The 9th Bartın Bicycle Festival. Notice that this is called “festival”, not “tour”, making it quite different from the two organized bicycle tours that I’ve done in Turkey (Kayseri and Gökova). The big difference is that we were based in one place the whole time — Amasra — instead of moving every day, like on a “tour”.
For years at my office at work I had a photo of Amasra from the first time I pedaled through in 1998. It was taken from a similar location as this photo which we took this year:
No one ever guessed that that was Turkey. Amasra is a beauty on Turkey’s generally ugly Black Sea coast. Not surprisingly lots of tourists come. The festival organizers got permission for us to camp on one of the beaches in town, Büyük Liman Plajı. It’s the beach you can see in the center of this photo:
Camping there is usually prohibited because of all the tourism. I was looking forward to the opportunity. They’re able to get permission because the festival is so late in the season — middle of October. The catch at that time of year is, of course, the weather. We know it can rain a lot (when it’s not snowing) on Turkey’s Black Sea.
It took Ferda and me about 15½ hours to get from Antalya to Amasra by bus. At the bus station in Ankara we picked up Ahmet, another cyclist heading to the festival. Gülizar and Ali came by car from İzmir, a 12-hour trip. We had all been looking at the weather forecast with some trepidation, and Gülizar made a reservation for the four of us to stay in a two-room apartment (with kitchen) above Büyük Liman Plajı for the entire festival. Here’s our view:
That turned out to be an excellent decision, and many others did the same. How much nicer to watch it rain through a window from a warm apartment than from the tent, and more importantly we loved being able to hang up lots of wet gear and have it be pretty dry by morning.
It didn’t actually rain the whole time. Ferda and I (and Ahmet) arrived first thing in the morning (it was overnight bus) on the day before the festival started. Thankfully we were able to get out and visit Roman (later Byzantine, later Genoese, later Ottoman) Amastris (later Amasra) before the rain started that afternoon. Check out the sunny weather, blue sky, and calm sea that morning.
We started by visiting the fortress/old walled city.
The Ottomans converted this 9th century Byzantine church to a mosque in the 15th century.
The nearby 9th Byzantine chapel was later used by the Genoese (as a chapel) and may have never been converted to a mosque. Restoration work by the Turkish Republic was carried out as early as 1963, but very little remains of the frescoes.
The fortress is on the easily defensible (?) peninsula and the nearby island (connected with a short bridge). Further inland we find the remains of the bedesten
and above that a restored Roman bridge.
We hunted around for the theater. It must be near the modern cemetery, but I don’t think there’s much left. The area is on a slope and quite overgrown. There is also a part of the old city with active excavation going on so maybe there will be more to see by the time you visit.
At the time of course we didn’t realize how lucky we were with many hours of sunny dry weather. It didn’t happen again while we were in Amasra. The next morning after breakfast, ready to start riding:
One problem with doing a number of day rides from Amasra is that the choice of routes is quite limited since you’re half surrounded by the sea. The other problem is that every route starts with a climb. It was raining when we started the first climb, and I was surprised — even with my supposedly fully waterproof Helly Hansen rain jacket — how quickly I was very wet. I got tired of always being wet in goretex so I bought the Helly Hansen, but that jacket was disappointing. I’ve bought a new rain jacket since then, but the verdict’s not out yet.
Because of the rain I have very few photos from the ride, but here we are in Bartın on the way to lunch.
It had rained almost the whole morning ride, but the sun came out during our lunch break. It looked like it could have been nice to walk around Bartın, but I was more interested in trying to dry my feet and socks in the sun.
The sun didn’t last. The route back to Amasra via Akpınar, Yeşilkaya, Makaracı, and Ahatlar was probably quite nice, but with so much rain it was hard to see anything and hard to appreciate it. It was really pouring at the top of a small pass where we turned off onto a dirt road. I stopped to bundle up and chatted with some locals standing in the rain on the side of the road watching all the colorful jackets go by.
The next morning we started with a different pass but similar weather.
The organizers actually changed the planned route — a dirt (muddy?) forest road — because it had rained so much during the night. We stopped at the (wet) Kuş Kayası Yol Anıtı, a Roman memorial.
We climbed from there and then had a gravel road descent through Kazpınarı in pouring rain. I was glad everyone made it down that safely. We had lunch again that day in Bartın, and I stayed in town to replace the screen on my phone. While waiting for that repair, I visited the Bartın Kent Müzesi. Often these city museums aren’t very interesting, but this one was good. That’s where I learned it was the Genoese that were in Amasra, not the Venetians as I might have guessed. Actually the Venetians weren’t in the Black Sea at all, but the Genoese were all over the Black Sea in what’s now Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Romania. I’m also reminded that Galata Tower in İstanbul was Genoese, not Venetian as I’m sure I’ve told some people.
On the third day something strange happened. Instead of being dry while we ate and rainy while we rode, it was the exact opposite — rain while we walked to breakfast and ate breakfast, rain when we stopped for lunch, but no rain the whole time we were riding! Incredible. What a fun way to end the festival.
It was a good route through Kuyupınar, Topallar, and Şenyurt.
Lunch was at Çakraz on the coast.
During the first two days I rode with Engin slowly up the climbs while many electric bicycles passed us quickly. We chatted about how satisfying it is to reach the top under your own power so I was surprised when he passed me in the morning of the third day speeding up the hill on an electric bicycle (they were available to borrow/test/rent from the organization). He had started to get a sore throat and wanted an easier day. What a surprise (again!) then to pass him on the 10% climb (steep for a main road) out of Çakraz. The battery had died, and he was suffering. How he wished that he had his own bicycle — lighter and more comfortable than the electric one!
It was a fun festival in spite of the rain, and I was pleasantly surprised that so many of us chose to ride day after day in the soggy weather. Bye bye, Amasra.
