions and a saucepan and three forks.

Back at camp we got the fire going and cooked up scrambled eggs and jacket potatoes then crawled into the tent to play cards.

REST DAY  We got up at 4:30 a.m. broke camp and went down for a swim in the sea.  We walked 3km into the town of Ahavi and caught a bus to Rize. We spent an hour or so at the local tourist office gathering information about places to visit in the hills then found a cheap hotel and stopped…

The bus arrived in Erzurum at 7:30 a.m. and we unloaded our stuff and went into the bus station to find onward transport. We got a bus to Tortum for 3,000TL each and got a board to wait for it to depart. Erzurum is the highest town in Turkey at over 2,000 metres and the beautiful steppeland around it was lush with spring growth. A myriad of alpine flowers were growing in the fields amongst thousands of small clear streams. As the bus drove further into the hills we passed many mobs of sheep and cattle tended by shepherds as they grazed the lush pastures.

Finally,  we drove over a saddle and descended into a long rugged valley until we reached the town of Tortum, nestling in a canyon full of poplar trees. We walked up into the centre of town and asked about transport down to Tortum Golu and were told the only way was by taxi which would cost 4,000TL.  We agreed on the price and loaded our stuff into the boot of a battered old car and drove down to Uzündere, 37 km away.  When we got there we were still 5 km from the lake so the taxi driver waited while we bought some bread and veggies then we carried on down to the lake.  We couldn’t find any likely camping spots as the lake filled a deep gorge, its sides plunging straight into the water so we carried on down to the bottom end of the lake where a 45m waterfall dropped the headwaters of the Çhoru River into the valley below.

Then disaster struck!  The taxi driver wanted 70,000TL for the trip –  he reckoned that the fare from Tortum to Uzündere was 40,000…not 4,000. We argued with him for 10 minutes and gave him 17,000TL and a 5 pound note, telling him he would get 100,000TL for it. He left in a huff and we decided not to camp straight away but to walk a few miles down the road. Unfortunately, the taxi driver wasn’t as stupid as we thought and he came back about 2 hours later with the local bank manager who reckoned the fiver was only worth 27,000TL, which was about right!  We had another long argument and ended up giving him another £5 and US$5.

Feeling very pissed off we walked on down the road which now entered a deep gorge with the river becoming progressively swifter and wilder as the valley deepened.  We managed to hitch a ride on the back of a truck which took us 10 km down the gorge to a service station. We had a drink there while the local men leered at us, then hit the road again. Only 200m from the service station we met an American guy sitting beside the river with four kayaks reading a book. We got talking to him and he told us that there weren’t many campsites all the way down to Artvin, 70 km away, and that the gorge got even narrower further down. While we were talking to him, his five mates turned up in two very tired rental cars and we yarned to them as well. They were all rich know-alls from California and when we left them Kelly was spitting sparks about rich yuppie computer geeks!!

About a mile further down the gorge we finally found a spot to camp on a small flat area of ground under some towering cliffs about 50m above the road.  We set up camp and I built a low rock wall to screen the tent from the road¹. It wasn’t an ideal spot but it was better than nothing and after sneaking down to the river for a cold bath,ducking behind rocks every time a vehicle went past, we fell exhausted into the tent and slept.

¹Freedom camping in Turkey, especially close to the Russian border, where we were, was illegal. We therefore had to make sure that we weren’t observed whenever we camped over the next few days.

Steve and I got up at 4:15 a.m. to watch the sunrise.  The wind was still howling in from the west and the sunrise was, like the sunset the previous night, wholly unremarkable. We packed our gear and walked back down to the hotel where a dölmus arrived to take us back to Malatya.  As we descended the steep hill we passed the same people as yesterday, riding their donkey’s up the hill to gather winter feed for their animals. The women kept their heads bowed to avoid looking at us but the driver stopped to talk to one man and his daughter couldn’t help but look at us.  She was beautiful, with long dark hair and alert blue eyes.  Sadly I thought, it will only take a few years before the harsh climate and hard work will turn her into a weathered crone like the rest of the women we saw up there.

The trip back to Malatya was quite speedy despite having two flat tyres, and we got there at about 9:30a.m.  We walked up to the information office to see what else we could do in the area, but there wasn’t much to see around Malatya so we decided to catch the night bus further east to the town of Erzurum.

After a meal at a lokanta¹ we lugged our gear to the bus station, bought tickets and left our packs in the waiting room. With a whole day to fill in we went first to a trashy Chuck Norris movie overdubbed in Turkish, then found a tea garden and sat there for 2 hours. We watched an army parade in the main street and wandered around the market for a while.  I bought a little sheep’s bell from a hardware store and we sat drinking çay with the owner while we worked out a price (2,500TL).

Finally with nothing else to do we walked back to the bus station and had a wash in the toilets.  A  kiwi guy called Tom was waiting for a bus to van so we swapped stories with him for a while.  When the bus turned up it had been badly overbooked and it was an hour later when we finally left Malatya and began our uncomfortable 10 hour journey to Ezurum.

¹ A lokanta is a small, family-run restaurant serving food through the middle of the day.