After having a magical time in Strandzha in Bulgaria, I crossed the border to Turkey. The border crossing went without any problems and I got the first stamp in my fresh passport.
In the first city I entered, I immediately felt how different Turkey was. It seemed very lively to me. In every settlement there was something like a central area where people met, hung out and lived their social life. I very rarely eat meat or fish, but when I saw the Köfte restaurant, I couldn’t resist. I’ve loved koefte for years and the ones I got there were minimalistic and delicious.
I took a long walk around the small town and bought different foods to try, a sim card, talked to a lot of different people and got a bit of a feel for how things were going in this new country. What impressed me the most was that the Turkish people seemed to be very talkative. They weren’t afraid of language barriers and seemed very friendly, interested and hospitable.
After that, I continued my trip and went to a wild beach on the Black Sea coast. This beach reminded me a lot of the big beach near Varna where I had spent a lot of time. But to get to this beach in Turkey, Rosinante and I had to go through some muddy off-roading and very narrow passages. We even got lost, but some friendly locals helped us finding the right way. That was a lot of fun. When I reached the beach, I met a very friendly goatherd and we had a nice conversation via Google Translate.
I stayed for a few days of hanging around at the beach, bo staff training, meditating, making music and so on and during these days only the goat herder visited me again, then I continued on my way. Because it would have been be an insanely long trip to return to the road and continue from there, I decided to take the shortcut and drive along the beach. I scouted the beach first, because I didn’t want to hopelessly bug down Rosinante on this wild beach. So I dropped the pressure in her tires to about one bar and took off. Everything was going great until we approached the last little slope that would lead to the exit of the beach. All the momentum I had built up was swallowed up in a second by that little slope and Rosinante’s tires immediately started digging themselves into the sand. Looking at the situation from the outside, I knew this was going to be a tough one. The sand was super soft and Rosinante’s rear axle was already touching it. I took my time and dug very well. I placed my two large aluminum recovery boards and the two small leveling blocks to get a little more traction. I locked Rosinante’s rear differential, let her slowly crawl onto the boards, and once she was there, I let her take off and build some momentum. The little slope swallowed it all with a big appetite. After three meters, Rosinante lay down on the sand like a sleeping whale. So I dug again. And it took me some time to find the leveling blocks because they were buried deep in the sand. After the second digging, I sent Rosinante forward again. The appetite of the slope didn’t seem to be satisfied. Again, it swallowed Rosinante’s entire momentum in just a meters. So I dug again. I dug out and placed the boards and leveling blocks. I launched Rosinante. And the slope got another feast of momentum. So I dug again, dug and placed the boards and leveling blocks, launched Rosinate and… finally we reached solid ground again.
