Our Cycling Route Through Turkey

Our cycling route through Turkey

The map above shows the route we cycled through Turkey. We entered Turkey from it's western boarder with Bulgaria and exited through it's north eastern border into Georgia.

The road surface in Turkey was for the most part, exceptional. We had not yet travelled to any country that had some smooth and undamaged roads. It was an absolute treat to ride here. On top of the great road surface Turkey also had many excellent tunnels allowing us to go through mountains instead of over them.

On the topic of tunnels I must mention how lovely the traffic management staff were to us in Turkey, whenever we entered a tunnel someone would update the illuminated road signs to show our lane as “closed” and encourage the cars to move over leaving us plenty of space to get through the tunnel safely.

The downside of taking the tunnels was the noise, it was nothing short of deafening and the reverberating sounds made it impossible to tell where the cars were in relation to you.

There are however a couple of exceptions, the roads leading up to and away from the border crossing with Georgia was an absolute disaster. It was rough and littered with holes. Perhaps it seemed worse at the time because of the enormous contrast with the other roads we had cycled but we were shocked by how bad it way and it left it quite worried about what might lay ahead for us in Georgia.

For the most part be thoroughly enjoyed cycling in Turkey and felt reasonably safe on the roads. There are however 2 exceptions to this. Firstly the dogs:

The stray dogs are a huge pain in Turkey, there are thousands of them and they often hang out together in small packs. This means that once one decided to start chasing you they usually all do, this was particularly scary on the second day when a pack of 6 giant Turkish sheep dogs who were all asleep on the road decided to chase me down.

Thankfully most dogs are chasing you got no reason and will quickly give up if you stop. You can read more about dealing with stray dogs in our guide here.

Secondly is Istanbul. Istanbul turned out to be the worst and most challenging place we have ever cycled. The traffic flowing in and out of the city is nothing short of insane. The driving is rude and aggressive and the roads are chock full of vehicles bumper to bumper, despite the roads being 10 lanes wide.

The annoying thing is that I knew it would be like this before arriving, I had already read many account of how bad it is to cycling into Istanbul and I’d even planned us a nice route entering the city via rural roads in the north.

However, given how nice and quite the roads in Turkey had been up to that point I decided to take the direct route in and it was much shorter.

The worst part about taking the direct route was the bus drivers, they seemingly don’t give a **** about your life or safety as they constantly cut you up in order to pick up their next passenger as quickly as possible or pull out in-front of you, never checking their mirrors. Even more infuriating is that the same drivers do this over and over again to you as the pull in front to get a passenger, you overtake, they pull out and overtake you again and the cycle repeats.

Despite this chaos and ignorance we made it into Instable unscathed, although my blood pressure may have been a little higher.

To avoid going through that again on the way out of Istanbul we decided to take a ferry to Yalova, this turned out to be a good decision as the road from Yalova to the east was much quitter.

If you'd like to take a closer look at our route or use it for your plans you can download the .kml file using the button below. For PC users you can view this file type in "Google Earth Pro", available here: google.com/earth/versions/, for Android users we recommend maps.me and for iPhone users we also recommend maps.me.

Daily Cycling Activity

Below is a breakdown of our daily cycling activity, you can see our exact route and final destination each day using the map at the top of the page.