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2 Mar 2012

Day 176: Sarkisla-Sivas

I was woken by the sun before the alarm clock set on a rather early hour could wake me. At eight I was on the road. It was not long before I found myself under snow clouds again. The road was free and the asphalt was steaming. The sight was short because of the snow fall and the myst. Around this plateau I was crossing truckers and google maps topographic views was promising a lot of impressive mountains. I did not see one. I just saw a couple of dozens meters of the black road and beside mostly white stuff. Sometimes the sun pushed a tiny bit through the clouds, hinting a couple of shadows into the white. To my own astonishment riding in these conditions was actually enjoyable. The atmosphere was quite particular and its silence was only disrupted by very few vehicles, one of which was my own. Wolters tires were humming on the smooth asphalted. On some stretches I rode on a thin fresh layer of snow, the humming got muffled and became an unusual sound. This transformed Wolter in some kind of futuristic spacecraft gliding through a strange environment in which I felt like an alien because of the usual noises beeing absent and my depth perception beeing fooled by the lack of contrast in all this white.
After lunch break the sun came back untill I entered this wind channel of a valley after a left turn to face north and the last 20km untli Sivas.
The town was very lively, lots of people in the street but I was in a hurry to get off it, get the ice out of my facial hair and find a place that offers hot tea and internet so I can contact Mehmet my host. He piloted me to his office before he ended his working day. I found the building of the public services without any problems, that house full of electric engineers. I could go on why this was special to me and why the memory box was rattling like mad, but that's another long story.
And at six p.m. we were out, back in Mehmets apartment and after dinner back in the streets of Sivas. But the cold did not make us last long there, just the time to see the building where the Turkish republic was founded before we clinched a glass of hot tea in one hand and a fork with baklava in the other inside a warm cafe.
The eavening ended with a movie of Fatih Akin, 'Im July'