This pudding proves nothing

Week 13 - Ellie and Mark park the bikes, take care of some business in Ankara, delve a little too deep into the food culture of Turkey, and immerse themselves in some family time.

I’ve got some bad news for you. I’ll try to break it to you gently.

No doubt many of you will be familiar with the phenomenon of being in a foreign land, and meeting a person who finds out your nationality, which triggers them to proclaim the name of a celebrity or thing that they are familiar with from your country of origin.

Many years ago I traveled coast to coast across America with a lad from Liverpool. When Marty told people where he was from, they would sing Beatles songs to him. It was actually really nice and made for some very pleasant encounters.

It’s an occurrence I warm to. The person is responding positively, trying to establish some common ground, let you know that they have some knowledge of where you’re from, make you feel welcome, and maybe even help you feel a little more at home. For the purposes of this post I’ll call the phenomenon International Kudos Transference (IKT).

International Kudos Transference

In a restaurant in Japan in the 2010s, I was having some extreme difficulty trying to scramble over the language barrier. I just about understood that the waiter was asking where I was from. I managed to convey that I was from Ireland, and his face lit up. “Ah, Loy Keane!” he exclaimed. I was delighted and surprised. I didn’t think Roy had stayed in Japan long enough for anyone to learn his name.

During my post-grad studies I did a couple of short stints working and studying in Jamaica. During one of these jaunts I made a trek up into the Blue Mountains to visit the Maroon people. They’re descended from a group of escaped slaves, turned militant rebels, who managed to cause British colonial authorities such bother back in the day that they were granted independence from Britain long before the rest of the country.

“Where you from mon?” I was asked by a tall Maroon rebel as I got deeper into Independence Day celebrations with the locals. When I revealed my nationality, “GERRY ADAMS!” was the deep baritone joyful shout that I was greeted with. I was showered, literally and figuratively, with rum for the rest of the day.

Whether or not I’d ever met Roy or Gerry wasn’t important. I was from the same place, very roughly speaking, and by some magical IKT procedure, I was a welcome guest of my new international friends.

International Kudos Transference can work the other way around too i.e. people in a place might tell you about a well known thing or person from their own home-place to transfer some kudos to it. Many years ago I was off with a band playing some gigs in Germany. We ended up playing in a town called Hagen. “Nina, who sang 99 Red Balloons, is from here,” many people told us. We were genuinely impressed.

Once upon a time when you told someone form a distant land that you were from Waterford, you might mention Waterford Crystal, to help them locate the place. Not as effective an IKT as it once was, there’s not many people buying crystal these days. The crystal with the Waterford stamp is no longer manufactured in the county anyway. Production and kudos has been outsourced to Poland and the Czech Republic.

At least Waterford still has Keith Barry and Brendan Bowyer; although they are not as kudos heavy as crystal, internationally renowned, and they too have been outsourced. Las Vegas, in this instance. I’ll settle for John Mullane and a modicum of more modest National Kudos Transference (NKT).

We had a Georgian gent greet us recently with a shout of “Jameson Whiskey.” It seems their marketing department are currently doing a better job than Guinness on the roads we’re traveling.

It is with deepest sympathy and regret that I shoulder the unhappy task of informing you that the IKT greeting that we’ve received most often since starting our attempt to cycle around the world is “Conor McGregor!” We’re not happy about it.

The most recent occurrence happened as we happily and aimlessly wandered through the covered markets of Ankara. As we made our way through a dizzying array of colours, sights, shouts and smells in the food market, we were approached by two smiling policemen who wanted to know where we were from.

When our answer was greeted with the well-meaning response of yet another “Conor McGregor!” exclamation, our smiles dropped. One enthusiastic policeman doubled down, giving us a big thumbs up, and an extra exclamation of “he is great!”

Taking in the sights of Ankara

If you ran a poll in Ireland tomorrow asking folk who they would most like to see have their citizenship revoked, I’d bet €220 with Paddy Power that Mr. McGregor would finish in the top three. Who else would be in there? Answers in the comments please.

Ambassador material he is not. Whatever he has done, for some international folk we have encountered on the road, whether we like it or lump it, he has managed to become the physical manifestation of Irishness. Neither Ellie or myself are comfortable with being involved in an international kudos transference procedure with The Notorious CMG. I’d much prefer David O’Doherty or Saoirse Ronan to be my IKT allocation. They seem like decent skins.

Ellie says she’d prefer to be greeted by exclamations of “Ed Sheeran!” An incorrect IKT allocation lending the situation the same positive interaction, with a little more subversive humour.

I’d opt for Kate Bush as an incorrect IKT allocation. The opportunity for all involved to respond like Americans did to Marty would be most welcome. Every holiday would be like a scene from a 1950’s Elvis movie where everyone would spontaneously burst into a chorus of Babooshka or Wuthering Heights every time Kate’s name was excitedly shouted. Fantastic if you were visiting Honolulu, probably not as welcome at a war memorial in Krakow.

Kate Bush’s mother actually hails from near Clonea in Co Waterford. Would it be worth starting a campaign to have Ms. Bush outsourced to Dungarvan? Kate Bush as both IKT and NKT ambassador certainly has my vote.

Myself and Ellie continue to be blown away by the kindness and consideration extended to us by the people of Turkey. The IKT greeting is a manifestation of this, even if we don’t particularly care for our allocated IKT ambassador.

Johnny Loogan

Ellie experienced an unexpected version of this kindness and consideration this week when she entered the tiny cubicle of a toilet in a small café we visited.

The cubicle was right beside a table of other customers. Ellie was worried that any sounds that might be emitted during her visit would be clearly audible to the customers sitting at the adjacent table. But the considerate café owners had wired the light switch in the toilet to also activate a speaker playing loud music in the cramped cubicle when you switch on the light. Ingenious!

When Ellie switched on the light, she was greeted by Johnny Logan singing his 1980 Eurovision-winning song “What’s another year.” The café owners had unwittingly imbued the situation with some of the positive side effects of an IKT greeting. The Johnny Logan soundtracked toilet visit was a little surreal, Ellie tells me, but it did feel a little bit like home. Coincidentally, she’d been waiting… such a long time… looking out for loo… so to speak.

Johnny himself could have qualified as an IKT ambassador in his Eurovision-winning heyday, but the craven McDonald’s ads and rowing in behind Israel’s use of Eurovision as a propaganda tool adds up to nil points from my voting panel. That said, his popularity endures, especially in Central Europe and the jaxxes of Turkey.

We’ve been frequenting a few more cafés as we’ve parked up our bikes for a break and some preparation for the next leg of our attempt to cycle around the world.

Hatching plans

Over cups of tea and köfte ekmek (delicious lightly toasted meatball, chilli and veg sandwiches) we’ve been trying to hatch plans for our route over the next few months. This week, in Ankara, we’ve been trying to sort visas and get some travel vaccinations for the road ahead.

The social and political situations in countries that could potentially act as our gateway into Central Asia mean that our exact route is still somewhat up in the air.

The land borders into Azerbaijan have been closed to people since the Covid lockdown in 2020. Foreign citizens can only enter through airports. There have been rumours that the border crossings will open again soon, but there is no official word. We can’t count on it.

To the south of Azerbaijan there is a long road through Iran that some cyclists take as they head further east. A few months ago, a British couple touring by motorbike were arrested on this route, under suspicion of spying. They are still being detained.

More recently, an Irish cyclist travelling through Iran was hospitalised after being beaten up, again on suspicion of spying. His injuries weren’t serious and he was able to continue his journey, but Iran isn’t a wonderful prospect for a long leg of our travels. That said, we’ve considered it, but the road after Iran, through Afghanistan and/or Turkmenistan throws up its own set of problems.

To the north of Azerbaijan is Russia. This route would see us passing through part of Chechnya. Chechnya has had its own difficulties in relation to political turmoil and kidnappings. Again, not something we’d like to experience or that we can afford.

I wonder would a kidnapper let you go for a reduced rate if you were skint or if they were Conor McGregor fans? We’ve been honing our haggling skills in Turkey, but I don’t think they’re that good yet.

It’s a shame that it has become so difficult to travel in these areas. As with many other countries, all reports suggest that the vast majority of people you meet on the road are welcoming and delighted to see you, but it’s authorities and regimes, our own European and western ones included, that make things difficult for people who would like to visit and experience the place and the welcome extended by the folk on the ground in these regions. That said, it’s their country: we don’t have a right to cycle through it if the powers that be don’t want us to.

Then there’s Turkmenistan. Securing a tourist visa is difficult and expensive. You need to book all of your hotel stays in advance, provide a complete itinerary of your travels, and pay a government registered guide to accompany you at all times during your time in the country. That all adds up to thousands of euros that certainly aren’t within our budget.

The alternative is to secure a transit visa allowing you five days to cycle across the entire country, which is doable if weather conditions don’t go against you. The London Turkmen embassy is no longer issuing transit visas, and this week we discovered that the embassy in Ankara isn’t issuing them either. Visiting the embassy was quite the experience though. We may try the Turkmen embassy in Tbilisi when we’re in Georgia and see what the craic is there. The official in the embassy in Ankara suggested that transit visas may become available again in the very near future. We live in hope.

We met two French cyclists in the hostel we stayed in while in Ankara. Independently of each other, they are following a similar route to ourselves. They too had visited the Turkmen embassy the same day we had. One of them is opting to pack his bike up in a box and fly from Tbilisi in Georgia to Aktau in Kazakhstan, skipping over Azerbaijan and side stepping Turkmenistan.

The other cyclist is considering the long road across Iran and Afghanistan. Even as an experienced male bicycle tourer, he’s reluctant to take it on. From what we read and hear, cycling for women is even more difficult and ill-advised in Afghanistan. This is a road we can’t take.

We’ll knock on the door of another Turkmen embassy in Georgia, keep an eye on the land borders of Azerbaijan, and figure out that leg of our trip by the time we reach Tbilisi. Maybe things will change in the coming weeks. We have a lot more of Turkey and all of Georgia to get through first.

We managed to get some travel shots in Ankara University Hospital. Spending a day navigating the healthcare system of Turkey was an interesting experience. It went pretty smooth, but it was quite obvious that as paying patients rather than public ones, we were fast tracked and treated completely differently. We had a private consultation suite in the public hospital that is solely for international clients.

Medical tourism is big business in Turkey, which is more a criticism of countries exporting their patients than it is of the Turkish healthcare system.

Much of the medical tourism to Turkey is what would be considered cosmetic surgery in a European healthcare context. There are huge cost savings to be made in buying a new nose in Ankara rather than stumping up for a remodelled schnoz in Stuttgart. I enquired about new bionic knees while we were there. They had none in stock. We settled for a typhoid jab.

Making a meal of it

Something we realised as we drifted through the markets, past bakeries, restaurants, and the street food vendors that lined the avenues of Ankara is that Turkish cuisine is by far our favourite of the nine countries we’ve cycled through so far.

This may be somewhat controversial, but we both rate Turkey higher than France when it comes to food. The confidence that Turkey has in its national identity, and the vibrancy of the place, is reflected in its food culture.

Kuru fasulye, pide, lahmacun, and all the trimmings

The national dish isn’t köfte or kebab, it’s a vegetarian dish called kuru fasulye. It’s a lightly spiced white bean casserole or heavy soup, in a tomato based sauce, with other veg and peppers thrown in, depending on the specific recipe. We first tasted it in a pilav shop, a cafe that serves mounds of rice with a topping or side dish of your choice.

Kuru fasulye has become our pilav accompaniment of choice, and we were delighted to discover that there are lots of tinned varieties of it that we can heat up on our camping stove to accompany our own rice. It’s a poor imitation of what you’d get in a decent pilav shop, but it does the trick when we’re camping.

Lahmacun isn’t far behind it as one of my other favourite Turkish foods. I’d never tried it until we crossed the border two weeks ago. It’s an extremely thin, crispy, but still flexible, large round flatbread that is freshly cooked from dough after you order it. The bread is topped with a tomato based sauce that is usually seasoned with cumin, paprika, chilli, salt, and black pepper. Added to this base is a mix of ground beef and lamb, which is also seasoned and spiced. The lot is cooked in wood fire oven. It sometimes gets compared to a cheeseless pizza, but that’s an over-simplification. I think it’s much tastier, lighter and more satisfying than pizza.

Good lahmacun is accompanied by a dressed salad of raw onion, parsley and lemon. When your lahmacun is served, you add as much of the parsley and onion mix as you want, roll up the whole thing up and devour. It’s delicious and cheap. Lahmacun usually come in pairs once a large flatbread is cut in two, and a brace of them normally cost somewhere between €2 and €4.

Tea, lahmacun and ayran.

Another dish we’d never tried before getting here was Gözleme. It’s a very thin flatbread, fried like a crispy pancake with a range of seasoned savoury fillings. When stopping to refuel at a roadside grill, one daycent potato gözleme probably won’t be enough. There’s a taste of more off them, especially when they’re stuffed with spiced spuds.

Köfte ekmek is a reliable staple, with the combination of really good bakeries providing bread, the wonderful array of fresh spices and salad ingredients that are available, and the smokey outdoor barbecues that can be found on the side of any road or street. These large meatball sandwiches can be delicious and cheap. Our favourites of these have been cooked on roadside charcoal fire grills. The smokey flavour binds the whole thing together.

A real risk of stopping cycling for a week is the food, and trying not to eat as much when we’re off the bikes as we do when we’re on the bikes. We won’t be able to get up the very large mountains ahead of us if we keep eating like cyclists while we’re somewhat stationary bipeds.

The biggest risk is Turkish pastry shops that are worryingly phenomenal. The sheer amount of pastry shops (pastaci in Turkish), even in small towns, is mind boggling. Who is eating all the tiny sweet cakes? The amount of shiny syrup-drenched and pistachio-sprinkled baklava alone that are on display in pastaci windows has to be more than the considerable population of the country can consume.

Where does it all go? Truth be told, we’ve been helping them shift some of it. If cycling around the world doesn’t earn you the right to eat a few small cakes, what’s the bloody point!?

Baklava is only the start of it. There is no end to the variety of tiny pastries on offer. Şöbiyet is a cylindrical pastry, that has the pistachio and thin crispy pastry of its baklava cousin, but it’s wrapped around a creamy filling. Then there’s dilber dudağı, which translates as “lady’s lips”. These are a softer pastry, filled with a sweet cream, with the whole shebang soaked in fragrant sharbat syrup. Tiny little chocolate eclairs are not sold individually; they’re sold by the kilo!

In a past life Ellie ran a bakery with her sister in Cork. She’s gone down a few rabbit holes, researching how different tiny desserts, with their delicate filo, kadayıf and kataifi pastry layers, are made. While down one of these rabbit holes she discovered two desserts that we’d definitely never tasted before: Künefe and Tavuk göğsü. She informed me that the metropolis of Ankara would be our opportunity to seek them out.

How’s your pudding?

There was a reason these particular desserts caught our attention. Künefe has the common incredibly thin delicate layers of pastry and soaking of rich syrup, but the main ingredient in this warm sweet tart is a thick layer of cheese with the same consistency as mozzarella.

I’m a conservative member of the cheese board at the best of times, so I had a feeling that warm syrup-soaked cheese would be a challenge for me. I’d have less qualms about climbing into a concrete bunker full of warm eggy water than I would about eating a chewy sweet cheese dessert. However, I know there will be much more challenging food down the road, so I’m not going to balk now.

We went to a cafe that specialised in künefe, and ordered one between us. The best way I can describe it to you is if you could imagine an extremely heavy and cheesy pizza covered in maple syrup, you wouldn’t be far off. Ellie doesn’t agree, and kinda liked it: she persevered, and ate the whole thing, which was about the width and twice the depth of a small dinner plate.

“I feel like I’m carrying around a big bag of cheese, but the bag is inside me,” is how Ellie described the sensation of having eaten the whole künefe and ice-cream topping minus my one bite.

We weren’t done yet. We were off to add a helping of chicken custard to the mix. Yep, chicken custard. Tavuk göğsü is a thick and sweet creamy dessert made from milk, sugar, vanilla and ground down chicken meat. Turkish for Gaviscon is Lansor. Just saying.

Here’s a fun fact: The internationally renowned coffee-infused Italian dessert Tiramisu is reported to have been invented in a brothel in the town of Treviso. The direct translation of tiramisu is “pull it up.” Can you guess what its purpose was? Tiramisu is brothel cake. Buon appetito!

As we eyed up the gelatinous white wobbling mound of Tavuk göğsü, about a pound of it that was staring us down, we tried to imagine the circumstances under which Tavuk göğsü was invented. We certainly hoped it wasn’t in a brothel. The best we could come up with was trying to get more protein into malnourished kids who only liked sweet things. We were unsure it should ever have been conceived.

My one word review: rank. Ellie had a little more to say about it: “That’s f@€king weird man.” We were under the impression that the meaty fibre consistency of the chicken would be completely ground out of this heavy, sweet and gloopy dessert. It wasn’t.

We both only managed a couple of forkfuls of this one. Maybe we were eating a poor version of it? We both agreed we’d rather not try a couple more in some different establishments, just to make sure we really didn’t like it.

Tavuk göğsü

It was a weird evening in Ankara. We walked slowly, with unhappily complaining and grumbling bellies, back to the hostel, for once in Turkey, unsatisfied. Why had we decided to do that to ourselves? To force ourselves to do something unpleasant when there were so many agreeable options all around us?

I suppose because we had never experienced those things before, it was educational, and we did laugh a lot in the process. It may be a characteristic trait.

Family time

The main reason for taking a break from the bicycles is that after being away from home for three months, members of our families have travelled here to join us for a little holiday before we take on the next part of our attempt to cycle around the world. We’re not going to have an opportunity to see them again in an easily accessible part of the globe for about a year, if all goes according to plan.

My Mam, sister and niece, and Ellie’s son and daughter, with their respective partners, have all arrived for a reunion and holiday in Yalikavak. Yalikavak is not far from Bodrum airport on the south Mediterranean coast of Turkey. We’re planning a barbecue by the beach during the coming week, and we managed to watch Waterford take on Limerick in the Munster hurling championship over the weekend.

It was wonderful to watch a hurling match with my Mammy, so far from home, under clear blue skies. Pity about the result, but we’re still in the mix. Up The Deise!

A day in the sun at the 2024 Munster Hurling Championship

Seeing them all here is wonderful, and it feels like a well earned reward for all the work we’ve put in so far. In the back of our minds we know that we’ll be saying goodbye for much longer at the end of this week than we did when we left Ireland on February 1. There may be a couple more tears, but at least this time they’ll be on sun burned faces. We’ll relish every minute in the meantime.

Our families have kindly brought us some needed supplies. There’s a water filtration kit that arrived too late to pack, a couple of maps, a new part for a pannier bag, some medical supplies for the first aid kit, and a whole haype of bags of Tayto. Wup, wup!

The bags of Tayto give me an opportunity to revisit my crisp reviews. They haven’t gone away: I’ve been collecting them quietly in the background as we trundle along.

Coming up trumps

My relationship with crisps may stem from our family pub, with the snacks filling in mealtimes as we worked behind the bar. My mother and sister are also connoisseurs of the crisp. It was nice to be able to bring them a Turkish yoghurt flavoured crisp to sample as we sat by the pool. They both agreed the yoghurt flavour was surprisingly nice. Not amazing, but nice.

As I tucked into a bag of Tayto, I took the opportunity to inform them about my shameful crisp treachery. While on the road I’ve found a crisp that I rate higher than Tayto Cheese and Onion. Hard to believe, but it’s true. I’ve been sitting on this revelation for a while.

Someways back I picked up a packet of mustard flavour Petr Hobža crisps, made in Czechia. Although we didn’t cycle through the country, these crisps had thankfully made their way across borders and onto our path.

I wasn’t expecting much from them: they were mustard flavour, after all. The crunch, the slight sharp bite of the mustard, the moreish quality and their ability to enhance a sandwich were outstanding. I was shocked and delighted. These are crisps of outstanding quality. Even though I feel like I’ve betrayed my homeland in some manner, Petr Hobža mustard flavour crisps are currently my top trump of international crisps.

Treason through the medium of international crisp reviews

They aren’t just an amazing crisp, they’ve got a solid backstory. Hobža crisps is a family business that started life with Petr and his wife frying crisps at a drive-in movie theatre.

The sons, who now run the family business, were brought up cooking fresh crisps at carnivals in their homeland. Under normal circumstances you can visit their crisp making facility in Strážnice in the Czech Republic, but they are currently undergoing renovations and an expansion. Hopefully to cope with demand for their new mustard flavour.

I’m currently up to 28 crisp reviews converted into top trump cards. When I get to 52 I’ll make the whole deck available to download. I’d be surprised if anything tops mustard flavour from the Hobža stable. Künefe and tavuk göğsü flavour definitely wouldn’t be in the running.

For a few more days we’ll be enjoying time with our families, floating in clear blue waters, trying to take it handy on the crisps, künefe and cakes.

Hold her steady, and keep it between the ditches!