After a good night's sleep we spied Miss Bec attempting to snuggle a little more sleep deep under her covers to escape the chill in the Ankara air, then we were up and away heading towards Istanbul. We lunched in Eskişehir and followed our usual routine of finding the specialty food for the town to hunt down. This often involves dedicated effort trying to find the place that sells this specialty food, but today this was easy: we only had to walk a few hundred metres from where our motorhome was parked.
We ordered Cibörek, and what a delight it is. This dish was bought to Eskişehir by the Tartars of the Crimea early in the 19th century, who were among the early settlers in this town. It is light as a feather pastry, thicker than filo, but so fragile you barely know it from air. Ours was filled with mince meat, shaped like a half moon, and cooked in vegetable oil. It should be deadly, but it is one of our favourite dishes, to date. Mind you, we say that at least once every day, but I doubt we will find it so brilliantly prepared and served ever again, so we are already in mourning for it.
Eskişehir is a university town and it feels like one. Just a few hundred kilometres away is Konya: traditional, fundamentalist, sombre. Eskişehir is different. Students walk the streets hand in hand. Tight jeans and trendy T's are the girls' standard gear. You rarely see young people, or old ones for that matter, in traditional long or black gear, tho' there are suburbs where this still happens, we drove through them. So it will be interesting to see how this developing regional difference will pan out as future years roll on.
Several villages around Eskişehir mine a very rare product that looks a little like chalk but is much lighter and softer, though as soon as it hits air it hardens. This white stone is called meerschaum. Meershaum is mined by drilling vertical shafts some thirty metres deep, then using a rope ladder to access the material. It is then carved into some of the finest tobacco pipes in the world, and some of them sell, even on the second hand market, for exceptional prices.
Today's driving turned into a marathon, which really was no great hassle as the roads were brilliant. Formal camp sites are frequent along the coast in Turkey, and in very touristy inland spots, like Cappadocia. But, elsewhere, they are few and far between. We finally found a lovely spot on Lake Iznik, just south of the town where the tiles that were used in Istanbul's Blue Mosque were made.
We were given permission by some restaurant folk to use their car park overlooking the lake. We stopped because of the view, but they gave us power, access to their amenities and a brilliant fish meal from the lake for dinner. With a view second to none. This was on a quiet secondary road heavy with ancient olive trees, and hardly a development in sight. We can't believe the Istanbul billionaires don't realise this little gem is there. We loved it.
Postscript: As usual, the remainder of our trip was too busy to allow detail. We took a ferry across the water back to Istanbul, camped one night near the heart of the city close to where the ferry docked, then our lovely motorhome rental agent met us there the next morning saving us the delivery trip. We found transport to the airport and then headed home that evening. But, this trip, for each of us, was one of our favourites trips ever. We loved every minute and will long remember it.
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