One in an occasional series of travelogues 😉

Did Atlas Morocco with cycleactive for Munqe chick’s 30th and had an awesome holiday. Rich @ Cycleactive gave us a heads-up that his Turkey trip would deliver the same blend of singletrack and exotic settings, so we signed up to the inaugural trip last week.

In a group of 9 clients, including the “fatdads” (their name) who holiday together every year, we were guided by Rich and Turkey-based John. Cappadocia is a stunning part of the world, all crazy rock formations and cave dwellings.

Accomodation and food all well chosen, some cool cave hotels, great lunch and dinner stops. In essence a week of uplift-assisted technical rocky singletrack with plenty of climbing but more descending. Highlights for me were Pigeon, White and Zemi valleys, all swoopy twisty smooth rock playground. Thursday, which was Zemi into the Turkish Euro XC course turned everyone into whooping 12 yr olds and Munqe Chick declaring “best ride ever!”. Friday was the “Balcon trail”, a ribbon of singletrack clinging precariously to the side of a table mountain and demanding total concentration.

A few pics to give a flavour of the riding and terrain

Youre never too old to photobomb

climbing out of a valley

chasing each other through the rocks

might be able to make out the trail…

An awesome week, really well sorted and slick for a first run showing how much planning went into it, and most importantly stunning riding. Highly recommended.

https://cycleactive.com/index.php/mtb-tours/asia-pacific/turkey

Turkish Airlines charged 30 Euros per bike per direction (their website suggested to us it would be twice that).

Bikes still a rarity out on the trails and all the walkers we came across were really ‘pro’; lots of applause, “allez allez!” and photographs taken.

Looks great! So was it ‘touring’ or did you have a base and ride different trails from there everyday?

Trying to find somewhere to go where the Wife can sit round a pool all day, while I go riding! We both like Turkey, so this looks like potentially a good option!

stayed in 3 hotels in total, but thats two 1-nighters and most of holiday spent in one place where we were local to the white rock valleys. Loads of non-bike stuff to do as the town is quite tourist-oriented, and the hotel we were in (flintstones, I kid you not) had a pool. We all sacked the non-riding-options half-day-off (hot air ballooning/quad biking etc etc) for more riding 😉

Temperatures lower than I expected (mid 20’s when we were there), pads recommended as though the rock is ‘soft’ thats a relative term! A couple of spills but we all rode away from them. Freshly-squeezed orange stalls were very popular at the trail ends and all the locals we dealt with were charming and helpful.

Cool – cheers!

IT was a fantastic holiday we will have to post some more pics on here now we have access to the 1200 that were taken amongst the group! Highly recommend Cycle Active as a company too, fanastic.