Here is the blog post, written in your style.
Distance: 119km
Elevation: 910m
The night had been good enough. I woke up a couple of times because of sounds nearby, but on the whole I got enough sleep. The morning started cold. While making breakfast I had an extra jacket on. Forty-five minutes after the sun came up the jacket was long gone and I was already too warm. By quarter to nine I was on the road.
The first goal was Aksaray, forty kilometers away and the end of the plateau I had been cycling on. It also marked the entry into the Cappadocian mountains. I had read about a good bike mechanic there, so I went to Mohammed and got my gears and chain fixed. He also checked the brakes and the spokes. A small inspection with no waiting time. I had a chai and was back on the road within fifteen minutes. It was that easy.
After that I found a pharmacy and picked up lip balm with UV protection. I stopped for an early lunch and tried a drink that turned out to be fermented carrot juice. A difficult taste at first. Bittersweet, slightly fermented. It grows on you when it is cold. Something new, at least.
Then the climbing started. On my right I would see Hasan Dağı (Mount Hasan) with its 3.300m summit still covered with snow.
For the entire day I stayed on the highway because there were no real alternatives if you wanted to cover distance. In the mountains the shoulder kept cutting in and out, which created a problem. At times I had to cycle alongside trucks on a four-lane road. Some drivers cannot or will not make space, especially when there is another vehicle beside them, or when they are on their phones. There were a few close moments. Nothing happened, but a few of those drivers have no business behind the wheel of a truck. I was angry, upset and cursed a lot.
It was getting warm and I made many stops at gas stations. As I have said before, the infrastructure here is above average. There is a station roughly every twenty kilometers. On one particularly steep climb, I felt my eyes nearly pop out of my head. At the top, another cyclist caught me up. Jia is cycling from London to Shanghai on an electric road bike covering about 100km a day. We compared gear and talked for a bit. Rain was coming in, and since we were both heading to the same town and had a rest day coming up, we exchanged numbers and agreed to reconnect.
With his motor he moved faster than I did, but at the next gas station we met again and continued the conversation. Jia is 42 years old and on a six-month sabbatical. His boss did not believe he was serious at first, but once he bought the bike it became clear he meant it. He was actually not an experienced cyclist yet. In fact his saddle position was about 5-8cm too low. He has been on the road for two months already. His wife was meeting him along the way, last time in Milan.
When the rain arrived we both rode on.
I managed to stay pretty dry and cycle out ahead of the rain the remaining distance. Let’s say it was very slow rain cloud.
In the evening I arrived at Nevsehir and continued to the nearby village of Nar. Nar is considered one of the centers of Cappadocia’s cave architecture. It is sitting on the rim of a deep volcanic valley in the heart of Cappadocia. The valley drops sharply below the village and the slopes are lined with cave dwellings and rock-cut facades carved into the soft tufa, many of them centuries old and some still in use. It is not a tourist destination in the way that Goreme or Uchisar are, which is part of what makes it worth visiting. The Nar valley is quiet, and the cave architecture here feels lived-in rather than preserved for display. For anyone cycling through Cappadocia and looking for a place to stop and slow down, it is a good choice.
I had booked myself a room in a cave hotel for my rest day, and I had been looking forward to it. Once I arrived I had to go back out to find groceries because there were no shops nearby and the hotel only serves breakfast. The tourist infrastructure here is not what you would call complete.
The Babili family runs the hotel. They were welcoming and kind. They served tea and showed me my room. They also offered to take my clothes for washing which were meanwhile covered with salt marks from my sweating.
When I head out again I will have a clean set and will no longer smell like a beaver. The honest truth is that on the road you do not have a mirror and you do not smell yourself, so it was not actually a problem. Coming off the road and into a hotel in the evenings does create a slight feeling of displacement. But I enjoyed the rhythm of the last three days and I intend to keep it going.
I called my wife and talked through the day. Then I went to bed early, spent too long scrolling through social media because I could and because I had electricity and internet access and nothing pressing left to do. That is my tendency when everything is available in abundance. I slept well in my cave.
A few things stayed with me from the day. Some truck drivers should not be driving trucks, or anything else for that matter. It is inspiring to see what targets people set for themselves when they decide to. And nature still finds ways to surprise you with its beauty, if you are paying attention.