Istanbul

Now it's nearly the end of the trip for me. Yesterday we tried to sell my bike in Lattakia but it
did not go so very well. I thinkh Per and Iwan gave it to a nice guy after I left. There was no
busses from Lattakia to Istanbul as I thought so I got on a servicetaxi to the turkish boarder and
walked over it. There were no taxis or anything there so I started to walk those five kilometers
to the nearest village. After a while I got a ride and then I met some helpful people on the taxi to
Antakia. They helped me book a bus to Istanbul (with discount) and I also had time to look at a
showroom that one of them had. After 14 hours on a bus
I'm now in Istanbul and it's raining a lot.
Picture one: Outside the furnitureshowroom in Antakia
Picture two and three: My first sight of Turkey. Not so crowded...

Thursday

Hi. We are now in Lattakia 90 kilometers north from Tartous. It's been a sunny nice day for cycling. We met the police in a little village and they asked for passports and stuf like that but when they find out we were tourists there was no problem. There was no vegetarian food along the road today so I only had breakfast (croisant with cheese) and now 30 minutes ago pizza at the Italian Corner here in Lattakia. Tomorrow I'm going to try and sell my Gasoline-Bike and then take a bus to Istanbul. Per and Iwan is going to continue a couple of days.

It seems like I'm blocked to put up pictures today as well.

Day 4 of the cycling tour (today)

I felt better this morning and we were about to go when we realized Iwan had a flat tire. When we got that fixed the rain was all over us again. We waited for 1,5 hours and then we drove away even if it still was raining. Today we have seen some really nice landscaped and we just arrived the sea again in a town called Tartousa. We are sleeping at Grand Hotel.
(pictures will be posted later on)

Day 3 (Tuesday)

View from the Castle.

We looked at the castle early in the morning and said goodbye to our friend and then we took off. After some nice driving down the hills it started to go upwards again and the rain started to come down on us. I got really sick and we had to find a hotel close nearby. We wrented a room on the roof of the restaurant were we had lunch. This they we traveled about 2 kilometers and then I just layed in a bed watching tv.

Day 2 (Monday)

Dinner in the Kiosk.

Coffebreak on the highway.

Transportation of the injuered bike.

We started to climb a big mountain even before breakfast but we turned around pretty soon because Per had a flat tire. We tryed to fix it in Manulolo but after a while we asked someone to drive us to the next town called Homs. From Homs we went on the highway with all the heavy traffic and then on some small roads until we came to Craq des Cheavaliers. We found a new friend there and we had dinner at his little shop and got to bed early.

Day 1 (sunday)

We had dinner with everybody else at this fancy reataurant.

Iwan is having a rest at the top of a mountain.

There were at least some kids that were happy to see us. They lived in Malouolo. Maloulolo is the only place in the world where they still speak the old language spoken by Jesus Christ.

The weather were okay so we decided to leave Damascus. After about 1 hour we started to have some problems. One of them was that one of Pers pedals (pedaler pa svenska) fell off. That was the first sign of the quality of our bikes.
We managed to go over some pretty high mountains and the kids in the small villages threw snowballs at us. They were proaberly just playing with us but they threw pretty hard. We ended up sleeping in a christian convent in a village called Manilulo.
(pictures will be posted)

Message

I was going to write all the details of our first 4 days cycling tour but there is a problem with access to blogger.com here in Syria. The other internetcafes I've been to were able to get around that somehow but this place is more strict. That means I can't post any pictures at the moment (and not log in to facebook).