“We can’t stop here, this is Hazelnut Country!”

The next day, when we resurrected from our deep sleep, it was snowing in
Akkuş. We still had 60km to go to the Black Sea, and it didn’t exactly seem like it was all going down hill. So we hitched another truck going around halfway.

The views out of the truck’s window were spectacular, although often concealed by the heavy fog. We tried to make some nice shots out of the moving truck.

The driver stopped several times, so we could make a nice shot, but he always stopped in the worst spots, so we continued to take pictures out of the moving vehicle.

Turkey produces 70 percent of the world’s hazelnuts, and almost all of it comes from the Black Sea region. So no wonder that, cycling through this landscape, there were more and more hazelnut bushes.

This photo contains 80 percent hazelnut and 20 percent sky 😉 This kind of landscape extended around 300km, till *Fındıklı*, which means actually Hazelnut in Turkey, but where the farmers now all settled fot tea.

While Ferrero is by far the biggest buyer of the turkish hazelnuts, supplying the whole world with it’s infamous Nutella spread, Turkey has also a couple of their own hazelnut spreads. Some of them are only hazelnut with some sugar or honey, and the result is actually much nicer than Nutella and all it’s stpinoffs.

Finally, the Black Sea (Somewhere in the background)

Cycling is fun, no doubt. But if there is one thing about it that i hate, then it’s cars! And there is one place where the traffic becomes even more scary than normally: While crossing a 4 kilometer long tunnel on the way to Ordu, with very bad lighting system, so we were riding on the elevated side, where we had to get off the bikes every hundred meter, because some box was in the way, i was contemplating about all the other cyclists who must have passed here before and the possibillity to have some bicycle related stickers to stick them somewhere in there, to give cyclists hope. And just when we left the tunnel finally, i saw this on the emergency phonebooth: 4 Stickers of different cyclist projects! What a coincidence. Just a little bit late to give us hope 😉

After finally arriving in Ordu, Serdal our Warmshowers host picked us up and welcomed us in their home. His wife Ayşe, who was the one who speaks good English was stil out, but even with limited language, we managed to become good friends already. Serdal showed us his wood carvings, his self made lamps, he also plays music and he showed us his humour by acting playing the piano while the demo mode was playing some demanding piece of classical music. Like so many times in Turkey we stayed much longer then planned, and had days of feasts, laughing and talking. Ayşe and Serdal are this kind of people where you feel like old friends almost immediatly. On our arrival Serdal told us, “this is your home”, and it didn’t actually feel like a phrase but very genuine.