The heat was horrendous, totally stuffy and airless, no wind and around 40 degrees Celsius.  It was in these conditions that we tried to advance, with a lot of pain uphill, at around 6km/h.

We stopped at most petrol stations, to freshen up a bit, pour water on our heads, have a drink and eat an icecream.

On leaving after one of these petrol station stopovers, Zita noticed that she couldn’t change gear, the Rohloff gear lever was not doing anything, in fact it was in neutral, no resistance, like until now. We got a bit frightened first, but I found the origin of the problem quite quickly, as it was quite obvious. The problem was not serious, it was only a small screw that got loose during our 4000km journey, as that is the mileage of these bikes since we had them.

The next section can be characterised as cycling in the cruel sunshine.

We got benighted before Nevsehir.

It was one hell of a tough day, but finally we did arrive in Nevsehir. Had I given it any thought beforehand, I would have realised that it would be this tough and perhaps we would have decided not to leave this late as I don’t think it was worth gaining this extra day at the cost of such a hard, extremely exhausting day finished off in the dark. Perhaps it would have been even more clever to leave 3-4 hours earlier.

Once at Mehmet’s, everything turned out OK, we had dinner, chatted a bit, followed by falling onto our matrasses.  By the way Mehmet is a brain researcher, sort of psychologist, loves his speciality a  lot, I am jealous of people like him: a man who has found his passion in his work, lucky man!

Our next stop was 20km on, where according to our custom we stopped at a petrol station to eat a 60Ft icecream. We were just about to leave when I discovered that they had free WiFi with net access there.
I quickly went on line and happily spotted that Cihan from Aksaray responded on the Couchsurfing site and he was expecting us.As we were nearing  Aksaray, the outline of Hasan Dagi, the 3000+m high volcano, that  dominates the background of the town, came into focus.

We easily rode into town, found the main square quickly with its mosque and Ata Türk sculpture.

We were Cihan’s first Couchsurfing guests. We had a quick shower, followed by shoving a large amount of dirty stuff into the washing machine.For  dinner we went out for a bottle of ayran and a portion of köfte, the latter we used for meat to go with the spaghetti. Dinner was extremely successful.

Cihan did everything he could for his first guests. Even though we only asked for one night on the couch, he thought that we would be very tired, so he had a copy made of the flat key. As it happened, we didn’t manage to leave with him in the morning, although the night before we were planning an early departure, we overslept and were dreaming for most of the morning. So the spare key came in very handy.

Óriás csirkés szendvics ayrannal - 2TL-ért (240 Forintért)

Giant chicken sandwhich with ayran – for 2TL (240Ft) one of our favourite foods!